Tomas O'Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous life of a primitive community, yet possessed a shrewd and humorous detachment that enabled him to observe and describe the world. His book is a valuable description of a now vanished way of life; his sole purpose in writing it was in his own words, 'to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again'.
The Blasket Islands are three miles off Irelands Dingle Peninsula. Until their evacuation just after the Second World War, the lives of the 150 or so Blasket Islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. A rich oral tradition of story-telling, poetry, and folktales kept alive the legends and history of the islands, and has made their literature famous throughout the world. The 7 Blasket Island books published by OUP contain memoirs and reminiscences from within this literary tradition, evoking a way of life which has now vanished.

This is a new release of the original 1925 edition.

1925. The originals of most of the poems here translated will be found in the collection of love poetry edited by Professor O'Rahilly under the title 'Danta Gradha.' These poems correspond in time to the lyrics of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline poets in English. In their peculiar mingling of beauty and ironic wit they remind us in particular of the Cavalier poetry which drew much of its inspiration from John Donne, and some of the authors, for instance, Pierce Ferriter, were in the strict sense of the word Cavaliers, though with an Irish nuance.

The originals of most of the poems here translated will be found in the collection of love poetry edited by Professor O'Rahilly under the title 'Danta Gradha.' These poems correspond in time to the lyrics of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline poets in English. In their peculiar mingling of beauty and ironic wit they remind us in particular of the Cavalier poetry which drew much of its inspiration from John Donne, and some of the authors, for instance, Pierce Ferriter, were in the strict sense of the word Cavaliers, though with an Irish nuance.