Poetry: As everyone knows, Ulster poetry came into its own in a major way in the 1960s, with the Troubles generation of Montague, Heaney, Mahon and Longley. It had a recognised prehistory too, in MacNeice, Rodgers and Hewitt. But there was a less familiar but significant medial period, with important writers such as Roy McFadden and Robert Greacen, who span most of their century, linking those two eras, writes Bernard O'Donoghue.
The 20th-century tradition of Ulster poetry pre-1975 was traced authoritatively by Terence Brown in Northern Voices, in which he considers together these two poets who were lifelong friends and collaborators: both liberal northern Protestants with rooted commitments to socialism and pacifism. There is a striking generational affinity between them too: they both published a successful book of poems in the late 1940s and then fell silent for nearly a quarter of a century, before embarking on a productive Indian summer in poetry.
It is appropriate that McFadden's last volume should be produced by the newest of Ulster's poetry publishing enterprises, Adrian Rice's Abbey Press, because the achievements of the medial Ulster generation were crucially linked with a series of publishing ventures which included the magazine Rann (1948-53), edited by McFadden and Barbara Edwards, and Lagan Press.
McFadden (1921-99) was a Belfast solicitor who stayed in Belfast throughout his life, living it "bomb by bomb" in Derek Mahon's memorable phrase. (One of his best-known poems, 'A Song For One Who Stayed', was remarkably prophetic in 1959.) His very imposing Collected Poems 1943-1995 was published by Lagan Press in 1996, three years before the poet's death. Philip Hobsbaum ended his introduction to that by declaring "there is no better poet living in Ireland today, and few, precious few, elsewhere".
Last Poems, again introduced by Hobsbaum, comprises the 19 poems written since the Collected. It is hard not to share Hobsbaum's mystification at the neglect of McFadden. His strengths (often reminiscent of his contemporary, Norman MacCaig) are remarkably sustained in this short posthumous collection, manifesting what Edna Longley evocatively called his "fastidious clarity of feeling".
Greacen's Collected Poems 1944-1994 won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry in 1995. Brown said in 1975 that Greacen's best way forward was to play to his "direct prosaic strength" by using "the terse laconic note"; Greacen has taken him at his word, especially in Lunch at the Ivy. Many of his recent poems deal with events that are described more fully in Greacen's engaging and sympathetic autobiography, The Sash My Father Wore (1997), to which this new book is a kind of complementary volume. From his Derry and Belfast origins he moved to Dublin and then London, throwing himself into the literary life of all these places with unflagging generosity, as well as retreating to his Anglo-Irish wife's home Ardnagashel, near Bantry, for some of his most evocative poems.
Medbh McGuckian comes at the end of the Troubles poets, in a new generation characterised by obliqueness - writers like Muldoon, Carson and Paulin. They - and she - could not be more different from the prosaic clarity which Brown commended to Greacen. Of that cryptic group, McGuckian is undoubtedly the most cryptic. If the reader feels that the recurrence of Greacen's family and acquaintances under what Heaney calls their "real names" is sometimes excessive, with McGuckian occasional real-name glossing would not be unwelcome.
Still, there is no doubting the earnestness and psychological resonance of The Face of The Earth, as of all her work. She is a genuine symbolist; if she seems mystifying in this age of the hyper-clear and reductive, we should recall that she is less oblique than the late 19th-century French Symbolists whose reputation is still paramount. As throughout her career, McGuckian's openings are completely spellbinding; she gets your attention from the first line:
There is something moving on the window,
like a re-dedication that darkens all I have written.
- 'The Dance Garden'
The themes here are ageing and illness, a change of direction from the public concerns of her recent books, especially Shelmalier. These beautiful, dreamworld poems are strangely soothing because McGuckian's subjects are unmistakably things that matter.
All three of these poets, in their different ways and times, testify to a better, more peaceful way of conducting affairs than our current practice. They are, to quote Greacen on his friend, Alex Comfort, the 1960s sex guru, "sane doctors in a world gone mad".
Bernard O'Donoghue teaches English at Wadham College, Oxford. His latest collection of poems, Outliving, has just been published by Chatto & Windus
Last Poems. By Roy McFadden, edited by Sarah Ferris, Abbey Press, 32pp, £6
Lunch at the Ivy. By Robert Greacen, Lagan Press, 54pp, £6.95
The Face of the Earth, By Medbh McGuckian, Gallery Press, 82pp, €10 pbk/€17.50 hbk