I'd like to hazard a mild dose of polemic on this
subject, if I may. Is it entirely true, or even
useful, any more to think of Irish poetry as dividing
into a trumpeted mainstream and a neglected radical
fringe? On a pedantic factual point, the original post
mentioned that George O'Brien's course would be using
Patrick Crotty's Blackstaff anthology -- a book that
*does* contain the work of Brian Coffey, unless I'm
very much mistaken. Not very much of him, but he is in
it.
But further to my initial point: while it's true, I'm
sure, that Irish poetry courses up and down the US
routinely ignore MacGreevy/Devlin/Coffey et al, they
are, all of them, the subject of intense and devoted
academic and not just academic interest. And, as the
posts about the Poetry Salzburg Review and this year's
Cork conference show, their contemporary heirs are
also hardly lacking in champions, even if they're not
in Crotty's book.
Sitting down to compile a list of differently
neglected Irish poets, I came up with the following
names almost at random. Several of them aren't in
print, aren't the subject of any sort of academic
interest as far as I can see, and are truly literary
non-persons in a way that makes Brian Coffey look like
Seamus Heaney.
Geoffrey Taylor
Lyle Donaghy (both praised in Beckett's famous 'Recent
Irish Poetry', but without any apparent follow-up,
anywhere)
Eoghan O Tuairisc (granted, John Goodby has written
about him, but is he in print?)
Sean O Riordain
Mairtin O Direain
(two hugely significant Irish-language poets, but when
did you last see any sort of article about them in a
non-exclusively Irish language journal?)
Padraic Fallon
Roy McFadden
Pearce Hutchinson
Biddy Jenkinson
Peter Sirr (hardly a mainstream sort of writer, but
inexplicably passed over in lists of contemporary
experimenters).
And finally on the subject of James Clarence Mangan, I
may as well mention that a new selected poems has just
appeared, edited by myself.
DW
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