About the Book
The poems featured in this anthology are quintessentially human documents informed by humor, compassion, and a joyful and visionary element—an impulse to praise what is really life and to protect it from the naysayers—as well as by a salutary realism and irony.
This revised edition features the work of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Durcan, Aidan Carl Mathews, Anne Hartigan, Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, and others who were not included in the first edition. Moreover, the selections from those poets featured in the first edition have, in many cases, been extensively changed and updated. In total, more than half the poems published in this second edition did not appear in the first.
Table of Contents
Introduction to the New and Revised Edition
The Poetry
Thomas MacGreevy (1893-1967)
De Civitate Hominum
Aodh Ruadh O'Domhnaill
Recessional
Homage to Marcel Proust
Nocturne of the Self-Evident Presence
Austin Clarke (1896-1974)
The Planter's Daughter
Pilgrimage
Night and Morning
Tenebrae
The Straying Student
The Envy of Poor Lovers
Wolfe Tone
Three Poems About Children
Forget Me Not
from Mnemosyne Lay in Dust
Inscription for a Headstone
Mable Kelly (translation from the Irish)
The Subjection of Women
Martha Blake at Fifty-One
from Tiresias
Frank O'Connor (1903-1966)
The End of Clonmacnois (translation from the Irish)
Hope (translation from the Irish)
The Angry Poet (translation from the Irish)
On the Death of His Wife (translation from the Irish)
Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)
Inniskeen Road: July Evening
Shancoduff
Father Mat
Art McCooey
Stony Grey Soil
To the Man after the Harrow
from The Great Hunger
Tinker's Wife
Epic
The Hospital
Canal Bank Walk
In Memory of My Mother
October
Padraic Fallon (1905-1974)
Odysseus
For Paddy Mac
PotShot
Weir Bridge
The Head
A Hedge Schoolmaster
Dardanelles 1916
Brian Coffey (1905-)
from Missouri Sequence
Headrock
from Advent
Cold
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Malacoda
Enueg I
I would like my love to die
John Hewitt (1907-1987)
Ireland
Because I Paced My Thought
An Irishman in Coventry
Once Alien Here
The Scar
St. Stephen's Day
Calling on Peadar O'Donnell at Dungloe
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
Dublin
Snow
from Trilogy for X
from Autumn Journal
Denis Devlin (1908-1959)
Lough Derg
Ank'Hor Vat
Wishes for Her
Daphne Stillorgan
Anteroom: Geneva
Renewal by her Element
from The Heavenly Foreigner
W. R. Rodgers (1909-1969)
The Net
Paired Lives
Scapegoat
Donagh MacDonagh (1912-1968)
The Veterans
from Charles Donnelly
Just an Old Sweet Song
Charles Donnelly (1914-1937)
Poem
The Tolerance of Crows
The Flowering Bars
Valentin Iremonger (1918-)
Hector
Icarus
This Houre Her Vigill
Padraic Fiacc (1924-)
Haemorrhage
The Poet
Gloss
Introit
Goodbye to Brigid an Agnus Dei
Anthony Cronin (1925-)
Apology
The Man Who Went Absent from the Native Literature
The Middle Years
Pearse Hutchinson (1927-)
Into Their True Gentleness
Boxing the Fox
Manifest Destiny
Richard Murphy (1927-)
The Philosopher and the Birds
The Poet on the Island
from The Battle of Aughrim
Seals at High Island
High Island
A Nest in a Wall
Beehive Cell
Thomas Kinsella (1928-)
Baggot Street Deserta
Another September
Clarence Mangan
Cover Her Face
A Country Walk
Mirror in February
Wormwood
Ritual of Departure
Hen Woman
A Hand of Solo
Death Bed
from A Technical Supplement
from The Messenger
Model School, Inchicore
John Montague (1929-)
A Bright Day
All Legendary Obstacles
That Room
The Answer
A Lost Tradition
Witness
The Wild Dog Rose
The Cage
Lament for the O'Neills
A Grafted Tongue
Last Journey
Windharp
from The Leaping Fire
Falls Funeral
Tracks
Herbert Street Revisited
The Silver FlaskProcess
A Flowering Absence
Sean Lucy (1931-)
Senior Members
Supervising Examinations
Longshore Intellectual
Friday Evening
These Six (translation from the Irish)
Anne Hartigan (1932-)
Advent
Brazen Image
St. Bridget's Cross
No Easy Harbour
Salt
Tom Macintyre (1933-)
On Sweet Killen Hill (translation from the Irish)
The Yellow Bittern (translation from the Irish)
Drumlin Prayer
James Simmons (1933-)
Fear Test: Integrity of Heroes
Outward Bound
Claudy
John Donne
October in the Country: 1983
Playing with Fire
James Liddy ( 1934-)
The Voice of America 1961
Paean to Eve's Apple
History (translation from the Irish)
The Strand Hotel, Rosslare
Desmond O'Grady (1935-)
Professor Kelleher ·and the Charles River
If I Went Away (translation from the Irish)
The Poet in Old Age Fishing at Evening
from The Dying Gaul
In the Greenwood (translation from the Irish)
Finn's Wishes (translation from the Irish)
Brendan Kennelly (1936-)
My Dark Fathers
The Thatcher
Proof
Yes
The Horse's Head
Seamus Heaney (1939-)
Digging
At a Potato Digging
The Wife's Tale
The Other Side
A New Song
The Tollund Man
Summer 1969
The Strand at Lough Beg
In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
An Ulster Twilight
from Station Island
From the Canton of Expectation
from Clearances
Michael Longley (1939-)
Epithalamion
Emily Dickinson
Caravan
Kindertotenlieder
Letter to Derek Mahon
Desert Warfare
Fleance
The Linen Workers
Peace
The Linen Industry
Detour
An Amish Rug
Seamus Deane (1940-)
A Schooling
Derry
Scholar II
History Lessons
A Burial
Michael Hartnett (1941-)
All the death-room needs
A Small Farm
from A Farewell to English
Death of an Irishwoman
The Retreat of Ita Cagney
Marban, a Hermit, Speaks (translation from the Irish)
Pity the man who English lacks (translation from the Irish)
All the same, it would make you laugh (translation from the Irish)
Derek Mahon ( 1941-)
Glengormley
In Carrowdore Churchyard
Afterlives
The Snow Party
Matthew V. 29-30
A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
Consolations of Philosophy
Ecclesiastes
Courtyards in Delft
Another Sunday Morning
Eilean Nl Chuilleanain (1942-)
Swineherd
Dead Fly
Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Night ...
from Site of Ambush
from The Rose-Geranium
Michael Smith (1942-)
Fall
Mitching
Dinner Queue
City II
From the Chinese
Augustus Young (1943-)
The Advice of an Efficiency Expert
Heritage
Woman, don't be troublesome (translation from the Irish)
Ballad of Fat Margot
Eavan Boland (1944-)
It's a Woman's World
The Glass King
Song
Lace
Child of Our Time
An Irish Childhood in England: 1951
Paul Durcan (1944-)
Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail
Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949
10.30 am Mass, June 16, 1985
Bewley's Oriental Cafe, Westmoreland Street
The Turkish Carpet
John Ennis (1944-)
Meeting at a Salesyard
The Years
A Drink of Spring
Richard Ryan (1946-)
Ireland
From My Lai the Thunder Went West
A Wet Night
Hugh Maxton (1947-)
Cemunnos
Waking
At the Protestant Museum
Frank Ormsby (1947-)
Ornaments
Spot the Ball
Interim
Survivors
from A N orthem Spring
At the Jaffe Memorial Fountain, Botanic Gardens
Ciaran Carson ( 1948-)
The Insular Celts
The Car Cemetery
It Used To Be
Dresden
Belfast Confetti
Campaign
Tom Paulin (1949-)
Under the Eyes
Surveillances
The Impossible Pictures
And Where Do You Stand on the National Question?
Desertmartin
Black Bread
Medbh McGuckian (1950-)
Mr. McGregor's Garden
The Mast Year
The Folk Museum
The Dream-Language of Fergus
Coleridge
Peter Fallon (1951-)
My Care
Spring Song
Winter Work
Paul Muldoon (1951-)
Clonfeacle
Cuba
Anseo
Gathering Mushrooms
The Minor (translation from the Irish)
The Sightseers
Meeting the British
The Wishbone
Sushi
Christo's
Nuala Nf Dhomhnaill (1952-)
Labasheedy (The Silken Bed) (translation of her poem in
Irish by the author)
The Shannon Estuary Welcoming the Fish (translation of her
poem in Irish by the author)
Parthenogenesis (translation from the Irish by Michael
Hartnett)
Feeding a Child (translation from the Irish by Michael
Hartnett)
The Race (translation from the Irish by Michael Hartnett)
As for the Quince (translation from the Irish by Paul
Muldoon)
Thomas McCarthy (1954-)
State Funeral
Feeding Ground
The Word Silk
The Poet of the Mountains
Question Time
Aidan Carl Mathews (1956-)
Descartes at Daybreak
The Library
Severances
At the Wailing Wall
Minding Ruth
Notes
Acknowledgments
Indexes
