Irish Poetry: 'New" optimistically recurs in the titles of anthologies. It promises a fresh-minted poetic generation, aesthetic spring cleaning, an avant-garde, "New styles of architecture, a change of heart" (to quote Auden).
But here Selina Guinness has done something rather cunning. Her initial criterion for The New Irish Poets was that poets' first collections should have appeared no earlier than 1993. Thus slow starters, like Faber's remarkable discoveries, Fergus Allen and the late Dorothy Molloy, cohabit with 20-somethings like Leontia Flynn and Nick Laird. Guinness further subverts generational niches by arranging the poets alphabetically. All this implies that poetry does not necessarily "progress" in a linear way. Moreover, as her handy head-notes often remind us, these poems intersect with the work of other contemporaries.
So, what's new then? Guinness intends the adjective to qualify "Irish" as much as "Poets". Her introduction outlines cumulative socio-political shifts that condition the poetry of the last decade. Forms and structures can be more historically expressive than images, than zeitgeist flotsam such as "cans of Harp and Beck's" or "a host of Styrofoam balls". But if modernity, as represented by its artefacts, has ceased to be an issue for Irish poetry, what should we make of the "new formalism" to which Guinness calls attention? In fact, "newness" need not signify modernist or post-modernist styles. Perhaps Guinness distinguishes too sharply between "determinedly 'experimental' work" (she includes an unhappy specimen) and the "presence of several accomplished sestinas and villanelles".
Accomplishment is experiment that works. Caitríona O'Reilly, author of one sestina, also produces the beautifully capacious unrhymed line of 'A Qing Dish': "When the sun declines, the dish is fired with a watery glaze like celadon,/ like light through ice or mist or paper, or the rarest of all whites, nephrite."
This portrayal and model of artistic concentration challenges looser poems. Not every poet achieves swift openings such as Molloy's "I redden to the roots when Jacqueline Dupont zuts/ at my French" and Colette Bryce's "That was the day that went too far/ And missed the turn on the Creeslough Road", or compressed images such as Mary O'Donoghue's autumnal "mesh of cable/ for small spiders'/ morning gossip./ The blatherskites".
If there is a new or old formalism, it does not only derive from Yeats or recent Northern Irish poetry. It has continuing cultural sources (as has Irish free verse) in alertness to all the potential play between speech and rhythmic shape. David Wheatley's 'Chronicle' subtly crossbreeds the sestina's repetitions with the Irish poem of ancestry: "My grandfather is chugging along the back roads/ Between Kilcoole and Newtown in his van." Other rhyme-words are Wicklow, mountains, door and father. Tom French builds 24 intense stanzas into a painful elegy for the Irish farm labourer, a coda to The Great Hunger: "Pity the bastards who hunted free-range eggs in sheds/ and bore them back in their flat caps like promises/ or secrets, who worked for fags and died of lung complaints."
What counts - what's always new - is when a distinctive sound, the outcome of concentration, animates any form. Kerry Hardie's compelling free verse follows (creates) a rhythmic pulse in a manner that recalls D.H. Lawrence. 'The Avatar' ends by imagining "a low god for winter:/ belly-weighted, with the unmistakable call/ of the bog curlew or the sea-going eider".
Hardie formulates her perspectives from a "low" position: hunkered, "the mole's view". This is also a political position, convalescent in its desire to "trace/ the shape of every townland in this valley". Similarly, Jean Bleakney sets therapeutic natural vistas against the years in Northern Ireland "when our unuttered shame/ was as stagnant as the cut flowers/ blackening under cellophane". Nick Laird compares "poetry" to the oak doors of a church "flapping slowly open to let us out,/ like some great injured bird trying to take flight".
Other poets from the North negotiate the endless aftermath of the Troubles by manipulating tones of voice, sometimes tones about voice. Paula Cunningham, "trying on voices just like hats", remembers her father being confronted by paramilitaries who test his pronunciation of "h". Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, the innovative Irish-language poet, mimics his interrogation by a British squaddie, "a first stab/ at translation". In 'Second Tongue', he interrogates himself too: "I am mumbo-jumbo, juju,/ a mojo of words/ in the back pocket/ of the weirdo poet/ busking for bursaries."
But perhaps the most liberating note is struck by Leontia Flynn's 'Come Live with Me', where the Belfast setting is not a problem: "Come live with me and be my mate/ and all the fittings and the fixtures of the flat/ will bust with joy - this flowered ottoman, this tallboy . . ."
A good "political poem" crosses borders. Two different examples are ingenious parables by Martin Mooney and Maurice Riordan. Mooney's ' . . . Gone for some time' compares Ulster unionism, or any self-defeating ideology, to a stranded Antarctic expedition. Riordan's 'A Word from the Loki', a people ever-threatened by unseen adversaries, probes the unconscious of tribal solidarity.
Again, Justin Quinn's poems of post-Soviet Prague come home to roost. Quinn's 'Personal', which evokes a Prague dinner-table conversation about "the Nixon years" with Orfeo heard in the background, dissolves boundaries between private and public worlds, art and politics: "Somehow Orpheus and Charon were a part of this . . . / Somehow the colours of our walls were part of this as well."
Sinéad Morrissey's powerful 'Hazel Goodwin Morrissey Brown' makes similar, questioning liaisons. Morrissey addresses her complex mother, once a would-be revolutionary in her "GDR worker phase", who left the family for New Zealand: "Out there a psychic/ Explained how, in a previous life, I'd been your mother,/ Guillotined during the French revolution." Perhaps Irish poets have increasingly internalised "the personal is political".
It's both a strength and weakness of Irish poetic culture that anthologies are somehow expected to update us on the condition of Ireland (I seem to expect this too). The impact of poetry by women may indeed have promoted new versions - including anorexic versions - of the body politic. Mary O'Donoghue's 'Bova' is a painful feminist coda to The Great Hunger. But Guinness wisely warns against seeing poetic effects, structures or influences as "gender-specific". Inter alia Irish poets are collectively revising tropes such as fathers and mothers, country and city, home and exile. It's here, as in the play between speech and shape, that historical increments are most finely felt. Thus French's 'Pity the Bastards' elegises a pastoral genre too, and Bryce's tricky 'The Full Indian Rope Trick' may say goodbye to the Derry poem as well as Derry. Riordan provocatively titles a poem 'England, His Love'.
Another telling ars poetica is Conor O'Callaghan's 'East' with its brilliant attack on persistent Celtic Twilight motifs: "give me a dreary eastern town that isn't vaguely romantic/ where moon and stars are lost in the lights of the greyhound track."
Guinness stresses the emergence of a more rigorous poetry criticism in magazines such as the marvellous Metre (edited by Wheatley and Quinn). If a few of these poets are "blatherskites", if there are dead poems or set-piece poems here by good poets, it's partly owing to a climate that encourages premature publication: genuine talent needs time to find its distinctive aesthetic. I might have preferred a leaner, meaner anthology (and Guinness stretches a point when she includes work by poets who grew up in Britain or the US). But anthologists of the "new" should probably err on the side of enthusiasm, generosity, and adventure.
The New Irish Poets, edited by Selina Guinness, Bloodaxe Books, 336pp, £10.95.
Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita at Queen's University Belfast. She is the author of Poetry & Posterity