As poet and critic Eamon Grennan has been a benign presence in Irish literature over the past quarter-century, dividing his time between Vassar College in New York State and holidays in Ireland. This book brings together most of his critical writing over the period, amounting as a whole to a good introduction to what has gone on in Irish poetry over the major part of what might be called Yeats's century. Extending from Yeats to a 1997 discussion of sexuality, the book is a loosely organized history as well. And its critical hallmark is the "generosity" and "hearty willingness to praise" that Grennan attributes to Paul Durcan.
The book has four sections: first, four papers delivered to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, kept together here as a tribute to Yeats as fountainhead of 20th-century Irish poetry. The second section is "Compass Readings": what the New Critics at the mid-century (to whom Grennan declares undying fealty) called touchstones - the exemplary texts by which the quality of others can be judged.These are on the poetry of Joyce (making as strong a case for Chamber Music as can convincingly be made) and on Bloom (Leopold). The other pair of items are an interesting exploration of a metaphorical trope in Spenser's (if it is Spenser's) View of the Present State of Ireland, and an examination of gaps and absences in "post-Catholic" McGahern.
Section four is Grennan's round-up of Irish poetry, including an enlightening consideration of American influence on it, which of course Grennan's teaching life at Vassar equips him ideally to provide, and the anti-puritanical sexual overview that acts as a kind of ending, though followed by two postscripts: a eulogy to post-Nobel Heaney and a cooking poem, inspired by the incoherence of Yeats's breakfaster.
This leaves section three which is, as Grennan says, the heart of the book, giving insightful accounts of the major Irish poets between Yeats and 1990. To give an idea of the representation, there are three pieces on Kavanagh, two on Kinsella and a recuperative essay on Padraic Fallon. Grennan is mildly concerned to redress what he sees as the Northern bias in most coverage; he comes as near as he gets to acerbic in his strictures against the small, and mostly Northern, cast of Muldoon's Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (though even here one of his principal regrets is the omission of Muldoon himself: "one of the most startling, original, inventive and important voices on the current scene.")
It is a pity that Grennan has not updated some of the earlier pieces, as he notes in the Preface. For example the excellent 1995 essay on Michael Hartnett would have found a poignant and apt conclusion with his early death. The general round-up of contemporary Irish poets ends in 1992 - regrettably soon, given Grennan's sure judgment on the poetic situation at that point. He is a scrupulously attentive and hard-working reader with the New Critic's yen to hit off a poet's quality in a word. Sometimes this is good: "the benign violence of metaphorical language" in Durcan, for instance; sometimes it is limiting: "porous" is not an adequate word for the Heaney whom Grennan so reveres, and "ex- tension" is an odd concept to summarise Durcan.
Grennan is hostile to "theory": a principled position that reads a bit tiresome by now. But if anyone can hold this principle with honour it is Grennan, who is a writer's critic, committed to the "presence" of the author. And what omissions there are can easily be supplied by more of the same attentive, intelligent reading and writing from this most kindly and sane of Irish poet-critics.
Bernard O'Donoghue is the incoming di- rector of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo