'The Hosts of the Air'

Subtitled 'Yeats and the Sidhe', the last contribution to The Far Tower (see running review below) is an essay by Nina Antonia. It is a thoughtful and engaging piece, examining the way the poet's beliefs evolved. Antonia explores how the young Yeats was haunted and enchanted by both family ghosts and Irish folklore, and how his discovery of spiritualism meshed with far older beliefs. It's fascinating to ponder how Yeats, scion of the Protestant Ascendancy, was both deeply involved with and yet stood apart from the beliefs of the great mass of Irish people. This essay is a fine coda to the fiction, and I'm glad that it was published alongside such splendid stories.