Poetry: Regular readers of Poetry Ireland will be aware of a feature which leavens the intensity of other pages where poets, young and old, strut their stuff.
Called Pickings and Choosings, it gleans epigrams and aphorisms on poetry from our global village, to match those of the past, like Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquillity". Or Shakespeare's description of the poet with "his eye in a fine frenzy, rolling".
The Pickings and Choosings became so popular that they were first gathered into a selection called As the Poet Said (Poetry Ireland, 1977). And now they are extended into The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations, a Burton-like anatomy of poetry. What is this elusive elixir, anyway? The late Jane Kenyon declared that "the poet's job is to find a name for everything". Seamus Heaney echoes Housman, wanting "it to touch you at the melting point below the breastbone and the beginning of the solar plexus". While that famous curmudgeon, RS Thomas, declares with surprising sweetness that "Poetry is that/ which arrives at the intellect/ by way of the heart".
Who distils this potion, and where? Patrick Kavanagh once famously proclaimed that the standing army of Irish poets never fell below 10,000. Tom Kinsella spells this out with characteristic pungency: "At any given time, anywhere, most poets are no good, and in Ireland most of the poets are no good."
On the other hand, a gullible American, Norman Dubie, extols his country's standing army: "We are the most important nation on the earth right now, because, one: we have thermonuclear weapons, and two: because we have more talented poets than have ever existed on the face of the earth."
AND SO ON. Who could edit such "a populous and polyphonous" compilation? I see a vast cavern, with many files labelled "Sex, Love and Marriage", "Alcohol and Pub Talk", "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know", etcetera. A hoard of assistants is scampering up and down ladders while at the centre sits a serenely bearded character, a poetic polymath with a mordant sense of humour. No, it is not the editor of An Anatomy of Melancholy, but our own Dennis O'Driscoll, who not only writes poetry but continues to love it in its divers forms, even when it is written by others.
O'Driscoll is the youngest in our formidable line of civil service poets, such as Denis Devlin and the early Thomas Kinsella. And he is a marvellous file master and creator of categories for these quotations. While this book cannot be read straight through, for fear of poetitis, there are surprises at every page's turning. For example, Charles Haughey's declaration that "I like the company of poets. They take you away from the boring realities of life".
John Montague's most recent collection of poetry is Drunken Sailor, published by Gallery Press
The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations Edited by Dennis O'Driscoll Bloodaxe Books, 256pp. £9.95