From the Back Cover

“Then, after this entirely apposite balance of the spiritual and the spirituous, we broke formation and ranged among the graves and in and out of the old church ruin, greeting friends and chatting. The splendid ranks of clouds had stood back in a semicircle too and the sun, very high in the south, blazed whitely on us like the atomic furnace it is, while high in the north the sky was as blue as the Virgin Mother’s cloak. Most Connemara skies are steeped in a decoction of tones wrung out of rainbows, but this blue had been filtered through infinities of depth to perfect purity; in fact I don’t believe I’d ever seen blue of such intensity. Colour is a modality we don’t need—old films and photographs show that we can get along with greys—and perhaps don’t deserve, I thought. It is a gift, an ornamentation; it is the song of matter, delivered in the ‘old way’, ever new.”

from “The Song of Granite” by Tim Robinson