In the best sense of the word, Kiely is a local writer—that is, a writer who knows and loves a particular place and realizes that the life of that place can represent and clarify a larger world….

Kiely makes this affectionate commitment to place the center of story after story [in "The State of Ireland"], and his fiercest anger is reserved for those who violate it….

Remembered songs and poems echo through many of these stories. Often the crude work of amateur poets, they testify to a continual effort to articulate a love of place, and so reinforce Kiely's major theme.

So it is not surprising that Kiely's best portraits are of people who combine an intense love for place with a knowledge of its traditions—the old folklore collector in "The Heroes in the Dark House," and the returned American who remembers ancestral custom in "The...