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IRELAND: Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and CultureBy Richard Tillinghast University of Notre Dame Press, 275pp, $25

THE GREAT WRITERS that came out of Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th century, and spectacularly once more since the 1970s, have in turn drawn the writers of other countries back to Ireland. They may be hard to notice among the big immigrant populations of Dublin, but one cannot keep clear of them in Galway, Sligo, Clare, or West Cork, where authorship sometimes seems the default character of a non-native resident. They may have come to inspect the scenery in which the literature is laid, or the society that cast it up, or the byways and habitations of bygone writers. Or maybe they just left their own country because it hates intellectuals.