In his lifetime James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849) wrote almost a thousand poems and translations but published only one collection of verse, the Anthologia Germanica of 1845 - the year in which this latest instalment of his Collected Works begins. It was an eventful time for the poet. His work in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, was halved, leading to a sudden upsurge in his creativity: in 1846 alone he wrote seventy-eight poems. He was shocked at the incipient Famine, and his nationalist fervour grew and he began to contribute to the Young Ireland newspaper, The Nation. His writing becomes not just more abundant in these years, but leaner and full of a new nervous energy. Although still capable of louche puns ("SING A SONG OF SIKHS, PENS!" he writes of unrest in the Punjab), the whimsy of his early work has almost completely fallen away. Ireland and its woes consume him: some of his most deeply-felt poems on Irish themes date from this time, among them "O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire", "Dark Rosaleen", "Lament over the Ruins of the Abbey at Teach Molaga" and "A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century", with its powerful images of "Cahal Mor of the Wine-Red Hand". As well as the anonymous Irish and Persian ballads which he may or may not have been able to read in the original, many poems are translations from such writers as Chamisso, Ruckert and Heine. Quite a few of the foreign poets, the innocent reader should be aware, are actually inventions of Mangan's. As Ireland's poete maudit, he also explores extremes of depression and "autophoby", as in "Eighteen Hundred Fifty" ("I am I, - myself and none beside") and the incomparable "Siberia" (In Siberia's wastes/No tears are shed,/For they freeze within the brain./Nought is felt but dullest pain,/Pain acute yet dead). In poems of this calibre, he transcends his minor status to prove himself a worthy contemporary of Nerval, Leopardi and Baudelaire. Big as this volume is, it is only one of four in this new edition of Mangan's complete poetry (a fifth, of his prose, is also planned). Readers short of patience (or money: all four will set you back £140) may yearn for a reprint of the slim Gallery Press Selected Poems of 1973, but there are many little-known gems in this volume which make it more than worthwhile. These include the Keatsian ballad, `"The Knight of the Swan", the "psychic soap-bubbles" of "The Wayfaring Tree" and the jaunty-grim "Hypochondriasis". In another little-known piece, "Song of the Albanian", Mangan comes as close as he ever did to depicting the horrors of the Famine:
Down on the burnt-up cottage roofs
The sick sun all the long day flashes.
In vain the old men seek the wood.
'Neath Charon's hot horse-hoofs.
At every step a fresh corpse splashes.
Into a pool of blood!
Oh, GOD! it is a fearful sign,
This fierce, mad, wasting dragon Hunger!
Were there a land that could at most
But sink and peak and pine,
Infant-like, when such Agony wrung her,
That land indeed were lost!
This new edition removes any lingering justification for treating Mangan as the author of a halfdozen anthology pieces and nothing else: he is Ireland's greatest poet of the 19th century, and the least we can do is read him entire. Irish Academic Press are to be congratulated for at long last making it possible.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic