An intimate, lyrical look at the ancient rite of the Irish wake--and the Irish way of overcoming our fear of death Death is a whisper for most of us. Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, pull the curtains, and speak softly. But on a remote island off the coast of Ireland's County Mayo, death has a louder voice. Each day, along with reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local radio runs a daily roll call of the recently departed. The islanders go in great numbers, young and old alike, to be with their dead. They keep vigil with the corpse and the bereaved company through the long hours of the night. They dig the grave with their own hands and carry the coffin on their own shoulders. The islanders cherish the dead--and amid the sorrow, they celebrate life, too. In My Father's Wake, acclaimed author and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Toolis unforgettably describes his own father's wake and explores the wider history and significance of this ancient and eternal Irish ritual. Perhaps we, too, can all find a better way to deal with our mortality -- by living and loving as the Irish do.
FROM USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND FAMILY HISTORIAN ELIZA WATSON! "This is a sparkling tale of Irish ways, mysteries and friendship." —5-Stars "Love, love, loved this book! I wish I could give it 5k stars!" —5 Stars, Becky on Goodreads It’s been a rough year for 26-year-old Mags Murray. First she learns that her dad isn’t her biological father, a secret her mother took to her grave three years earlier. Then her beloved Irish grandmother passes away at Christmas while Mags is visiting her from the States. Now Mags must host her grandmother’s wake and sell her cottage. A cottage filled with cherished memories. A cottage Mags inherited but her odd jobs won’t enable her to keep. Shortly after the funeral, a young man, Finn O’Brien, arrives at the cottage with an old photograph. Finn believes the boys in the photo are a clue to his father’s identity. Mags can sympathize with him, and because she often helped her genealogist grandmother uncover skeletons in people’s closets, including hers, she agrees to assist Finn. But searching for Finn’s father stirs up trouble. Finn is in a near-fatal car crash that wasn’t an accident. So Mags and her childhood friend Biddy McCarthy investigate why someone wants to prevent Finn from finding his father. Questioning the quirky locals proves a wee bit difficult as several of the suspects were victims of Mags and Biddy’s childhood shenanigans. It might take a fake Irish wake to reveal Finn’s father and the would-be murderer. But what if the two turn out to be the same person? **Genealogy research tips included!** Other readers of Eliza Watson’s books enjoyed books by: Addison Moore, Alyssa Maxwell, Angie Fox, Carlene O'Connor, Cate Martin, Catie Murphy, Ellery Adams, Fiona Grace, Jana Deleon, Janet Evanovich, Joanne Fluke, Kennedy Layne, Laura Durham, Lee Strauss, Leighann Dobbs, Paige Shelton, Rhys Bowen, Shanna Swendson, Sheila Connolly, and Tonya Kappes. Topics: Cozy Mysteries Amateur Sleuth, Mysteries Amateur Sleuth, International Cozy Mysteries, Cozy Mysteries Women Sleuths, Genealogy, Family History, Ancestry, Family Trees, Fiction Set in Ireland, Humorous Cozy Mystery, Humorous Beach Read, International Mysteries, Chick Lit Mystery, Friendship Fiction, Witty Fiction, Humorous Fiction, Cozy Mysteries Set in Europe, Cozy Mysteries, Funny Beach Read, Cozy Mysteries How To, Cozy Mysteries like Stephanie Plum, Cozy Mystery Series, Cozy Mysteries in Ireland, Cozy Mystery Funny, Cozy Mystery Amateur Detective, Mysteries like Stephanie Plum
Poetry by Eil an N Chuilleanain, Eavan Boland, Eva Bourke, Medbh McGuckian, Kerry Hardie, Nuala N Dhomhnaill, Mary O'Malley, Rita Ann Higgins, Paula Meehan, Moya Cannon, Katie Donovan, Vona Groarke, Enda Wyley, Sin ad Morrissey, Caitr ona O'Reilly, and Leontia Flynn. Revised, expanded edition, with poetry from 16 contemporary poets: Edited and with a new introduction by Peggy O'Brien
'Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language?' W. B. YeatsThis anthology traces the history of modern Irish literature from the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century to the early years of political independence. From Charlotte Brooke and Edmund Burke to Elizabeth Bowen and Louis MacNeice, the anthology shows how, in forging a tradition of theirown, Irish writers have continually challenged and renewed the ways in which Ireland is imagined and defined. The anthology includes a wide-ranging and generous selection of fiction, poetry, and drama. Three plays by W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge are printed in their entirety, along with the opening episode of James Joyce's Ulysses. The volume also includes letters, speeches, songs,memoirs, essays, and travel writings, many of which are difficult to obtain elsewhere.'Stephen Regan's anthology vividly and valiantly presents a nation, and a national literature, coming into being.' Paul Muldoon
Many scholars of Finnegans Wake have long suspected that a key to the Wake lay deep within the core of Irish myth. George Gibson proposes a new interpretation of the novel, based upon a previously unrecognized paradigm from Irish mythology underlying the entirety of the work. This mythic structure derives from the ancient rituals and events collectively known as the Teamhur Feis (the Rites of Tara), the most important religious festival conducted in pre-Christian Ireland. Gibson demonstrates that sources known and used by Joyce describe the Rites as a historical event with nationwide attendance, an extraordinary and complex array of Druidic ritual, mystical rites, historical reenactments, sacred drama, conclaves, assemblies, and ceremonies performed by a bizarre cast of characters ranging from representatives of Irish deities and personifications of abstract principles to Druids, magistrates, ritual functionaries, and reenactors of the mythic dead. In Irish tradition, the most significant performance of this pagan spectacle occurred in 433 A.D., when Saint Patrick arrived at Tara just as the Rites were reaching their climax. Gibson argues that this pivotal event is also the climax of Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating remarkable parallels between specific events and performers of the Rites and the episodes and characters comprising Finnegans Wake, Gibson shows that every event and performer at the Rites has a correlate in the novel, and all Wakean episodes and performers have their parallels in the Rites of Tara. Ultimately, he argues, Joyce structured his novel according to the Teamhur Feis, and Finnegans Wake is a calculated reenactment of the most important event in Irish paganism.
The Celtic Unconscious offers a vital new interpretation of modernist literature through an examination of James Joyce’s employment of Scottish literature and philosophy, as well as a commentary on his portrayal of shared Irish and Scottish histories and cultures. Barlow also offers an innovative look at the strong influences that Joyce’s predecessors had on his work, including James Macpherson, James Hogg, David Hume, Robert Burns, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The book draws upon all of Joyce’s major texts but focuses mainly on Finnegans Wake in making three main, interrelated arguments: that Joyce applies what he sees as a specifically “Celtic” viewpoint to create the atmosphere of instability and skepticism of Finnegans Wake; that this reasoning is divided into contrasting elements, which reflect the deep religious and national divide of post-1922 Ireland, but which have their basis in Scottish literature; and finally, that despite the illustration of the contrasts and divisions of Scottish and Irish history, Scottish literature and philosophy are commissioned by Joyce as part of a program of artistic “decolonization” which is enacted in Finnegans Wake. The Celtic Unconscious is the first book-length study of the role of Scottish literature in Joyce’s work and is a vital contribution to the fields of Irish and Scottish studies. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Joyce, and to students interested in Irish studies, Scottish studies, and English literature.
Talking to the Dead is an essay on death and its tenacious hold on Irish culture. There are few traditions in which funerary motifs have been so ubiquitous in literature, popular rituals, folk representations, public rhetorics, even constructions of place. There are even fewer cultures in which funerary genres and preoccupations constitute the central thread of continuity. The Irish Theatrum Mortis is not simply an obsession of writers from the bards to Beckett and Heaney. Nor is it confined to contemporary Republican iconography. It is to be found in the pages of the local press, in acts of ritual resistance to unpopular decisions, in the way in which significant public events are narrated and framed. Though the funerary Ireland presented here may well yield to the new, positive self-image of the Celtic Tiger, it is the authors' contention that at the end of the twentieth century the funerary sign continues to define Irish identity. For good and ill, it is the centre that holds.
