Mother Ireland: A Memoir

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Synopsis
"Countries are either mothers or fathers... Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare." In her first work of nonfiction, Edna O'Brien finds the pulsing heart of Ireland as cannily as in her fiction she probes the recesses of the human soul. "Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else," she writes. "It is a state of mind as well as an actual country... Ireland for me is moments of its history, and its geography, a few people who embody its strange quality, the features of a face, a holler, a line from a Synge play, the whiff of night air--"but Ireland, insubstantial like the goddesses poets dream of, who lead them down into strange circles. I live out of Ireland because something in me warns that I might stop if I lived there, that I might cease to feel what it has meant to have such a heritage, might grow placid, when in fact I want yet again and for indefinable reasons to trace that same route, that trenchant childhood route, in the hope of finding some clue that will or would or could make possible the leap that would restore one to one's original place and state of consciousness, to the radical innocence of the moment just before birth." It is that trenchant childhood route that Edna O'Brien traces as she journeys through an Irish landscape; the tracing is at once autobiographical and mythological, physical and imaginative. Fergus Bourke's magnificent photographs, taken especially for Mother Ireland, provide graphic commentary as Edna O'Brien evokes Ireland's rich and tragic past. Here is a portrait of rural Ireland. Its essential poetry, beauty, humor, strangeness, simplicity, contradiction, superstition, and fear linger in the reader long after the book is closed.
Copyright:
1976

Book Details

Book Quality:
Excellent
Book Size:
144 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780151625871
Publisher:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Edna O-Brien
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
Yes
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Travel, Biographies and Memoirs, Social Studies
Submitted By:
Evan Reese
Proofread By:
Lissi
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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