Review written by Adrian Frazier

THE GREAT WRITERS that came out of Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th century, and spectacularly once more since the 1970s, have in turn drawn the writers of other countries back to Ireland. They may be hard to notice among the big immigrant populations of Dublin, but one cannot keep clear of them in Galway, Sligo, Clare, or West Cork, where authorship sometimes seems the default character of a non-native resident. They may have come to inspect the scenery in which the literature is laid, or the society that cast it up, or the byways and habitations of bygone writers. Or maybe they just left their own country because it hates intellectuals.

It used to be Irish writers who went into exile; now the traffic goes the other way. There is a flood out of the USA, and that hardly needs explaining.

Yet writers have for decades been coming. There was Heinrich Böll on Achill Island, and Theodore Roethke on Inishbofin. John Berryman lingered in Dublin from 1966 to 1967 to "have it out with" Yeats. Knute Skinner - a poet classmate of John Montague at the Iowa Writers School - has been flourishing his pen in Killaspuglonane for 40 years. Best-selling writers like DBC Pierre or Michel Houellebecq are relative newcomers.

Richard Tillinghast is an ideal case of such a pilgrim. Born in Memphis and educated at Harvard (where he studied with Robert Lowell), he had already published four books of poetry when, in his 50th year, he spent a 1990 travel fellowship with his family in Kinvara. A musician and sociable being, he liked it. Year after year, he returned.

On the 1990 stay, he published a "letter from Galway" to American readers. The oldest Tillinghast boy went to school in Gort. On that town's main street his father noticed Burke's welding shop. It had on display Yeats's lines about "smithy work from the Gort forge" that enabled the poet to restore Thoor Ballylee for his "wife George" (a difficult name on which to rhyme). Tillinghast also managed to locate a man who had been grocer to Mr and Mrs Yeats, now the owner of Lady Gregory's desk, a drawing by Robert, and Sir William's swords. Tillinghast not only seeks out such details, he can also see the meaning of them. This is no superficial tourist.

A 1998 "letter from Dublin" sizes up the Celtic Tiger when it was still roaring. Some Irish scholars were crediting the boom to the Irish soul: contemporary go-getters were to business what Joyce had been to the novel, agents of transformation. Tillinghast fears rather that the Irish soul may be just what was getting lost. A third letter from 2005 takes exhibitions of the various arts of Wilde, Synge, and Orpen for its subject. By that time the poet had retired from the faculty of the University of Michigan and taken up residence in Tipperary.

Parts of this biographical sketch are taken from other sources than Finding Ireland. While the book is personally voiced, and we see what Tillinghast sees, we rarely see him. There is, however, a moment in his chapter on five contemporary poets where he finds himself gasping with pleasure over a "very sexy poem" by Catríona O'Reilly, in which the speaker "woke, drenched to the roots,/ my flannelette pyjamas stiff with sand". He had to "interrupt the person who was reading beside [him] in bed, to insist she hear it aloud". Suddenly the lens is turned upon himself. O there you are! And who is she beside you?

Yet this book is not about Richard Tillinghast finding himself, but about his helping us to find Ireland. It needs finding because large parts of it seem to have been mislaid, or gone altogether. There is, for instance, the Anglo-Irish tradition.

A GOOD PART OF this book is devoted to Synge, Wilde, Orpen, Bowen, Somerville and Ross, George Moore, and especially WB Yeats. Those sections arise from essay-reviews of recent biographies that Tillinghast published in the New Criterion or another US journal. These are roaming, appreciative, learned but unacademic chapters, with a rich, unsectarian sense of the vanished colonial structures that once sustained the lives of such authors.

For instance, he notices that while mostly the Anglo-Irish lived at a physical distance from one another and at a social distance from cottiers, several gentry families settled in Castletownshend at the time of Cromwell, thrived, intermarried, attended the same church, and saw one another regularly.

The busy social calendar of the population within the novels of Somerville and Ross may spring in part from the uniqueness of Edith Somerville's seaside village in Cork.

Like many visitors to contemporary Ireland, or older residents here for that matter, Tillinghast expresses his sadness that the nation, if more prosperous, is possibly less Irish than it used to be. An anthropologist friend of mine who did important work here on rural life in the 1970s returned a few years ago to find no culture left at all for an anthropologist to study, unless she happened to specialise in traumas of rapid modernisation. Tillinghast nonetheless lights upon lots in Ireland to admire, especially on stage and between the covers of books.

His writings about plays are delightfully specific about the theatre in which he saw a play (viz the "olfactory imprint" of past audiences at the Olympia), who was on stage, and what they did there.

He was at the Gate to see Donal McCann risking terribly long pauses as Frank in Faith Healer - the actor drew out the suspense to the snapping point, then rescued himself and the audience from panic with further spoken revelations.

Best of all, however, are Tillinghast's chapters on contemporary poets. He has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the top reviewers of poetry in the US. Of his treatments of Irish poets, the best concerns Derek Mahon.

Ever reader-friendly, Tillinghast nonetheless takes us into a careful examination of Mahon's meters, his half-rhymes (choose, knows, epiphanies), and Mahon's taste for rough edges in poems of exceedingly complex craftsmanship. A fine example of one poet taking his hat off to another.

Finding Ireland is written for Americans. Simple explanations turn up wherever American readers would need them, and Irish readers either would not, or would quarrel that things were not so simple. Yet the book deserves a readership both here and there. It enacts the belief that literature is a form of pleasure, woven out of history and society, and weaving its way into the personal lives of readers anywhere.

It shows how and why Ireland has become a magnet for writers worldwide. It is a culture that one can contemplate, and where scribbling contemplatives are tolerated.

Adrian Frazier directs the MA in writing and the MA in drama and theatre studies, NUI Galway

© 2008 The Irish Times
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times