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Home , Brendan Kennelly, Brian Coffey, David Wheatley (poet), Denis Devlin, Harry Clifton, John Montague (poet)

The Handbook of Modern ed. by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (review)

Nicholas Grene

Modernism/, Volume 20, Number 3, September 2013, pp. 597-599 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2013.0074

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/525178

[ Access provided at 1 Oct 2021 11:53 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] book reviews Notes 597 1. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (: J.M Dent and Sons, 1965), 80–81. 2. See Jessica Stern, Terror in the Mind of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (: Harp- erCollins, 2003); and Jeffrey D. Simon, Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013).

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds. New York: , 2012. Pp. xx + 723. $150.00 (cloth).

Reviewed by Nicholas Grene, Trinity College

The primary OED definition of “handbook” is “a small book or treatise, such as may conve- niently be held in the hand.” At over seven hundred large-format pages and weighing in excess of three pounds, this Oxford Handbook is small nor handy to hold. The next definition sounds more like it: “a compendious book or treatise for guidance in any art, occupation or study.” Certainly, with forty chapters by specialist scholars on different aspects of modern Irish poetry from the emergence of Yeats in the late nineteenth century to the current generation in the first decades of the twenty-first, the book is compendious enough. This handbook, like the others in the Oxford series, is intended as a reference book, with its individual chapters eventually to be made available for download online. No one but the duti- ful reviewer, it is likely, will set out to read the book from end to end. But its great strength is in fact the way the editors have re-mapped the territory of Irish poetry by their organization of the volume. Chronological sections like “Poetry and the Revival” or “Mid-Century Irish Poetry” alternate with thematically focused sections like “The Poetry of War” or “Poetry and the Arts.” The generous allocation of chapters, each of a substantial eight thousand words, allows for the inclusion of senior scholars such as Edna Longley, Warwick Gould, and Dillon Johnston, of a much younger generation of critics such as Tom Walker, Maria Johnston, and Gail McConnell, and of a number of poet practitioners such as , , , and Alan Gillis, all of whom figure in the book both as contributors and authors discussed. Not all the poetry in the book is treated reverentially. There is a judicious evaluation by Kit Fryatt of the “potentialities” of and his failure fully to realize them, and there are some stern judgments by John Redmond on and ’s engagement with the public sphere in their poetry. But for the most part, the contributors write in patient and informed appreciation of the work they analyze. The scale of the volume makes possible specialist chapters such as Damien Keane’s “Poetry, Music, and Reproduced Sound”—which discusses a range of Irish poets—or Paul Simpson’s stylistic analysis of modern Irish poetry. The book is primarily limited to English language poetry, but there is a chapter by Aodán Mac Póilin on from Irish and a fine discussion by Eric Falci of the collaborations between Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and . Inevitably, Yeats looms large throughout. Even apart from the dedicated essay by Warwick Gould on his relationship with and Edna Longley’s wonderfully perceptive essay on Yeats and violence, he is an inescapable presence, compared with in his relation- ship with English (Michael O’Neill), used as the starting point for Neil Corcoran’s exemplary overview of modern Irish poetry and the visual arts, and presented as the figure that subsequent Irish poets have had to imitate, resist, or try hard to ignore. But the range of later writers is well represented in the volume also, with two chapters devoted to Louis MacNeice (Tom Walker, Jonathan Allison), an excellent essay by John McAuliffe on Clarke and (which very usefully focuses on the presses that published their poetry), and an extended treatment of the / modernity

598 wealth of Irish poetry published in the last fifty years, when Yeats has been a less insistent ghost. Modernity came late to , and some might argue that modernism never got here at all. One section of this book is devoted to “modernism and traditionalism,” starting with Edward Larrissy’s intriguing exploration of congruences between the ideas of tradition of Yeats and Eliot. More representative, perhaps, is the view of the Northern Irish poet W. R. Rodgers, quoted by John Goodby: “the Irish have never been bitten by the T.S.E. fly” (606). Goodby is trying to account for the marginal status of “alternative Irish poetry,” recent avant-garde poets very little known inside, much less outside, Ireland. They are the latter-day counterparts of the 1930s Irish modernists, Thomas MacGreevy, , and , who are the subject of Susan Schreibman’s essay earlier in the volume. Why should modernism be so belated, so under-acknowledged in Ireland? Goodby argues that it is because “the discourses defining Irish poetry add a particularly acute concern with national and cultural affiliation to the empiricist suspicion of formalist experiment” (608). Certainly the preoccupation with national identity has been one of the continuing and defining features of Irish poetry. In spite of Beckett’s contemptuous denunciation of the “antiquarians” in his much-quoted 1934 review article “Recent Irish Poetry,” the poetic recourse to some underpin- ning myth of “ancient Ireland” went on right through the twentieth century, as Matthew Campbell makes clear in this book’s broad-ranging opening chapter. And one can understand why W. J. McCormack called Irish poetry “incurably descriptive” (quoted on 416). Preoccupation with the expression of a recognizably Irish experience has privileged representational poetic technique. So, for example, there was the regionalist ideal promoted by and others in in the 1940s, with its insistence on rootedness, explored by Richard Kirkland in his chapter, “the poetics of partition” (210). Patrick Kavanagh’s aesthetic of the parochial as against the cosmopolitan, discussed in Hugh Haughton’s very intelligent essay on the Irish poet as critic, has proved highly influential. Place names, localities, the scenes and smells of rural childhoods, and regional dialect vocabularies have been the very stuff of Irish poetry through the work of , , Paul Muldoon, and Bernard O’Donoghue—an unaccountable absence from this volume. And then there is politics. The renewal of violence in the north of Ireland from 1969 on required some degree of engagement, particularly from the very talented generation of Irish poets then emerging, many of them from Ulster. In one of the most illuminating essays in the book, Heather Clark shows how John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and shaped their early-1970s volumes in response to the violence, even if only very obliquely, as in the case of Mahon’s The Snow Party (1975). Obliquity was necessary if partisanship was to be avoided. But in spite of Heaney’s wry dictum “whatever you say say nothing,” something had to be said. Many of the poems considered in Stephen Regan’s sensitive study of the Irish elegy after Yeats were laments for the deaths caused by . Not all the politics was national. Chapters in this volume on Medbh McGuckian (Leontia Flynn) and (Catriona Clutterbuck) look at the gender politics of Irish women poets. But specific to Ireland are issues of religious background. As Peter McDonald points out in his essay on Protestantism and Northern Irish poetry, “for a great deal of modern poetry from places like Britain and the USA, analysis in terms of religious affiliation makes next to no sense” (478). By contrast, McDonald’s own essay or Gail McConnell’s well focused chapter on Catholic art and culture from Clarke to Heaney are essential to the understanding of Irish poetry. , poetry of the city, does arrive in Ireland, if a bit later than elsewhere. El- mer Kennedy-Andrews’s chapter on poetry is balanced by Maria Johnston’s on Dublin walking poems. ’s earlier cityscapes, Kennedy-Andrews shows, are very much informed by the thinking of Walter Benjamin, as some of Carson’s later poetry draws upon . Irish poets from the time of MacNeice on have always been aware of their international peers—Frank O’Hara is mentioned in passing as one of Longley’s heroes book reviews

(495). The use of traditional forms such as the is not to be equated with a conservative 599 formalism, as Alan Gillis illustrates with the witty opening of his chapter on modern Irish sonnet sequences: “‘I’m up to my bollox in ’, says Spenser. Or, at least, Brendan Kennelly’s ver- sion of Spenser in Cromwell” (567). Paul Muldoon can make the sonnet do weird and wonderful postmodernist work. Even in a volume as capacious as the Oxford Handbook, there are gaps. There is a limited amount on ’s poetry as against her influential criticism, very little on Tom Paulin or on , nothing on , currently Ireland Professor of Poetry. There seems to be a slight imbalance in favor of Northern Irish writers and of a younger emergent generation of poets. The inclusion of dates of birth and death would have been helpful for the volume as a reference work. But these are minor grumbles. This is an enormously rich and valuable guide to the great diversity of modern Irish poetic achievement, a book that will help all readers to appreciate just what an achievement that has been.

Beckett/Philosophy. Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani, eds. Sophia: University Press St. Klimrnt Ohridski, 2012. Pp. xv + 323. $34.00 (cloth).

Reviewed by Andre Furlani, Concordia University Montreal

“I am not a philosopher,” told an interviewer. What other modern writer has felt pressed to make such a disavowal? Not even T. S. Eliot, who had studied at Harvard to become one. The very depth of the literary imprint of Beckett’s engagement with philosophy, which this rewarding anthology confirms and clarifies, wrested the denial from him. “Beckett seems the most philosophical of writers in both his ‘early’ and ‘mature’ (postwar) work,” Matthew Feldman says in the book’s introduction (3). No qualification is necessary. Beckett read Schopenhauer in German, Vico in Italian, Geulincx in Latin, and Bergson in French, mailed home from his German sojourn Kants Werke, compiled copious notes from such overviews as Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy, wrote his longest poem about Descartes and his shortest story about an axiom of Heraclitus, examined Viennese Sprachskepsis for Joyce, was solicited by Sartre for contributions to , noted in his German travel diary his Leibnizian aim to bring “light in the monad,” urged in a letter the aesthetic value of nominalism, wrote a inspired by Berkeley, and in the opening of ironically echoed the Tractatus interdiction “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”:1 “I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak.”2 This anthology contains ac- counts of Beckett’s engagements with all but one of these philosophies. recalls Picasso saying that Joyce and Braque were “les incomprehensibles que tout le monde peut comprendre.”3 Beckett is so clear we hardly understand him at all. Scholars have long been concerned to identify Beckett’s philosophical kinships and gauge affinities, while philosophers like Adorno, Cavell, Deleuze, and Badiou have engaged with his work as with that of an intellectual peer. Some of these have succeeded only at the expense of obscuring the immediacy of the work. However, with the increased availability of archival documents, including the 266 folio pages (recto and verso) of the philosophy notebooks held at , and the painstaking account in Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon’s Samuel Beckett’s Library of his shelves of philosophy, Beckett criticism has been greatly enhanced, and sometimes chastened, by genetic scholarship, as this anthology, like the November 2011 special issue of Modernism/Modernity, attests.