Illustrator draws on Yeats’s love life for her new book

Annie West developed a "loathing" for the poetry of WB Yeats at school and there was an element of "getting my own back" with her book Yeats in Love.

Launched last night by RTÉ's David McCullagh (above, with West) at the Yeats Memorial Building in Sligo, it's a semi-fictional account of Yeats's obsessive pursuit of Maud Gonne. The book includes some of West's irreverent illustrations, documenting the poet's four proposals of marriage to his muse.

Also included are the sometimes caustic comments of Yeats’s contemporaries, including his sisters Lily and Lolly, who were less than impressed by the infatuation.

West's parents are from Sligo and her grandmother Louisa played the organ at Yeats's funeral. The illustrator has done commissions for, among others, the children of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Having been forced to read Yeats's poems in secondary school, she initially veered away from him as a source of inspiration. But a chance meeting with Stella Mew, former chief executive of the Yeats Society, changed that.

“She told me about the four proposals and I thought, this is too funny, I have to draw this.”