Robin Skelton Book order (chronological)

The Aran Islands of Aranmor, Inishmaan, and Inishere lie thirty miles from Galway, and so attracted J M Synge that he returned to them time and again. He recounts here his travels and encounters on the islands, telling of magic wells, poteen drinkers, fishing expeditions in currachs, and stories told him by the solemn Pat Dirane, of islanders fallen victim to the druids and the fairies. Synge developed a great and reciprocated affection for these fine-featured people, for the ungovernable eyes and wild jests of the men, and for the dark beauty of the women, dressed in their heavy scarlett wool clothes. He faithfuly records the pathos and strangeness of the life of the Aran peasantry at the turn of the century. The book is illustrated with fourteen of Synge's own photographs depicting rope-making, kelp collecting and drying, threshing, wool-spinning, the horrors of evictions, and many other aspects of island life. 'I had some photographs to show them that I took here last year' which were 'examined with great delight, and every person in them identified.'

Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the 'Thirties' were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as people whose actions are as publically important as their poems. For them, the Spanish Civil War epitomized the mood of the times, as their symbolic obsessions were transmuted into tragic reality. But from within their strongly defined unity of ideals, an astonishingly varied body of poetry emerged. Robin Skelton has arranged the poetry to make an illuminating 'critical essay' of the period, and in his introduction he brilliantly probes the moods and mores of an intensely troubled and creative decade.