Patrick Crotty - The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

1. I: WRITING OUT OF DOORS:
   EARLIEST TIMES TO 1200
2. II: THERE IS NO LAND ON
   EARTH ITS PEER: 12011600

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com. This selection first published 2010 Published in this format in Penguin Classics 2012 Selection and introduction copyright Patrick Crotty, 2010 Preface copyright Seamus Heaney, 2010 The moral right of the editor has been asserted Cover illustration by Eoin Ryan The constitute an extension of this copyright page All rights reserved ISBN: 978-0-241-38798-6 P ATRICK C ROTTY is a critic and translator who works as Professor of Irish and Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He has published articles on many aspects of Irish, Scottish and Welsh writing and is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology appeared in 1995. He is currently editing the definitive Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, the first volume of which will appear in 2013. Death of a Naturalist, his first book, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. Death of a Naturalist, his first book, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations which have established him as one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In memory of Patrick Crotty (191080)
and Kathleen Burns (191394)and for Brian, Ronan and FergalAoibhinn, a leabhrin, do thriall

This is the most comprehensive and confident anthology of Irish poetry yet. The comprehensiveness is due to the inclusion of a much greater selection of work from the earlier periods, the confidence to sureness about the artistic quality and significance of that work and of writing done later, in Irish and English, in the decades since the death of William Butler Yeats. But the anthology also benefits from being compiled at the end of an era which has seen important new developments in the relationship between Ireland and Britain, between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and between the unionist and nationalist communities within Northern Ireland itself. Patrick Crotty has a scholars understanding and an insiders feel for the complications and rewards of the relationship between the British and the Irish islands, its causes and hurts and consequences. He is totally cognizant of the bitter histories lurking beneath the old familiar binaries Planter and Gael, Protestant Ascendancy and Hidden Ireland but a look at the contents list will show that he has an inclusive attitude.

Translations of work from Latin, Old Norse and Norman French indicate that Crotty, like Leopold Bloom, takes it for granted that a persons birth in Ireland (or indeed a translators feel for Irish poetry) is sufficient to make Ireland his or her nation. Blooms nation the same people living in the same place starts off as those original Gaels whose myths and practices would subsist for centuries in a country that was destined to experience conversion by Christian missionaries, raids and eventual settlement by Viking adventurers, then conquest by Norman barons, annexation by the English crown and, finally, military and cultural defeat of the Gaelic order by that same English power. All of these great events are confronted and given expression in the poems included here, but the poems are not chosen only as commentary on that history. Their imaginative vigour, their technical pleasure in themselves as works, their artistic sufficiency and inner freedom are what earn them their literary place. And when we turn to the work of the nineteenth century and after, that resurgent energy of the writing qua writing becomes an aspect of a wider surge towards political and cultural independence. Certainly the Irish in Patrick Crottys title does not induce in him the kind of anxiety detectable in the introduction to the earlier 1958 Oxford Book of Irish Verse.

One of its editors spoke there of Irish poetry in English as a relatively novel art and harked back to a phase of Irish history when the only English known by the majority was that minimum necessary to understand an order. But if such old resentments have disappeared it is still worth remembering that the editor who wrote those words was Donagh MacDonagh, himself a poet and son of the poet-revolutionary Thomas MacDonagh who had been executed a mere forty-two years earlier because of his part in the 1916 Rising. Which is another way of saying that until relatively recently Irish poetry has often been implicated, and has sometimes very deliberately implicated itself, in the national question. When, for example, Yeats declared in 1937 that Gaelic was his national language, but not his mother tongue, he wasnt just making a fine linguistic distinction: he was clinching the argument that he owed his soul not only to the Irishry the quotation marks were his but to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake and to the English language. He was also detaching himself from the cultural nationalism of the new Irish Free State which his early work had done so much to foster, as well as from the early work of his friend Douglas Hyde, then president of the country, the man who had once written a manifesto on the necessity of de-anglicizing Ireland. In similar and equally significant fashion, there was more than word choice involved when half a century later Paul Muldoon translated the title of Nuala N Dhomhnaills poem Ceist na Teangan not as The Language Question but as The Language Issue, since issue implies offspring from an on going intercourse between Irish and English rather than a barren stand-off.

In the history of Irish poetry, crisis and recuperation are recurrent features. Fifteen hundred years separate the Adze-head who appears in the sixth-century poem which opens this anthology from the speaker of Pedigree, the last poem in the contemporary section, yet those poems are united in at least one respect: each is the utterance of a writer expressing a world in transition, the former poised between pagan / immemorial and Christian / other, the latter between local / domestic to pluralist / diasporic. In the intervening centuries much of the greatest work arises from similar, often far more extreme tensions and contestations: historical and cultural change due to defeat in war, the attendant cycles of dispossession and repossession, loss of language, of standing, of learning, of cohesion at local and national level, loss of physical and psychic security. But equally important at every stage of this history is the sufficiency of poetry itself: the immense incantation of Dalln Forgaills Amra Colm Cille, for example, proclaiming the heroic virtue of Colum Cilles epoch-defining life, the exhilaration and licence of Brian Merrimans

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