ESSAYS: Publishing a collection of writings which pre-date successful work is a daring and sometimes dangerous pursuit for an acclaimed writer, says Sylvia Thompson
The west of Ireland-based non-fiction writer Tim Robinson won the Irish Book Award Literature Medal and a Rooney Prize Special Award for Literature in 1987 for Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, and went on to gain further accolades for Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1995) and Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (1996).
This newly published book is a collection of essays and stories inspired by dreams, brief encounters with strangers and travel experiences, some of which date back to the 1950s and 1960s. Although the origins of the writings are often interesting (travels in Malaya and Thailand in 1956, a visit to Norway in 1971, London in the 1970s, memories from his childhood home in Yorkshire and his adopted home in Roundstone, Co Galway), the "tales and imaginings" are often based on whimsical characters and scanty stories which aren't always worthy of the development they are given.
At times, the writing is self-conscious and laboured (he even scolds himself in one piece: "I'm always bidding you take art easy, as leaves grow on the tree"). Yet, at other times, the reader is drawn into Robinson's dreamy world and left with an appreciation of his absolute affinity with nature and human vagaries.
Sylvia Thompson is an author and journalist
Tales and Imaginings. By Tim Robinson. Lilliput Press, 190pp. €19.99