The past year's offerings from Irish publishers fall through one's short-term memory like Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte's little bowlerhatted men. How to choose the brightest and best? A random gathering perhaps, and let objectivity be damned.
The field of non-fiction offers the richest harvest, with publishers Gill & Macmillan the most prolific sowers of seed. John Horgan's Sean Lem- ass: The Enigmatic Patriot (£18.99) has to be the definitive portrait of the politician who did more than any other to drag Ireland into the modern age, while The Ireland An- thology (£17.99), edited by the late Sean Dunne, with an introduction and notes by George O'Brien, provides a lively cross-section of Irish history, people and society by writers both native and otherwise.
If one is not suffering from a surfeit of the charismatic Michael Collins, there were two excellent additions to his legend: Michael Collins: The Secret File, edited by A.T.Q. Stewart (Blackstaff Press, £10.99 in UK) presents in facsimile form all the important material in the RUC's secret file on the Big Fellow from December 1916 to April 1920, while Vincent MacDowell's Michael Collins and the Broth- erhood (Ashfield Press, £9.99) details the rise to power of the IRB under Collin's leadership.
If one feels the urge this Christmas to peruse a volume of photographs of characterfilled and lived-in faces (ahem), then Kindred (Townhouse, £27.95), a collection of portraits by Fergus Bourke, is the one for you. The same imprint also brought out the third in the Lifelines series, Lifelines 3, devised by the students of Wesley College, collated by Niall MacMonagle (£16.99/ £10.99), a handsome collection of favourite poems by various people, with accompanying letters to explain why they are favourites.
Getting back to politics/history, Mike Cronin's The Blueshirts and Irish Poli- tics (Four Courts Press, £19.95) is a reworking of a lively period in Irish history; Rebellion! - Ireland in 1798, by Daniel Gahan (O'Brien Press, £14.99), is the tip of a coming avalanche of books to celebrate the bicentenary of a glorious failure; The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (Lilliput Press, £40/ £20), edited by Angus Mitchell, seeks, among other things, to explode the myth of the Black Diaries; and from Irish Academic Press, Donal MacCarron's Step Together (£19.95) is the story of Ireland's Emergency Army as told by its veterans.
Dorothy Walker's lavishly illustrated Modern Art in Ireland (Lilliput, £25) is not only a fascinating study, but is beautiful to look at; Brendan Fullam's Legends of the Ash (Wolfhound Press, £16.99) is one of the better sports books; Stuff It All! - A Survivor's Guide to Christ- mas (Blackstaff Press, £5.99 in UK). by Paul Farrell and Graeme Keyes, will make you laugh; while Three Storeys Up: Tales of Dublin Tenement Life (Marino, £5.99), by Fred Kennedy, may well make you cry.
Not a lot of Irish-published fiction this year, but there was a new novel by Deirdre Purcell: Love Like Hate Adore (Townhouse, £15.99), about a woman's trying time with a rebellious younger brother; Alice Taylor's The Woman of the House (Mount Eagle, no price given), a story of the struggles and joys of country living, set in the Fifties; a humorous novel about an incompetent boxer by Brendan O'Carroll, Sparrow's Trap (O'Brien Press, £5.99); and a collection of tales by women writers from Poolbeg, If Only (£7.99) edited by Mary Maher and Kate Cruise O'Brien.
There was also new poetry from Gallery Press: Moya Cannon's The Parchment Boat, Medbh McGuckian's Selected Poems, Derek Mahon's The Yellow Book, with Michael Hartnett's O Rathaille, translated from the Irish, promised before Christmas.
The Irish-language book of the year has to be Breandan O Buachalla's Aisling Ghear: Na Stiobhasrtaigh agus an tAos Leinn 16031788 (An Clochomhar, £25), an analysis of the dream-poetry of the time, through which the author brings alive a whole landscape of literary and social history. A monumental undertaking, the book is an amazing feat of scholarship, but is also highly diverting and has much for the lay reader as well as the professional historian. Aisling Ghear was shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Awards 1997.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic