Selected Poems of James Clarence Mangan (review)

The year 2003 marked the bicentenary of James Mangan's birth, so it was an appropriate time to bring out this new edition of selected poems. In 1903, D. J. O'Donoghue brought out the first collection of Mangan poems. In the 178 poems that comprise Poems of James Clarence Mangan, O'Donoghue believed he had included nearly the complete poems. But over the twentieth century many more were discovered. Irish Academic Press recently published an eight-volume set of Mangan's works, four of which collect his poems. The Chuto et al. volume presents 234 poems drawn from those four volumes. Each editor is a noted Mangan scholar, Chuto having written a bibliography of Mangan's work and co-edited Mangan's Complete Works, Holzapfel co-edited Mangan's Complete Poems, Van de Kamp co-edited Mangan's Complete Prose, and Shannon-Mangan written a biography of Mangan as well as co-edited the Complete Works.

The book opens with a brief overview of Mangan's life and milieu by Irish social and cultural historian Terence Brown, followed by the editors' note discussing their selection of poems for the volume. They explain, for instance, that O'Donoghue had included very few of Mangan's humorous poems, finding them not "poetical" in their sardonic and sometimes aggressive tone. This omission they correct. The poems themselves are presented in chronological order, each identified with the year of its publication, beginning with Mangan's early puzzle poems of 1822 and concluding with poems published in 1849, the year of his death. Following the poems are 35 pages of valuable notes. In addition to identifying historical and literary allusions as well as explaining words no longer current, the editors, helped by Peter Mac Mahon and Tadhg Ó Dúshláine on the poems Mangan translated from the Irish, identify which poems are translations, which originals, and where Mangan has added material not found in the original poems. Though many of Mangan's poems have subtitles indicating that they are translations, the editors remind us that "'translations' may be original poems, and vice versa." This being so, readers need the notes to indicate the status of each poem. The volume concludes with an index of titles and first lines.

James Clarence Mangan's position in the history of Irish poetry has been a contested one. William Butler Yeats credited Mangan with intensity in writing but little else that was positive. James Joyce recognized that Mangan's writing, as well as the obscurity into which it quickly fell, was a product of its time; that is, Catholics in Ireland during the 1820s, 30s, and 40s were very much embattled and second-class citizens. Mangan's name rarely appears in the works of late twentieth-century Irish social and cultural historians. From a postcolonial perspective, Mangan has been viewed as a colonized subject who could not write from his own voice because, given its subjugated relation to England, Ireland itself did not have a voice of its own, having been forced into the 1800 Act of Union. In the past six or seven years, several conferences focusing on Mangan's writing have taken place in Ireland, attempting a broader perspective based on information that became available with the 1995 publication of Shannon-Mangan's biography of the writer. That Seamus Heaney and Garret FitzGerald recently took part in a public homage to Mangan's poems may signal that Mangan's place in Irish literary history is in process of being rewritten.

Like Joyce, Mangan was born into a middle-class family that, because of his father's unwise business decisions, fell into Dublin poverty when he was a young boy. As an adult living with his parents and two siblings in a two-room apartment in a rundown house, Mangan's first employment was as a legal copyist. To assuage the boredom of this work, he sought companionship...