Madam, – Wes Davis's apology (July 2nd) for the offence caused by his reference to Paddy Joe Hill on page 174 of An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, which I reviewed (Weekend Review, June 26th), is to be welcomed. It is also good to know that the publishers of his anthology, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, intend to set the record straight in the next printing of the work. It will be interesting, in due course, to see what steps are taken.
Mr Davis is wrong to suggest, however, that I “took a sentence about Paddy Joe Hill and the Birmingham Six out of context” in my review. In the review I drew attention to Mr Davis’s introduction to a selection of poems by Pearse Hutchinson and in particular to his claim, in relation to Hutchinson’s poem British Justice, that Paddy Joe Hill was “one of the six men accused, perhaps wrongly, of bombing a pub in Birmingham, England.” The phrase “perhaps wrongly” used here is Mr Davis’s construction, as he admits in his letter, and in his anthology he himself makes no explicit attempt to clarify the meaning of this phrase. While he may now “regret the inaccurate phrasing” and call this a “mistake”, moreover, it is nonetheless a matter of some concern that he still does not appear to appreciate the seriousness of his error by saying that this has resulted in “a controversy where none should exist.”
In his letter Mr Davis refers to a note that Pearse Hutchinson wrote for his poem included on page 946 of his anthology. The presence of the note clarifies and confirms Mr Hutchinson’s view, but in my review I was not questioning the integrity of the poet’s position, which has never been in doubt. Rather, I was drawing attention to the deeply problematic and offensive suggestion made by Mr Davis himself regarding the innocence of Paddy Joe Hill. I do not see how Mr Davis could have made this suggestion if he had taken Mr Hutchinson’s poem and its accompanying note seriously. For Mr Davis to suggest, then, that I have taken his sentence “out of context” is nothing less than an attempt by him to re-contextualise an error for which, ironically, he goes on to accept full responsibility.
His apology, in short, is almost as confused and confusing as his initial statement. The question I asked in my review has still not been answered: “What does ‘perhaps’ mean here”? Mr Davis seems to believe that “the anthology makes [the] history clear when the sentence in question is read in its proper context”, but I believe it was a fundamental failure to appreciate the relationship between a poem and the contexts of its composition that caused Mr Davis to make such a mistake in the first place. – Yours, etc,