Northern Windows/Southern Stars

Preface

Looking back to when these essays were first written is chastening. For a start it is difficult to imagine how things were in the 1980s and early 1990s in an Ireland, north and south, still trying to adjust to the ongoing tragic impact of the Troubles, the slowly dawning public realization of the extent of human travesty conducted in the name of the Catholic Church (in the main) and the realignments which were taking place in our economic and political engagements with Britain and Europe. In what would become the defining symbolic act of the period – the election of Mary Robinson to the presidency of Ireland in 1990 – the surrounding literary and cultural conditions in the country were also changing as decades of economic policies ran into the ground and emigration soared. What had been a profoundly conservative society on both sides of the border, started to unwind. Now, half a century after the earliest of these essays first appeared, it is disorientating for me as writer and, I suspect, for the reader as well, to recognize how much actually has changed and how quickly. When we bear in mind the impact of Brexit and, hot on its angry heels, the Covid-19 pandemic with its terrible loss of life, the moral and ideological disaster of ‘Trumpism’, the world of twenty-first-century Ireland is indeed a very different place.

These though are factors well beyond the scope and competence of the present writer. Safe to say, however, that inscribed in this gathering of essays, devoted to writing from Ireland, there is, I hope, a justified and validated conviction that poetry matters. While the pressing issues today which swirl around the making and reading of poetry – of which gender equality, diversity, and inclusivity are the most currently debated – it is important to say that these issues are in themselves historical and form part of a longer and wider narrative of Irish, British, and North American cultural history. These essays only touch upon such matters tangentially since their concerns at the time of writing were other, generally trying to draw attention to lesser-known (male) poets whose work was being re-issued, ←ix | x→such as W. R. Rodgers or Padraic Fiacc. An early essay on Eavan Boland’s poetry collections, including The War Horse and Night Feed, along with other literary essays and editorial work will appear in a forthcoming collection, Politic Words: Essays in Irish Women’s Writing 1985–2022.

Re-reading these essays in the 2020s will seem for many, I have little doubt, to be an exercise in historical re-visitation; going back, that is, to how things appeared to one who was trying to reason equably with himself and a relatively small, yet engaged readership of ‘little’ magazines in Ireland and elsewhere. The questions raised were about what was ‘good’ in this poet or that verse; about what was happening inside the culture as the forces of politics, or the rising influence of various cultural forces – marketing, PR, and the proliferation of literature as entertainment – became increasingly more popular in Irish society from the late 1980s and 1990s onwards. The work included here was mostly based on personal impression, and the tentative conclusions reached in, say, ‘Critical Mass’, were not meant to be anything more than that – impressions, soundings, shots in the dark. Most of what follows was written in the spaces between a fairly demanding teaching schedule and the needs of finding the time and sympathetic routine for producing poems of my own. What connects these different factors was the students, to whom this book is dedicated – along with the late and much missed poet-critic Dennis O’Driscoll – students of poetry who for forty years or so matched and superseded my love of the art with their own ideas, experience, and knowledge in lecture ←x | xi→hall, seminar room and tutorial office. It was never really a job, or a ‘career’. If I led the conversation, they, from all various arts and parts of Ireland, the UK, Europe, US, and further afield, took over and made it, to quote Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’, ‘afresh, afresh, afresh’.