Martin Lahiff can’t explain why he has spent over eighty years
under what William Shakespeare might have called the Spell
of the Muse. That spell continues to bother us, writers an...view moreMartin Lahiff can’t explain why he has spent over eighty years
under what William Shakespeare might have called the Spell
of the Muse. That spell continues to bother us, writers and
readers alike, who waste valuable time looking for worth in a
world that knows otherwise. His book, Iona, records the raids of
the Muse over the course of his lifetime, from his early college
enlightenments at a school by that name in New Rochelle, New
York, through the civil rights and hippie movements of the
Sixties in San Francisco, the misery of Communist Europe, the
emergence of Moslems in the East, thirty years deep in Mexico
due to another kind of spell that has lasted 53 years, and his job
as a U.S. consul.view less