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CULTURAL STUDIES: Connemara: The Last Pool of DarknessBy Tim RobinsonPenguin Ireland, 373pp. €25

IN THE FINAL paragraph of the final chapter of his 200l essay collection My Time in Space, in which he moves from the smallest of observable phenomena - the "less than a speck" of Planck's Constant - to the infinite number of possible universes hypothesised by some cosmologists, Tim Robinson remarks that: "This heartshaking vision of the grounds of our possibility in a perhaps eternal and infinite profusion of universes is strangely like that of the foam of being we glimpse at the other end of the length-scale. We are not desolate creatures helplessly adrift between two deathly abysses. The perspectives I have sketched span the perilous sea of our universe from shore to shore. They are two wings of not-quite-inconceivable breadth and power, that bear us up for a time. Not for long enough, but for a time."