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Chris
Arthur, Irish Willow
A PenMark
Press Book
Irish Willow is the second
Chris Arthur essay collection published by PenMark Press. It
continues his thoughtful and lyrical meditations on the world we
live in, the actions we take, and the consequences of our existence.
Arthur is first and foremost a poet; a poet who has chosen to write
in the prose form of the essay. His ability to look deeply, feel
intensely, and write compellingly can move the reader to a deeper
appreciation of life.
As with Arthur's first collection,
Irish Nocturnes, each essay is
illustrated. Click on the blue shard to read a representative
essay. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader™)
Contents
Falling Through
Willow Pattern
On the Face of It
Table Manners
The Cullybackey
Fox-Weasel
Takabuti’s Tears
Walking Water
Transplantations
Handscapes of the
Mind
Taxidermy
Atomic Education
Train Sounds
A Tinchel Round My
Father
Envoi
Critical
acclaim for Chris Arthur’s essay collections:
“Arthur meditatively stakes out his
own personal space, and reclaims the landscape for the Protestant
sensibility, describing a terrain that is at times as immanent with
a sense of the numinous and sacred as any Heaney landscape…[it] is
an engaging and inspiring read…filled with existential reflections
which not only deal with reminiscences of growing up, with
relationships, and rites of passage, but with all the complexities
of life, with unexpected encounters — not least with language…Inspiringly,
Irish
Willow manages to catch
quite a bit of the ‘uncatchable mystery of being’.”
Irene Gilsenan Nordin,
Nordic Irish Studies
“[D]on’t
underestimate the imaginative qualities of this collection. Look in
this direction, and it’s all about wildlife; look over there, and
it’s about the politics of contemporary Ireland; switch tack and
it’s all about exile and loss and personal identity…Arthur’s text
— a challenge to the canonical tyranny of the empowered — is a
gracious composition; a weave of contemplative, meditative longing.”
Glenn Hooper,
Irish Studies Review
“The real value
of these intensely absorbing personal meditations is that, somewhat
like W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn or Naipaul’s
The Enigma
of Arrival, they are a genre unto themselves and their apartness
from other ways of writing is licensed by the force and eloquence of
the writing itself. These [essays] accommodate the most personal and
local of memories and the most abstract philosophical musings…They
convey the reader into mysterious mazes of association and
reflection which are, I believe, unique in Irish writing.”
Denis Sampson,
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
“The author —
an Ulster-born, Buddhist-influenced, Scottish-educated former Irish
game-warden-turned-essayist now living in Wales — must, on the
strength of this collection alone, now be counted among the most
innovative advocates of creative nonfiction in contemporary Irish
writing, and certainly the one most committed to creating a
distinctly Irish habitation for the essay.”
James Rogers,
New Hibernia Review
“I have just
finished reading Irish Willow, a book of essays that is so
thoughtful and perceptive (think Seamus Heaney’s poetry in prose)
that I wanted to underline whole passages, and yet so beautifully
produced that I didn’t dare.”
David Robinson,
The Scotsman
“Irish
Willow navigates the philosophical terrain between individual
experience and the cultural milieu in which one is born and
raised...Arthur’s is at once a poetic, affective and sometimes
chilling prism…The collection is an exhilarating affirmation of
the act of rumination, both in terms of writing and reading.
Arthur’s deft prose and lacerating meditative style provoke empathy, humour, disagreement and no shortage of self-reflection.”
Eóin Flannery,
Irish Studies Review
Author
Chris
Arthur was born in Belfast and lived for many years in County
Antrim. He worked as warden on a nature reserve on the shores of Lough Neagh before enrolling at the University of Edinburgh where he
took a First Class Honours degree followed by a PhD. He has been
widely published as an essayist and poet on both sides of the
Atlantic. His work has appeared in
The American Scholar,
The Antigonish Review,
The Centennial Review, Contemporary
Review, Dalhousie Review, Descant, Event, The Honest Ulsterman, The
North American Review, Northwest Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The
Southern Review, The Threepenny Review,
The Wascana Review
and others. His first essay collection, Irish Nocturnes, was
published in 1999.
Chris
Arthur was Gifford Fellow at the University of St. Andrews and is a
winner of the Akegarasu Haya International Essay Prize, the Beverly
Hayne Memorial Award for Young Writers, and the Theodore Christian
Hoepfner Award. He teaches at the University of Wales, Lampeter.
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