Wake Forest Books

We live in a life-care community. I shall try to give this book to our health care center activities person, and to anyone I know who is having difficulties with dementia in a loved one, as well as to the active clergy of our acquaintance. The point Hill makes--requesting equal rights for the demented dying as for those who are in full possession of their mental faculties--is one that had never occurred to me before I read this book. I kept thinking (naturally) of my own mother, who for at least six months, and perhaps longer, didn't know anyone, and who seemed not to have anything at all to "get off her chest." Hill's entertaining (yes, it is) story of her wonderfully eccentric and charming parent made it clear that no matter what is happening, the person it's happening to is still somehow the same as in years past, at least enough so that it is cruel to ignore his or her need for expression. Whether there are old wounds to heal or bridges to mend is really secondary. Read this lovely essay and learn!

This is the most moving memoir I have ever read. The intimacy Sheridan Hill shares with her readers and close attention to details is breath taking. I could not put it down. Astonishing and simply beautiful.

This is a must read for the hospice community and the families they serve.

I could not put this book down, so real, taking us to that uncharted territory, the death of our mother. How do we stay present, how do we understand our relationship, how do we face death and find life?
Sheridan Hill tells her story with such detail and honesty. I am no longer afraid of death, for my parents or myself after reading this book.

Refreshing for the heart -- as eternal family values wait til the end of one's life to come to light. I want my siblings to read this. How I wish I had had time with my own mother before her passing!

I'm one of the "baby boom" generation, we who once shouted "never trust anyone over twenty-five!" And now we are in our forties, fifties, and sixties, often facing alone the crisis of the death of a parent or loved one. Our culture has ill prepared us for this passage, a society that dwells on youth and so carefully hides away death. I lost both of my parents several years back and only wish I had first read Ms. Hill's book, it would have served as a guide, and reaffirmed as well the rightness of decisions I made for the sake of my mother and father. It is not a book about death, it is a book about living and sharing to the fullest one's final journey with a parent.

I will freely admit I wept repeatedly as I read Ms. Hill's beautifully crafted tome which honors and celebrates her mother's final months. Reading it made me realize that so much of what I experienced was valid, that I was not alone in my feelings and gave me new and hopeful insights into my own life and the spiritual journey of my mother and father.

If you just read these reviews and do not buy the book, please heed her advice from this reviewer. Listen to your parents now, talk with them, share and recall all the moments, good and bad, and fight with all your passion to insure their time of passage is a time that is respectful of their dignity. Though I do hope you purchase this work even though the subject might be the last one on your mind at this moment. For someday it will occupy your life front and center and Ms. Hill is a guide you can turn to and trust.

This is the best collection/selection of Emily Dickinson's poems I have ever found. They're selected from a complete collection. What's special about this book is that none of the poems are edited, as is done in many other collections of her works - and excellent choices are made for which poems to include. Emily often used simple dashes at the ends of her lines, and this selection is true to her originals - and she never put titles on her poems, or indented lines - as many other collections of her poems have the audacity to do - as if the editors of those works knew better than this greatest poet the English language has ever known.

Everyone who aims for the ultimate, the elusive, and the exquisite, ought to pack. The edition is affordable, durable, well-organized, comprehensive . . . and produced with care NOT to alter the form or format of the poems . . . which for some dreadful reason a lot of folks seem to feel compelled to do . . .

more importantly . . . all that white witchcraft still dazzles

For those whose aquiantance with the Belle of Amherst is limited to the classroom edition - i.e., There is no Frigate Like a Book, et al., look again. Dickenson really is the epitome of the rugged individualist - a free spirit - in ways surprisingly opposed to her contemporary, Whitman, she arrives at similar conclusions going no further than her garden. She is the inward sojourner - at home in the harshest tensions and conflicts of the psyche - where her distinctly feminine sensitivity speaks truth in "slant" - as she qualifies her enormous insight.

Most haunting: 'Success is counted sweetest', 'To learn the Transport by the Pain', 'My life closed twice before its close', and, "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -". Dickenson laments our sovereign anguish, our exile from the immediate truth or the comprehensive immediacy of truth, the quest for which her poems articulate an urgent hunger enveloped in alternately the most naturistically ambient references or stonily direct terms.

There are Emily Dickinson's greatest poems, most of which my guess is , have in one way or another been anthologized. There is her complete oeuvre of 1775 poems, a large volume indeed. I am not a Dickinson scholar and I found myself a bit lost with such a large number of poems to search through for new gems.
This present volume edited by the dean of Dickinson scholars purports to choose of the total oeuvre the very best of her work.
I truly appreciate this as a volume of this kind can extend my knowledge and appreciation of her poetry in a way which is most economical and helpful to me.

I was never actually a fan of poetry until I encountered Emily Dickinson's poems. It seems as if she has written a poem for everyone. I strongly recomend this book, as my English teacher did to me, not only because of my love for Emily Dickinson, but for the quality of the book. It is obvious that Thomas H. Johnson, the editor, put many long hours of hard work into gathering this collection. Many of her poems were simply scribbled on little pieces of paper, which makes me wonder what kind of literary genius she must have been. With the help of this book, she has become my favorite poet, and I have learned that poetry can be strong medicine for the hurting soul. Final Harvest never leaves my side.

Don't get me wrong, I truly love a large selection of the poems in this volume. However, that is a measure of Emily Dickenson and me, not T. Johnson's collection. What makes this book better than many that are around and about, as has been mentioned, is the lack of editing to her poems--something that has always bothered me. In this regard, the content of the poems is better than many others, however there are other issues of note.

This is, of course, an abridged collection. As such, we are forced to rely on the opinion of another. Granted this is common enough with poetry collections, but that doesn't change the very nature of each person having differing interests. There is no way to know if the ones he leaves out are just as good or even better, from each individuals perspective, without going to more comprehensive texts.

Regardless, I do have one gripe with this book that is unrelated to the above pettiness. The method of dating each poem seems silly to me. The reason is that they are all claimed to be from one of several (if memory serves 3) years separated out over several decades. That and there are two listings of dates for each poem, which I don't recall off hand why they did that, and it may serve some purpose, but it's not useful information if when these poems were written can only be pinned down to plus or minus five-ten years. I can't blame Johnson for this as I imagine that is as close as is known, but, by the same token, the dates could have been left out so that it doesn't detract from the actual poetry.

All in all I would recomend this book, but I might suggest getting a more complete version instead (so long as it is unedited--Emily hated it when people wanted to edit her poems, and I think that we should respect that).

If you liked this book, be sure to get the new book CRAZY IVAN: A TRUE STORY OF SUBMARINE ESPIONAGE by W. Craig Reed available today on Amazon.com. Type in CRAZY IVAN under Book Search on this page and order your copy today!

This is a deckplate view of submariners at the height of war in the Pacific during WWII. As a Navy Sailor, I found myself drawn into the book simply because of its no frills language and realistic portrayal of heroes that don't know they are heroes, in action.

I reccommend this for anyone looking for an inside view of Navy life in general and submarine Sailors in particular.

Bravo Zulu Chief Sterling for a great story!

Wake of the Wahoo by Forest Sterling is a great read! Reading this engrossing book is actually more like sitting down with the author, and listening to him as he relates the five patrols he experienced on the Wahoo. We should be thankful that he received his orders for transfer before the 7th and fatal final patrol.

Forest Sterling was an enlisted sailor- the 'yeoman' aboard the Wahoo. His descriptions of long, sometimes very boring days on patrol, broken only by the tense, gut-wrenching episodes of discovering the target, tracking, stalking, and finally attacking, and evading, draws the reader into the clamy, sweaty, smelly, claustrophobic innards of a fleet submarine. No details are left to the imagination; Sterling recounts eating a particular sandwich at a moment in time; he describes his 'yeoman's' shack in minute detail. The yarns he spins on the personalities of his shipmates (including officers), is worth the read alone. His colorful insights of 'Mush' Morton, Dick O'Kane (also author of another Wahoo book, and Skipper of the Tang - the sub that sank the most tonnage in WWII), among others, is just plain fun to read about.

Footnote; Forrest Sterling also served on another sub after Wahoo, along with George Grider, who ALSO wrote a very good book on WWII subs; 'WAR FISH'. Sterling 'mentions' Grider in his book, but I don't recall if Grider ever re-called Sterling.

Anyway; Buy It, Read It, and Enjoy It!

It is, perhaps, one of the classic images from World War Two. The sailor sits on his seabag, smoking a cigarette as he looks at the submarine that is about to take him into what will be the defining moment of his generation; World War Two. While he has served on submarines before, this will be the first time he has been on board a sub during a war. And wouldn't you know it, the sub he is assigned to will become a legend, not just for this war but forever.

There have been many books written by officers that served on U.S. submarines during World War Two but Forest Sterling gives us the unique perspective of going to war on a submarine, the perspective of that sailor sitting on the seabag on the pier. Sterling was Wahoo's Yeoman for five war patrols, four of them with the skipper that would become a legend right along with his boat, Mush Morton.

If what you're interested in is what it is like to carry the burden of command you may be a bit disappointed in this particular book. Sterling takes us to a different place. "Yeo" takes us to the crews messroom where we get to experience the obligtory "scuttlebut" that occurs on any navy ship. "So where we going this time Yeo?" "I don't know, Mush hasn't told me yet." "How many ship we gonna get this time?"

We also hear the crew's voice during an attack and a unique voice it is. "Is the old man crazy? Why ain't we runnin' from that destroyer?" Sterling takes us to most of the crew's activities and this is a unique perspective that is interesting. We go on liberty in Brisbane, Pearl Harbor and Midway (which apparently was a bit of a disappointment).

But there is something else here that is special. Sterling is a pretty good writer. Wake of the Wahoo is no dry recitation of procedures. Nope, you are there with the crew and you get to experience what they do and in a witty, well written style. Suffice it to say that from now on if anyone asks me about good submarine books, Wake of the Wahoo will be high on the list. Well done Yeo!

Forest Sterling's "Wake Of The Wahoo" gives the perspective of the Enlisted Man's take on Submarine Warfare in WWII. As I titled this review, it's a very hard book to put down once you start reading it. Like Cmdr. I.J. Galatin's "TAKE HER DEEP!", Sterling does not bore the reader with technical terms a non-Navy person would be confused with. He even went so far as to complain about "Fish Making Lots Of Noise" over the Sonar when Wahoo was in water replete with sediment and strong undercurrents---a problem with early Sonar you don't read much about.

"Wake Of The Wahoo" chronicals one of the most Daring Submarine Skippers from WWII and the crew the Author sailed with. "Wake Of The Wahoo" is a terrific story and worth reading over and over.

The man was genius, and this collection of his work is one of the best I have seen yet. AMAZING!

This is a rich collection of the work of Tennyson, and those who care for his verse will derive great pleasure from it. For myself most of Tennyson's longer poems have been more skimmed and tasted by me than really chewed and digested. Tennyson lives as a poet to me primarily through one poem, 'Ulysses'. This poem to my mind perfectly embodies a certain heroic stance toward life. It does this in immortal lines. The poem tells the story of the great Ulysses returning home after having voyaged and become ' a part of all I have met' . He is now not the youth who set out in the beginning but an elderly veteran. He begins with , 'Though much is taken much abides' And so in mid-life or in late- life having come home he is not content to rest. But is an ' old man explorer' who sets out again to meet and make his destiny. ' Though much is taken much abides, and though we are not that strength, which in old days, moved earth and heaven, that which we are we are, one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'
This kind of determination not only spoke to the Victorian world, and to Tennyson's own life- situation with its great losses and difficulties, but I believe will speak to mankind for so long as we are human.

This is an excellent collection of Tennyson's poems,
very representative, very inclusive. In order to make
room for so many poems with full texts, the editor has
chosen not to include an Introduction. This, of course,
for the non-Tennyson reader or person wishing to know
more about him presents something of an obstacle. However,
a bit of rambling to one's own library, or a municipal
one, can solve that.
There is included a Chronology of important dates and
events concerning Tennyson's life. From this, a few of
the important facts seem to be: 1809--born at Somersby,
fourth son of Revd George Clayton Tennyson, Rector of
Somersby; 1816-1820--pupil at Louth Grammar School,
subsequently educated at home by his father; 1827--
publishes _Poems by Two Brothers_ with his brother
Charles, also enters Trinity College, Cambridge University;
1829--meets Arthur Henry Hallam, also a student at Trinity,
who was to become Tennyson's close friend and the fiance
of Tennyson's sister Emily, also wins the Chancellor's
Gold Medal with his prize poem "Timbuctoo", and becomes
a member of the "Apostles," a Cambridge debating society;
1830--publication of _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_; 1831--death
of Tennyson's father, he leaves Cambridge without a
degree; 1833 (September) death of Hallam, his close
friend, from a cerebral hemorrhage while on holiday in
Vienna; 1840--beginning of almost a decade of depression
and ill health for Tennyson; 1850--marries Emily
Sellwood, appointed Poet Laureate of England; 1852--birth
of first son whom he names "Hallam"; 1883--accepts offer
of title of Baron, taking his seat in the House of
Lords in March 1884; 1892--dies on 6 October.
The poems in this anthology come from the major
publishings of Tennyson's poems. The first two:
"Timbuctoo" was published in the _Cambridge Chronicle
and Journal_ (1829) --and "The Idealist" was not
published during Tennyson's lifetime [this information

comes from the very good notes supplied by the Editor
Aidan Day at the back of the volume].
The poems included in this volume which the scholar or
general reader might wish to know are here collected
in one edition [full texts], along with many more
than these mentioned, are: The Lady of Shalott; Oenone;
The Palace of Art; The Hesperides; The Lotos-Eaters;
Morte d'Arthur; Ulysses; Locksley Hall; short poems
from _The Princess_; IN MEMORIAM, A.H.H. (1850);
MAUD (1855); Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington;
The Charge of the Light Brigade; Tithonous; Lucretius;
To E. FitzGerald; Tiresias; The Ancient Sage; Locksley
Hall Sixty Years After (1886); Demeter and Persephone;
Crossing the Bar. These poems are presented in
chronological order in the text, and the very good
Table of Contents in the front of the book tells
the poetry collection and its date from which the
poems come.
Tennyson is one of those interesting poets that take
a bit of time (at least for me) to get used to -- to
want to read, to really listen to. Having had the
experience of being required to memorize some of
Tennyson for my early academic training in school
at least got me acquainted with the more accessible,
but somewhat less deep poems. But it has taken several
years, much experience, and depressed grief over the
loss of a beloved, to bring me into synch with
the deeper poetry...or at least, being able to hear
it with deeper understanding, deeper reading.
From these poems it is hard to pick "favorites," and
that almost seems too trite a word. Maybe "meaningful"
would be more appropriate as a term. The two I would
select out would be "The Palace of Art" (1832; rev.
1842) and IN MEMORIAM, A.H.H. (1833), on the death
of his dear, beloved friend Arthur Hallam.
From "The Palace of Art," these lines resonate:
* * * * * * * * *
And with choice paintings of wise men I hung
The royal dais round.

For there was Milton like a seraph strong,
Beside him Shakespeare bland and mild;
And there the world-worn Dante grasp'd his song,
And somewhat grimly smiled.

And there the Ionian father of the rest;
A million wrinkles carved his skin;
A hundred winters snow'd upon his breast,
From cheek and throat and chin.
......
And thro' the topmost Oriels' coloured flame
Two godlike faces gazed below;
Plato the wise, and large-brow'd Verulam,
The first of those who know.

-- Arthur Lord Tennyson.
* * * * * * * *

This little book is a good and inexpensive introduction to Tennyson, who was every Victorian lady's favorite. From a purely technical level, he was absolutely ingenious, perhaps the best poet of Victorian times. His poems were also easy to remember and recite aloud. For example, "The Lady of Shalott." Give this poem a try and you'll see what I mean.

David Rehak
author of "Poems From My Bleeding Heart"

By the way, this Penguin book has the COMPLETE text of "In Memoriam." The Everyman's edition does not.

Collins not only does a superior job of telling the tales, but also characterizing the people who lived them. At Wake Forest it is not so much the story as the people. The university is one built upon relationships. This is a book for any generation of Wake Forest or ACC fan because one can open it and connect to the players and coaches with whom they are familiar. Collins offers an accurate and unbiased account. He has witnessed many of the events he described in this book first-hand as a veteran journalist and Wake Forest beat reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal, Wake Forest's hometown newspaper. Open to any page and enjoy!

It's been almost a century since basketball started at Wake Forest (1906). And from that beginning, not long after basketball was invented, there has been time to develop a lot of history. A history of events, certainly, but especially a history of people: the team, the players, the coaches.

Dan Collins has covered Wake Forest for the Winston-Salem Journal since 1978. He's collected a century worth of stories into this small book. It's clearly aimed at the Wake Forest fan. This is not basketball in general, this is Wake Forest basketball. Well maybe a little bit about North Carolina basketball, but not much.

Beyond that, the writing is excellent, it flows quickly and is absolutely filled with amusing anecdotes. If you're a fan....

This book is an excellent read, not just for Wake Forest fans, but for all sports fans. I recommend it highly!

Collins effectively presents interesting and informative anecdotes on Wake Basketball, its players and coaches. A pleasant read for any Deacon fan.

This book could be read as its own text, or as a companion to the author's previous book, The Irish for No. This volume takes on many of the same places, people, and themes, and uses the same groundbreaking poetic line sprawling across the page to recreate the eight-bar rhythm of traditional music. But this book is also distinct: its short discursive essays give it the narrative feel of somebody letting you in on the secrets of his own life, and the darker tone reminds you that you have traveled to the other side of the poet's mind.

The extensions from the previous volume begin very explicitly, with the title, which comes from a poem in TIFN. The Exiles' Club, who were the center of a poem in the last book, now come up as the subject of an essay in this book. But the book reads like the aftermath of a car bomb, with body parts strewn throughout the titles (Hairline Crack, Bloody Hand) and memorials to notable acts of violence ("The stopped clock of The Belfast Telegraph seems to indicate the time / of the explosion -- or was that last week's?").

This book could easily have a wider audience than most books of poetry. For students of history, lovers of literature, Celtophiles, and those curious about the mind of the victim of violence, Belfast Confetti can be both an education and a very grim pleasure to read. Be warned, you can't read it too quickly, or the darkness will tear you down in a hurry; this is a book to be consumed in sips, not huge gulps. But it is a book to be consumed nevertheless, and enjoyed for as long as it lasts.

"Belfast Confetti", along with Carson's 1987 "The Irish For No", are the most impressive volumes of poetry I have read in recent years. I could (and do, as an English student) pour over the poems for hour. He is wonderfully skilled at interconnecting his work and setting a real sense of place. Carson explores Belfast and the way the city and its people have changed in the last four decades or so since his youth. He is concerned not with judging the changes, but in examining the ways in which the Troubles, the English presence, and modernization have affected Belfast/Northern irish culture and the way his own memory betrays the truth as it falters. These are rich books, they keep you looking over & over for more layers. I also reccommend, if you can find it, his 1997 prose work, "The Star Factory". Its themes and subjects tie right back in with BC and TIFN.

These poems feel like poetry of a certain clear questioning existensial mind. They are precise and colored brightly. But after having read a long prose work of Auster's not long ago, I found them diminished things, not capable of giving anything like the context and complexity his prose can.
This too is a matter of understandibility. The language of prose we are told gives a clear surface meaning. The language of poetry is more resistant to this. And more the prose builds a narrative, and brings us characters and situations. The voice of the prose I am thinking of, 'The Brooklyn Follies' was clear and well- defined.
Here the abstract impersonal voice means we never quite know where we. Auster can make poetry of abstraction but the message tends to be one more of the no, no, nothing of things rather than their fullness in being. Nonetheless whether it is in finding 'consolation in colors' or in trying to remember himself ( lost in the wide world/ within me, and thereby to have known/ that in spite of myself / I am here. / As if this were the world..."
or in 'Facing the Music'

"where the air and earth erupt
in this profusion of chance, the random
forces of our own lack
of knowing what it is
we see, and merely to speak of it
is to see
how words fail us,how nothing comes right
in the saying of it, not even these words
I am moved to speak
in the name of this blue
and green
that vanish into the air
of summer.

Impossible
to hear it anymore. The tongue
is forever taking us away
from where we are, and nowhere
can we be at rest
in the things we are given
to see, for each word
is an elsewhere, a thing that moves
more quickly than the eye, even
as this sparrow moves, veering
into the air
in which it has no home. I believe, then
in nothing.....

these words might give you, and still
I can feel them
speaking through me.."

Auster defines a voice of his own wondering seeing and feeling, a voice which can too awaken the reader to some sense of the ' dearest freshness deep down things' sometimes.

Dupin's poetry brings together fear and desire, death and life, oppositions which fuse together not out of juxtaposition but out of a bleeding neccesity for eachother. Death and life do not contrast in dupin, they are one. Opposing themselves within themselves, self rending and fusing simulataneously. Parageneous and sublime.

A really good writer. I enjoyed this book. The poet has a very distinctive voice. He is one of the younger generation of Irish poets who are really doing different things. I would highly recommend this book to any reader.

Conor O'Callaghan is a very witty young Irish poet, who shows that there is more to Hibernian verse than those talented Northerners we've all come to know and love. He writes movingly and funnily about the (superficially) unpoetic east-coast town of Dundalk, and the social, domestic and sexual claustrophobia of small-town life.

The Wake Forest Series Of Irish Poetry, Volume One is an anthology of selected poems intended to introduce a broad audience to five Irish poets, old and young, who have not previously been widely published in North America: Harry Clifton, Dennis O'Driscoll, David Wheatley, Sinead Morrissey, and Caitriona O'Reilly. Prefacing the collection is a brief biography on each contributor, rounded out with literary comments about each contributor's works and tone. The poems themselves are rich with emotion, imagery, and kinship to Irish soil and culture. A superb introduction to contemporary Irish poetry through the voices of previously overlooked artists. Glaciers: There is no sea in my blood. /There is nothing that cannot be stopped. // God's wand is absolute. / Looking at glaciers // Jinxed into stillness - / I miss oceans in my head.

I've taken a few Irish Studies courses over the years and have always liked Irish poetry, but must confess to not having heard of any of these five writers before picking up this book. They range in age from mid fifties to early thirties, and come from both Southern and Northern Ireland. The selections are very generous, and give the reader a real flavor of the work. First up is Harry Clifton, who likes to rhyme and is something of a boho existentialist. The speakers in his poems tend to be glamorous outsiders who worry about women, male desire and the Vietnam war - all the big questions. Clifton does persona a lot too: philosophers, artists, mystics. He talks about `the agelessness / of the man with no birth certificate, / Innocent of history', which reminded me of Derek Mahon's famous poem `The Fire King'. I get the feeling that Harry Clifton would be a really fun guy to spend an evening with in a French or Italian town: he'd know all the good bars, and all the local painters and musicians. Or that's my hunch anyway.
Dennis O'Driscoll must be the Thomas Hardy of Irish poetry. He writes about just the kind of middle class lives of quiet frustration that Clifton doesn't. He goes for the uncomfortable but true rather than the beautiful but false. The people in his poems tend to have mortgages and desk jobs, usually with a sprinkling of black humor and puns thrown in. When he describes a woman wasted by illness he says `to weigh so little / she must have taken / enormous pains'. Sometimes he satirizes the contemporary Ireland of newfound wealth. There is a long poem about office work that has lots of lists. But then there is a very good short poem called `Water', which summarizes his whole style. He's like a refreshing drink of water.
David Wheatley is different again. He starts off with nice little poems about his garden and sleepwalking, then gets all satirical and angry in a sequence about the nineteenth century (I think) poet Mangan, then drops the Dublin theme and starts writing about birds of prey and Irish myth. It's all very varied. The last poem is in prose and is called `The Treasures of a Folklore Beyond Compare', which I assume is intended ironically. He always seems on the point of exasperation, for some reason.
Sinead Morrissey is from Northern Ireland. Maybe that explains why she takes religion so seriously. There's plenty of it here, even though she seems to have grown up in an orthodox communist household. Go figure! These poems have a more mystical feel to them than those of the other four writers. She has also travelled around alot, and writes about Japan and New Zealand. The poems I enjoyed most were the ones where she sweeps us along in a kind of descriptive rapture, like in `Between Here and There' and `To Imagine an Alphabet'. She even has a September 11 poem. She takes herself quite seriously, I think, but in a good way.
Caitríona O'Reilly writes very mysterious poems too. Most of the work I see in magazines over here is in an everyday colloquial style, very laid back in tone, but O'Reilly's poems have a kind of psychic tension to them that kept me on my toes. Of the five writers here she writes the best about the natural world. She is very sensitive to her surroundings without being precious or twee. Sometimes her work hints at darker themes without really spelling out what they are or might be. So she has a kind of controlled menace, which is good. I rate her highly.
They're all good. I recommend this book highly to all readers of contemporary Irish poetry!

These are poems that deserve a far wider readership than they are likely to get. The original poems are written in Irish Gaelic, a language that has teetered on the brink of extinction for the better part of the last 200 years. Despite a heartening recent come-back, Irish is still a minority language even in its own country, both as a spoken language and in literary form. I suspect it is quite easy -- even likely -- that most prospective readers would imagine that literature in Irish must necessarily be as marginal as the language itelf. Hardly anything could be farther from the truth, at least as regards Ms. Ni Dhomhnaill.

Although the poems have been ably translated (by Medbh McGuckian and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain), one knows that the Gaelic versions must be still more resonant, richer, drawing as they must on a literary tradition at least 1500 years old. But of course, that is an issue whenever one reads poetry in translation, an issue that in no way invalidates either the translating or the reading.

It is also important to say that these are bright -- in all senses of the word -- perfectly contemporary pieces. There is nothing remote or archaic about them.

Thus don't let a title like "An t'Each Uisce" (The Water Horse) put you off. These are poems worthy in any language.

The Water Horse is a collection of fabulous Gaelic poetry ably translated for an English reading audience and laced with the power of myth from beginning to end. This bi-lingual collection (Gaelic on the left/English on the right) is an enthusiastically recommended acquisition for academic poetry collections, and will very aptly serve to introduce the reading public to an undeniable modern Irish poetry with an antiquarian bard's feeling for language and imagery. Eithne The Hun: The earliest woman to be cited/in that might tome of Keating--/The Growth of Learning in Ireland--/figured children were for eating.//She'd been fostered out, seemingly,/with the Decies tribe of Munster/who reared her on a diet/of the fatted flesh of youngsters//so as to bring on her menarche/before she was well ready/and get land they were promised/out of the blade who might wed her://but the lamb must still be waiting/to be led to the altar/by the mess they've just made/of those three in Gibraltar.