Beauty and Poison

This representative anthology of ancient and medieval Irish quatrains from the 7th to 14th century presents the Czech reader with the first opportunity to discover the traditional Irish poetry.  A collection on this topic of this magnitude has not been published in any world language. An accompanying essay dealing with the phenomenon of the Irish quatrain is also the first attempt to grapple with this complicated and unexplored issue. The Irish verse form rann (quatrain, strophe) is the basic building block of most long Irish poems; of particular interest is its thematic similarity to the Japanese haiku. The book contains endnotes and a bibliography.