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AN IRISH WILD FLOWER, Etc.
By Sarah M. B. Piatt.
Small Crown 8vo, Cloth, gilt top. Post Free.
Published in the United States by FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY, New York.
The Academy, September s, 1891.
'It is in short poems that Mrs. Piatt excels. The one which gives its name to the book, "An Irish Wild-flower" (suggested by the sight of a barefooted child by a castle), is complete in eight lines. . . . This seems to me absplutely perfect, the loveliest Irish growth of this sad summer. . . . Finest, if not most beautiful, among Mrs. Piatt's octaves is the one entitled "A Reproach," addressed to Ireland. The Shan Van Vocht is a shameful name for Ireland's sons to have given her. Walt Whitman has made perhaps the best that poet could make of it in his metreless, rhymeless, most unmusical, but most powerful and pathetic "Old Ireland;" but Mrs. Piatt has done better in treating Ireland not as a lonely beldame, but as a mother "beautiful, cruel," and, I dare think, young, with her wild brood about her feet. . . . The book has no political colouring, and is the work of an artist, not of an "orathor." This makes it not only gracious, but timely.'
The Irish Monthly, September 1891.
'This slight volume is for all its slightness worthy of the gifted woman whom we would fain call an American Irishwoman—an American indeed, but sojourning in Ireland, and full of kindly Irish sympathies, as this book very touchingly testifies. As the fastidious critic of The Athenæum says, "there is no need at this time of day to assert Mrs. Piatt's claim to recognition on our side of the Atlantic—has not her genius been honoured by a hundred pens?" . . . In the volume before us, it is easy to discern what the English critic just quoted ascribes to her—"the feminine insight, the fortunate tact in thought and phrase that gives her verses their unique and incommunicable charm." Each little poem—for she is fond of condensing her thought into eight lines—has a soul in it.'
The Spectator, April 2, 1892
'"A Funeral on the Lee" is the best thing in the book, not inadequate to the striking scene which it commemorates.'
The Athenæum, January g, 1892.
