POETRY: THE FALL, by Anthony Cronin:MEMOIRIST, BIOGRAPHER, critic, journalist, novelist (whose comic masterpiece The Life Of Reillyis being re-issued later this year), tireless agitator for the arts in the public and political spheres, inspirational figure to generations of Irish writers – Anthony Cronin is all of these things. But the publication of this, his 12th volume of poetry, is a timely reminder of the fact that poetry has always been his core business.

Since the publication of Poemsin 1957, Cronin has gone his own way in Irish poetry. His early poetry, often lyrical, but also witty and meditative, and expressed in the language of good sense, was already at a slight angle to the trend of Irish poetry. His poems often move forward discursively through argument, rather than a stringing together of metaphors, or the elaboration of a lyrical, ego-based anecdote, which is the norm even now in Irish poetry. He has sometimes been associated with the Movement poetry in England, and it is notable that he is rare among Irish poets in his genuine interest in, and understanding of, the matter of England.

In 1961 he published the long poem R.M.S. Titanic, a work which long before Hans Magnus Enszenberger brilliantly exploited the Titanicas a symbol of a doomed capitalism. Also characteristic was his choice of subject, compared to his contemporaries, many of whom were still mired in 17th-century Irish history.

In his playfulness and his honest approach to relationships, Cronin was the true inheritor of later Kavanagh. But he was to go much further, in the astonishing sequence of sonnets The End Of The Modern World. Difficult to summarise, this is a meditation in hypnotic iambics on themes of history, work, sex and society, beginning in early medieval times with an analysis of courtly love, from which much of the underlying structure of Western love poetry ultimately derives. But Cronin dissects the nexus where sex meets market forces, love as a commodity in the developing capitalist society.

This fascinating rampage through centuries of relationships between the sexes and the classes, in the company of De Sade and Baudelaire, is skilfully interwoven with autobiographical elements, especially Cronin's own final return to Ireland in the 1970s. By now, the battlements where Yeats paced have become the back bedroom of 51 Stella Gardens, where Cronin sat facing the wall, writing his Viewpointcolumns for The Irish Times, which for many of us were one of the few glimmers of light in those dark years.

Here he deals with the dilemma of art and public life in Ireland:

I wrote long pieces

About the need of state support for artists . . .

Some well known ghosts appeared reproachfull.

“Thats phony, all that politics and stuff.”

It wasn’t, but I felt a traitor to

The long tradition of the man alone.

He takes the Romantic symbol of the Dark Tower to which Childe Roland came even further, transforming it into a symbol of late capitalism, a gleaming tower of glass and steel, Roland a thrusting executive, a latter-day knight. With unsettling prescience, the poem ends on an image of Manhattan and its towers:

Rise in resplendence, such a culmination

Of History seen at sunset from the harbour

Meaningless, astonishing and simple.

Twelve years after the poem’s first publication, of course, this is where the Modern World would end.

With the publication of Collected Poemsin 2004, it seemed the work was complete. That essential volume ends with the poet standing on the cliffs of Clare, looking out to the sea where instead of the Titanic, he sees:

. . . Venus now above the waves,

Low in the west, bright star of evening love.

Given that elegiac note, it is a particular delight to greet this superb new collection of poems. The voice is perhaps mellower, the wisdom deeper, but the fire and wit are still there. In it he has achieved what Kavanagh saw as the summit of artistic ambition, “to play a true note on a slack string”.

All the old preoccupations are to be found here. The book opens with a celebration of the simple fact of being alive:

A man worn down by time,

Who does not even expect death,

A man who has learned to be grateful

For the lesser things each day brings –

Sleep, habit, the single evening glass . . .

The fascination with the feminine continues. There is a set of eight poems which celebrates women and their parts with a fine disregard for political correctness:

Of course God is a woman.

God has no sense of justice or fair play.

In the final poem, there is, along with a waspish dig at the purveyors of rebooted celtic mysticism, a hard-won wisdom coupled with an ease, a lively scepticism and self-interrogation which has always been there from his early work on:

But I say, I’m inclined to think –

If I were to say more than ‘inclined’

I would really be on the incline,

the slippery slope –

The next thing I would know

and the thing after that.

I would be trying to make other people know.

In his plain speaking, his unabashed thinking in the poem, and attention to the political, all things which now seem almost taboo in Irish poetry, Cronin’s work is of a piece. In a particularly moving poem he writes:

All my life

I have never felt completely happy

Unless I felt that I was,

Somehow,

About my father’s business.

Cronin can say with pride that he has been about his father’s business. It is the effortless and natural mingling of the public and private, personal and political, which makes him a unique figure. He wrote once of “the little republic of love”, and Cronin has in every sense maintained and defended that Republic for us.

Michael O'Loughlin's next poetry collection, In This Life, will be published in the autumn