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Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Crying of the Wind: Ireland by Ithell Colquhoun – An exquisitely strange British-Celtic artist's travels in Ireland
The Crying of the Wind: Ireland Author : Ithell Colquhoun ISBN-13 : 978-1805331568 Publisher : Pushkin Press Classics Guideline Price : £12.99 Exquisitely strange, British Celtic surrealist artist, literary writer and occultist Ithell Colquhoun's memoir of her travels in Ireland in the first half of the 1950s is now republished as a Pushkin Press Classic. Colquhoun's trove of art, writing and the fruit of a lifetime's 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's 2025 retrospective of Colquhoun's visual work, which runs until October. Colquhoun's trained eye scans the Irish landscape. She visits prehistoric stone monuments, about whose ritualistic purposes – reflected in the still-living folk traditions of rural people she meets – she speculates evocatively. Colquhoun's 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's writing is lit from within by an incandescent glow that derives, I feel, from her deep sensing of the numinous everywhere. READ MORE The linguistic beauty Colquhoun generates with her visionary artist's 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. Colquhoun describes all-night partying with Dublin's 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'Murnaghan, at a time when you could let yourself into the ancient mound by borrowing the caretaker's key. The joie-de-vivre of Colquhoun's Cornwall travels is noticeably absent here. Perhaps it was the author's recent divorce, alongside the menace of Catholic theocratic mind control – then reaching fever-pitch – that made the bleak Irish summers and ever-present poverty harder to bear. Nevertheless, the still-existing pagan spirituality of Ireland – the beauty of our skies, our precious extant Gaelic culture and its animistic worldview – seen through the eyes of a genius mystic polymath over 70 years ago, makes this book an enchanting read.
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire review – the legacy of a dissident and inspirational surrealist author
This brief work from New York film-maker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is the equivalent of a platform performance in the theatre: a look at the works of Caribbean feminist, anti-imperialist and surrealist partisan Suzanne Césaire, played by Zita Hanrot; Hanrot, rather, plays an actress musingly preparing to play her. Césaire's brief, intense flowering of work occurred in second world war Martinique, then a colony of France, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy government. Paradoxically liberated by this oppressive situation, Césaire co-founded a journal called Tropiques and published an influential series of essays on politics, literature and art, which showed how passionately inspired she was by her encounter with the great surrealist André Breton. For Césaire, surrealism was a revolutionary mode of thinking and feeling: a battle cry and a challenge to the accepted order, and as she puts it here, the 'tightrope of our hope'. This is an image that conveys vertiginous excitement and danger, although Césaire was a surrealist in the sense of being an evangelist for and a theoretician of surrealism, rather than a practitioner. Her essays do however have a prose-poetic quality. If this chamber-piece film is a little opaque, perhaps that is because Césaire herself is opaque. After 1945, she stopped publishing her own work, transferring her energies to teaching in Martinique and elsewhere, and in looking after her large family. Perhaps the liberation of France, an event that certainly did not presage its colonies' liberation, was not an inspiring moment. And perhaps also her story is all too familiar; she found herself crowded out of the spotlight by a prominent husband, in this case Aimé Césaire, whose literary and political career made him a substantial public figure in France into the 21st century. Suzanne died in 1966, by which stage the record shows that she and Aimé were in fact divorced. A calm and interesting introduction to an important dissident author. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is in UK cinemas from 18 July.
