Matthew Campbell (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry.

Kennedy, Sean

Matthew Campbell (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xv + 294 pages. GBP 15.95.

The would-be editor of a Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry confronts a number of nettles that require to be grasped. Indeed, it may be that only Cambridge can be taken as self-evident among the keywords in the present instance. Matthew Campbell's hope that this volume should prove 'companionable' to those wishing to understand recent Irish poetry defines the function of the volume in vague terms, suggesting an amount of uncertainty regarding the likely audience for such a book. What should a companion do? Often a first stop for students in need of a quick fix for the end-of-term essay, the Cambridge series also aspires to make an expert contribution to its field, as well as leaving itself open to perusal by non-academic readers. The scope of this ambition is not without its dangers, and, taken as a series, the resulting volumes have tended to be uneven, with contributions ranging from the authoritative to the idiosyncratic.

Nor can the meaning of 'contemporary' be taken as given in any immediate sense. Ever since Shakespeare became our contemporary the word has meant many things to many people, and, whilst an emphasis on the present is generally expected, the term can easily be taken to include deceased predecessors whose work still informs the present, or be simply confined to that body of writers still present. On this issue Campbell charts a 'middle way', and includes a number of deceased writers whose work still 'reverberates for living Irish poets', in the sense that they 'still work within or against their differing examples'.

In a bold move, Campbell proclaims Yeats's example as 'given', and therefore excluded from the remit of the present volume, which carries the questionable implication that Yeats's work has ceased to reverberate for our contemporary poets. Yeats does 'shadow' the volume, Campbell suggests, but he is not made the subject of a full chapter examining the nature and extent of his continuing influence on poetry in 'Celtic Tiger' Ireland. However, the fact that Yeats is mentioned in these essays more often than any other poet with the exception of Heaney--and this in a volume that does not discuss him at any length--tells us much about the length of the shadow Yeats has cast, and may lead some to query the justness of Campbell's decision. If, as Robert Faggen argues here, 'Yeats remains the great meteor ... of Irish poetry', then he is contemporary in Campbell's sense of that term, and deserves consideration. For many of the volume's intended readers Yeats must still seem an oddly inscrutable figure, and an assessment of his impact on Irish poetry and politics would provide a welcome, perhaps even necessary frame for what follows.

On the difficult topic of what might constitute an 'Irish' poetry, Campbell is deliberately non-combative, opting for an inclusive definition that covers 'the range of poetry written by Irish men and women, parochial and international, Irish and English, North and South'. If this definition papers over a lot of cracks, it does so in accordance with a generosity of spirit that is entirely refreshing, underlining the need to move beyond the acrimonious identity debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps recent developments in the peace process may serve to remind us of the dangers attached to moving on too readily, but Campbell's difficult editorial decision is more than justified by the extraordinary range of writers and traditions that his volume has brought together for our consideration.

So it is that, however one may feel about the significance of his omission, Yeats's exclusion does allow a number of relatively neglected contemporaries to come out into the light. The recent resurgence of interest in Patrick Kavanagh's work is registered here by the inclusion of an essay on antipastoral by Jonathan Allison. In effect, it adds little to recent work by Antoinette Quinn and Seamus Heaney, taking the form of a series of short readings of the well-known poems. This is Cambridge Companion as introductory survey, a solid, if unremarkable, account of Kavanagh's complex relationship with the idealized Ireland envisioned by de Valera and his acolytes. A more successful, because more ambitious, essay is John Goodby's reassessment of Austin Clarke. Clarke emerges from this analysis as a subversive yet sensitive soul, prone equally to anger and collapse in the face of Ireland's repressive Church/State orthodoxies. Goodby also points up the extent to which Ireland's neglect of Clarke can be explained by his singularity, as man and poet. At a time when poets were often asked to speak for the nation, Clarke was 'unconscriptable', and so his work was marginalized in the recurring debates about what it might mean to be Irish.

If Clarke was found to be unconscriptable, Ulsterman Louis MacNeice has for a long time been considered unacceptable: more likely to be found consorting with the enemy. For this reason, if for no other, his inclusion in the present volume is to be particularly welcomed. In a revealing account of MacNeice's complex cultural and historical situations, Peter MacDonald stresses his exacerbated sense of cultural dislocation as an Ulster Irishman working for the BBC in Britain during the war. Even more intriguing is his emphasis on MacNeice's deep-rooted affection for the West of Ireland, which appears to have had the status of a paradise lost for his family and himself. The search for an epistemology of this loss, MacDonald suggests, was one of the subsequent driving forces behind MacNeice's poetry, even when his response to Ireland's competing political and religious traditions was 'not so much even-handed as two-fisted'.

The centre of the book is taken up with an assessment of the so-called 'Northern Renaissance', a designation that is itself made the subject of a careful re-evaluation by Fran Brearton. Highlighting the geographical mobility of the figures involved, Brearton recommends a degree of scepticism regarding the extent of the influence commanded by Philip Hobsbaum's legendary Belfast Group. She reveals how the group quickly attained the status of an enabling fiction for many of the writers involved, Seamus Heaney especially, but argues that it has long since regressed to myth. In an attempt to unpack that myth, Brearton highlights the significance of Trinity as an alternative alma mater, and revisions the Group as something a good deal more chaotic, analogous to a 'Belfast-Dublin-London aesthetic collision ground'. The value of this gesture is underwritten by the heterogeneous body of work produced by writers commonly associated or affiliated with the Group. As Brearton indicates, many Northern poets shared the same 'conditions of production', but that did not have a homogenizing effect on what they produced.

What all of the Northern writers have shared, however, is an oppressive sense of social responsibility. Almost all of the key figures have felt the need to justify their choice of career, as if haunted by the fact of Nero's having played while Rome burned. Seamus Heaney's attempts to negotiate this line are the subject of a measured and largely sympathetic essay by Dillon Johnston, which exonerates Heaney from any gratuitous complicity with the brutal acts carried out by terrorists claiming to represent his community, although Johnston's reading of individual poems--'The Early Purges' in particular--tends towards ingenious overkill in the process. Terence Brown's essay on Derek Mahon and Michael Longley carefully traces the impact of the Northern crisis on two poets who have sought to present themselves as 'deracinated' poets of the 'alienated mind'. With customary eloquence, Brown demonstrates how Mahon's placeless poems are always 'haunted by the possibility of belonging'; while Longley's taxonomic nature poetry is seen as a means to 'write of historical disasters as if they were unwarranted assaults upon the nature of things'. In Ireland, it appears, even petalworts can be political, and the extent to which 'the Troubles' have overdetermined the poems produced in their shadow is a singular lesson of this volume.

'It is the peculiar business of poetry', R.P. Blackmur has written, 'to qualify with form and order so much of experience as can be made intelligible'. However, for the Northern poets this formula may need to be amended. Time and again they have confronted the need to speak of much that remains unintelligible, and their search for forms to accommodate the mess is the subject of an essay by Shane Murphy. Many have allowed themselves to be guided in that search by Emily Dickinson's advice to 'tell it slant', and Murphy is particularly perceptive on McGuckian's work, revealing how her use of the cento form constitutes a complex engagement with the social responsibilities of the poet. Guinn Batten contributes an insightful essay on the attempts of Eavan Boland, McGuckian, and Eilean Ni Chuileeanain's to resist assimilation to the dominant, masculinist tradition in Irish poetry. Boland's early example has been salutary in diagnosing the terms of the problem, but it is the latter poets that emerge from this study as the more resourceful. Boland's strategy is to reoccupy the female body, contesting the value of the terms she has inherited; whereas the body in McGuckian and Ni Chuileeanain remains deliberately elusive and disruptive, constantly seeking 'metamorphoses under conditions of threat'.

Recent poetry in Irish has been doing something rather similar in Frank Sewell's account of that issue, although it does still seem to be marred by a jargon of authenticity that seems to be inescapable in debates around the Irish language. That Michael Hartnett described as 'bastards' the late poems he wrote in English after he returned to the language is troubling, and the sense of threat posed by the dominant language appears to have seeped into Sewell's own vocabulary when he refers to Ireland's poets variously as 'comrades'. However, he is right to suggest that many Irish poets feel embattled, especially in the field of translation. Translations are always difficult under circumstances of uneven development, and whilst Sewell's call for a generous circulation of cultural capital is understandable, his assertion that culture is a conversation between equals seems somewhat idealistic in the circumstances. Louis de Paor's view that translation can be coterminous with 'annihilation' may be closer to the mark, although the resulting decision to refuse to have translations appear in Ireland at the same time as they circulate freely elsewhere hardly solves the problem.

Overall, Campbell's volume does what it sets out to do. The liveliness of contemporary debates attests to the need for this book, and many of these articles are significant works of scholarship in their own right. 'Your friend is your needs answered', Kahlil Gibran has written, and in that sense Campbell's volume will indeed prove 'companionable' to anyone seeking to engage with the astonishing body of work being created by Ireland's contemporary poets.