River tale is a Suir thing

The River Book: A Celebration of the Suir

The Suir will be familiar as one of the Three Sisters (along with the Nore and the Barrow) and flows through Tipperary, Waterford, Kilkenny, Limerick and Cork. Photographer Paddy Dwan and poet Mark Roper have come up with a book that’s not so much a run-of-the-mill guide book as a textual and visual meditation on the many aspects of the river.

The narrative, which combines prose, poetry and first-hand testimony from people familiar with the river, tracks the Suir from Fiddown to the sea itself, a natural course to follow. There’s a nice tension between the gentle pastoral scenery on offer on many pages, some of them visually stunning studies at dawn or twilight, and the urban sprawl of Waterford, the main city on the river.