NONFICTION - Jan. 1, 1995

IRELAND IN OLD PHOTOGRAPHS, by Sean Sexton (Bulfinch: $22.95; 220 pp.) OUT OF IRELAND by Paul Wagner and Kerby Miller (Elliott & Clark: $29.95; 132 pp.) and IRISH HANDS The Making of Beautiful Crafts by Sybil Connolly (Hearst Books: $29.95; 186 pp.). Ireland is a small country, a dot on the map compared to America. And yet, this teeming culture overflowed onto American shores, enriching us with each new immigrant. “Out of Ireland” shows why many Irish first came here, and what happened to them after. Too poor to pay rent, starved out of their homes, they died or they left. Four million emigrated from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. During the dread five year period of 1845-1849, an estimated three million men, women and children died. In blight after blight, the potato, the staple diet of many, failed. With photographs and text, “Out of Ireland” tells us what happened to those who fled and those who stayed. As this book explains, the Gaelic word for the act of leaving Ireland is decorat. It means not emigration, but exile. Millions of Irish were unhappily forced into exile by the Famine and by evictions. Always, the exiled seem to have a fierce, nostalgic hunger for the land they left.

What the Irish did best one could argue, is the things they did with their hands, and their imaginations, not machines. “Irish Hands” is the title of the next book and shows what can be accomplished by hand, small personal work of lovely, tactile beauty. To labor over something, as these photos show, can be an act of devotion, an act that becomes its own reward. Quietly, with awe, I flipped through these photos of the creations of master artisans feeling as if I were in the nave of a church. One artisan, named Nicholas Mosse knew he wanted to be a potter from the age of 7. Grown, he studied in Japan, came home, married, bought the family mill and turned it into a pottery factory. In his pots, he uses Irish earthenware clay, 35 million years old, and a blue spongeware design. It is very popular and profitable, he tells his interviewer. You can see why. Some of the plates look like blue larkspur had spilled all around the edges. It’s just glaze. Other artisans included in this coffee table book are a crystal maker, a basket maker, a thatcher, a lacemaker whose lace designs look as supple and intricate as a spider’s web.

“Old Photographs” has pictures of Ireland from early on in this century, haunting evocative black and white shots of old, rural Ireland and the culture that spawned the artisans. One chapter called “The Land,” shows the cairns, the round towers, stone crosses built thousand years ago, seeming to rise up naturally out of the landscape. Then there are photos of people, laborers walking the fields, houses curling off into the distance, men and women curing mackerel, women washing clothes in streams. The black-and white-photographs give you a taste for the sea and sky that dominate any human life on the island. Another chapter called “The Big House,” show the large houses belonging to the Protestant ascendancy. For centuries, those who dwelled in the “Big Houses” ruled Ireland at the expense of the Catholic majority. In these photos, beautiful square Georgian homes rise up like clean white toy boxes out of the stony land. My favorite photographs though, are of the cities at the turn of the century: one of a steam tram, of boats going into the quay at Cork, a photo of a mass of people at an Orange march and another of a Catholic, countryside mass. They make you wistful, filled with longing to know this island and its people. Then there is the chapter on the Anglo-Irish Protestant administration, filled with photos of soldiers. Eviction is just a word until you see the photo of men with a battering ram, sheriffs, the suddenly homeless family standing by. The cottages of evicted tenants were crushed, make uninhabitable. These bring Ireland’s harsh history to life in a way that’s fresher than most words. They fuel one’s desire to go, to experience what Yeats called Ireland’s “terrible beauty,” its wondrous paradoxical smallness, for oneself.