MOTHER IRELAND
by EDNA O'BRIEN 144 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95.
"Suddenly you must get away," writes Novelist Edna O'Brien, 45, in Mother Ireland, her first work of nonfiction. "The country is breathlessly beautiful, but there is too an undeniable sadness, the sadness of being cut off, a cultural atrophy that goes all the way to the brain." O'Brien did get away, but she never escaped from the enchantment of Ireland's bleak beauty and rich legends. Hence Mother Ireland, an aptly titled remembrance of things past that re-creates the Ireland she knew as...