A Supplement to 'Orders of Knighthood, Awards and the Holy See'

ISBN: 978-0-905715-32-2

23.5 x 15.5 cm.        196 pp.    illus.  Van Duren 1987

With an Introduction by Archbishop, later Cardinal, Jacques Martin

This book attests to the fact that there is nothing more ancient, more venerable, more diversified than the Orders of Chivalry that have existed or still exist, and more desired, more sought after by certain people, than a papal decoration. It is always necessary to underline the essential differences between temporal decorations and those that are conferred by the sovereign Pontiff. A papal knighthood is not to be viewed solely as an honour, as a reward: it also incorporates a duty and a mission, that of serving and protecting the person of the Vicar of Christ. Papal Knights form a sort of army, on the devotion of which the Pope must be able to rely. To the Knight it is not the honour that matters but his obligations and services.    + Jacques Cardinal Martin

Peter Bander van Duren's The Cross on the Sword is a supplement to his edition of the late Archbishop H.E. Cardinale's Orders of Knighthood, Awards and the Holy See (1985), and consolidates his revisions and additions that appeared in that work.

The first part deals with the statutes and regulations concerning the Pontifical Equestrian Orders of Pius IX, St. Gregory the Great and Pope St. Sylvester, the privileges granted to Papal Knights and their juridical position. As His Excellency Archbishop Jacques Martin writes in his introduction the author had to rely, for the information in this section, on ‘the Papal Briefs of the Orders' founders and the provisions made for the Papal Knights by Pope St. Pius X, many of which were contained in personal directives. It was left to Peter Bander van Duren to interpret them in the light of today's need as the Holy Father wrote them over eighty years ago.’

For the first time in the history of the Papal Knights, guidelines have been devised for an investiture ceremony, and the question of precedence has been examined in the light of the privileges granted to Papal Knights by Pope St. Pius X.

Part II deals with general juridical questions arising from Archbishop Cardinale's work, particularly the position of Catholic Orders of Knighthood that he stated were ‘extinct’, ‘abolished’, ‘suppressed’ or ‘in abeyance’. The author also examines the degree of importance that should be attached to the Bullarium Romanum when establishing the status of an Order.

Part III contains addenda to the 1985 edition of Orders of Knighthood, Awards and the Holy See concerning Catholic and Catholic-founded Orders of Knighthood, and Part IV introduces two Christian but not Catholic Orders, each unique in their nature.

The Cross on the Sword is a most useful work, not only for Papal Knights and everyone who may at one time or another be connected with their investiture ceremonies — Parish Priests, Masters of Ceremonies, diocesan and parochial administrations, for example — but also for everyone who is interested in Orders of Chivalry, and their continuing role in the world today. The illustrations not only show insignia — medals and uniforms — of the Orders examined in this book, but also illustrate the ceremonies themselves, adding a further dimension to the help that this work provides for the reader.

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ISBN 978-0-86140-214-4 21.6 x 13.8 cm.

For over five centuries the essays of Ze-Ami – considered, with his father Kan-Ami, to be the founder of Noh, the classical dance-drama of Japan – were kept secret. They were not shown to more than one Noh actor in each generation until recently. Though they contain a large number of paradoxes and contradictory statements as well as a great deal of repetition, they were regarded as a Bible by actors in the Noh technique. As repetition was a constant feature in training and in techniques in many arts in Japan, and as paradox had often been used in the search for the truth in Zen, so Ze-Ami's essays were accepted, despite their repetitions, paradoxes and contradictions. They were not. however, easily translatable, and they benefit from being edited.

In this work therefore, Ze-Ami's ideas are dealt with in eight chapters: The History of Noh: Five Groups of Noh Plays: Training: Acting: Writing a Play: Public Tachiai Competitions and Grades of Acting: The Audience: and Hana. This arrangement presents Ze-Ami's ideas with some order and consistency. Relevant sections of eighteen essays by Ze-Ami are translated and discussed. These include Fushi-kaden, Kashū, Ongyoku-Kowadashi-kuden, Kukyō, Shikadō, Nikyoku-Santai-Ningyōzu, Sandō, Fushizuke-shidai Fukyokushū, Yūgaku-Shūdō-Fūcken, Goi, Kyūi, Rikugi, Shūgy-okutokuka, Goonkyoku-Jōjō, Goon, Shūdosho, Kyakurui-ku, and Zeshi-Roku-juigo-Sarugaku-Dangi.

This volume is a most useful introduction to an understanding of Noh history, practice, and technique, for all readers in the West, written as it is by a trained Noh actor..

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W. E. (‘Kits’) van Heyningen has had a many-sided career: born in South Africa, he arrived in England in 1934 to carry out research on bacterial toxins, first at the Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry, Cambridge, and then at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford. There he joined Sir Howard Florey, and continued his research, on dysentery, tetanus, and cholera, which has taken him to many parts of the world.

Apart from his research work, he has taken an important part in the life of Oxford University, having served on the Hebdomadal Council, and the governing bodies of the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, as well as playing a major role in the foundation of St. Cross College, of which he was the first Master.

In 1940 he married Ruth Treverton, a leading researcher on the biochemistry of the eye. They have a son who has followed in his parents’ scientific footsteps, a daughter who is an architect, and four grandchildren.

In The Key to Lockjaw Kits writes with clarity, compassion, and with humour, not only about his life but also his work and the subjects of his research, and, in so doing, sets the record straight on more than one popular misconception.

 

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Vol.1             ISBN: 0-901072-41-9   £40.00
Vol.2             ISBN: 0-901072-42-7   £40.00
Both v.1 &v.2 ISBN: 0-901072-96-6 £80.00

Edited by Henry Summerfield

During its existence, A.E. contributed, often anonymously chiefly while he was its editor, to well over 1,000 issues of the Homestead and 400 of the Statesman. Professor Summerfield has made a selection covering the entire period, dividing it into general articles and book reviews, and adding indexes to themes, books reviewed and of footnotes. In two volumes, sold separately or as a pair, totalling 1,037 pages.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm. with 24 illus.

Hurriedly summoned from his English public school in November 1922, Erskine Childers was permitted by the Free State authorities to make one brief, final visit to his condemned father in the cells of Portobello Barracks, Dublin, at the height of the Civil War. Not surprisingly, such an emotional ordeal had a profound and lasting impact on the sixteen-year-old boy, who had promised his father in the death-cell to shake hands with and forgive every Minister in the Provisional Government who were responsible for his death, and that if he entered Irish politics himself he would never mention the execution in public, and do everything possible to ensure that the Childers name would become a healing memory.

A little over half a century later when that same schoolboy became President of Ireland he was universally regarded as a man of peace. His sudden death after only eighteen months in office brought the largest gathering of monarchs and rulers ever to assemble on Irish soil, to pay tribute to Erskine Childers in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, while people wept openly in the streets outside.

This work tells of the patient determination that nothing and no one would divert Erskine Childers from the exacting task he had promised to undertake, and of the very considerable contributions to Ireland that he was able to make in the process, in the various ministeries that he headed, and finally as the country’s first citizen, the fourth President of the Republic of Ireland.

Mr. Jack Lynch, Ireland’s premier from 1966-73, and 1977-79, has written a foreword for this biography.

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In the third and final volume of The Meaning of Life, Professor Whiteman, a mathematician and mystic (who will be celebrating his 100^th birthday in November 2006) has completed the mammoth task he set himself, namely to incorporate his own mystical experiences into a world view. As he writes in the Preface, ‘What we are to consider here is the experience of the divine Reason (Logos) in everything of life, always working for the advancement of the good. The experience which gives or leads to this is today described as mystical. So here we study what has been said or depicted regarding the mystical, also the way to proceed for its attainment and development, and what the most notable teachers in the past have seen fit to declare.

‘This third volume on the “meaning of life” deals accordingly with the fruits of spiritual development in three chief ways. Firstly, every conclusion reached is based on and in accord with the mystical and psychical experience granted to me over the course of about eighty years (some even earlier). . . . Secondly, there is need an intensive study of ancient scriptures, which I have felt obliged to study in the original languages: Vedic, Sanskrit, Pali, Hebrew and Greek [as] translations of these scriptures have almost invariably been made by scholars lacking mystical experience. . . . Knowledge of quite another kind is also needed, philosophical and indeed mathematical in character, if the consistent rational development of objective phenomena in other-world states of life (and even in the physical world) is to be understood. . . . In the Historical Survey, Part III, I have restricted the enquiry to writings reasonably taken to refer to first-hand mystical experience in history up to about 120 C.E. . . . there is good reason to believe that, after that date, the earlier and genuine accounts of mystical experience have been built on by theologians and others who had not been granted that experience.’

Professor J.H.M.Whiteman (who also wrote as Michael Whiteman) published more than fifty contributions relating to spiritual development, psychological, mystical, or otherwise scientific matters. He taught in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town for twenty-nine years (principally Relativity, Quantum Theory, and related subjects). He has conducted classes in Sanskrit at various times, served as Editor of The South African Music Teacher for over fifty-five years, and has appeared as an expert witness in court or as a consultant on psychological or other scientific matters. His previous books – The Mystical Life (1961), Philosophy of Space and Time (1967), The Meaning of Life, Vol.1 (1986) and Vol.2 (2000), and Aphorisms on Spiritual Method (1993) – have all been highly praised.

CONTENTS

Preface

List of Diagrams and Charts

Abbreviation Code

Acknowledgements

Prologue: The ‘World Illusion’ (Māyā), Universal Reason, Consciousness, and Individual Life

PART I

introductory studies

1. The Scientific Validation and Reality Rating of Reports of Non-Physical Experience
2. The Fallacies of Modern Materialism and the Correction
3. Survival of Death: A Clarification of Ideas, on the Basis of Evidence
4. The Angelic Choirs

PART II

an outlining of universal theology, with first-hand evidence

5. Part I: Divinity, Creation, and the Purpose of Suffering
6. Part II: Individual, Society, and the System of the Worlds

PART III

a selected historical survey

7. Mystical Religion in the Late Bronze Age
8. Mystical Teachings in the Rig Veda: Four Hymns in New Translation
9. Two Classical Upanishads in New Translation, with Commentary
10. The Psychical and Mystical Experience of Gotama Buddha
11. The Mystical Experience and Teachings of the First Isaiah
12. Four ‘Messianic’ Psalms, in New Translation, with Commentary
13. Mystical Teachings of St  Paul
14. Mystical Evidence in the Johannine Gospel and Letters

PART IV

life in the other worlds

5. ‘Naturalistic’ Experiences ‘Out of the Physical Body’
6. Meetings after Death
7. The Intermediate world
8. The Clothing of the Spiritual Body
9. The Higher Worlds
10. The Lower Worlds, and their Inhabitants

SUPPLEMENTS

1. The Mystical Derivation of Quantum Theory and Physical Laws in General
2. Six Parables
3. The Transliteration System used her for Biblical Hebrew

References

Names Index

Subject Index

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In the present period of soul-searching, conflict and reconciliation, many people are turning to the ancient Indian classics of spiritual development and psychology for illumination and guidance. Prominent among these classics is the collection of aphorisms called the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which offer a systematic exposition of principles and practices successfully followed over the course of 1000 years before the Christian era.

This comprehensive and up-to-date study, with its preliminary mystical explanations of themes in the Rig Veda, Upanishads and early Buddhism, will hopefully make the substance of this ancient guide to spirituality more immediately accessible and illuminating for our modern times.

Contents: eleven chapters on the mystical and historical background - an idiomatic translation - an interlinear translation and detailed commentary - and three supplements to assist teachers who are unfamiliar with Sanskrit.

Previous books by the author (who also writes under the name of Michael Whiteman) - The Mystical Life (1961), Philosophy of Space and Time (1967), and The Meaning of Life vol.1, An Introduction to Scientific Mysticism (1986) - have all been highly praised.

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Horace Plunkett is remembered for his efforts to transform Irish agricultural practice, through the Co-operative Movement which he founded in 1889, and its administration via the Department of Agriculture, which he established ten years later.

From a protestant ascendancy background, Plunkett was one of those ‘fenian unionists' who were always able to see both sides of the Irish Question, and whose reforming zeal, and frank expression of opinion, during the period in which Ireland moved from benevolent Tory rule by Westminster, to independence for the south and partition of the island, brought him into conflict with all shades of political opinion.

This biography traces the development and interplay of his social and political philosophies, establishing Plunkett as the pioneer of modernisation of Ireland's principal industry, and as a political figure whose ideals and experience are of abiding interest.

 

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ISBN 978-0-86140-252-6

This volume of critical essays and of creative writings brings together work by distinguished authors in many fields in honour of Alexander Norman Jeffares: English literature, Irish and Anglo-Irish Literature and Commonwealth literature, all fields which gained his interest throughout his life and to which he has contributed much, both through the spoken and printed word – as can be’ seen from the bibliography of his writings at the end of this volume.

Scholarship and criticism are deployed by the essayists to show how literature, by virtue of its creativity, offers a human and vivid insight into the individual in his or her society.

Poets and imaginative writers of many traditions deepen and extend our understanding of the creative impulse and its immediacy through their own work.

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xii, 108pp., 28.5 x 18.7 cm.   1997

To mark the first twenty years as Francis Warner's publisher, years which included our publication of thirteen books by him (as well as a number of books about his work), and to mark his sixtieth birthday Colin Smythe Ltd. published this volume containing poems written since those published in Collected Poems 1960-1984, together with lyrics from his recent plays.

This book, Nightingales: Poems 1985-1996, is designed by Michael Mitchell, set in Lutetia Italic type, and printed in three colours throughout and embellished with real gold-leaf motifs in a limited edition of 500 signed and numbered copies on mould-made Velin Arches rag paper by the Libanus Press, Marlborough. It is bound by Brian Settle of Smith Settle, Otley, in quarter vellum with boards covered by paste paper made by Victoria Hall of Norwich.

The Libanus Press was founded by designer and printer Michael Mitchell thirty years ago. Working together with two highly-skilled journeymen, compositor and printer, the Press reflects all the splendid qualities of such presses as William Morris's Kelmscott Press and St John Hornby's Ashendene Press. It uses three relief presses and has maintained one of the few remaining type foundries in the country allowing it to produce high quality type for each individual work. Its range and knowledge of the world's best handmade papers gives it the broadest experience of print on the most interesting and beautiful materials, and has persevered with nearly lost techniques, such as the printed application of gold leaf used in the present volume. Numbered amongst the books produced by the Press in the past have been a series of dual text publications - a new translation of Plato's Symposium that is now the contemporary benchmark, Voltaire's Candide, The Letters of Pietro Bembo to Lucrezia Borgia and Extracts from War and Peace - Greek, French, Italian and Russian, giving it unparalleled editorial and design expertise with texts.

‘What a triumphant harvest!’
Dr George Rylands, King’s College,Cambridge

‘A sumptuous treat. It is good to have an unashamedly lyric poet of such talent.’
The Bishop of Oxford

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-206-9

This volume, the first full collection of Francis Warner’s poems for more than twenty years, confirmed his position as a master of lyric form, and also made possible a deeper awareness of the consistency of his development, and the range of his poetic achievement.

Collected Poems contains sonnets in every classical form – also sonnets reversed, inside-out, upside-down, ends-to-middle, with centre-rhyme, boot-lace rhyme, in two voices, acrostic, double acrostic. . . . Far from being merely a cascade of virtuosity, they are filled with deep emotion and rich experience, as well as being precisely made: modifications of the form grown from the pressure and directions of the emotions. The ‘dark’ sonnets are here (this time along with more than fifty others), but these now can be seen set in their original context, the sequence Experimental Sonnets – a book about which much has been written, on account of its technical innovations and its range of feeling, but the full text of which had been unavailable for twenty years.

In addition to such longer poems as his classical evocation Perennia, and over one hundred lyrics brought together for the first time, there are songs from ten plays.

‘Some of the most rewarding and individual poetry of the last quarter century.’ Glyn Pursglove in Francis Warner’s Poetry (1988)

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ISBN 978-0-86140-289-2

All the papers in Medieval and Modern Ireland were presented at the eighteenth annual international conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, held at Calgary, Alberta, in February 1985. The conference theme, Medieval and Modern Ireland, was chosen by the organising committee for its intrinsic merits, and as a reasonable extension of the theme of the previous conference which focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Readers of this volume will be struck by the pervasiveness of the connections between the medieval and the modern in Ireland and the Irish, artists in particular, and realise why James Joyce could hardly avoid linking the modern Irish artist with the medieval Irish monk, as he does in the bitter musings of Stephen Dedalus, who walks alone into eternity along Sandymount Strand: ‘You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery Columbanus.’

The contributors are Hallvard Dahlie, Ann Dooley, John Wilson Foster, Brian John, Toni O’Brien Johnson, Heinz Kosok, F. X. Martin O.S.A., and Wolfgang Zach.

 

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-442-1

Approximately 800 years have passed since the introduction of the English language to Ireland and 400 since the establishment of an Irish Literature in English. However, for complex socio-political reasons there is, as yet, no comprehensive dictionary of the English of Ireland to which readers of Irish Literature – and indeed, of any aspect of Irish studies – can turn to for assistance when they encounter completely unfamiliar words and phrases, or apparently familiar words used unconventionally by Irish writers.

This work is designed to provide the general reader, as well as the specialist, with direct and easy access to this important but elusive and often-overlooked element of Irish Literature. Quotations from writers ranging from AE to Zozimus (including all four Nobel Laureates in literature: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney) are used to illustrate vocabulary and idioms. Also are included are illustrative quotations from English writers, such as Spenser and Thackeray, who wrote about Ireland.

From archaeology (crannog) to zoology (graunogue), almost every aspect of Ireland and Irish life is reflected here in the mirror of art.

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-359-2

This work is intended to provide the general reader, as well as the specialist, with access to an important but neglected element of Irish literature in English: its vocabulary and idioms.

Over seventy years have elapsed since the establishment of an independent Irish state, but for complex socio-political reasons there is, as yet, no dictionary of Irish-English to which readers can turn for assistance when they encounter unfamiliar words and phrases or apparently familiar words usedunconventionally by Irish writers.

The focus of this work is the writers of the Irish Literary Revival, but their use of Irish-English is so extensive that it is relevant to the entirefield of Irish literature in English from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to the present.

Almost all aspects of Ireland and Irish life over the past 400 years are mirrored here: agricultural, economic, educational, linguistic, military, political, religious and social history as well as animals, emigration, drink, food, folklore, geography, music, mythology, plants, sports and even the mercurial Irish weather.

 

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This work is intended to provide the general reader as well as the specialist with access to an important but neglected element of Joyce's style: the Anglo-Irish (Hiberno-English) dialect.

Although some commentaries and editions of individual works include glossaries on a few terms, this is the first full scale reference work of its kind. It will be of use to others besides Joyceans also because Joyce's use of the dialect is so extensive that most examples a reader is likely to encounter elsewhere are identified and explained here.

 

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-045-4
22.9 x 14.5 cm.      xvi, 91 pp.  1979

 

The Harvest Festival is Sean O’Casey’s earliest extant play. Written in about 1918 or 1919, it was the second play that O’Casey offered the Abbey Theatre. It was turned down, but he kept the manu­script and it now forms part of the extensive O’Casey archive in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. It has never been performed, and this is its first pub­lication in the U.K. and Ireland, following on its U.S. publication by only a few months.

The plot focuses on the turmoil of an outside world of strikes and riots converging on a Dublin city church in the midst of its preparations for a harvest festival. Set in 1913, it deals with Irish workers’ battles against economic oppression and religious hypocrisy, with that vital combina­tion of passion, humour and pathos that distinguishes O’Casey’s later plays. It is a rich melodrama of class struggle, with ironically pointed clashes involving representatives of Church, Employers and Labour.

An incomplete revision of the first act, which O’Casey kept with the original manuscript, is included as an Appendix to show the direction the playwright might have gone had he chosen to revise the entire play: as it is, students of drama will see in The Harvest Festival the seeds of O’Casey’s later works, and the lineal descendants of its characters appear in Red Roses for Me, The Drums of Father Ned, and The Bishop’s Bonfire.

Eileen O’Casey has contributed a foreword entitled ‘Clench Your Teeth’, and John O’Riordan has written an Introduction.

A three-quarter leather edition with wood veneer panels, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt, intended to be limited to 50 copies, ISBN 0-86140-052-6, signed by the writers of the Foreword and Introduction, Eileen O'Casey and John O'Riordan, was also published, but of the 50 copies only 30 were actually bound.

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Words Apart is a study of the rich linguistic heritage of the people of Northern Ireland, providing an invaluable introduction to this remarkable and eloquent variety of English. The book is not simply a dictionary: it is a record of the unique interaction of three peoples, the Irish, the English and the Scots, and reflects a history of courage, humour and stoicism.

This study is in four sections. The first provides a brief account of the growth and development of the English language in Northern Ireland. Section Two offers a lexicon which includes pronunciations, etymologies and illustrative sentences from live recordings made in both rural and urban areas in all six counties. Section Three is an alphabetically-arranged list of English words followed by their equivalents in the dialect. The final section includes extended examples of verse, prose and recorded speech.

This book will be of value to the general reader as well as to those with a special interest in Irish studies, in variations in English and in the spread of English throughout the world.

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With notes on interpretive criticism 1910 to 1984

ISBN 978-0-86140-408-7 874pp.

The writings of William Blake were not understood by his contemporaries or the Victorians, and it was only in 1910, with the publication of Joseph Wicksteed's Blake's Vision of the Book of Job, that the long process of comprehending Blake's works seriously began.

Part 1 of the present work consists of twelve chapters that are primarily intended to lead the reader who has little or no acquaintance with Blake's more difficult works through all his books. These consist of Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, three early prose tractates, the eleven shorter prophetic books (including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), the lyrics of the Pickering Manuscript, The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, The Gates of Paradise, The Ghost of Abel and Illustrations of The Book of Job.

The reader who wishes to explore a work more fully can proceed to Part II, where a headnote outlines the main scholarly views of its structure and meaning. The headnote for each book is followed by a survey, laid out line by line, of how such details as proper names, Blakean symbols, political allusions, and obscure phrases have been interpreted. Where there are engraved designs, these are covered in a comparable fashion. Part II will also be useful to those who want an overview of the interpretations of a particular work or passage and to readers interested in the evolution of twentieth-century understanding of Blake.

There are two indexes providing ready access to explanations of terms and proper names.

'Its nearly 900 pages comprise the most helpful overview of Blake's works and of Blake criticism I have ever come across... Highly recommended.' Bill Goldman in The Journal of the Blake Society

HENRY SUMMERFIELD teaches in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is author of That Myriad-Minded Man, A Biography of G.W.Russell - 'AE', is General Editor of the Collected Works of G.W.Russell, and editor of A Selection from the Contributions to 'The Irish Homestead' by Russell. He is also author of An Introductory Guide to The Anathemata and the Sleeping Lord Sequence of David Jones.

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Late in his career, the Irish poet Austin Clarke was asked by Robert Frost what kind of poetry he wrote. ‘I load myself with chains,’ Clarke replied, ‘and try to get out of them.’ ‘Good Lord!’ Frost said. ‘You can’t have many readers.’ Despite a distinguished career spanning almost sixty years, Austin Clarke has not had many readers outside Ireland. Inside Ireland, many critics ranked Clarke as the most important Irish poet writing after Yeats, but his work has not received extensive critical attention — partly because it is often difficult and complex, and partly because Clarke was committed to writing not just about the Irish, but also for the Irish.

In The Poetry of Austin Clarke, the first published book-length study of Clarke’s poetry, Gregory Schirmer argues against seeing Clarke as a provincial writer. Rather, he sees Clarke’s large and varied canon as informed by a broad humanistic vision that enables it to transcend Clarke's commitment to the local.

Clarke once said that in reading Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he had difficulty distinguishing between Stephen Dedalus and himself. Like Joyce, Clarke (1896-1974) came to see Irish Catholicism as a powerful and complex threat to his freedom and artistic vocation. In The Poetry of Austin Clarke, Schirmer asserts that almost all of Clarke’s poetry moves between two poles: his view of Irish Catholicism as a repressive, life-denying force, and his humanistic faith in man’s inherent goodness and right to moral, intellectual, and spiritual freedom.

This argument is advanced through a detailed reading of Clarke’s poetry, beginning with the early narrative poems, which are based on the same pre-Christian Irish legends that inspired Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, and then turning to Pilgrimage (1929) and Night and Morning (1938), two volumes of lyrics that are central to understanding Clarke’s poetry as a whole. In these books, Clarke sets forth the terms that govern all his art – the struggle between humanism and religion, flesh and spirit, reason and faith. Clarke’s satirical poems and epigrams of the 1950s and 1960s are then examined in terms of this tension. Finally the book discusses Clarke’s later poetry, including the long, semi-autobiographical Mnemosene Lay in Dust (1966), the late erotic poetry, and Clarke’s free translations of Gaelic verse.

Throughout all this varied writing, Schirmer argues, Clarke is celebrating the human in the face of the forces that he sees ranged against it. It is this vision that makes Clarke’s poetry an important part, not just of Irish literature, but of all literature attempting to express man’s condition in the twentieth century.

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Edited and annotated by Raghavan and Nandini Iyer

This volume contains A.E.'s known mystical writings, including his four major works, The Avatars (1933), The Candle of Vision (1918), The Interpreters (1922), and Song and its Fountains (1932), together with his letters and other prose contributions to Dana, Ethical Echo, The Internationalist, The Irish Theosophist, Lucifer,  and Ourselves, W.Y.Evans Wentz's interview with A.E. in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, A.E.'s first independent publication, To the Fellows of the Theosophical Society, his introduction to City Without Walls, and many other spiritual books, reviews and his hitherto unpublished story ‘The Return’.

Although Russell, known as A.E., was a poet, painter, newspaper editor, and a political writer, working for three decades in the Irish cooperative movement, it is probably as a mystic that he attracts contemporary attention. His writings on mystical and mythological topics, reflecting his study of Hindu and Theosophical teachings as well as his own visionary experience, offer a unique and inspiring exploration of unseen worlds.

Interpretation of the context and significance of A.E.’s thinking is facilitated for the reader of this collection by the extensive introduction and copious notes offered by Professors Raghavan Iyer and Nandini Iyer.

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