From the Celtic to the Quotidian

The poet Patrick Kavanagh observed that Ireland has never been without a standing army of 10,000 poets. That may well be true, but until recently you would hardly have known it from reading North American anthologies of English-language poetry. The 1400-page Norton Anthology of Poetry (third edition, 1970), for example, includes only five modern Irish poets: W. B. Yeats, C. Day Lewis, Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, and Seamus Heaney. John Frederick Nims's Harper Anthology of Poetry (1981) contains only four. Over the past few decades, specialized anthologies of Irish verse, notably Brendan Kennelly's Penguin Book of Irish Verse (1970), John Montague's The Book of Irish Verse (1974), and Thomas Kinsella's Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986), have supplied a corrective; but in their efforts to accommodate the oldest vernacular poetry in Western Europe, the editors have had to limit their twentieth-century selections. Paul Muldoon's Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986), which offers ample selections from only ten poets, and Derek Mahon and Peter Fallon's Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990), which includes twenty-six, have filled in some of the gaps, but with the exception of the five-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, no one anthology has quite done justice to the plenitude, depth, and variety of modern Irish poetry.

The present volume answers that need. Wes Davis's hefty anthology, which could occupy the better part of a student's backpack, contains nearly eight hundred poems from more than fifty Irish poets, whose dates of birth range from 1881 to 1972. Spacious in design and generous in spirit, this handsome book evinces respect for the poems and poets it presents, allowing individual poems room to breathe and individual poets an average of a dozen pages. Included here, among the many short lyrics, are Kavanagh's groundbreaking "The Great Hunger" and Paul Muldoon's polyphonic "Incantata" in their entirety, a broad swatch of MacNeice's "Autumn Journal," and a selection of Paul Durcan's lively expansive monologues. Included also are such poets as the Irish-born Day Lewis and the American-based Eamon Grennan, who have too often been absent from Irish anthologies, and others such as Gerald Dawe, Bernard O'Donoghue, John Ennis, and Enda Wyley, who are well known in Ireland but may not be familiar to American readers. For each poet Davis has provided a nuanced introduction, most often addressing the poet's dominant themes.

In his historical overview Davis portrays the evolution of twentieth-century Irish poetry as driven on the one hand by a widespread rejection of Yeats's romantic mythologies and on the other by a gravitation toward James Joyce's quotidian realism. In Davis's estimate the two most prominent Irish poets after Yeats are Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh. And just as Clarke "discarded the lumber of Celtic legends," casting a cold and often satiric eye on urban realities, Kavanagh repudiated Yeats's pastoral version of the Irish peasantry, offering in its stead a brutally realistic vision of rural Irish life. With Joyce as their guide and Kavanagh's validation of the "parochial" as their creed, poets of succeeding generations—particularly Heaney, Kinsella, Montague, Michael Longley, and John Hewitt— cast their lot with the ordinary and the local, which Kavanagh viewed as the source and site of the universal. With few exceptions the present generation of Irish poets has done the same.

Although Davis's broad historical narrative may give too much weight to Joyce and Kavanagh and too little to international influences—that of William Carlos Williams on Montague, for example, or Robert Lowell on Heaney—his account is not inaccurate, and it is largely borne out by the body of work he has chosen. To compare, for example, Yeats's "Ancestral Houses" (1922), with its imagery of "leveled lawns and graveled ways," to Mahon's "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford" (1973), is to detect both a lingering elegiac regard for the passing of...