Just under thirty years ago The Oxford Book of Irish Verse first appeared, edited by Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox Robinson, an anthology that claimed it was ‘going back to the earliest times’ (otherwise the seventeenth century) and ‘finishing the day before yesterday’. The last poet to be represented in that collection was Thomas Kinsella. Thomas Kinsella, himself, is editor of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse: but his view of ‘Irish verse’ is quite different from that of the former editors. For Kinsella, who, interestingly, omits Donagh MacDonagh from his selection along with many other expected names, Irish verse includes poetry in the Irish language as well as in English. He presents not only a gripping anthology of personally chosen poems, which bears reading straight through, but he endeavours through his selection to offer a picture of the development of formal verse in Ireland from early Christian times—and supposedly before—up to the present day. He demonstrates, in a volume not much larger than the original one, how, as various infiltrators such as Christians, Norman-French, and English established themselves, so the particular character of ‘Anglo-Irish’ poetry, or ‘Irish’ poetry written in the English tongue, gradually came into being. He starts with three anonymous poems of the sixth century. ‘He is coming, Adzed-Head’ is a terse denunciation of Christians, perhaps written, and certainly preserved by Christians. He ends with the equally strong, but more verbose, extract from Michael Hartnett’s ‘Farewell to English’. Michael Hartnett, born in 1941, abandoned the English language to write solely in Irish.

Starting ten centuries, then, before the original Oxford Book of Irish Verse, a great deal of the present volume consists of poetry translated from Irish. Thomas Kinsella has much experience of this. Only five years ago, with Seán Ó Tuama, he published An Duanaire, an important collection of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century poems, both in the Gaelic, and in English translation. Some of the translations in the New Oxford Book are drawn from An Duanaire—for instance the five examples of Aogán Ó Rathaille—but by no means all derive from that anthology. In his recent collection, too, he includes translations of twentieth-century poets writing in the Irish language, such as Pádraic Pearse, and Máirtín Ó Direáin who recently published his Tacar Dánta with translations. (Irish writers are now reaching wider audiences in this way.) Seán Ó Tuama and Máire MacEntee are omitted by Kinsella, presumably because of space. Eminent poets like Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eithne Jordan, and a host of modern contemporaries are excluded, as well as established poets of the Irish cultural renaissance. Indeed, it is interesting to observe that Dr Kinsella includes not a single woman poet in this anthology, with the exception of the conjectural author of The Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire.

Dr Kinsella admits that it has not been possible to represent the tradition adequately, but pursues his initial theme first and foremost, looking for ethnic relevance, or reference, in the poets of past and present whom he chooses. ‘The complexity of that past and the nature of that remove are suggested in the selection of poetry that follows’, he writes in the introduction.

It should be clear at least that the Irish tradition is a matter of two linguistic entities in dynamic interaction, of two major bodies of poetry asking to be understood together as functions of a shared and painful history. To limit a response to one aspect only, as is often done—to the literature in Irish, through specialized academic concerns or out of nationalist emotion, or to the literature in English as an annexe to British literature, an ‘aspect of the Anglo-Saxon experience’ (as I have heard it put), or out of mere convenience—is to miss a rare opportunity: that of responding to a notable and venerable literary tradition, the oldest vernacular literature in Western Europe, as it survives a change of vernacular.

Through his selection, it is possible to compare the eighteenth-century wit of Swift with the earlier, but similarly hardy, Gaelic satire of Ó hEoghusa and Feiritéar, or the rich, overwritten translations of Mangan with the drawing-room prettiness of his contemporary, Thomas Moore. Moore, though, is surely over-represented, with the same number of poems as are chosen from W. B. Yeats, and at the expense of more worthy, more modern writers. Kinsella’s own ‘gloss’, ‘Wyncote: Pennsylvania’, is directly in the Old Irish poetic tradition, and yet genuinely of the twentieth century, in its trenchness and ambiguity.