Companions and IntroductionsThe Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry by Matthew CampellReview by: Leontia FlynnThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 32, Thinking in Public (Autumn - Winter, 2004), pp. 109-111Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736251 .

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?9 i

Companions and Introductions

Matthew Campell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-521-01245-7. ?16.99

pbk.

'Contemporary' in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry means,

roughly, the second half of the twentieth century ? an editorial 'middle way', the

preface notes, between beginning with the deaths of Yeats and Joyce and discussing

only those poets writing at the present day: 'the example of Yeats, say, may be taken

as given, but the work of Patrick Kavanagh or Louis MacNeice or Sean ? R?ord?in

still reverberates for living Irish poets, some of whom still work within or against their differing examples.' 'Irish poetry'

? though paradoxically referred to more than

once as 'the Irish poem' ?

is given an equally broad, even evasive, conceptual remit.

Acknowledging that Irish verse might be said to be written in two languages, as well

as in two places, the book 'offers no solution to these questions, but attempts to be a

companion to those who would wish to encounter the range of poetry written by

Irish men and women, parochial and international, Irish and English, North and

South'. As well as nodding towards a variety of practice, the Cambridge Companion

strikes a generally optimistic note about the current state of play in such Irish poetry,

celebrating major figures like Heaney along with precursors and successors under

the banner of'some of the most exciting poetry in contemporary literature'.

Continuing the business of unpacking definitions, 'companion' can often be

read as 'introduction' here. Matthew Campbell's own essay, 'Ireland in Poetry:

1999, 1949, 1969', comes first and sets the tone for much of what follows, both in

terms of the historical periods he considers (of precarious cultural confidence and

high profile poets; of post-war uncertainty and division; and of modernization in

the Republic and the Troubles in the North) and, in brief, of the key poets up for

discussion. In the canon, then, are: Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, John

Montague, Eavan Boland, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Brendan Kennelly and Paul Durcan - all name-checked in the context of public stature, international reputation and millennial prosperity. The lean mid-century

years are given

over to MacNeice, Hewitt, Montague and Kavanagh, while Kinsella

FLYNN, 'Companions and Introductions', Irish Review 32 (2004) 109

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(again) and 'The Group' (and Derek Mahon - again) are indicators of the different

energies of the 1960s. Campbells essay ends with the emergence of women poets - Eil?an Ni Chuillean?in and Medbh McGuckian, as well as Boland and Ni

Dhomhnaill - as evidence of what has changed in Irish poetry between the late

1960s and early 1970s and the last years of the twentieth century. If there is a negative effect to this introductory emphasis

? not just the provision

of cultural and historical background but also a tendency towards exegesis and

paraphrase -

its that it can lead to both obviousness and repetition. One essay

introduces 'The Great Hunger' as 'pos[ing] a challenge to the pastoral myths of the

Anglo-Irish Revival, including the myth of the noble peasant and the mythology of "cosy homesteads" and "dancing at the crossroads" propagated by Eamon de

Valera's new government of the Republic of Ireland'. When we are told, then,

within a couple of pages, that

Humans are reduced to commodities - to 'what is written on the label'.

Maguire is good-hearted, but dominated by his manipulative, elderly

mother. He lives in fear of a vengeful God, or at least of vigilant clergy.

The religion practised in the community smacks of uniformity and conven?

tion, though affording occasional consolation and uplift . . . This is a far cry

from the pastoral crossroads dances with 'comely maidens' invoked by Irish

Taoiseach Eamon de Valera in the 1930s about the rural basis of Irish

society[,]

it is tempting to feel that having been taught to suck eggs once, we do not need to

be instructed a second time. Indeed, Kavanagh appears a peculiar lure to commenta?

tors looking to provide memorable explanations; his distinction between the

provincial and the parochial, noted in Campbell's essay, is repeated uncritically at

least twice in the Companion, on all three occasions with reference to 'Epic'. A

certain flatness even seems to have infected the work of a stylist like Peter McDonald, in an otherwise forensic analysis of irony and seriousness in Louis MacNeice's

work. Sometimes, too, an apparently interesting angle on a topic, like 'Performance

and Dissent: Irish Poets in the Public Sphere', can be followed by a more or less

conventional discussion, and several of the pieces here have a curious reticence and

inconclusiveness about them ? as though, for all the talk of a healthy and flourishing Irish poetry, the criticism doesn't always have the courage of its convictions.

Elsewhere, however, the editorial decision to allow a degree of overlap in the

subject matters pays off, bringing the essays into fruitful dialogue with one another.

Thus Campbell's reference, in passing, to Austin Clarke's ambivalence over Thomas

MacDonagh's proposed 'Irish mode' in poetry (MacDonagh's execution crops up a

number of times here too) is elaborated by John Goodby's expert close reading of

Clarke. Dissenting from received opinion rather than restating it, Goodby finds an

Irish example of a neglected strain of modernism: 'Refusing to acknowledge

modernism until late in his career, the radical elements of Clarke's poetic and ideol?

ogy were long occluded.'A little later, in Alex Davis s study of'The Irish Modernists

and their Legacy', the grain against which Goodby is reading becomes more clear.

110 FLYNN, 'Companions and Introductions', Irish Review 32 (2004)

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Fran Brearton takes issue with the coherence and distinctiveness of the Belfast group

of the 1960s, noting how Seamus Heaney,'knowingly and slightly mischievously', has

evaluated the group dynamic 'in terms of his own aesthetic practice'. Her remarks

on Longley and Mahon's ambiguous

sense of identity and place, then, satisfyingly

anticipate Terence Brown's evalution of'Place and Placelessness' in the two poets.

In this work the Cambridge Companion provides considerable insight into a variety of complex strains of Irish writing.

On the whole though ?

and despite Alex Davis s run-down on figures such as

Sheila Wingfield, Eugene R. Waiters and Hugh Maxton ? it's notable that there is

more here, both qualitatively and quantitively, on older established names. To

return to the preface, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice reverberate a little

more strongly than Sean ? R?ord?in, and in terms of those still writing, the

presence of Muldoon, Carson and Paulin is also surprisingly faint. So too the

(brief) accounts of women poets' revolutionary impact on a dynamic Irish poetry

facing a new millennium might benefit from being less descriptive and - in the case of a scholar as serious as Guinn Batten

- a little clearer:

. . . there is a further dilemma for the woman poet whose 'spirit' occupies a

body that is (in Luce Irigaray's terms) not 'one'. With whom is she to iden?

tify if there is not only not yet (in Lloyd's terms) a community, much less a

nation, emerging on the ground and through the figure of mother Ireland

but also no clear model at the level of the individual psyche for how she

might desire and then dominate that female body which will represent

unity?

It's not that I don't understand this, it's that I resent the amount of time it takes me

to understand it, and the extent to which its language hinders rather than helps my

understanding ?

and it will take more than that before I'll be persuaded that Eavan

Boland's later work should be included in even such a self-professed liberal and

open discussion of Irish poetry.

LEONTIA FLYNN

Greening from Within

Kerry Hardie, The Sky Didn't Fall, Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 2003. ISBN

1-852-3534-81. ?10.00 pbk.

This, Kerry Hardie's third book of poetry, tracks the flow of her pendulum of the

spirit back from the dark, the weight, and the enclosure of her second volume, Cry

for the Hot Belly (2000), itself the outward edge of the arc of assertion of the 'furious

place' that is the heart, which was carved in her first volume of that name. This

new book moves towards the light, towards a vision of an outside beyond the

claims of the local and of the given, involuntary experience (the embracing of

CLUTTERBUCK, 'Greening from Within', Irish Review 32 (2004) 111

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