A Pity Youth Does Not Last: Reminiscences of the Last of the Great Blasket Island's Poets and Storytellers

by Micheál O'Guiheen

Book Overview

Mich al O'Guiheen was the son of Peig Sayers, "the Queen of the Gaelic storytellers." The last of the Blasket's celebrated poets and storytellers, he describes how the isolation of his youth was slowly eroded by the creeping of civilization across the three miles separating the islands from County Kerry, and the sadness of leaving the Great Blasket for the last time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 019281320X
• ISBN13: 9780192813206
• Release Date: April 1982
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.1" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Pity Youth Does Not Last

It has been years since I read this book, yet it keeps coming to mind. The author's use of language is exquisite and touching. It is a tale of life in a time and place that can never be replicated. I have never seen the Blasket Islands, nor known anyone from there, yet I feel that I have been there and experienced it as fully as if I lived there in the islands' zenith, which, like the youth referred to in the title, surely could not last in the modern world.