Sir, John Waters (April 23rd) is not totally correct in saying that "it is not possible to buy the works of Padraic Pearse in an ordinary book shop." His poems and those of Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett, introduced by Desmond Ryan, are available in a new edition from Gill and Macmillan of The 1916 Poets (1995, Pounds 7.99).
Likewise MacDonagh's "semi final" (Robert Farren) work, Literature in Ireland. Studies Irish and Anglo Irish (Pounds 7.95) is in the bookshops, re published by us to coincide with the 80th anniversary of his death and its first publication. Its text includes his translations of three poems in Irish by Pearse, versions stated by Desmond Ryan to be "more accurate and musical and faithful than Pearse's own." Its mini anthology of verse includes four translations from Irish by James Clarence Mangan who "knew no Irish" (Douglas Sealy review of the new Mangan biography April 30th).
What Ezra Pound termed "the sanity of the general criticism in MacDonagh's book is evident largely in his identification of "the Irish mode a separate thing". Gerald Dawe's introduction to the new edition claims that such a separate identity "was as potent an issue as the legitimacy and validation of the Irish State". Perhaps it is also as inviting an arena for debate as the political ideology and impact of 1916.
Incidentally, what Ryan calls MacDonagh's "self epitaph", "Of a Poet Patriot", is revealed in a profile of MacDonagh, which rounds out the new edition, to have been originally a tribute to the young poet, William Rooney, who died in 1901. Yours, etc., Relay Books, Tyone, Nenagh.