Crossways

This is Yeats before the Nobel Prize, before the Easter Rising, before the blood and iron of the twentieth century broke through. This is the young poet dreaming in a tower, transcribing folklore from country storytellers, conjuring an Ireland where the sidhe move through the hawthorn groves and a girl might wait forever for her murdered lover to return from the grave. Crossways captures Yeats at his most lush and haunted, when he still believed that magic was a thing you could hold in your hands. The poems pulse with Celtic twilight, with the ache of unrequited love, with the weight of ancient myths made new. Here you'll find "The Stolen Child," more waters than land, calling the child away from the world of men into the world of faeries. Here is "The Song of the Old Mother," who has lost her youth to the wind. Here are poems about love that kills, about dreams that sustain, about the border between this world and the next growing thin as morning mist. These are not yet the difficult, compressed poems of his middle and late period. These are poems that want to be held, to be whispered, to be memorized by heart. For anyone who has ever wanted to believe that the world is older and stranger and more beautiful than it appears.