Around Kiltartan with W. B. Yeats

Galway Poems of W. B. Yeats

(Kiltartan Gregory Cultural

Society, €9.00+€1.60 p&p)

In this little booklet, the Kiltartan Gregory Cultural Society, under the chairmanship of Sr De Lourdes Fahy, have got together a collection of W.B. Yeats’ poems inspired by the estate at Coole where he so often stayed with Lady Gregory and the townlands around Kiltartan Cross.

Next to his native Sligo, this area of south Galway was important to his creativity, which from an early age had been dominated by a sense of place. The pages are illustrated by paintings and by photographs of many of the scenes and people involved in Yeats’ imagination. 

Local societies such as this one at Kiltartan are a great boon to local life in rural Ireland. Their activities bring in visitors in the summer, and even more importantly in the winter evenings without tourists they help to feed the minds of local people on the tales, traditions and literature of their own localities. 

This book will hopefully take many to Coole and to Ballylee this summer, where Yeats tower still stands, the very symbol of his mind and thoughts.