Anthology:Terence Brown and I were classmates - and friends - at Trinity College. We took the same courses, sat for the same exams and travelled to the university in a city which is scarcely imaginable now: a place of sparse traffic and silent streets after midnight; of violent opinion and divided retrospect.
When we got off our lumbering green buses we entered a college atmosphere which is also hardly imaginable. Trinity in those years had fewer than 3,000 students. Education was canonical and deliberate. The teaching was often illuminating but was scarcely open to challenge.
I don't remember that Terence or I, or other students, had long conversations about this. Education was a given. Brendan Kennelly was beginning to lecture there in any case, and filled the silences with his own particular lyricism and energy. Nevertheless, coming from Dublin, there were days you could feel your own history was somehow hidden in the curriculum. We both sat through lectures where there seemed, at least to me, far too much of Gray's elegy and far too little Joyce and Yeats.
But what I didn't see and what this book makes clear is something else: that the real hidden history was within us. I may have known - I think I did - that Terence was born in China, the son of missionaries. But I had very little idea of the shadows and subtleties which would become plain in the eloquence and civility of his own writing - in books such as Ireland: A Social and Cultural History and Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision and Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster - over the next few decades. If Trinity College in the early 1960s was a charged, fascinating place, with Northern, Southern and British students never quite revealing to each other the contradictions and narratives which would become the wounds and reconciliations of the next decades, it was only a mirror of the wider situation. The histories existed; the language for them was missing.
NICHOLAS ALLEN AND Eve Patten have assembled a sparkling array of histories in this book, none of them hiding in plain sight any more; none of them needing to. The many contributions put together here suggest a thriving, open conversation. "The poems and essays collected here attest to the centrality of Brown's vital presence," they write in their preface. "They also register the affection in which he is held." Adding to this, John Wilson Foster sets the tone in a brief personal foreword: "In the early 1970s, balance and genuine impartiality were very difficult to achieve in Ireland. It was then that Terence Brown published his first criticism."
Once past Paul Muldoon's witty, presiding poem A Mayfly, the book opens out into a rich and varied field of essays and poems. Seamus Heaney's powerful poem Human Chain, which is dedicated to Terence Brown, joins vivid lyrics from Derek Mahon, Gerry Dawe, and Greg Delanty. Brendan Kennelly has a poem, and a particularly eloquent reminiscence of being in Japan with Terence, going through the town of Nara together. Terence pointed out to him that they were on "the path to philosophy". Later, they agreed wryly they travelled the path but didn't find the philosophy. Brendan records Terence saying: "But that's what matters, isn't it? The journey, the search."
Terence Brown's presence as a Virgilian guide through the fractious search for answers and identities in Irish writing is everywhere here. John Wilson Foster writes "he was decisively launched as a serious voice in Irish Studies before there was a field of that name".
THIS BOOK IN his honour shows how that field has grown by leaps and bounds, enriched by memoir and analysis and the continuous strengthening of the critique. RF Foster, Nicholas Grene and Helen Vendler have fine essays on Yeats and Heaney respectively; Nicholas Allen an illuminating one on MacNeice; Declan Kiberd writes powerfully about Edna O'Brien. Edna Longley's valuable retrospect on Belfast in the 1960s is balanced by Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch's view of the symbols of public mourning: a look at Irish Gardens of Remembrance. Eve Patten writes a particularly interesting piece about Olivia Manning, and Chris Morash contributes an intriguing essay about a 19th-century crime - the murder of Ellen Hanley - and follows its mutation from journalism to fiction to theatre.
There is something here then to hold every reader. And more than that there is something for every reader to reflect on: that the inevitable cultural tensions of one island can produce a harvest of different views, contrary perspectives and yet find a real poise and inclusion at the end of all. Terence Brown amply deserves the tribute of this book for the civility with which he has weighed these different views, and in harder times; and for his contribution to that outcome. And certainly, the contributions here range so widely and fruitfully over different authors and fields and topics that it's almost possible to forget how mere proximity once led these same views to friction. Now they lie down together in these pages - and Four Courts have certainly made a handsome, durable book - in a peaceable kingdom.
Eavan Boland's forthcoming book is The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, co-edited with Edward Hirsch, to be published by WW Norton in March 2008. She teaches at Stanford University
That Island Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown Edited by Nicholas Allen and Eve Patten Four Courts Press, 199pp. €55