An Irishman's Diary

With the possible exclusion of events in the National Maternity Hospital, it was the highlight of my life so far when the students of Wesley College wrote asking me to nominate my favourite poem for a new edition of their celebrated Lifelines anthology.

But you have to remain calm at moments like this. Flattering as it is to be included, you know that revealing your favourite poem in a published collection is a dangerously defining act: one that will say a lot about you now and for years to come. It may hint at your emotional and intellectual depth, while making a passing reference to the size of your library. Lest the chosen poem does not hint strongly enough, the Wesley students also invite an explanatory note, which is published in full.

Were I doing it again, I might have furnished a longer explanation for why I chose a poem by Ogden Nash (Very Like a Whale). The note would first have protested the impossibility of picking a single favourite. It would have mentioned that it broke my heart not to include something from Shakespeare, Dante, Virgil, Chaucer, Whitman, Lermontov, Rimbaud, or any of the haiku masters. Finally, and with a sigh, it would have explained that Nash was the compromise candidate who picked up enough transfers to sneak through on the 17th count.

As it is, I am left to curse the journalistic training that persuaded me - unlike others - to confine my covering note to a short paragraph, which I worry may mislead impressionable readers into thinking me shallow.

On the other hand, I have to admit that certain base, tactical considerations also influenced my choice. As Niall MacMonagle notes in his introduction, successive Wesley anthologists have by now written to more than 650 people - from Mother Teresa to Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh - and not all contributions make it in. Even if you do survive the cut, by choosing a popular piece you run the risk of relegation to a "this poem was also chosen by" footnote, behind somebody better known.

I could easily have picked Patrick Kavanagh's Epic, for example, as Graham Norton did. I grew up in South Monaghan and can still hear voices from childhood saying "Damn your soul", like the Duffys said to old McCabe. Graham Norton probably doesn't even realise that in the local dialect, the word "soul" rhymed with "foul". But knowing this would hardly have secured me joint billing in future editions with Mr Big-shot TV Personality and I'm glad I avoided a head-to-head.

The latest Lifelines combines new contributors with a selection from the earlier editions, which makes for some interesting re-readings. Political reporters may search between the lines of another Kavanagh poem, Canal Bank Walk, for clues as to why the then Minister for Finance chose it in February 1994, just after the dig-out. Was it the green waters of the canal "pouring redemption" for him? Perhaps it's still too early to say.

The forewords of previous editions, by Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, and Eavan Boland, are also included. In his, Heaney has some fun deducing which contributors chose poems that made a statement about "their known professions or commitments" (like Tory MP Jeffrey Archer choosing Kipling) and the ones in which there was "a little bit of decoy activity going on" (like the realist Margaret Drabble choosing Blake).

But of course many of the choices are very personal, and a few in particular illustrate the real power of poetry. Among the new contributors, businessman Bill Cullen touchingly nominates a poem he found written on a page in his dead father's wallet, only later identified as Oliver St John Gogarty's Golden Stockings. Gogarty wrote it for his daughter, and Cullen Jnr surmises that his father carried it with him to remember a daughter of his own, who died of pneumonia in the slums in 1942.

The deaths of children are a poignant sub-theme among the new contributions, as in Irish Times literary editor Caroline Walsh's choice of a poem written by her bereaved sister, Elizabeth Walsh Peavoy. Elsewhere, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte nominates Mid Term Break, Heaney's own description of his infant brother's funeral, with its desolate last lines:

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear/

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

There are many joyful poems too, none more so than MacMonagle's selection, Joe Kane's exhilarating The Boy Who Nearly Won the Texaco Art Competition. But I both envy and pity his backing team of Dónal O'Connor, Caroline Shaw and Stephanie Veitch.

These are the latest Wesley students to inherit a tradition that first saw the light in 1985 and has sold 50,000 copies, all for the aid agency Concern. The drawback of being exposed at an impressionable age to so much poetry is that, should they themselves have to contribute to a future edition, the choice will be impossible.

Despite the anthology's many eclectic selections, the traditional powers hold up well. Yeats tops the league table with 14 poems, followed on 10 each by Heaney and that category-defying prodigy, Anonymous. Kavanagh is nudged into fourth place on nine, followed by two surprises: Gerard Manley Hopkins on seven (a tribute to the enduring power of the old Leaving Cert text book Soundings) and Raymond Carver on six. Among the poets who secured only a single entry, by contrast, is Ogden Nash.

• Lifelines: new and collected is published by TownHouse, priced €27.99 (hardback) and €19.99.