Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780815602583)

Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature--the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland's traditional storytellers.

Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Peig said of her son Tom疽, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: "Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. . . . laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him." Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: "People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying; I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished."

Peig died in 1958, when she was 85. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island.

Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the "quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone." Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is--one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.

Author: Peig Sayers
ISBN-10: 0815602588
ISBN-13: 9780815602583
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/01/1974
Pages: 216
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.40w x 0.50d