The Wanderings Of Oisin

"The Wanderings of Oisin" is a narrative poem by W. B. Yeats that delves into themes of aging, nostalgia, and the passage of time. Drawing from Irish mythology and legend, the poem follows the ancient hero Oisin, who returns to Ireland after spending three centuries in the mythical land of Tír na nÓg with the fairy princess Niamh. As Oisin recounts his adventures and reflects on the changes that have occurred in his absence, he grapples with a sense of displacement and loss in a world vastly different from the one he knew. Through vivid descriptions and lyrical language, Yeats evokes a sense of longing for a glorious past while also exploring the inevitable dissonance between memory and reality. The poem captures the tension between the desire for eternal youth and the reality of mortality, as Oisin comes to terms with the transient nature of life and the inevitability of change. "The Wanderings of Oisin" stands as a poignant meditation on the passage of time, the complexities of memory, and the enduring power of myth and storytelling.

"Most of the newly discovered poems date from the mid-1880s and reveal how Yeats experimented with style, stance, and subject during the crucial years at the beginning of his poetic career. Nine others written in the 1890s display a more polished technique, and many of these address the themes of Yeats's love for Maud Gonne and his occult interests. The editor's introduction to this volume will replace the familiar image of the young Yeats as dreamy and apolitical with a more accurate perception of him as a poet highly involved in the political and cultural issues of his day."--BOOK JACKET.

Celebrated as an unusually original poet - nervy, refreshing, deceptively simple - Leontia Flynn has quickly developed into a writer of assured technical complexity and a startling acuity of perception. In her third collection, Flynn examines and dismantles a fugitive life. The first sequence moves through a series of rooms, reflecting on aspects of the author's personal and family history. Using the idea of the haunted house or the house with a sealed-off room, and Gothic tropes of madness, doubles, revenants and religious brooding, the poems consider ideas of inheritance and legacy. The second section comprises a magnificent long poem written in the months leading up to the banking crisis and presidential election of October 2008. Taking as its occasion a flat-clearing, it assumes a more public voice (inspired partly by Auden's 'Letter to Lord Byron'), and reflects on aspects of the rapid social and technological change of the last decade. An extraordinarily moving reflection on mutability and mortality prompted by the spring-cleaning of a life's detritus, 'Letter to Friends' evolves from a private reliquary to a public obsequy. Its collapse back into private griefs, including the poet's father's decline into Alzheimer's disease, is pursued in the third section of the book. Here the theme of a tallying of private and public balance sheets, of different kinds of profit and loss, widens to include poems of motherhood and marriage, the possibilities of hope and repair.