In Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara

by J.M. Synge

Book by Synge, John Millington

Genres: Travel, Ireland, Nonfiction, Irish Literature

166 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1980

About the author

Edmund John Millington Synge (pronounced /sɪŋ/) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots during its opening run at the Abbey theatre. Synge wrote many well known plays, including "Riders to the Sea", which is often considered to be his strongest literary work.

Although he came from an Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view.

Reviews

[Mir]

I read one of the passages from this book, "A Landlord's Garden," and enjoyed it.

[Jean Carlton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the collection of articles that appeared in various publication of the day with their reflections on the life and people of rural Ireland at the turn of the 20th century as well as the inclusion, in my edition, of the artwork by Jack B Yeats. Planning to visit Ireland in a few months, I think I'll have a good feel for the early days. As enjoyable as the writing is, the actual book I was able to borrow from our library was really special. I was not able to find the exact version on Goodreads; it's a 1911 version published in Dublin, hardcover with very thick paper, string bound and with the original library check-out card pasted in the front cover with date stamps in the 1940's. The page edges are lightly'speckled' and stamped Minneapolis Athenaeum! I had no idea our Minneapolis library was ever called that. Inside the title page is a hole punched image of those words.It was fun to hold this copy in my hands and wonder who read it before me.

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of 3 different travelogues in 3 different regions of Ireland by Irish poet and playwright John Millington Synge from the early 1900s. His book on the Aran Islands is more famous and widely-read but I loved this one even better since there is more diversity in his travels, locales and the communities he stays in. He has an incredible eye for details that paint vivid, specific scenes and an unparalleled ear for capturing the conversations and uniquely-Irish turns-of-phrases. He is present as a "character" here, but unobtrusive, curious, respectful and fine company to spend time with. I think the best value of this book is Synge having captured so clearly and with just the right amount of reverence traditional life on the rural West Coast in Gaeltacht Ireland before modernity creeped in. It's almost anthropology, written with a poet's eye and playwright's sense of scene-building. I purchased this at the oldest bookstore in Galway and glad to have discovered it.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

J. M. Synge is perhaps the least well known of the great early-twentieth-century Irish writers, being eclipsed by such modernist darlings as Joyce and Yeats, but I'm gaining a quick appreciation for his work. His low profile may in part be due to his deceptively simple creations. In contrast to Joyce, the avante-garde literary provocateur, and Yeats, the eccentric, difficult allusionist, Synge is a master of the understated point breifly made. His style is exceptionally on display in this spare collection of essays drawn from his extensive travels throughout Ireland. Focusing mainly on rural Irish culture, Synge paints beautiful, yet unsentimental portraits that become more remarkable when you notice how unadorned his prose is. His writings on the Blasket Islands, in the protion on West Kerry, are valuable not only as windows onto a lost culture but also as exemplars of precise, controlled, just plain good writing. We're also given a unique and close view of the difficulties of Irish life in that time and the social structures that lamentably oppressed and starved these gifted people for so long.