{"id":82723,"date":"2011-06-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/out-of-ireland\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:16:29","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:16:29","slug":"out-of-ireland","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/out-of-ireland\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of Ireland"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/font>reland is associated in the popular imagination, or at least in that dwindling portion of the popular imagination that concerns itself with literary matters, with poetry. Seamus Heaney (\u201cSeamus Famous,\u201d as Clive James once dubbed him) is one of the best known writers of our time, while W. B. Yeats has only a few serious competitors\u2014Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot chief among them\u2014for the title of best English-language poet of the modern period. Heaney\u2019s contemporaries, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Eavan Boland are, if not household names, major figures in contemporary poetry. All this despite the fact that Ireland, as Wes Davis points out in his introduction to An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry<\/i>, \u201chas roughly the population of Tennessee in a land area the size of South Carolina.\u201d That\u2019s a helpful reminder, given the enormous quantity and high quality of literature produced, in two languages, by this nation\u2014or nations\u2014during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.<\/p>\n

At first glance you might think Davis has chosen to include all of it. Including the notes and index, the anthology is a whopping 976 pages. Granted, there are advantages to this sort of editorial generosity. We get all of Patrick Kavanagh\u2019s \u201cThe Great Hunger,\u201d and Anthony Cronin\u2019s \u201cr.m.s. Titanic,\u201d and healthy selections of Richard Murphy\u2019s \u201cThe Battle of Aughrim.\u201d In the case of the younger poets here who haven\u2019t yet published a \u201cselected,\u201d this is also a welcome opportunity to get an overview of their work. Still, it\u2019s not the sort of book you\u2019d want to take with you on the plane while flying to the old sod, or in your backpack while cycling around it. Portability isn\u2019t the only test of a good anthology, of course, but it\u2019s all too easy to imagine this one suffering the same fate as, say, The Riverside Shakespeare<\/i>, purchased when required for a college course, sold or left to gather dust thereafter.<\/p>\n

That would be a shame, because this is a book that in every sense deserves a broad readership. I say in every sense, because we sometimes say that a poet or body of work deserves readers based entirely on literary merit, without taking into account the needs and capacities of those as-yet-unconverted readers. The English poet Geoffrey Hill may deserve a broad readership, but the difficulties posed by his work, even if often exaggerated, are sufficient to ensure that this will never happen. Most readers of poetry will never cotton to Hill, to say nothing of the larger group of readers who have largely abandoned poetry for prose fiction and non-fiction.<\/p>\n

These are just the readers, however, that I can imagine perusing An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry<\/i> with a palpable sense of relief. Davis cites Louis MacNeice\u2019s assertion that the ideal modern poet is \u201ca fairly normal person,\u201d and in fact most of the poets here are determinedly normal, or at least want their readers to regard them as such. In part this seems a conscious strategy, adopted in response to the ways in which modern education created divisions within communities and families. Seamus Heaney, for one, returns obsessively to the ways in which his education and poetic vocation distanced him from his family and social class. You see this in perhaps his most famous poem, \u201cDigging,\u201d which Davis includes, and in \u201cCasualty,\u201d which I wish he had. The latter poem tells of the poet\u2019s relatively casual acquaintance with a fisherman killed while violating an ira curfew. The dead man had frequented a pub owned by Heaney\u2019s father-in-law, where the poet helped out behind the bar:<\/p>\n

Incomprehensible
\nTo him, my other life.
\nSometimes, on the high stool,
\nToo busy with his knife
\nAt a tobacco plug
\nAnd not meeting my eye,
\nIn the pause after a slug
\nHe mentioned poetry.
\nWe would be on our own
\nAnd, always politic
\nAnd shy of condescension,
\nI would manage by some trick
\nTo switch the talk to eels
\nOr lore of the horse and cart
\nOr the Provisionals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cShy of condescension\u201d is a lovely, double-edged phrase\u2014the poet is \u201cshy of condescension\u201d in the obvious sense of fearing to condescend, but he is also \u201cjust shy of\u201d condescension, which is to say he is very nearly condescending, in his assumption that he needs to get the fisherman back on familiar turf.<\/p>\n

That shyness inflects\u2014not \u201cinfects,\u201d its influence has been too salutary for that\u2014much modern Irish poetry. References to Irish history and legend, to classical myth, to the Bible or Shakespeare abound in the anthology\u2014Homer, Virgil, and Ovid might be ancient Irish poets, to judge by how often they\u2019re mentioned\u2014but these are typically handled with a minimum of fuss and bother, contra the example of high modernists like Eliot, Pound, and David Jones. The thrust of modern Irish poetry is not to lament a rupture with the Western past (\u201cThese fragments I have shored against my ruins,\u201d as Eliot put it), but to demonstrate Irish culture\u2019s continuity both with its Gaelic inheritance and with the broader European tradition.<\/p>\n

N<\/font>owhere are literary references thicker on the ground, for example, than in Davis\u2019s selections from James Simmons\u2014 also a singer and songwriter of some note\u2014with more than half of the poems based on other literary works past and present, including a parody of Heaney\u2019s \u201cStation Island.\u201d At the same time, Simmons\u2019s work is direct to the point of bluntness. Many, though by no means all, of the poems in Modern Irish Poetry<\/i> read as though they could have been written in a world where Modernism never happened; Simmons\u2019 \u201cExploration in the Arts\u201d offers a more direct critique:<\/p>\n

Old Tom and Ezra battened on the Old.
\nMaking it new, my arse. Rapists! Damnation!
\nWhere\u2019s the originality, the gold,
\nwhen every memorable line\u2019s quotation?
\n\u201cHast \u2019ou seen but white lilly grow. . .\u201d
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The cheek, the gall!
\nCompare Pound\u2019s bits with the original. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Simmons is largely unknown in the U.S., which is a shame, as his combination of populism, intellect, and loyalty to tradition is unlike anything we have. Another name that\u2019s likely new to most American readers is Michael Hartnett, a contemporary of Simmons (and of Heaney, Longley, and Mahon). Hartnett produced major work in both Irish and English, abandoning the latter at one point for a period of ten years. \u201cDeath of an Irishwoman\u201d is a small masterpiece, which concludes:<\/p>\n

She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
\nShe was a card game where a nose was broken.
\nShe was a song that nobody sings.
\nShe was a house ransacked by soldiers.
\nShe was a language seldom spoken.
\nShe was a child\u2019s purse, full of useless things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As will be evident from the verses quoted above, Irish verse not only remained accessible, but unabashedly, if modestly, musical. Poetry in meter and rhyme, which in the US and Canada was nearly swept from the field at some points, has remained the gold standard in Ireland. Even those poets in the anthology who could arguably be said to write in free verse (always a difficult term to define), have a clear sense of the line, and of traditional prosody. And a number of the poets born in the late Sixties and early Seventies\u2014Justin Quinn, David Wheatley, Connor O\u2019Callaghan\u2014make virtuosic use of
\ntraditional forms.<\/p>\n

By contemporary standards, then, Irish poets are uncommonly conscious of craft, and this consciousness connects them at once to the tradition of high poetic art in their two languages, where craftsmanship is a necessary precondition to the creation of art, and to the more ordinary crafts\u2014digging, fishing, sewing\u2014that make life, especially rural life, livable. Heaney famously concludes \u201cDigging,\u201d in which he compares his writing of poetry to his father\u2019s digging potatoes by saying, \u201cBetween my finger and my thumb \/ The squat pen rests. \/ I\u2019ll dig with it.\u201d Paula Meehan establishes a similar connection, if a more personally troubled one, between her poetry and her mother\u2019s domestic work in \u201cThe Pattern\u201d:<\/p>\n

Sometimes I\u2019d have to kneel
\nan hour before her by the fire,
\na skein around my outstretched hands,
\nwhile she rolled wool into balls.
\nIf I swam like a kite too high
\namongst the shadows on the ceiling
\nor flew like a fish in the pools
\nof pulsing light, she\u2019d reel me firmly
\nhome, she\u2019d land me at her knees. \n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tongues of flame in her dark eyes,
\nshe\u2019d say, \u201cOne of these days I must
\nteach you to follow a pattern.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I<\/font>f I have a reservation about An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry<\/i>, aside from its bulk, it would be that Davis, as a critic, has one very big chip on his shoulder, a chip by the name of William Butler Yeats. One of the central theses of his introduction, and one to which he returns in his introductions to the selections from individual poets, is that Irish poets writing after the height of high modernism, when faced with a choice between the two masters available to them, Joyce and Yeats, chose Joyce. Yeats, to hear Davis tell it, is a world denying, faintly ridiculous mystic, while Joyce is the great champion of ordinary life.<\/p>\n

This is a gross oversimplification. There are many Yeatses (and many Joyces, too, but that\u2019s for another time): there\u2019s the love poet, early and late, of \u201cAdam\u2019s Curse\u201d and \u201cPolitics,\u201d for example, or the political poet of \u201cAn Irish Airman Foresees His Death\u201d and \u201cEaster 1916.\u201d And if none of these Yeatses wrote as convincingly (or at times as drearily) about Irish country life as Patrick Kavanagh was to do in the 1950s, Yeats did attempt to write a vigorous poetry based in the vernacular, his desire to do so most memorably expressed in \u201cThe Fisherman,\u201d where the poet first imagines the title character, then vows, \u201c\u2018Before I am old\/ I shall have written him one\/ poem maybe as cold\/ And passionate as the dawn.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Yeats went on to make good on this promise. Yes, he was capable of writing lofty, sometimes sententious stuff that suggested a withdrawal into Platonic realms, but he could also write musically matter-of-fact lines like those in the first stanza of \u201cEaster 1916,\u201d his great poem about the abortive uprising against British rule:<\/p>\n

I have met them at close of day
\nComing with vivid faces
\nFrom counter or desk among grey
\nEighteenth-century houses.
\nI have passed with a nod of the head
\nOr polite meaningless words,
\nOr have lingered awhile and said
\nPolite meaningless words,
\nAnd thought before I had done
\nOf a mocking tale or a gibe
\nTo please a companion
\nAround the fire at the club,
\nBeing certain that they and I
\nBut lived where motley is worn:
\nAll changed, changed utterly:
\nA terrible beauty is born.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Heaney poem \u201cCasualty,\u201d which I quoted earlier, draws some of its considerable power from its allusions to \u201cThe Fisherman\u201d and \u201cEaster 1916,\u201d bringing together as it does the figure of a (real, not imagined) fisherman and the threat of revolutionary violence. To make the linkage all the more explicit, Heaney cast his poem in the same meter and rhyme scheme that Yeats employed for both of his. It\u2019s striking, though, how little poetic form seems to enter into Davis\u2019s reading of literary history. If Irish poets have generally preferred Joyce\u2019s Dublin to Yeats\u2019s Byzantium, they have by and large chosen to work in the traditional meters and unfragmented syntax of the latter.<\/p>\n

Davis\u2019s lack of subtlety on the subject of Yeats and his influence is luckily not a fatal flaw. He does a fine job of introducing and contextualizing the work of the poets he has selected, and of translating and clarifying terms and allusions when necessary (though I wish one didn\u2019t have to flip all the way to the end of the book to find his notes). An anthology ultimately stands or falls on the strength of the work that it collects. In this regard, especially, An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry<\/i> is a notable success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1269,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[745],"department_id":[561],"issue":[2996],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":82,"value_formatted":82,"value":"82","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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