The Last Pool of Darkness

“Combining detailed descriptions of Connemara’s history, folklore, artistry, geology, and nature, Tim Robinson’s The Last Pool of Darkness is a sprawling, joyful romp along Ireland’s western coastline. […] Told in the gossipy tone of a confidante, there are adventure stories about sea captains, balladeers,priests, farmers, and artists, as well as seances, drownings, unsolved murders, the potato blight, and islands that disappear in the mist. Sweeping and authoritative, The Last Pool of Darkness is an astonishing, immersive view of the people and places of Ireland’s Connemara region.”

“[Robinson’s] work is reminiscent of that of some early explorers and geographers in its painstaking exactitude. But instead of bringing back the record of a hitherto unknown terrain, he is resurrecting the ignored or forgotten from under our feet. He attends to wildflowers, heathers, pollens, and to phenomena ranging from the cemeteries of unbaptized babies to the mythology of hares. His scientific rigor is suffused by a marveling poetry.”

“Visitors to Connemara, that expanse of stony beauty in the west of Ireland, are often struck by its stillness. One of the most eloquent readers of that silence is the Yorkshire-born writer Robinson, whose new collection of essays succeeds in the difficult task of staying true to the verities of a place on to which so many fantasies have been projected… . Robinson writes with lapidary precision about a landscape so frequently shrouded in cliché that its unmediated truths are often invisible.”

“Robinson is a stylist of exceptional cadence, tact and ingenuity… . At their most intricate, measured and exalting, his sentences sound like the sermons of John Donne, or the elaborate essays of Sir Thomas Browne. And yet: there is nothing antiquarian about this style; it may echo the voices of the great writers who have passed before him—Roderick O’Flaherty in the 17th century, Thackeray in the 19th—but Robinson’s is a medium woven as much out of modern environmental science, land art and fractal geometry as it is from the sonorous periods of the past.”

“Milkweed’s Seedbank series is one of the most exciting and visionary projects in contemporary publishing. Taking the long view, these volumes run parallel to the much-hyped books of the moment to demonstrate the possibility and hope inherent in all great literature.”