A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland

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Verso, 1998 - History - 194 pages
Strangely positioned between Europe and the post-colonial world, Ireland occupies a fluid and contradictory space, not least in the memory or imagination of its many emigrants. In this exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit returns to Ireland, armed with a newly-acquired passport - courtesy of otherwise forgotten maternal ancestors. Her journey is not to find a stable identity in ancestral roots, but to confront notions of stability, identity, ethnicity and nationalism in one of their great mythic sources.

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Contents

The Cave
1
The Book of Invasions
8
Noahs Alphabet
20
The Butterfly Collector
28
The Beggars Rounds
44
Anchor in the Road
58
Wandering Rocks
71
Articles of Faith
79
The Circulation of the Blood
108
Rock Collecting
119
The War between the Birds and Trees
127
Wild Goose Chase
133
Grace
143
Travellers
151
The Green Room
166
Notes
174

A Pound of Feathers
87
And a Pound of Lead
95

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About the author (1998)

Rebecca Solnit writes extensively on photography and landscape. She is a contributing editor to Art Issues and Creative Camera and is the author of three books. She has contributed essays to several museum catalogues including Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach and the Whitney Museum's Beat Culture and the New America. She was a 1993 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

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