THIS collection of essays, originally a series of radio talks offers a useful introduction to contemporary Irish poetry. Part of the ever anxious project to determine and define an Irish poetic tradition, or set of competing traditions, it seeks to map contemporary achievement and to look also at the legacy of Kavanagh and Clarke. This is easier to suggest than to define, for, in spite of undoubted affinities between Kavanagh and poets such as Heaney or Montague, or between certain aspects"of Clarke and Kinsella, there are many poets to whom their legacies mean little.
The title of the collection is in that respect something of a misnomer, in that besides according Kavanagh a centrality he doesn't have for many of the poets here, many of whom preceded or were working at the same time and towards very different ends (Devlin, Coffey, MacGreevy, MacNeice, for instance).
Irish poetry doesn't always proceed neatly along the locally determined track, and some of these essays glance at European and American intersections. Devlin, Coffey and Beckett are again pressed into service as Ireland's conic modernists. Writing of their work, Gerald Dawe castigates what he terms the "Cult, of Failure" that causes poets to view their work as "a compensation for an inability to cope, challenge or deal with the world", and offers the counter example of Devlin as a poet indifferent to the emphasis on personality and sustained, in J.C.C. Mays's phrase, by utterly impersonal ambitions".
It is, however, possible to overstate the contribution of these poets, as a corrective to a perceived isolationism. There are in fact - many poets whose engagements with the different poetic legacies of Europe run deep, though it's not a subject much explored. In "American Relations", Eamon Grennan begins with an enticing, if lightly entertained, proposition: "Modern Irish poetry in English begins with Walt Whitman." It is, as he says, "an intriguing, thought".
His essay goes on to trace some of the American connections in Irish poetry, reminding us, for instance, how important poets such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren were for Denis Devlin. He also shows how Padraic Fallon (mentioned in only one other essay and then as a candidate for the title of Ireland's most neglected poet) was liberated by "the normal human range of William Carlos Williams. Grennan points out too that Kavanagh's suppleness is partly indebted to his reading of Americans. And even the Beats left their mark: "That rascal Alan (sic) Ginsberg has made news - with the Beat generation. You only have to roar and use bad language. I'm genuinely thinking of having a go."
In an ambitious sketch of Irish poetry since the Sixties, John Goodby argues that poets such as Kinsella, Montague and Richard Murphy also looked to American poetry in a desire to transcend the isolation and particularism"
of the likes of Clarke and Kavanagh, and also in a search for the "sweeping overview" far from "the inbred irony of English nodes. Yet if they did travel far it was still to return," he argues, "to poetic narratives of Irishness at exactly the time when these narratives were being subverted by the rush towards a pluralist modernity and redefined by the explosion of the North.
Goodby posits a clash between older neo Modernist and nativist strains" and both a looser "anti elitist" poetry and the emergence of women's poetry, a clash further complicated by the arrival of a new and challenging strain of Northern poetry - cogently analysed in Terence Brown's contribution. Perhaps the single most useful point to emerge from this is that the time has long passed when it might have been possible to talk of a single tradition or style, a point which is also made by Eavan Boland's sweeping survey of poets born in the 1950s.
The marginalisation of women in the Irish language is examined by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. Her ,"Hidden Ireland" is an Ireland of hidden achievement by women who "were not let near the ink" and "were not allowed into the corpus of the canon". She concludes that "the hysteria" which has surrounded the issue of women poets in Ireland "cloaks a deep and fundamental ontological terror".
The book also includes useful surveys of modern poetry in Irish by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith and Alan Titley, a perceptive essay on Louis MacNeice and his influence by Edna Longley, the late Augustine Martin on Kavanagh and Clarke, a look at poetry journals and publishers by Anthony Roche. It would have been strengthened by a sustained analysis of some poets - Kinsella, particularly - too often sidelined or used as counters in an argument; and perhaps also by a less frenetic inclusiveness in which many are mentioned but few examined. The collection, though, is an excellent starting point for an exploration of the many poetries produced on the island.