Containing the full text of Benedict Kiely’s acclaimed memoir, ‘Drink to the Bird’: ‘Close to Omagh I was born and in its streets and on the roads around it I grew up.’ Kiely is haunted by the people and stories of Omagh, and in Drink to the Bird Kiely’s own history, and that of his family and friends, flows into the history of Ireland itself. Plus a selection of Benedict Kiely’s essays on Irish literature: from the last of the Gaelic poets, Aodhagán O’Rahilly; the first great Irish novelist, William Carleton; to W.B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague and Seamus Heaney. While sharing his enthusiasm for their work, Kiely never neglects the dark history of the writers’ own time. These essays contain Kiely’s unique wisdom and humanity and explores Ireland’s most significant poets through the countryside that inspired them, asking: which came first, the place or the poet?