Dreamtime

'John Moriarty weaves an extraordinary tapestry of myths and memories, drawing on the riches of a dazzling variety of cultures to conjure up a personal vision of a world alive to spirituality. He has none of the dangerous certainty of the wide-eyed mystic and writes with grace and subtlety... an enthralling reminder that religion is supposed to be about openness, daring and humility.'
- Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times

'A thing of beauty, at once a Greek temple and a Christian basilica... read any one episode carefully and you will find every other episode begin to reflect it... John Moriarty does not claim to have prophetic foresight in any ordinary sense, yet Dreamtime is surely a work of rare prophetic power for those who have ears to hear.'
- Noel O'Donoghue, The Furrow

'This is one of the most extraordinary books ever published in Ireland. ...the depth of the scholarship displayed here is astonishing... Like William Blake, whom he resembles, Moriarty engages with the world not argumentatively but as a single individual singing his own Song of Experience... [He] takes on almost every one of the world's great religions and many of its mythologies, particularly Ireland's, in an attempt to embody a way to live in our time... Dreamtime is undoubtedly a milestone in contemporary Irish literature and thought.'
- Brian Lynch, Evening Press

'Here then is a Peripatetic who is standing his ground, a man on walk-about without real wanderlust, a man who is, in the Borgesian formula, the perfect reader - that is to say, someone who has re-read the same passage endlessly, someone who is prepared to privilege a quorum of old religious scrolls over the lazy, aphasic multitude of brisk paperback bulletins in our three-second time-span culture... There is something magnificent about his single-minded oppositional stance in our deconsecrated world; and to watch him perform his rain-dance on the astroturf is to witness an ecumenical invocation of all human spiritual authority.'
- Aidan Mathews