Anthology: This wonderful anthology is the collected - and final - book of Lifelines, the great project begun by Niall MacMonagle with his students at Wesley College in 1985, in the first place to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. The idea was to write to famous people - many Irish, but many others too - asking them to name their favourite poem and explain their choice.
This very handsome collected edition (the proceeds are to go to Concern) includes most of the things in Lifelines 1, 2 and 3, from the 1990s, supplemented by some new contributions. In one of the earliest letters to the young editors of Lifelines in 1985, Myles Dungan grinds his teeth and asks prophetically "why didn't I think of that?" He is right: this has proved to be one of the best ideas in the world of poetry publishing in recent times. Paul Durcan calls it, with justification, "the world's best anthology".
It was of course a wonderful and noble idea in the first place. But it is not only the nobility of MacMonagle's project that gives it distinction. The result really is an incomparably attractive and interesting anthology. Generally speaking, even the best poetry anthologies tend to pall (to quote Durcan again, from his delightfully vigorous introduction to Lifelines 2 in 1994, no class of book is "more boring, more prejudiced, more snobbish, more exclusive, more narrow- minded . . . more soulless . . . than a poetry anthology"). Reading unrelieved sequences of poems - even the best poems, like the best butter - leads to indigestion. Some effective ways have been found to alleviate this and spice up the mixture: with memorable success, for instance, in the Heaney-Hughes Rattle Bag which brought everything to life by the unlikely collocations that resulted from organising poems alphabetically by their titles.
But Lifelines has a compulsiveness all of its own. Durcan's list of negative qualities is cunningly chosen because they are all the things that this anthology is not. The reader has three points of vantage: first the poem itself - and that is already quite a powerful guarantee of quality; almost everyone says how difficult it is to name a single poem, and the responsibility of choosing is not taken likely. The choice in relation to the Famous Person is a second fascination. Roddy Doyle picks Sassoon; Frank McCourt picks Wilfred Owen. Ted Hughes picked Lady Gregory's Dónal Óg (which he used to read so electrifyingly). What do you think Bertie Ahern would choose? Or Dermot Desmond? Or Garret Fitzgerald? Or John Gielgud? Or Gay Byrne? What same poem was chosen by Charles Haughey and Seamus Brennan? You will have to buy the book to find out. The prize for charm goes to Ollie Campbell.
The third point of interest is what people say about their poems - or indeed about themselves, or about life. This is endlessly interesting. There are profound pieces of criticism by several people: predictably from the professionals, like Helen Vendler on Wallace Stevens. But there are also major contributions by Jenny Joseph, John Connolly (on the evidence of his reading of e.e. cummings, the best critic in the book), and Sr Stanislaus Kennedy. There are ways that this part of the project could have gone wrong, of course: the most obvious is what Stephen Potter in Oneupmanship called "Rilking" - making clever or unlikely choices (preferably in a foreign language) which testify more to the chooser's cleverness than their preferences. There is almost none of this here, no doubt because of the good cause being served (and I hasten to add that the translated choices from languages other than English add greatly to the book's emotional and political range). Few of the choosers fall victim to the kind of Mortification collected in Robin Robertson's brilliant anthology of that name.
In the end, of course, the poems are the thing. And, whether you are already a paid-up reader of poetry or not, you will find this book entertaining and affecting in equal measure. Some people meet you half-way by saying they don't like poems at all: Ben Elton does this, but in a very one-up move he then offers Cliff Richard's The Young Ones, said by Rik Mayall to a dying boy. Likewise, Derek Mooney says he is not "into poetry" before quoting Lawrence's Self-Pity. Myles Dungan - mentioned already - salutes the virtues of Private Eye's EJ Thribb (whose elegy to Eubie Blake, quoted in passing, might have warranted gathering into the excellent Index). Of course there are a lot of familiar favourites (though not as many as you might expect), and refreshed readings of poems by old masters like Auden and Larkin and Bishop. But there are some astonishing finds here: for example Frank McDonald's nomination of the letter from Chief Seattle of the Duwamish Tribe to President Franklin Pierce in 1854, arguing that The Earth is Sacred and therefore unsaleable. There is a haunting scrap chosen by Alice Maher, and an extraordinary poem of quiet power for her dead 14-month-old daughter by Elizabeth Walsh Peavoy. The People I Grew Up With Were Afraid by Michael Gorman (chosen by Pauline McLynn) is a masterpiece by any reckoning. Don't miss I Am Stretched on Your Grave, translated from 18th-century Irish by Frank O'Connor - or the poems of devastating political power by Neruda, Levertov and Holan.
I trust it is becoming clear that this is the most enjoyable and worthwhile book I have had in my hands for years. Everyone should buy it: not as a contribution to charity, but as a self-indulgence, or a life-changing gift for someone whose opinion you think matters.
Lifelines - New and Collected: Letters From Famous People About Their Favourite Poems Compiled by Dónal O'Connor, Caroline Shaw and Stephanie Veitch. Forewords by Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan and Eavan Boland. Introduced and edited by Niall MacMonagle TownHouse, 361pp. €27.99 hbk, €19.99 pbk
Bernard O'Donoghue's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published as a Penguin Classic this year