In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (review)

Literary anthologies always raise questions of inclusion and exclusion, the whys and the wherefores as to why some writers were included and others left out; yet, in navigating between the Scylla and Charbydis that is Irish poetry, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland, has managed to create a worthy collection of voices in a book that must be celebrated for its range and multiplicity. The anthology collects interviews with twenty-two poets from the North of Ireland. Many familiar names—John Montague, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Medbh McGuckian—appear here, but Brown stretches out further to welcome such new voices as Martin Mooney and Colette Bryce. In his brief introduction, Brown discusses touches on the broader issue of "the politics of belonging." He does concede in the opening pages that there are "absent qualifiers," but does not elaborate on those absentee poets, nor does he give reasons as to their exclusion. It is surely noticeable that only five women (all born after 1950) appear here, which may well remind readers of the gender imbalance of earlier anthologies.

Arranged in chronological order by each poet's date of birth, the interviews track poetry's development in the North of Ireland over roughly the last half century. Although the dates of the interviews span a twenty-year period, similar concerns and questions hover around all of the conversations in the book. The interviews usually start at a leisurely pace with discussion about the poet's family and background, and then to less autobiographical elements concerned with the poet's work—literary influences, politics, religion, sexuality, the role of literature and the poet in society, and so on. Brown's informed questions deserve much of the credit for the success of the interviews as a whole. One peculiarity simply must be questioned. Why is a major figure like Paul Muldoon represented by an interview that took place more twenty years ago, in 1981?

One of the most rewarding interviews is that conducted with Cathal ÓSearcaigh, who writes in the Irish language. Irish was the language spoken at his home in the Donegal Gaeltacht and he learned to speak English with a Glaswegian accent as a child, when emigrant families returned from Scotland with their own particular cadences and speech. English, he comments, has given him a new lease of life in translation, and has given him the ability to live a working life as a poet. The relationship between the Irish and the English languages works its way into all of the interviews. Muldoon wrote his first poems in Irish, and John Montague writes of stuttering with a "grafted tongue" that "chokes" in its attempts to learn and speak another language. Where our forebears struggled with speaking English, today poets in Ireland struggle with the linguistic legacy of Irish. James Simmons notes that we have to come to terms with the fact that "Irish literature in English has this huge tradition of Irish literature in Irish that most of us are cut off from." The violence of this "severing" and the notion that "careless talk costs lives" occupies an important place in the poetics many of the poets in this collection.

The subtitle of the collection draws our attention to the politics of nomenclature. What, exactly, is the distinction between the North of Ireland and Northern Ireland? Brown has opted for the geographical term, "North of Ireland," rather than the political "Northern Ireland," and can include County Donegal (which Ó Searcaigh has called "the detached limb of the South"). In his interview, Gerald Dawe astutely remarks that, "living in the west of Ireland I began to find that there were Irelands—not just physically but culturally and psychologically." Reading the interviews collected here, one gets a sense that there are many Northern Irelands...