in production

Forthcoming Books

 

With the publication of Annals of the Irish Harpers and Irene Iddesleigh many of our teething problems have been met and overcome. We now hope to issue a number of books across the succeeding years. This is a short list of some of those that are currently in production.

 

The Collected Poetry of Joseph Campbell (1879–1944)
All volumes edited and introduced by Roland Spottiswoode
Ardrigh’s intention is to issue each original volume of Joseph Campbell’s poetry as single volumes with a biographical and critical introduction.
Songs of Ulaid
The Garden of the Bees
Irishry

 

Songs of Ulaid
This collection of songs, originally issued in 1904, contains much of Joseph Campbell’s earliest published poetry. Campbell collaborated with the folk music collector Herbert Hughes to provide words and folklore notes for a number of Irish airs collected in Donegal at the opening of the twentieth century. A number of these lyrics have entered into the Irish folk music tradition, his original authorship of them all but forgotten.

 

The Garden of the Bees
The Garden of the Bees of the volume’s title refers to the garden of F.J. Bigger at his home Ardrigh, below Cave Hill in Belfast. Ardrigh was an open house for many of the young artists who contributed to the rich cultural revival in Belfast and the north during the first decade of the twentieth century. This first collection of Campbell’s poetry offers the best introduction to the singular flavour of those years when it seemed for a short while that Belfast would again become the Athens of the North.

 

Irishry
Irishry was Campbell’s first collection of poetry to come out of his exposure to T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and the Imagist movement. His verse is arguably the most innovative of his time for any Irish poet, and would profoundly influence James Stephens amongst others. Irishry is an attempt to poetically describe the diverse experience of Irishness through a long sequence of poems describing or “voicing” strong Irish individualities, rather than types. In many ways it prefigures the later experimentations of Joyce’s Ulysses. T.S. Eliot in a later review of Campbell would speak of him as one of six poets who defined the modern movement in poetry.

Shan Bullock (1865–1935)
After Sixty Years
Edited and introduced by Roland Spottiswoode
In the last years of his life, Shan Bullock looks back from his sophisticated London life upon his vanished childhood within one of the great Fermanagh demesnes of the late nineteenth century. At the heart of the book is a portrait of his much loved father Thomas Bullock who acted as steward to the Earl of Erne at Crom.

Frank Mathew (1865-1924)
The Spanish Wine
Edited and introduced by Sara Craig Lanier
A tale of love and betrayal set in storm swept Dunluce Castle during the sixteenth century by a forgotten master of Irish historical fiction. It is the personal narrative of a young girl, Jessica Lady Dunluce, whose life is tragically caught up within a cat’s cradle of historical events. It is a strikingly sympathetic treatment from a woman’s point of view and although it is clothed in the highly romantic style of the Revival, it never sentimentalizes its female heroine. ‘Mr. Frank Mathew has a fine literary touch, spirited and delicate…The story seems to flit before the reader in a series of pictures’ from the London Daily News, May 18th 1898.

Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939)
Delina Delaney
Edited and introduced by Roland Spottiswoode
Mrs Ros was a celebrated Larne author whose alliterative and vivid prose was avidly read by, among many others, Aldous Huxley, D.H Lawrence, Robert Lynd and Mark Twain. This is a companion edition to the Ardrigh edition of Irene Iddesleigh already in print.

Delina Delaney is Amanda’s most successful novel, where the restraints on her experimentation with language are entirely removed. In it she develops the genre of the Victorian “Sensation Novel” into a form that would profoundly influence many of her younger contemporaries within the modern movement, including the young Ronald Firbank whose own profoundly innovative experiments in language and form can be traced back to Amanda’s complex wordplay.

John William Brodie-Innes (1848-1923)
Brodie-Innes was a Scots lawyer born at Downe in Kent. His involvement in esoteric work began after his move to Edinburgh in the 1880s and and his inheritance of a small estate just a few miles outside Inverness. He wrote four novels with powerful esoteric themes that reflected his own experiences and insights as one of the most important figures within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. As a mentor to the young Dion Fortune he would profoundly influence her later approach to esoteric fiction as a portal for her magical work.

 

Morag the Seal
Edited and introduced by Sara Craig Lanier
Set against the backdrop of wilderness of the Scottish western isles this novel draws upon the ancient folklore of magical shape shifting sea seals or selkies for its narrative structure. Steeped in this world of the Other Brodie-Innes weaves a romance where ancestral wrongs are righted and lovers united.

 

Old as the World
Edited and introduced by Roland Spottiswoode
A novel where the Celtic twilight of the Scottish western isles, doppelgangers, megaliths, ancient temples and Carlist politics all combine to link two lovers whose links have been sundered apart for centuries. Of special interest to those familiar with the literature of the Revival, in the character of “Mona McLeod” Brodie-Innes presents his own personal impressions of the Scots poet, author and playwright, “Fiona McLeod”.

John Arthur Goodchild (1851-1914)
The Light of the West

Edited and introduced by Sara Craig Lanier and Roland Spottiswoode
Originally published in 1898 it has since become a classic source for Celtic Christian scholarship and 20th century Goddess-centered spirituality.
Goodchild was a Celtic Literary Revival poet and mystic who turned to original Bardic and early Christian sources for this mystical history of early Ireland. It describes how, from the arrival of the earliest inhabitants, Ireland’s spirituality was centered upon a great feminine deity or High Queen. Her influence is traced until her adoption into Celtic Christianity by way of the cult of Saint Bride. This is the first time it has been reprinted.