Writing Within Borders

The Writer's World, a new series of books edited by poet and former Poet's Choice columnist Edward Hirsch, examines how nationality, language and history influence the way writers write and what they write about. The first three books in the series feature authors from Ireland, Poland and Mexico.

IRISH WRITERS ON WRITINGEdited by Eavan Boland Trinity Univ. 325 pp. $24.95

Eavan Boland, a poet and the editor of this well-populated collection, aims "to show Irish writers not in reflection, which is not an Irish mode, but in conversation, which is." The writers included here -- from Samuel Beckett to William Butler Yeats, Emma Donoghue to Colm Tóibín -- compose their work in a language that was imposed on them long ago by the English. "Irish writers took the language of their country's abasement," explains Boland, "and forced it -- poem by poem, novel by novel -- to retell the story. The sight of a language that had formerly been an instrument of power and colony, now being made to voice the imaginative redress of a whole people, was and is a spectacle to behold."

POLISH WRITERS ON WRITINGEdited by Adam Zagajewski Trinity Univ. 262 pp. $24.95

Polish literature, both historically and now, is about "the fierce combat between two completely different elements of the human environment -- the artistic dream on the one hand and the brutality of history on the other," writes Adam Zagajewski, the poet who gathered the pieces in this anthology. Nationalism and the periods in which Poland vanished as a nation color much of the writing here, which, Zagajewski suggests, has "a tone rarely heard elsewhere . . . the notion of the moral responsibility of literature, of the seriousness of poetry." Many of the writers -- Czeslaw Milosz, Witold Gombrowicz, Jerzy Stempowski, Zbigniew Herbert -- lived as exiles, and their contributions here are often correspondence with other exiles. They are "a family of writers . . . a tribe of artists who confronted each other through time, shaping each other's ideas accordingly."

MEXICAN WRITERS ON WRITINGEdited by Margaret Sayers Peden Trinity Univ. 210 pp. $24.95

The history of Mexican literature, at least of that written in the Spanish language, begins during the Conquest with "chronicles and letters," explains Margaret Sayers Peden, "a fascinating body of materials in which their authors report, not infrequently with exaggeration, their own feats, along with the wondrous landscapes and cities and peoples they encounter." Novels and plays and poems came much later, once Spanish dominance was established. But "it seems inevitable," Peden writes, "that future scholars and historians will define the twentieth century as Mexico's Golden Age." Three giants -- Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo (all of whom are included in this collection) -- ruled the field, but many other writers (and a nascent publishing industry) contributed to the cultural richness, which has only in recent decades been translated into English.

FROM OUR PREVIOUS REVIEWS

· In geneticist Francis S. Collins's The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, $15), "Collins's purpose is grand," wrote Scott Russell Sanders, but "his manner is modest and his prose clear, as befits a man more concerned with sharing his views on the nature of things than with displaying his ego."

· Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions (Pantheon, $16.95) is "certainly one of the great road novels," according to Steven Moore. "It's an exhilarating trip, a literary experience unlike anything else piled up in book stores."

· "When a historical biography begins with its hero escaping from the Bloomingdale Asylum, a 'madhouse for the rich' in 1900, the book exerts a fairly immediate claim on my attention," wrote Francine Prose of Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age by Donna M. Lucey (Three Rivers, $14.95).

Rachel Hartigan Shea is a senior editor of Book World.