The joys of life and the sorrow of death are expressed in two new artistic works focused on Ireland.

Mourning the loss of her husband, Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen made several visits to Ireland. The result: a 60-page collection of images titled Beyond Maps and Atlases. (The title is derived from the final lines of the Seamus Heaney poem, “A Herbal.“)

It is “a book in which death is an oblique presence, hinted at in ghostly landscapes – mist-shrouded fields, looming trees, shadowy rural nightscapes – and in images of the Atlantic, that vast emptiness that lies beyond the west of Ireland,” Sean O’Hagan wrote in The Guardian. “It is also, inevitably, a book about the profound absence that the death of someone close leaves in its wake.”

The statue of Jesus: Clifden, Connemara.

A more upbeat look at Ireland has been produced by native media company Sonder Visuals. The montage of drone-captured images of rural and urban, natural and built, Ireland fly past as quickly as the many voices (and dialects) that describe living there.

In a recent Facebook post, the Embassy and Consulates of Ireland USA describe this 9-minute video as “very insightful and beautiful.” Have a look-and listen-for yourself: