The Crying of the Wind: Ireland <\/p>\n
Author: Ithell Colquhoun <\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 978-1805331568<\/p>\n
Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u00a312.99 <\/p>\n
Exquisitely strange, British Celtic surrealist artist, literary writer and occultist Ithell Colquhoun\u2019s memoir of her travels in Ireland in the first half of the 1950s is now republished as a Pushkin Press Classic. <\/p>\n
Colquhoun\u2019s trove of art, writing and the fruit of a lifetime\u2019s passionate research into a vast range of esoteric subjects were nearly lost after she died in Cornwall in 1988, aged 81. Fortunately her work was salvaged by a small group of devotees. The Crying of the Wind, The Living Stones: Cornwall, and the alchemical novel, The Goose of Hermogenes, have been republished by Pushkin to coincide with the UK Tate Gallery\u2019s 2025 retrospective of Colquhoun\u2019s visual work, which runs until October.<\/p>\n
Colquhoun\u2019s trained eye scans the Irish landscape. She visits prehistoric stone monuments, about whose ritualistic purposes \u2013 reflected in the still-living folk traditions of rural people she meets \u2013 she speculates evocatively. <\/p>\n
Colquhoun\u2019s erudition comes alive through her extrasensory perception. She was a druid, witch and magician. As with the work of WB Yeats, who she met and admired greatly, Colquhoun\u2019s writing is lit from within by an incandescent glow that derives, I feel, from her deep sensing of the numinous everywhere. <\/p>\n
The linguistic beauty Colquhoun generates with her visionary artist\u2019s eye, and her ability to describe what are generally unseen worlds, can carry the reader, for example, from the crumbling grandeur of Protestant Ascendancy culture to panoramic vistas of giant spirit beings who live alongside humans in the Irish landscape. <\/p>\n
Colquhoun describes all-night partying with Dublin\u2019s bohemians; hanging out in the studio of painter Jack B Yeats; and being brought to meditate inside Newgrange by the now almost forgotten Irish occult artist, Art O\u2019Murnaghan, at a time when you could let yourself into the ancient mound by borrowing the caretaker\u2019s key.<\/p>\n
The joie-de-vivre of Colquhoun\u2019s Cornwall travels is noticeably absent here. Perhaps it was the author\u2019s recent divorce, alongside the menace of Catholic theocratic mind control \u2013 then reaching fever-pitch \u2013 that made the bleak Irish summers and ever-present poverty harder to bear. Nevertheless, the still-existing pagan spirituality of Ireland \u2013 the beauty of our skies, our precious extant Gaelic culture and its animistic worldview \u2013 seen through the eyes of a genius mystic polymath over 70 years ago, makes this book an enchanting read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Crying of the Wind: Ireland Author: Ithell Colquhoun ISBN-13: 978-1805331568 Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics Guideline Price: \u00a312.99…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[9943,64,63,457,134,9948,9944,9945,9947,9946],"class_list":{"0":"post-8023","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-20e-siecle","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-epreuve-gelatino-argentique","14":"tag-europe-periode-periode-contemporaine-de-1914-a-nos-jours","15":"tag-man-ray-dit","16":"tag-portrait-de-femme","17":"tag-radnitzky-emmanuel-1890-1976"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}