`Irish poets, learn your trade,/ Sing whatever is well-made,/ Scorn the sort now growing up,/ All out of shape from toe to top." Yeats had just died when this injunction appeared in The Irish Times, probably spoiling - with its magisterial and, as Thomas Kinsella says, "stage-Irish" effects ("Sing the peasantry and then/ Hard-riding country gentlemen") - a number of bardic breakfasts. But the Irish poets did learn their trade, and this volume is evidence of it. They learned their trade and they tuned themselves to what the world was doing, whether it was out of shape or not. Men and women, in Irish and in English, in their own solitudes and in their sense of community, found a way to register the reality of an evolving identity, which the word "Irish" may be not fully adequate to, and the word "national" only blurs.
Watching the River Flow is not so much an anthology of Irish poetry as a collage, a patchwork quilt of poems celebrating the achieved independence of Irish poetry (in two languages) over the past hundred years. Ten selectors, all distinguished poets themselves, had the impossible task of choosing ten poems apiece to "represent" a particular decade. Personally I wish a poem by Joyce had been there, or a mouthful of Anna Livia from Finnegans Wake; also a poem by Maire Mhac an tSaoi; and, and, and . . . But these selectors, while admitting its impossibility, have nonetheless played the game in earnest, and each one has come up, however reluctantly, with his or her list. In addition, each has written a remarkable introductory essay to his or her assigned decade, so that it is really the larger design composed of poems and introductions that creates the true sense of the subject.
Aside from the poems, one of the great pleasures of the volume is the way the different voices of the selectors emerge: Montague anecdotal and amused, O Searcaigh morally and politically impassioned, Heaney scrupulously generous, Ni Chuillenain rational but touching the edges of the mystical, Carson a seanchai blend of memory and music, Kinsella terse, Boland a fluent mix of brilliant formulation and questionable rhetoric, O'Donoghue all scholarly shrewdness, Longley with his eyewitness warmth and authenticity, Ni Dhomhnaill and her beguiling directness.
On such a positive occasion it is possible, of course, to get carried away with thinking what a fine bunch we are. We are, but this does not mean, as one of the selectors says, that "this has been, in many ways, the Irish century in poetry". Consider soberly such a claim, and names like Mandelstam and Akhmatova and Tsvetsaeva will float into view, followed by Neruda, Lorca, Rilke, Stevens, Eliot, Celan, Pound, Amichai, Plath, Milosz, Szymborska, Berryman, Bishop, Lowell, and Hughes. To name a few. Perspective is necessary. We are fed by such poets, they have nourished us all. An exclusive, competitive term like "the Irish century" is as hollow an abstraction as "the Irish poem". Multiplicity is the point. Irish poetry is a wonderfully double-tongued dialect of a larger language, which is poetry itself. And multiplicity is beautifully the point in this exhilarating collection.
The poems gathered here, along with the introductions, provide us in their patchwork way with an unofficial view of Irish life in this century, from the Celtic-spirit-haunted note of "The Wind on the Hills" by Dora Sigerson Shorter to the jaunty, home-grown, multi-cultural extravaganzas of Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon; from the nationalist lyricism of Thomas MacDonagh's "Of a Poet Patriot" to the elegiac note of reconciliation in Michael Longley's "Ceasefire"; from the political meditations of Yeats taken from "Meditations in Time of Civil War" to the meditative probings of the honeycombed consciousness itself in a poem like Kinsella's "His Father's Hands"; from the keen, clear accent of Pearse's "Mise Eire" to the grim portrayal of human pain and degradation, the brutality of incest and sexual abuse, in Cathal O Searcaigh's unsparing and compassionate "Gort na gCnamh" ("The Field of Bones"); from Yeats's interrogative self-portrait in "What Then?" to Heaney's meticulous delineations of self through image in "Terminus." Such poems, and many others, show how good poetry keeps pace with life and finds a language adequate to its raptures, its emergencies, its occasions.
Yoked in painful but productive ways to the history of the island, Irish poetry in this century has collectively borne honourable witness to that tangled reality and to the lives - extraordinary and ordinary - caught up in it. That's its distinction. That's what Watching the River Flow celebrates.
Eamon Grennan's collection of essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century, has just been published in America