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Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature from authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. The anthology begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, but also the poetry of many others, and an excerpt from George Moore's novel The Lake. Part four of the anthology shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with late twentieth-century, early twenty-first-century poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.
Tim Wenzell is an associate professor at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virgina. He has published widely in all genres, including a novel, short stories, poetry, and ecocritical essays in both Irish and American literature, as well as the book Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature.
"Irish literature's ubiquitous relationship to the environment offers a vast reservoir of meditations on humanity's relationship with non-human natures. This can often prove daunting to both established scholars and novice readers. For all those who are interested in the intersectional concerns that arise from Irish literature's evocations of the environment, Tim Wenzell's timely anthology will prove to be especially invaluable. The book brings into sharp focus the unique ways in which Irish history merges with national and geopolitical ecologies, and how geographical questions are always conflated with geological ones."
– Dr. Malcolm Sen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
