THE short, tense looking woman, one of the first visitors to the Irish pavilion at the Frankfurt Book Fair, had only one thing on her mind.
"Wo ist Gulliver?" she demanded.
Sandra O'Connell, the beatifically good humoured manager of "Ireland and its Diaspora" assured her calmly that Gulliver would arrive soon.
Sure enough, the giant figure created by Macnas was in place before the pavilion within hours and Ireland's presence at the fair seemed complete.
Inside the low, circular glass building, Luke Dodd has created an extraordinary impressionistic exhibition surveying the literary history of the Irish at home and abroad.
Ignoring chronological order, Mr Dodd takes the visitor on a charming roundabout tour of Irish literature, pausing before almost forgotten curiosities as well as before such giants as Joyce and Beckett.
"The real concern is that people can walk through and take in a series of shapes and objects or if they want to they, can spend longer "studying the individual items," he said.
Among the oddities is a collection of translations of classic English novels published by An Gum, including Arda Wuthering, by Emily Bronte, and Sceal Fa da Chathair, by Charles Dickens.
The spartan budget available to "Ireland and its Diaspora" is probably the reason why the only audio visual element in the exhibition is a film about the Famine.
The text panels with the exhibits often emphasise the interaction between Irish culture and the outside world. This focus on looking outwards is in keeping with the theme which is already emerging from "Ireland and its Diaspora", the relationship between "the parish and the universe" which Nobel winning poet Seamus Heaney spoke of yesterday.
