A controversial collection of flowers

Anthology: Anthologies began with the Greeks; the word itself meant "a collection of flowers"

Anthology: Anthologies began with the Greeks; the word itself meant "a collection of flowers". More recently the issue has become thorny, especially among poets: whenever a new anthology appears, disputes arise as to who is included, who is left out.

Readers may recall the controversy surrounding the lack of women in the original Field Day Anthology. Paul Muldoon's choices for the Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry were controversial when the book came out in 1986. Most of the poets were Northern in origin, and Muldoon's 10 poets included only one woman.

With the reprinting of the anthology 20 years on, we can revisit Muldoon's selections. In the words of Thomas Kinsella, "It seems again that it is time to learn". Despite its perceived limitations, this is a book to be devoured, read like a novel. With his strategy of limiting his choices to 10 poets, Muldoon highlights the particular genius of each. The work of writers we thought we knew well emerges with a new clarity.

Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice get the lion's share of space - roughly 60 pages each. It was Kavanagh's grounded vision that helped embolden poets as diverse as Seamus Heaney, John Montague, John Ennis, Mary O'Malley, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Peter Fallon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and even, I would argue, Medbh McGuckian, and made a rooted kind of Irish poetry possible. Later this mould would be broken by Desmond O'Grady, Macdara Woods, Eavan Boland, Eamonn Grennan and Paul Durcan, and more recently by Harry Clifton, Dennis O'Driscoll, Peter Sirr, David Wheatley and others, as well as poets with an urban focus, such as Paula Meehan and Rita Ann Higgins.

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In the selection given here, Kavanagh asserts self-confidently his sovereignty over a poetic realm no Irish poet had previously staked out. "I am king," he famously wrote, "Of banks and stones and every blooming thing." By printing The Great Hunger in its entirety, Muldoon gives us a chance to see Kavanagh working on a large canvas.

MacNeice is revealed here as a poet of great range and power, acerbic and unsparing. Eclogue between the Motherless, a long poem in two voices, has an absurdist strangeness that anticipates the plays of Beckett. His attacks on "darkest Ulster" are balanced by withering critiques of nationalist pieties which anticipate recent revisionist interpretations: "The land of scholars and saints:/ Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,/ Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints,/ The born martyr and the gallant ninny;/ The grocer drunk with the drum,/ The land-owner shot in his bed . . .".

The selections from Heaney give a good sample of his early modes. Interestingly, by printing The Otter and The Skunk, with its delightfully cheeky ending that has the poet "stirred/ By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,/ Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer/ For the black plunge-line nightdress", Muldoon points to an erotic side of the laureate's work that would surface this year in District and Circle. Among other glories of this astonishingly fruitful period in Irish poetry are classics such as Longley's Wounds and a handful of McGuckian's breathtakingly original and oblique early poems. Durcan is here, seriously political and brilliantly off-the-wall as only he can be, as is the indispensable Derek Mahon with epigrammatic gems such as Glengormley, which begins "'Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man'/ Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge/ And grasped the principle of the watering-can."

EDITED BY DOUGLAS DUNN, Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, re- issued now after first publication in 1992, is a different book - more comprehensive, giving less space to more poets. Dunn's scholarly introduction is a good entrée to this body of work, which is informed, among other factors, by Scottish nationalism and the language question. Max Weinreich has written that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy", and readers can ponder the choices of those, such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean (noms de plume in both cases), who mustered their forces and went to sea in boats powered by Scots dialect. Scots Gaelic is also represented here.

It is good to revisit Edwin Morgan, WS Graham, and Edwin Muir, with his eerie, post-apocalyptic poem The Horses, which begins "Barely a twelvemonth after/ The seven days' war that put the world to sleep,/ Late in the evening the strange horses came . . ." and to see what the younger poets have been up to. For me the selections from Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown are by themselves worth the price of admission. MacCaig describes the blue tit as "four inches/ of hurricane," whose call is "the sound/ of a grain of sawdust being sawn/ by the minutest of saws". George Mackay Brown is one of the 20th century's great originals in any language, from any country. Some of his deliberately archaic poems seem almost more Norse than Scottish: "I went the blue road to Jerusalem/ With fifteen ships in a brawling company/ Of poets, warriors, and holy men./ A hundred swords were broken that voyage."

Richard Tillinghast is an American poet living in Co Tipperary. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Poetry and What Is Real, University of Michigan Press, 2004

Contemporary Irish Poetry Edited by Paul Muldoon Faber & Faber, 415pp. £12.99 Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry Edited by Douglas Dunn Faber & Faber, 434pp. £12.99