Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland by Peter McDonald Calrendon Press, Oxford 226pp, £35 in UK
On the first page of the first chapter of this book, Northern Ireland is described as "the province". Immediately I turned to the biographical note: "Peter McDonald is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol." No clue there. Now if Peter had been William or Henry or George . . . But on page 18 my suspicions are confirmed when the author confesses to being "a Belfast-born Presbyterian". Well, that's that, then. We know what to expect: another unionist (or worse, neo-unionist), revisionist assault on the undeniably superior nationalist literary tradition; snide sniping at Seamus Heaney and John Montague; digs at Tom Paulin, Declan Kiberd and Terry Eagleton; promotion of the merits of John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon; side-swipes at Thomas Kinsella. In short, their side against ours.
Crude, of course, but all the same, when the academic suavities are set aside, isn't that what McDonald's opponents will think he's at? According to the blurb, he "argues against the totalising ambitions of identity politics, and questions the value of nationalist assumptions, amongst both Irish and non-Irish critics, for the understanding of Northern Irish poetry". Forget the jargon - "totalizing", no less - the man's a Brit.
Caricature is a usefully disabling weapon in politics (an idea brilliantly illuminated by Nicholas Robinson in his recent book on Edmund Burke), but while McDonald is hardly Burkean when it comes to prose, he is well armoured against simplifications. A subtle and unsettling polemicist of an unusual kind, at least in terms of contemporary literary criticism, he is attentive to ideologies, to the autonomy of poetry as an art, and exceptionally knowledgeable about poetic technique. He fixes on political and formal delusions, exaggerations, vague nesses, distortions, anything which leads away from the "necessary incompleteness" of reality.
And the highest monument he raises on this unsteady ground is to that most lapsed of all Irishmen, Paul Muldoon (Irishwomen are another matter). True, he relegates the most telling criticism of Muldoon's word-bewildered consciousness to a footnote (John Carey's description of the poems as "packed to the gunwales with higher education . . . (they) stand around smugly knowing that academic commentators will come running"). But he does make a plausible case for the integrity of Muldoon's weird achievement of identity, a case now more than plausible since the Moy magician revealed himself in his elegy for Mary Farl Powers. Of course, McDonald's thesis - to resume the caricature - is essentially partitionist. There is an important distinction to be made here, between Southern critical attitudes to Northern identity and the actual work of poets in this jurisdiction - though it might be more illuminating to say educational area rather than jurisdiction, since the real border between poets in the two parts of the island was drawn not by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act but by Rab Butler's 1949 Education Act. (All the good Northern poets have degrees in English; none of the good Southern ones has - not true, of course, but anyway . . .)
McDonald's analysis of Kin sella's statement that "The past, in Northern Ireland, is not" is exact and tart; he also recognises the provincialism required of Northern poets by the metropolis (that is, London). But the privileging (if I may use that term) of poetic experience as Northern is impoverished by the exclusion of the Southern variety. Of course, in the wild world beyond these shores and the scattered archipelago of academic atolls that cares about Irish verse, no one gives a rattling damn about such matters. Still, as far as "we" are concerned, this is a powerful and provocative book. Pity, though, a Presbyterian had to write it.
Brian Lynch's script Where Darkness Lies is now being filmed