The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry ed. by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis

The primary OED definition of “handbook” is “a small book or treatise, such as may conveniently be held in the hand.” At over seven hundred large-format pages and weighing in excess of three pounds, this Oxford Handbook is neither small nor handy to hold. The next definition sounds more like it: “A compendious book or treatise for guidance in any art, occupation or study.” Certainly, with forty chapters by specialist scholars on different aspects of modern Irish poetry from the emergence of Yeats in the late nineteenth century to the current generation in the first decades of the twenty-first, the book is compendious enough.

This handbook, like the others in the Oxford series, is intended as a reference book, with its individual chapters eventually to be made available for download online. No one but the dutiful reviewer, it is likely, will set out to read the book from end to end. But its great strength is in fact the way the editors have re-mapped the territory of Irish poetry by their organization of the volume. Chronological sections like “Poetry and the Revival” or “Mid-Century Irish Poetry” alternate with thematically focused sections like “The Poetry of War” or “Poetry and the Arts.” The generous allocation of chapters, each of a substantial eight thousand words, allows for the inclusion of senior scholars such as Edna Longley, Warwick Gould, and Dillon Johnston, of a much younger generation of critics such as Tom Walker, Maria Johnston, and Gail McConnell, and of a number of poet practitioners such as Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, David Wheatley, and Alan Gillis, all of whom figure in the book both as contributors and authors discussed.

Not all the poetry in the book is treated reverentially. There is a judicious evaluation by Kit Fryatt of the “potentialities” of Patrick Kavanagh and his failure fully to realize them, and there are some stern judgments by John Redmond on Brendan Kennelly and Paul Durcan’s engagement with the public sphere in their poetry. But for the most part, the contributors write in patient and informed appreciation of the work they analyze. The scale of the volume makes possible specialist chapters such as Damien Keane’s “Poetry, Music, and Reproduced Sound”—which discusses a range of Irish poets—or Paul Simpson’s stylistic analysis of modern Irish poetry. The book is primarily limited to English language poetry, but there is a chapter by Aodán Mac Póilin on translations from Irish and a fine discussion by Eric Falci of the collaborations between Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon.

Inevitably, Yeats looms large throughout. Even apart from the dedicated essay by Warwick Gould on his relationship with symbolism and Edna Longley’s wonderfully perceptive essay on Yeats and violence, he is an inescapable presence, compared with Austin Clarke in his relationship with English (Michael O’Neill), used as the starting point for Neil Corcoran’s exemplary overview of modern Irish poetry and the visual arts, and presented as the figure that subsequent Irish poets have had to imitate, resist, or try hard to ignore. But the range of later writers is well represented in the volume also, with two chapters devoted to Louis MacNeice (Tom Walker, Jonathan Allison), an excellent essay by John McAuliffe on Clarke and Thomas Kinsella (which very usefully focuses on the presses that published their poetry), and an extended treatment of the wealth of Irish poetry published in the last fifty years, when Yeats has been a less insistent ghost.

Modernity came late to Ireland, and some might argue that modernism never got here at all. One section of this book is devoted to “modernism and traditionalism,” starting with Edward Larrissy’s intriguing exploration of congruences between the ideas of tradition of Yeats and Eliot. More representative, perhaps, is the view of the Northern Irish poet W. R. Rodgers, quoted by John Goodby: “The Irish have never been bitten by the T.S.E. fly” (606). Goodby is trying to account for the marginal status of “alternative Irish poetry,” recent avant-garde poets very little known inside, much less outside, Ireland. They are the latter-day counterparts of the 1930s Irish modernists, Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin, who are the subject of Susan Schreibman’s essay earlier in the volume. Why should modernism be so belated, so under-acknowledged in Ireland? Goodby argues that it is because “the discourses defining Irish poetry add a particularly acute concern with national and cultural affiliation to the empiricist suspicion of formalist experiment” (608).

Certainly the preoccupation with national identity has been one of the continuing and defining features of Irish poetry. In spite of Beckett’s contemptuous denunciation of the “antiquarians” in his much-quoted 1934 review article “Recent Irish Poetry,” the poetic recourse to some underpinning myth of “ancient Ireland” went on right through the twentieth century, as Matthew Campbell makes clear in this book’s broad-ranging opening chapter. And one can understand why W. J. McCormack called Irish poetry “incurably descriptive” (quoted on 416). Preoccupation with the expression of a recognizably Irish experience has privileged representational poetic technique.

So, for example, there was the regionalist ideal promoted by John Hewitt and others in Northern Ireland in the 1940s, with its insistence on rootedness, explored by Richard Kirkland in his chapter, “The Poetics of Partition” (210). Patrick Kavanagh’s aesthetic of the parochial as against the cosmopolitan, discussed in Hugh Haughton’s very intelligent essay on the Irish poet as critic, has proved highly influential. Place names, localities, the scenes and smells of rural childhoods, and regional dialect vocabularies have been the very stuff of Irish poetry through the work of John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Bernard O’Donoghue—an unaccountable absence from this volume.

And then there is politics. The renewal of violence in the north of Ireland from 1969 on required some degree of engagement, particularly from the very talented generation of Irish poets then emerging, many of them from Ulster. In one of the most illuminating essays in the book, Heather Clark shows how John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Mahon shaped their early-1970s volumes in response to the violence, even if only very obliquely, as in the case of Mahon’s The Snow Party (1975). Obliquity was necessary if partisanship was to be avoided. But in spite of Heaney’s wry dictum “whatever you say say nothing,” something had to be said. Many of the poems considered in Stephen Regan’s sensitive study of the Irish elegy after Yeats were laments for the deaths caused by the Troubles.

Not all the politics was national. Chapters in this volume on Medbh McGuckian (Leontia Flynn) and Vona Groarke (Catriona Clutterbuck) look at the gender politics of Irish women poets. But specific to Ireland are issues of religious background. As Peter McDonald points out in his essay on Protestantism and Northern Irish poetry, “For a great deal of modern poetry from places like Britain and the USA, analysis in terms of religious affiliation makes next to no sense” (478). By contrast, McDonald’s own essay or Gail McConnell’s well focused chapter on Catholic art and culture from Clarke to Heaney are essential to the understanding of Irish poetry.

Modernist poetry, poetry of the city, does arrive in Ireland, if a bit later than elsewhere. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews’s chapter on Belfast poetry is balanced by Maria Johnston’s on Dublin walking poems. Ciaran Carson’s earlier cityscapes, Kennedy-Andrews shows, are very much informed by the thinking of Walter Benjamin, as some of Carson’s later poetry draws upon William Carlos Williams. Irish poets from the time of MacNeice on have always been aware of their international peers—Frank O’Hara is mentioned in passing as one of Longley’s heroes (495). The use of traditional forms such as the sonnet is not to be equated with a conservative formalism, as Alan Gillis illustrates with the witty opening of his chapter on modern Irish sonnet sequences: “‘I’m up to my bollox in sonnets’, says Spenser. Or, at least, Brendan Kennelly’s version of Spenser in Cromwell” (567). Paul Muldoon can make the sonnet do weird and wonderful postmodernist work.

Even in a volume as capacious as the Oxford Handbook, there are gaps. There is a limited amount on Eavan Boland’s poetry as against her influential criticism, very little on Tom Paulin or on Paula Meehan, nothing on Harry Clifton, currently Ireland Professor of Poetry. There seems to be a slight imbalance in favor of Northern Irish writers and of a younger emergent generation of poets. The inclusion of dates of birth and death would have been helpful for the volume as a reference work. But these are minor grumbles. This is an enormously rich and valuable guide to the great diversity of modern Irish poetic achievement, a book that will help all readers to appreciate just what an achievement that has been.