[In the following excerpt, Howard praises Kinsella's work as editor of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse.]

To the etymologist an anthology is a gathering of flowers, but to poets, critics, and other interested parties it is almost always a political statement. It swears allegiances and announces disavowals. It redresses grievances—and often creates new ones. If the poems happen to be Irish, the statement will be uncommonly charged, for Irish poetry is today a welter of conflicting allegiances and loyalties, conventions and traditions. Beneath the obvious topographical, political, and religious divisions—North and South, British and Gaelic, rural and urban, Protestant and Catholic—lies a more profound rift between two languages and their attendant traditions. On the one side there is the Anglo-Irish tradition, whose language is Hiberno-English and whose bloodline runs from Swift, Goldsmith, and Sheridan to Mangan, Ferguson, Davis, and Yeats. On the other there is the native tradition, whose language is Irish-Gaelic and whose treasures include early monastic poems, charms, prayers, courtly verse, Buile Suibhne, “The Hag of Beare,” and four centuries of bardic poetry. Any new poem by Seamus Heaney or Thomas Kinsella will steer an uneasy course between those rivaling traditions. And any new anthology is bound to reveal a bias, however balanced it may appear.

Thomas Kinsella has long since taken sides, both as the author of an anti-British broadside and as the leading translator of poetry from the Irish. In “Butcher’s Dozen” (1972) Kinsella recalled the violence of Bloody Sunday and alleged a coverup by the Widgery Tribunal. In his editorial role he has more subtly attacked those literary prejudices which venerate the Anglo-Irish canon and demote the native tradition. Kinsella’s translation of The Táin (1969) made the eighth-century saga available to the general reader and reasserted its importance in world literature. His translations of three centuries of Irish verse, collected in An Duanaire, have done much to make Irish poets—and American readers—aware of an endangered heritage. And now, in his radical revision of The Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1958), he has taken his effort one step further, setting his new translations of Irish poetry beside the Anglo-Irish canon. His stated purpose is to “present an idea of these two bodies of poetry and of the relationships between them.” His achievement in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse is to chronicle the flowering and decline of the oldest vernacular poetry in Western Europe.

Kinsella’s selections tell a melancholy story. Beginning with a poem in praise of St. Colum Cille (A.D. 597) and ending with Michael Hartnett’s “A Farewell to English” (1975), Kinsella’s history spans fourteen centuries, placing well-known Anglo-Irish poems beside obscure or famous Irish texts. The balance is never even—and never easy. From the sixth through the twelfth centuries a mixture of Christianity and pagan naturalism, Latin and vernacular Irish gives rise to songs, prayers, epitaphs, and lyrics of sensuous immediacy, notably those attributed to Colum Cille (“I am sad for the tearful cries / from the two shores of Loch Febail: / the cries of Conall and Eogan / lamenting as I left”). Over the next four centuries a body of candid love poetry emerges, concurrent with the work of the bardic order, whose era begins with eulogies for local chieftains and ends with laments for their own dispossession. After the Cromwellian wars the vitality of Irish poetry quickly dwindles, as the once-privileged bards become outcasts, and such survivors as Aogán Ó Rathaille and Dáibhi Ó Bruadair are left to mourn a fading culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, its vernacular eroded by famine and oppression, poetry in Irish has suffered the fate of the Irish harp, despite the efforts of Mangan and Ferguson to bring it back to life. Little wonder that the tenor of Irish verse, from the Flight of the Earls to the ascendancy of Yeats, largely embraces sounds of lamentation, relieved by Brian Merriman’s “The Midnight Court” and other moments of comedy and satire.

Kinsella’s anthology is not the first to tell this rueful tale. Its most recent forbear is John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974), which includes many of the same texts. What distinguishes Kinsella’s book is both his scholarly thoroughness and his almost total reliance upon his own translations. Where Montague drew on the work of many hands, Kinsella has left his distinctive mark on nearly every poem. Here, for example, are two versions of a stanza from Piaras Feiritéar (c. 1600–1653):

Gentlest of women, put your weapons by,
Unless you want to ruin all mankind;
Leave the assault or I must make reply,
Proclaiming that you are murderously inclined.
Put by your armour, lay your darts to rest,
Hide your soft hair and all its devious ways;
To see it lie in coils upon your breast
Poisons all hope and mercilessly slays.

—Trans. Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin

Lay your weapons down, young lady,
                    Do you want to ruin us all?
Lay your weapons down, or else
                    I’ll have you under royal restraint.
These weapons put behind you:
                    hide henceforth your curling hair;
do not bare that white breast
                    that spares no living man.

—Trans. Thomas Kinsella

Here Kinsella’s drift is toward greater physicality and away from the clichés of English verse. The conventional tropes of slaying, darts, and armor give way to the stark image of a bare white breast.

Elsewhere Kinsella restores Irish proper names and place-names, recovering the strangeness of the originals:

O if he lived, the prince who sheltered me
And his company who gave me entry
On the river of the Laune,
Whose royalty stood sentry
Over intricate harbors, I and my own
Would not be desolate in Dermot’s country.

—Aogán Ó Rathaille, “A Time of Change,” trans. Eavan Boland

If that guardian King from the bank of the Leamhan lived on,
with all who shared his fate (and would pity my plight)
to rule that soft, snug region, bayed and harboured,
my people would not stay poor in Duibhne country.

—Trans. Thomas Kinsella

Here Kinsella’s rendering bespeaks an intimacy with landscape, while honoring the tradition of the Dindsenchas—the lore and legendry of place-names. It also sends us to his extensive notes, where we learn that Duibhne (pronounced dív-na) lies in the Dingle Peninsula.

Those of us without Irish cannot judge the fidelity of Kinsella’s translations, though their gains in directness seem unassailable. At the same time we can wonder a little at his choices from the Anglo-Irish tradition, where his taste is at once conventional and idiosyncratic. Old favorites by Goldsmith, Mangan, Davis, and Ferguson are included. Thomas Moore is given a fair hearing. But in the selections from modern Irish verse one is left with the impression that poems have been chosen as much—or more—for their bearing on Irish affairs as for their intrinsic merits. And certain omissions are puzzling.

Kinsella has, for example, included Yeats’s “1916,” “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” and “Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland,” but not the Byzantium poems or “Leda and the Swan” or “Among School Children.” Louis MacNeice’s “Autumn Journal” is excluded, as are Patrick Kavanagh’s early Monaghan poems and the entirety of The Great Hunger. John Montague, author of several book-length sequences, is limited to four minor lyrics; and the choices from Heaney include nothing from Station Island—perhaps his most important collection. No doubt considerations of space dictated some of these omissions, but they create imbalances nonetheless, as does the complete absence of women writers after 1800.

Given its breadth and historical depth, Kinsella’s anthology should remain an invaluable resource for many years to come. To appreciate the high achievement of modern Irish verse, however, we might do better to look to Paul Muldoon’s new anthology [The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry], one of the most valuable in the Faber series. Like Kinsella’s it is anything but neutral, but it is astutely edited, and it presents some of the best work produced in (or about) Ireland during the past four decades. …

I, for one, hope that both Muldoon’s intelligent anthology and Kinsella’s more compendious book find the wide audiences they deserve.