POETRY: An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry,Edited by Wes Davis, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 976pp. €24

'NEVER BEFORE HAS there been a single volume of modern Irish poetry so significant and groundbreaking as An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry." So goes the cover note on Wes Davis's gathering of work by 53 poets in a book that has been widely heralded as a major addition to the Harvard University Press catalogue for 2010. As the academic David Mikics is quoted as saying on its back cover, "this is a publishing event," and given the attractiveness of the book's design and its sheer size it's sure to have caught many readers' eyes in bookshops on both sides of the Atlantic since its publication, interestingly, on St Patrick's Day. Denis Donoghue is probably right in his claim that "no one could have presented the poems more handsomely" than Harvard (or the Belknap Press thereof), but appearances can be deceiving. "Anthologies are sickly things," as Sir Francis Palgrave once put it, and for all its sturdy good looks An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetryis no exception.

It is no exception in part because it strives to be more than it is, and suffers as a result. In his preface Davis asks readers to "think of this anthology as a guidebook to a vibrant terrain you'll want to explore further once you've closed the cover". Fair enough, but why not call it A Guidebook to Modern Irish Poetry, then? Readers of this work may well want to explore more poems by those included in it once they have closed the cover, but for those whose first encounters with so-called modern Irish poetry are based on this work, what does it say? In the preface Davis refers to a "general introduction" called "Learning the Trade" (a title that appears to have been excised from the final edit of the book), but that phrase, of course, calls to mind Yeats, a figure who is nonetheless absent from the book's contents. Again, fair enough: Yeats's poetry is widely available elsewhere, but Davis's counterclaim that it was Joyce who pioneered "the route forward for many Irish poets" is not sufficiently or convincingly illustrated in the selections included here.

Dillon Johnston has made a cogent argument for considering “Irish poetry after Joyce” in his book of that title, but, leaving aside biographical and other contextual analogies, what of Joyce’s writing practice may be said to have informed the work of the Irish poets who came after him? Davis argues that it was Joyce’s “realism” that helped poets such as Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh to engage more closely with aspects of Irish society, but there is a great deal of residual post-Yeatsian symbolism in the work of these and other 20th-century Irish poets, and Yeats’s presence has not always been a disabling factor as is suggested here. To describe Yeats as an “out-and-out mystic” with “cryptic ideas and elaborate postures” reveals only one side of a man who was also fully committed to the social and cultural agency of his art. This, more than anything else, may account for the richness of Irish poetic culture in the 20th century – the example of a prominent precursor who believed that poetry mattered and that the voice of the poet was of central importance to the life of the state.

Anthologies are interesting and often controversial in the way they map or remap poetic genealogies and literary histories, and this is no exception. Despite Davis’s argument in relation to Joyce’s importance in his introduction, however, it is hard to see that influence clearly here. What is clear, and what needs to be stated clearly, is that this is a gathering of some of the finest poems written by Irish poets over the past 100 years or so. As Davis himself puts it, “greatest hits” are included “where appropriate”, while “less familiar poems” are also given space. Questions of familiarity and popularity are of course relative, but it is nonetheless good to see certain poets represented here who don’t always get the recognition they deserve in critical accounts of Irish poetry – figures such as Padraic Colum, C Day Lewis, Padraic Fiacc and Anthony Cronin, as well as James Simmons, Desmond O’Grady and Frank Ormsby, who have more than a dozen poems each here. On the other hand, it is alarming to this reader at least that figures such as Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy, Patrick MacDonogh, George Reavey and Padraic Fallon are omitted. Quibbling of this kind is commonplace where anthologies are concerned, but the omission of poets like Devlin and Coffey in particular points to another, perhaps more serious lack at the other end of the book’s chronological spectrum, where Maurice Scully, Trevor Joyce, Catherine Walsh, Billy Mills and Randolph Healy might quite properly have been given exposure but are left out altogether.

Of the 53 poets included in An Anthology

of Modern Irish Poetry only 10 are women, and it is astounding that contemporary poets such as Leontia Flynn, Colette Bryce and Leanne O’Sullivan are not included. Poems by Máirtín Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Nuala

Ní­ Dhomhnaill, Michael Davitt and Cathal

Ó Searcaigh are included in translation, but it is a pity that space could not be found for Máire Mhac an-tSaoi and Caitlín Maude, for example, as well as a number of important emerging voices whose work may come as a real surprise to readers who decide to diverge from the routes proposed by Davis’s guidebook – poets such as Dave Lordan, Kevin Higgins, Colette Ní­ Ghallchóir and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn. As anthologies of modern or contemporary Irish poetry go, selections by Selina Guinness and (more recently) Roddy Lumsden, though much smaller in size, are vastly better than this in terms of their representation of the vibrancy of contemporary Irish poetry.

In a work of this scale there are bound to be minor errors and omissions, as well as historical and cultural generalisations, such as the twice-repeated note that Maud Gonne was a figure "with whom Yeats was infatuated" – a classic of understatement – but most of these are excusable. Less forgivable is the suggestion in Davis's note to the selection of poems by Pearse Hutchinson that Paddy Joe Hill was "accused, perhaps wrongly, of bombing a pub in Birmingham, England" in 1974. What does "perhaps" mean here? Hill was wrongly accused of being involved in terrorist activities, as the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice showed in 1991. The presence of that "perhaps" not only undermines the very premise of the poem by Hutchinson to which the note refers ( British Justice), but it might also constitute an instance of dangerous historical revisionism that casts a dark cloud indeed over this work as a whole.

Davis, like all anthologists, anticipated some of these more general comments, complaints and suggestions when compiling this work, and of course there may be other reasons (legal, financial, or personal) for some of his editorial decisions. In his preface he admits the anthology is incomplete, but it is a pity he doesn't at least make brief reference to the poets whose inclusion might have made it a more convincing and accurate selection of the work now happening in Ireland. Who are "the many worthy poets" he mentions and what, in any case, does "worthy" mean in this context? Worthy to sit on JD McClatchy's "short shelf of indispensable books", on which it already has its place according to a note on the book's back cover? On that basis, for all of its prominence on the bookshelf, An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetrymay have a very short shelf life.

Philip Coleman is a lecturer in the school of English at Trinity College Dublin