I may only be imagining it, but I seem to recall a remark made by Ben Kiely when I bumped into him on Poolbeg Street one afternoon in the early 1980s and asked him what he was writing. In the sensual basso profundo that has long made his voice one of the most familiar in Ireland, he revealed that he was working on a series of articles about Cobh for The Irish Times. The problem, however, he confided, "is that I'm halfway through the second article and I haven't mentioned Cobb yet".
I think that's what he told me, but, as I say, I may only be imagining it. After all, stories about Ben Kiely are nearly as numerous as stories by Ben Kiely, and perhaps over the years I subconsciously invented a fictitious remark in order to illustrate a particular aspect of his personality. If so, my defence is that, whether said or not, the remark should be true, and thus, I suppose, is true.
The aspect I'm talking about his life-long fondness for digression - is everywhere in his new book, right from the beginning. Or, rather, not from the beginning at all, but from page 47, where the writer declares: "You might not find your favourite piece for recitation within the covers of this book. If not I beg your forgiveness; in my wanderings here and there I might have missed it." Shaping a book about places in Ireland and the songs and poems associated with them, you or I would have put that in the preface; it's typical of Ben Kiely that, well-advanced on his travels, he sandwiches it between a reminiscence of travelling singer Margaret Barry and a commendation of Percy French.
For this reason, the book may infuriate those readers who like their journeys to move from A to B to C to D, and in that sequence. In one sense, it does that - starting in the author's Omagh, then moving from Ulster to Leinster, westwards to Connacht and down to Munster, before returning home again - but the approach is far removed from that of the conscientious tour guide worried lest his charges lose their bearings.
Instead, something is always putting Ben Kiely in mind of something else, and if you find that prospect wearisome, this is not the book for you. Indeed, as an amateur stroller along Ireland's balladic byways, I thought it mightn't be the book for me, but I soon accustomed myself to the anthologist's serendipidous mode of rambling and by the end was very glad to have discovered so many interesting and unfamiliar sights and sounds.
Almost two-thirds of the contents are by other hands, from anonymous ballads to well-known poems, all of them reproduced in their entirety "I will cut or diminish no poem," the anthologist roundly says: "This would be to insult both poets and reciters." Mind you, he breaks the rule with Father James B. Dollard's splendid (and, to this reviewer, unfamiliar) verse catalogue, Song of the Little Villages, though excusing himself with the observation that "even the most eloquent and energetic elocutionist might rest content with that much for his party-piece ... and so might his audience".
At one point he declares: "It has just occurred to me that I may have taken on an impossible task: to move round Ireland ... and to move in an orderly way, remembering and reciting as I go." But (if "orderly" is defined loosely) the task proved far from impossible, and the result is a book that celebrates not just Mangan, Yeats, Ledwidge, Kavanagh, MacNeice, Fallon, Iremonger, Montague and Delia Murphy, but also such unsung creators as the creator of My Love Is Like the Sun, of which Ben Kiely says: "No one knows who wrote that lovely song. Where are they now, the nameless authors of old sweet songs? Waiting for us in the shadows of eternity."
At the very end, writing about the lovely village of Tyrrellspass (the ballad of which gives the book its title), he recalls a visit there during a 1970s Bord Failte organised European Architectural Heritage Year jaunt around parts of Ireland. I was on that trip, too, and have vivid memories of Ben Kiely at his exuberant and inimitable best. Some day I'll write them - that's if I'm not imagining them.