That island never found

Essays and poems for Terence Brown

Nicholas Allen & Eve Patten editors

'[T]his book represents a recognition by colleagues, friends and admirers of the rigour and excellence of Brown’s contribution to the examination of Ireland’s literature over four decades, and also a celebration that his contribution is ongoing ... What makes the contributions to That Island Never Found so fascinating is the way that a range of contributors re-examine not just MacNeice, but the other figures and themes central to Brown’s work right up to his 1999 biography The Life of WB Yeats ... It is hard to imagine a more fitting tribute than this engaging volume, and hard to imagine a figure so deserving of such an accolade', Dermot Bolger, The Sunday Business Post.

‘Distinguished writers such as Roy Foster, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Declan Kiberd and Edna Longley invoke the spirit of Louis MacNeice and W.B. Yeats, two of Terence Brown’s favourite subjects. Brown was considered a vital life force in Ireland’s intellectual and cultural community, and each entry brings a different perspective on this remarkable writer’, Book News (May 2008).

‘… a genuine celebration of a career and a life given to perceptive teaching and literary criticism … This book is a splendid honour. Brown’s cup runneth over. I raise my glass to many more productive and illuminating years in the classroom and on the page’, Rory Brennan, Books Ireland (Summer 2008).

‘[W]hat this book makes clear is … that the real hidden history was within us … Nicholas Allen and Eve Patten have assembled a sparkling array of histories in this book … [T]he book opens out into a rich and varied field of essays and poems. Terence Brown’s presence as a Virgilian guide through the fractious search for answers and identities in Irish writing is everywhere here … This book shows how that field [Irish Studies] has grown by leaps and bounds, enriched by memoir and analysis and the continuous strengthening of the critique. There is something here … to hold every reader. And more than that there is something for every reader to reflect on … Terence Brown amply deserves the tribute of this book … [T]he contributions here range so widely and fruitfully over different authors and fields and topics that it’s almost possible to forget how mere proximity once led these same views to friction … Four Courts have certainly made a handsome, durable book’, Eavan Boland, The Irish Times (November 2007).

'The achievements of Terence Brown, the honorand and dedicatee, deserve to be feted ... In homage to him are nine essays by scholars of Irish literature and cultural studies, and poems by Gerald Dawe, Greg Delanty, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon. Of the poems, those by Dawe and Heaney are particularly noteworthy', Peter Denman, The Irish Book Review.