Ferocious Humanism, WJ McCormack, review by Pat Boran

Ferocious Humanism. ed. WJ McCormack. Dent. £30 UK.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

The word anthology comes from the Greek where it originally meant a bouquet of flowers. But from the first gathering of epigrams, about the 4th century BC, up to the present the anthology has been more than a short-term decoration. With WJ McCormack's Ferocious Humanism, the supporting thesis is hinted at in the subtitle, An anthology of Irish poetry from before Swift to Yeats and after.

That Swift and Yeats are named is the first clue. After all, the book starts with the late Michael Hartnett's version of O Bruadair's lament for the Irish language, and drives on well past Yeats to give us a glimpse of Heaney, Boland, Kinsella, Montague and others on the contemporary roadside. It can't be that a book that used the name Heaney on its cover would be any less popular. And if it is either ferocity or humanism, or a combination of both that connects O Bruadair, Swift and Aoghan O Rathaille -- a trio whom Montague in the introduction to his Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974) called 'three angry men, concerned in their different ways about the state of the country, and vituperating against those in power' -- why not go back a mile or two further to include Pádraigín Haicéad and others?

The answer is that this book attempts to describe a tradition in which Swift and Yeats are the two leading lights if not quite the two human bookends, a tradition that includes far more of what might be called Anglo-Irish poetry -- were that not such a hopelessly complicated and inadequate label -- than previous works (though see Brendan Kennelly in The Penguin Book of Irish Verse, 1970: 'I personally believe that both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish combine to create a distinctively Irish tradition.') McCormack writes here of 'a recognisable team of popular entertainers or sham shamans' at work in Irish poetry, though it would be hard completely to exempt even the 'master' Yeats from such an accusation.

In the Introduction to the New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986), Thomas Kinsella wrote of having tried, in his choices, 'to pick a thematic path through the many possibilities, taking advantage of a poem's documentary value', and adding that 'one does not come to such an anthology for a full view of the careers of O Rathaille or Yeats.' Yet McCormack, many of whose choices are inevitably echoed in other volumes, detects 'a subtle, corrosive tendency for Irish literature to find contentment in the priority of content or subject-matter over form or aesthetic regard' and suggests that Kinsella 'subjects Yeats to just such treatment'. Whatever truth there is in the first part of that assertion, surely to put Kinsella's 1,500 year- alongside McCormack's 300 year-span is not to compare like with like.

So, given McCormack's sharper focus, what does Ferocious Humanism offer that is not already familiar? The answer is quite a lot. Certainly more of Swift and a wider-ranging Yeats than Kinsella can offer, though even McCormack doesn't find room for The Fascination of What's Difficult (Montague has it in The Faber Book of Irish Verse, 1974), a poem which seems to tackle the very matter of content head-on. 'The fascination of what's difficult / Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent / Spontaneous joy and natural content / Out of my heart.'

There is a generous and welcome representation of women poets here, seven, for example, since Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's 18th century (Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire/Lament for Art O'Leary). And there are certainly good reasons for including the chill of Jane Francesca Elgee, Lady Wilde's A Supplication ('Golden harvests we are reaping / With golden grain our barns heaping, / But for us our bread is weeping, / Kyrie Eleison) or the fierce disappointment of Susan L Mitchell's 'Ode to the British Empire' which nicely complicates the political picture.

Of more recent vintage, it's good to see a decent-sized chunk of Eugene Watters' long poem The Weekend of Dermot and Grace (a fragment of which Kennelly included in the Penguin book). Interestingly this compelling reworking of the Diarmuid and Grainne story in the nuclear age also uses Kyrie eleison as a refrain -- a happy accident for any anthologist. The commitment to longer poems in general, and the inclusion of original Irish texts alongside translations, alone make this a book worth having.

As omissions go, personally I think Michael Hartnett's -- writing as himself, as it were -- is a major oversight. Even so, for the civilised country, or island, we think we have become, this anthology points to diversity in our past and present as well as in our future and, whatever perspective we might have on things, reminds us that some who come to change or open our minds bear not weapons but gifts of flowers.