The Complete Poems by Francis Ledwidge, ed. Liam O'Meara Goldsmith Press 312pp, £15
Ledwidge is one of those Irish writers about whom it is heresy to say a bad word. You can argue over the reputation of almost any other writer, even (perhaps especially) Joyce and Yeats, but on Ledwidge you're not allowed to demur - sanctified by his early death, he went straight into myth unbothered by any proper critical consideration.
Perhaps the reason is that he provides reassurance to people on both sides of the traditional Irish divide, people whose championing of him has little to do with literature. Republicans can embrace the nationalist peasant who would have manned the barricades in 1916; anti-republicans can cherish the fact that he chose instead to fight a greater foe than the Auld Enemy.
However, the problematic fact of the poetry remains, much of which isn't any good and some of which is awful. A clunking predictability in his rhymes and a muffled lack of specificity in his images give too many of his poems a dusty and archaic feel.
As a poet of the countryside he is sometimes compared to Edward Thomas, but they have nothing in common. Thomas's poetry is distinguished by a love of language and by a realisation of how language can be made to capture particular sights, sensations and feelings; Ledwidge's, by contrast, is characterised by lazy options and vague generalities - his pastoral Slane countryside, for instance, could be anywhere.
Still, a definitive edition of the poems aimed at placing his work in its proper historical and literary context and offering the opportunity for measured critical re-evaluation would be welcome. Sadly, there's nothing definitive about this ill-produced Goldsmith edition, even though it boasts that "no fewer than 66 of the poems . . . have not appeared in book form before and 20 of those included here have never been published anywhere".
But how could there be anything definitive about an undertaking that pays scant attention to the rudiments of spelling and punctuation? Indeed, Ledwidge's famous poem to Thomas MacDonagh has a howler of a misprint in its penultimate line, and you'll find other misprints elsewhere in the poems.
The notes in the main appendix are no better ("Alice Curtayne" on one line, "Alice Curtane" on the next), while the editor's dutifully partisan eight-page introduction is distinguished by forty-one errors of grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation - neither Mr O'Meara nor his proof-reader (was there one?) seems to know what a comma is or what distinguishes a colon from a semicolon. And when the editor says of the "peasant poet" tag that "it is a title in which, I believe, he took pride, and worked to create," basic sense goes out the window.
Readers of Ledwidge, whether admiring or sceptical, deserve better than this.
John Boland is a poet, and an Irish Times columnist