The gift of Irish wildlife in a book

BOOKS make excellent Christmas gifts and last Monday’s Examiner carried recommendations from the crime-thriller, vampire and general fiction genres.

Here are some wildlife and natural history suggestions: Dave Campbell and Margaret Healion’s Voice of the Great Spirit will appeal to readers of a pantheistic disposition. Campbell hails from Bangor in Co Down. His atmospheric photo-essay celebrates Knight Inlet, a fjord on the Canadian Pacific coast north of Vancouver. The book opens with shots of overcast, almost crepuscular, sub-arctic landscapes. Then animals are introduced. Grizzly bears appear in unusual, often humanlike, poses. Healion’s crisp quasi-oracular comments punctuate this visual symphony and end in a mystical creation myth; ‘The ear of his ear could no longer hear; the eyes of his eyes were blind. Creator covered his face and looked away and the ice continued to melt’, etc. The fusion of photographs and prose is seamless.

To those who prefer more down-to-earth material, Aideen Cooper’s The River Shannon, a Journey down Ireland’s Longest River, may be more appealing. The catchment of the longest river in Ireland and Britain extends to a fifth of our island. Navigable for most of its length, the Shannon played a pivotal role in Irish history. Clonmacnoise, for example, was a ‘centre of excellence’ known throughout Europe. The Vikings used the waterway to penetrate the country. The Normans fortified Limerick, creating the largest settlement on the Shannon’s banks, the ‘broken treaty’ of 1691 leading to the ‘wild goose’ exodus. On a more positive note, the power station at Ardnacrusha was, until overtaken by America’s Hoover Dam, the largest hydro-electric installation in the world. That a fledgling insecure state, recovering from a vicious civil war, embarked on such an ambitious project is extraordinary. The village of Foynes and the swamp at Rineanna, which became Shannon Airpor t, were the hubs of transatlantic aviation from the ’30s to the ’60s.