Someone has blundered. John Montague, universally and rightly esteemed as one of our finest living poets - to be spoken of in the same breath as Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon - has been omitted from a major new anthology of British and Irish verse.
The book in question, The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945, edited by Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford and published by Viking, features the work of 141 poets, including twenty-four from this country.
These latter include Matthew Sweeney, Bernard O'Donoghue, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Tom Paulin, Paula Meehan and Peter Sirr, all commendable choices, but no room has been found for Montague - or, indeed, for such other notable poets as Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey, Padraic Fiacc, Valentin Iremonger, Michael Hartnett, Frank Ormsby or Michael Coady.
And even with the included Irish poets, the representation is generally miserly. The editors say that they have allowed four or five poems to poets of "particular importance", but only Seamus Heaney merits the maximum five. Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson , Michael Longley, Louis MacNeice and Derek Mahon are allotted four each, but Patrick Kavanagh is deemed worthy of a mere two (the early "A Christmas Childhood" and "The Long Garden"), while Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, Richard Murphy and Paul Muldoon have to make do with a meagre one each.
So much for Irish poetry, then. Or, rather, so much for Messrs Armitage and Crawford whose choices and omissions seem based on either wilfulness or ignorance.
A couple of years ago, Brian Lynch showed me a poem he had just completed. Entitled "An Angry Heart, An Angry House", it ran to over 1,400 lines of rhyming couplets, and indeed there was something Augustan in the satirical spleen it directed against apologists of the murderous savagery that has always underpinned the Northern Ireland conflict.
At its heart were extended and terrifying descriptions of two particularly obscene murders - that of Margaret Wright by loyalists and of Pat Gillespie by republicans - passages that could only be read in a pitying horror at what they were recounting.
In its anger and despair I thought it a remarkable poem, and obviously Grey Gowrie, Fleur Adcock, Charles Moore and Andrew Motion thought so, too. As judges of this year's Daily Telegraph Arvon International Poetry Competition, they have included it in The Ring of Words, an anthology selected from the competition entries and published by Sutton Publishing (£7.99 in UK).
At forty-nine pages it's by far the longest poem in the anthology, and is worth the price of the book. Indeed, its candour, passion and formal control are such that it deserves publication on its own by some enterprising publisher.
A very useful dictionary of Irish writing is due out next week. At 223 pages, The Mercier Companion to Irish Literature is not as comprehensive as its Oxford counterpart, which runs to over 600 pages, but then at £9.99 it's £15 cheaper, and authors Sean McMahon and Jo O'Donoghue should be well pleased with their inclusiveness, sense of judgment and informational accuracy.
Mind you, like the Oxford people, they have a bit of a problem with Elizabeth Bowen, whose ancestral home is called Bowen's Court (not Bowen Court) and who wrote ten novels, not seven, but they score over Oxford in the number of entries devoted to younger contemporary writers.
However, the publicity material accompanying my copy of the book is odd. The authors, it declares, are "ruefully aware (a) that the book is out of date before it even hits the shelves, and (b) that they are likely to please nobody but themselves. Still, there was `good fun in the making'."
Oh, come on, it's an awful lot better than that.
To coincide with the paperback publication of The Apprentice Mage, the magnificent first volume of Roy Foster's biography of W.B. Yeats (Oxford), the author will be talking about the poet in Belfast's Lyric Theatre tomorrow night at 7.30pm.
He'll be doing the same in Fred Hanna's of Nassau Street on Tuesday evening at 7pm, and will be well worth hearing at either venue.
Gore Vidal is seventy-three today, Myles na Gopaleen began his "Cruiskeen Lawn" column in this paper fifty-eight years ago tomorrow (and no, it wasn't a Sunday that year), and Edgar Allan Poe died of alcohol 149 years ago next Wednesday. Just thought you'd like to know.