Sir, - Pat Hunt, in his affectionate account of teaching Soundings, the anthology of English poetry for Leaving Cert students compiled and annotated by the late Prof Gus Martin, observes (An Irishman's Diary, June 6th): "It has been argued that time has rendered many of the poems in the anthology inaccessible, even irrelevant." While much of the material in Soundings was comprehensive - spanning selections from Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales to two sombre lyrics by Thomas Kinsella - the anthology suffered, I think, from two main drawbacks: a glaring lack of poems by women (Emily Dickinson is the only one featured) and a dearth of living poets (Kinsella himself is the only one included). Indeed, only Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas - as well as Yeats, Kavanagh, Clarke and Kinsella from Ireland - were there to represent the past 100 years.
It is therefore good to see that the new poetry course includes work by women and contemporary poets, balancing the classical or pre-modernist verse that comprised the bulk of Soundings. Regarding language and subject-matter (themes in poetry tending to be universal), this new course should prove accessible and relevant to Leaving Cert students who, in my own experience, usually find poetry the most opaque and demanding of the literary forms they are required to study. I warmly welcome the change. - Yours, etc,
Edwin McCloughan, High Road, Letterkenny, Co Donegal.