The Tain. Translated by Thomas Kinsella from the Irish. With Brush Drawings by Louis Le Brocquy. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970. First Trade Edition. Pp [xxvii], 295. Black cloth, titled in white along spine, devise on front & cover, in publisher’s dust jacket lettered in red and black. A fine bright copy.

Liam Miller’s presswork had come to international prominence with the publication of Thomas Kinsella’s The Tain as the ninth Dolmen Edition in September 1969, in a limited edition on 1750 copies. Kinsella’s prominence as a poet and his finely honed skills as a translator made this book a contemporary classic.

However, it was the Irish artist Louis le Brocquy’s suites of ink brush drawings for The Tain that fixed the aesthetic standards of the Dolmen Press in high, inter-national repute. The images that le Brocquy created for Kinsella’s rich text have a powerful, primal effect on the reader, and from their making le Brocquy – Ireland’s most renowned artist after Jack Yeats – derived both the impulse and motifs of his later tapestries and paintings.