The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry,edited by Patrick Crotty, introduction by Seamus Heaney, Penguin, RRP£40, 1,120 pages

I frequently find myself thinking as I read collections of poems: what makes an Irish poem? You know it when you see it, and it owes much to inheritance from Gaelic modes and rhythms. Seamus Heaney’s truncated technique is often used for versions of medieval bardic or monastic poems; and one of the strengths of this anthology is the space devoted to such material. The editor, Patrick Crotty, has commissioned marvellous translations from contemporary poets such as Michael Longley, Maurice Riordan, David Wheatley and Heaney. Crotty himself emerges as a formidably accomplished translator as well as critic, negotiating the spirit of a medieval original with a delicate flair:

When I find myself with the elders

I lay down the law against fun;

when I wind up with the clubbers

I go-go like the youngest one.

So he does, and the effect is wonderfully rich. In fact, translation is one of the keys to the book, along with a sense of history. Section titles such as “Civilisations, 1601-1800”, “Union and Dissension, 1801-1880” and “The Sea of Disappointment, 1922-1970” suggest their own story, and place the development of Irish poetry against the “national tale”.

Poets such as Samuel Ferguson crop up in different places, as translators, love-poets and – in Ferguson’s case – political commentators; Paul Muldoon doubles not only as (in the editor’s words) “arguably the greatest lyric innovator Ireland has produced ... since the scribes of the monasteries”, but also as an inspired translator of the contemporary Irish-language poet Nuala Ni Dhomnaill.

The modern masters are all here (MacNeice, Kavanagh, Mahon) but Crotty also stakes out suggestive ideas in Irish Victorian poetry: not only Ferguson and Jeremiah Callanan but – daringly – Tennyson’s version of the “Voyage of Maeldun”, which may well have inspired Yeats’s debut “The Wanderings of Oisin” a decade later. The poète maudit James Clarence Mangan, admired by Joyce and Yeats, features large but there is also room for the robust Trinity College atheist James Henry (1798-1876).

The great length of the anthology allows brave decisions. Brian Merriman’s 18th-century bawdy epic, “The Midnight Court”, is uncut, but daringly mixes the various translations by Frank O’Connor, Heaney, Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Thomas Kinsella. The result is a tour de force. Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” is here in its entirety too, partly because Crotty believes the Merriman poem partners and answers it. Merriman’s supposedly un-Irish sexual frankness is echoed in Austin Clarke’s “Tiresias”, Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems and a slew of brilliantly suggestive love-poems of obscurer provenance: another way that poems speak to each other in a subversive dialogue. Yeats is also implicitly invoked in Crotty’s translation of a medieval poem called “Age”:

I can no more

Grope under skirt

Though my will, he wants to;

I am yoked to yore,

Sin my sole lore,

My sun, set.

The editor’s eye for assonance produces some surprising choices. Yeats’s “Madness of King Goll” is included instead of much more accomplished early work because it resonates with the theme of the mad King Sweeney, inspiration of Irish poets through the ages. Crotty’s liking for connections similarly leads him to prioritise the rather clunky “Reprisals” instead of “The Wild Swans at Coole” or “The Fisherman”. (However, the agonising task of selecting later Yeats is performed in exemplary fashion.) Editorial expansiveness also allows the reader to revisit and savour the effect of poems such as Kinsella’s masterly “Tao and Unfitness at Inistiogue on the River Nore” – a nod to Wallace Stevens as well as a commentary on Irish history.

Amid such treasures, questions and answers stretch beyond that dialogue between the poems. Part of the pleasure of anthologies is argument but I found few cavils. I would have preferred to swap Oscar Wilde’s creaky prose-poems for more of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” – suggestively included under “Songs”, not “Poems”, along with a wide selection of “Melodies” by Thomas Moore.

Political poems such as Ferguson’s “At the Polo Ground” (about the 1882 assassinations of two British officials) demand annotation; translators should have been indexed along with poets; room should have been made for the mid-20th-century modernist Thomas McGreevy; and among the contemporary section, I could have done with less of the relentlessly charming and prolix Paul Durcan, if it allowed for the inclusion of Paula Meehan and more from Tom Paulin and Bernard O’Donoghue. But the discrimination, imagination, deftness and heft of the whole is masterful. Much more than an anthology, this is an alternative history of Ireland, in poems that burn into the mind – the newly minted no less than the canonical.

Roy Foster is the author of ‘Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970-2000’ (Penguin)