IN Cathal O Searcaigh's poem, "Caoineadh", the Irish language is described as "Gafa i gcreagacha crochta na Faillii", or, in Seamus Heaney's translation, "On a fatal ledge that we won't attempt." John Hewitt in "Conacre" positions himself culturally on "this faulted ledge", while Richard Murphy's negotiation between Gaelic and AngloIreland in "Sailing to an Island" includes the line, "There is no refuge on the gannet's cliff."
A reading of these images of peril might set them against a secure cultural space occupied by an Anglicised Catholic Ireland which threatens other cultural formations with obliteration. Certainly the normative assumption is that while Protestant poets are defined by their religious background, the permeative influence of Catholicism on those reared as adherents needs no explication. Patrick Crotty refers to the "recognisably Protestant empiricism" of John Hewitt, to the poetry of W.R. Rodgers as "a Presbyterian manifestation of our racial drama of conscience", and to James Simmons as a "street wise counterpart to John Hewitt's Calvinistic neatness" - all defensible comments but standing in contrast to a failure to note the extent to which the work of poets as diverse as Mhac an tSaoi, Heaney and Muldoon can only be fully appreciated by reference to Catholic belief and culture. Particularly striking is Crotty's failure to link the European Modernism of McGreevey, Coffey and Devlin to the international character of the Catholic Church: Catholicism is no more aesthetically restrictive than Modernism is inherently liberating.
Crotty's critical commentary is succinct and considered but is in danger of confining poets from outside the dominant tradition to restrictive definitions. Thus poetry by women is defined in terms of "a feminist aesthetic" demanding "new forms and cadences", a programmatic imperative which may account for the (welcome) inclusion in the anthology of poets such as Fergus Allen, who have come late to publication, but the exclusion of a body of women poets whose significant work was written in middle age but whose aesthetic forms may refer back to work written by them in earlier parts of their broken careers.
Essentially, this is an anthology of Irish poetry since Partition, an appropriate starting point given the extent to which the separate development of the two states was to determine who the poets might be. Much has been written about the relationship between the Northern Troubles and Northern poetry, but Heaney, Longley and Mahon initially gained a realisation of their ability through the 1947 Education Act; the 20 year gap between them - and the emergence of groups of poets in the South for whom Ni Dhomhnaill, McCarthy and Meehan might serve as emblems is exactly in line with the two decades which separated the introduction of free education in the two states.
A similar determinism could be applied to the emergency of modern poetry in Irish, its indebtedness to the policy of compulsory Irish made plain by the paucity of poetry in Irish from Northern Ireland.
One poet whose emergence utterly defies such banal categorisation is Michael Hartnett, and Crotty pays just tribute to "the vehement, unironical tonalities" which place his poetry "further from the orthodoxies of 20th century taste than the work of any comparably gifted contemporary Irish writer". The leaks sprung by Hartnett in the boundaries between languages and traditions is rivalled only by the achievements of Eavan Boland and Cathal & Searcaigh in respectively changing women and native speakers of Irish from romanticised object to articulate progenitor.
Overall, this is a less geographically biased, less critically tendentious anthology than most. It includes an introduction, as well as critical and biographical notes on each poet, and can be, particularly in the case of Kavanagh, provocatively revisionist in its selections.