PERIODICAL: Poetry Ireland Review 100Edited by Paul Muldoon, Poetry Ireland, 156pp. €9.99
THE OPENING ESSAY in Poetry Ireland Review 100is by Dermot Bolger on the late David Marcus. It's a sincere tribute to one of the greatest advocates of Irish writers in the 20th century and records significantly the discovery by Marcus, four years before his passing, of his own "lost" poems, which are now published by New Island. Following Bolger's essay is a roll-call of familiar names in an orderly, if not imaginative, alphabetical sequence. John F Deane's Shoemakercontains the wonderful lines:
When I conjugate
Christ, and longing, what I mean
is the lake behind the cobbler’s house.
While Seamus Heaney does not disappoint in With Hindsight,where the mythical Oisín is admonished:
Let them hustle round their boulder.
When they call on you, ignore them.
Don’t unbend or brace your shoulder.
Tom Mathews shows a quirky humour in Mr Larkin's Sunday Morning Insomnia, and Iggy McGovern's occasional Centesimal marks the 100th issue with 100 words of playful aplomb. Catríona O'Reilly and Michael Longley also have memorable poems. Derek Mahon translates Rimbaud and Mark Granier gives us a snapshot of Dublin's literary pub Neary's, while Aoife Casby is one of the few "new" names to appear. The Irish language is represented with poems by Celia de Fréine, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Aifric Mac Aodha, whose debut collection appears this summer.
As for the alphabetical roll-call, there’s no indication why editor Paul Muldoon may have chosen such a format, or why, for that matter, he chose to include four villanelles for one issue. Please don’t tell me it is the age of the villanelle.
The omission of an editorial is something of a missed opportunity, but it is made up for by the London-based Poetry Revieweditor Fiona Sampson's It Depends How You Look At It,in which she argues that a literary magazine "inhabits and informs the zeitgeist" and concludes that Poetry Ireland Reviewis an "invaluable cultural record".
This is not, however, an issue of self-congratulation and pure celebration. Maria Johnston takes a critical look over PIRfrom 2000 to 2009. She questions the quality of the translations from the "vast number of languages" featured in the review and bemoans the "deadwood heart" of Irish poetry, namely the love poem. She directs our attention to the fact that Nick Laird, whom she names as the "prom-king" of Irish poetry, has never appeared between PIR'ssheets. Justin Quinn, who also has a technically adroit poem, Babylon, included, writes a severe, and to my mind inaccurate, review of Paul Durcan's Life Is a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems, 1967-2007.Conceding that Durcan was "an agent of social change", Quinn also finds his oeuvre "uncompelling" and "unlikely to find a permanent place in the canon".
A central inset of cover images of PIRcreates a visual record of the journal over the years. It includes images from the review's previous incarnations, most poignantly the very first, edited by David Marcus, in 1948. These previous incarnations have been illuminated in an essay by Joseph Woods, the director of Poetry Ireland, in Poetry Ireland's newsletter, and it could well have been included in the Reviewto lend some light on the journal's shifting histories.
So why with such good poems and provocative essays does PIR 100seem somewhat underwhelming? With PIR 77, back in the autumn of 2003, Poetry Ireland did a great job in reinventing the look and feel of the journal. Heading into its second hundred issues, maybe it is time to rethink what comes between those historical covers.
Paul Perry's The Last Falcon and Small Ordinancehas just been published by the Dedalus Press
