Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara & Other: Writings

Born in England in 1935, Robinson has lived in the west of Ireland since 1972, working as an artist, cartographer and writer. On the evidence of the 14 essays in this collection, he also appears to be a born naturalist, geologist, archaeologist and linguist. Filled with wise and surprising personal observations, these fluent essays reflect their author's knowledge of local settlement patterns, rural customs and Celtic mythology. Throughout, Robinson regards the bleak and haunting Connemara landscape with an artist's eye, a lover's affection and a scientist's detached precision; and he writes with the grace of a poet. Though his particular territory is the west of Ireland, his larger subject expands beyond and incorporates the intersection of natural history, the human presence and the human past. He hints at his method in the opening of ""A Connemara Fractal"": ""To spin a few threads of ideas out of my experience... and tie them to some specific features... in the hope that they will lead off into wider territories of thought."" Cartography is a metaphor for our relationship to the places we inhabit: ""We could not use or even bear to look at a map that was not mostly blank. This emptiness is to be filled in with our own imagined presence."" In ""Listening to the Landscape"" Robinson explores the ""connection between language and reality"" and concludes that ""placenames are the interlock of landscape and language."" This book is a door into a place and a reality that few of us ever are privileged to know. It is a sheer joy to read. (May)