Sir, - I read Pat Hunt's affectionate tribute to Gus Martin and his Soundings anthology (An Irishman's Diary, June 6th) after it came up at a recent gathering of friends. Three of us, now living in different parts of France, were among the million Irish adults who had first discovered such poets as Eliot or Hopkins in its pages. We sipped wine around a table in a sunlit garden in a village near Lyon, remembering classrooms with the rain coming down outside as we sailed to Byzantium or listened to the still, sad music of humanity. Gus Martin (later my tutor in UCD) would have been amused.
An educational publisher for whom I worked here gets regular, impassioned requests for long-out-of-print "classic" schoolbooks; he marvels at how attached people can become to them. I predict a run on Soundings in the second-hand bookshops and have already reserved my copy. - Yours, etc.,
Jean O'Sullivan, Passage Rauch, 75011 Paris, France.