Now for the actual poems I did choose. `Marconi's Cottage', from the book of that title, is as nearly typical a poem as I could find of Medbh McGuckian's multi-levelled and multifarious oeuvre, which has been as rich in its development in the 1990s as it was in the 1980s, culminating in her new book, Shelmalier, based (as much as any poem of Medbh's is based) on the Rebellion of 1798.
If anybody has most changed the "territories of the voice" of Irish poetry in recent times, that person has to be Medbh. A dense, secretive inner world unfolds in poems of great and subtle rhythmical and imagistic beauty. As Ciaran Carson wrote in a recent issue of Verse (Volume 16, number 2): "There is no one like McGuckian writing in the English language, and we should be grateful for her ornate and ambiguous presence. Too often, I have been asked, `But what does it all mean?' You might as well ask what Charlie Parker `means'. He means music. McGuckian means poetry and as she puts it in Shelmalier, `This great strangement has the destination of a rhyme.' "
Another major female voice from the 1990s has been Paula Meehan, and her poem `The Pattern' has already taken on the status of a classic. A richly textured evocation of a childhood growing up in Dublin's inner city and the deeply ambiguous relationship between mother and daughter are explored throughout the poem but best summed up in its final lines:
Tongues of flame in her dark eyes,
she'd say, `One of these days I must
teach you to follow a pattern.'
Another classic poem about the mother/daughter relationship is Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's `Fireman's Lift'. Though ostensibly a description in precise detail of the painting of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary painted by Correggio on the great Renaissance copula that sits rather incongruously on top of the otherwise Romanesque structure of the Cathedral of Parma, it is also an elegy to her mother, who was standing beside her when she first saw it. An immense act of grieving, the poem itself is perhaps a translation of the mother's image in the older, medieval, and religious sense of the word as transformation, or removal from earth into heaven.
"Tell the truth but tell it slant", was Emily Dickinson's dictum and I think that one of the great strengths of Irish poetry in our time is a necessary reticence in the face of the personal, a refusal to follow the straight in-your-face confessional mode which, fuelled originally by TV sound-bites, has come to dominate most of the art forms of our time, including, sad to say, much of modern American poetry. I say unfortunately, because, though it has its moments, ultimately its very topicality and closeness to the facts of any particular individual's life leaves it very one-dimensional and often trite.
I know I am going against the spirit of the age, which is that of the apotheosis of the memoir, but unless the commonplace details of our lives are shot through by something of more permanence, our poems are built on sand, and on them we can build no lasting city.
This Irish preference for obliqueness and the great artistic advantages to be gained by speaking of the personal and the here and now through an "objective correlative" or a distancing lens of some kind, is best exemplified by one of the great poems of the 1990s, Michael Longley's `Ceasefire'. Though collected in his 1994 volume, The Ghost Orchid, it made its first electrifying appearance in print in The Irish Times to coincide with the announcement by the IRA of the first Northern Ireland ceasefire. Though Michael assures me it was written sometime before and appeared then purely as a fluke, I myself am not too sure of that, John Banville being the Literary Editor of the paper at the time. He knew what he had here, and he was right; its effect was dynamic, and rippled right through the community, both North and South, having a galvanising effect that can only be imagined of some lines of Yeats, perhaps, at the turn of the century - the "Did you see an old woman go down the road", of `Kathleen Ni Houlihan' or the "terrible beauty is born" of `Easter 1916'.
Trusting the words of The Odyssey to speak to us through the ages Longley has Priam sigh:
`I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son'
lines which have been taken to heart by many on this island and are among those most quoted in conversation or in print during this last decade.
Which brings me to one of the reasons I chose my next poem, Cathal O Searcaigh's `Gort na gCnamh' or `The Field of Bones' as it is translated by Frankie Sewell. This first appeared in Irish alone in a book called Na Buachailli Bana (1996), which was among many other things Cathal's testament of "coming out" in terms which could not by a long shot be called uncertain. Nevertheless the poem in the book that caused the most commotion is not about homosexuality at all, but rather the description of the dire straits of a young woman violated by her father, who had to suffocate and bury her newborn child in the eponymous "Field of Bones".
This poem caused an absolute furore in Cathal's home place and caused him, among other things, to be "read out from the altar"; in other words a sermon was preached against him, a social punishment which in my innocence I had thought had gone out with the proverbial Flood. I heard him subsequently defending himself on Raidio na Gaeltachta with both dignity and aplomb, and it seems from all appearances that he came off the winner in this particular verbal duel. The days when a poor Tailor could be forced to burn a book of his own harmless, witty, and hilarious reminiscences (The Tailor and Ansty by Eric Cross) have at long last been superseded. Still, that the very attempt was made to pillory Cathal over this poem is to me actually a great sign, proof positive that poetry in Ireland is still taken with a seriousness that it has lost out on in most Western societies, and maybe most especially in America.
The other Irish language poem that I have chosen `Tuireamh Marie Antoinette', could hardly be more different in many ways to Cathal's poem, but in its "bricolage" of some curious historic facts, European sophistication and a personal history of a young Irish girl's innocence, wonder, and subsequently incongruous confusion about what on earth breasts are all about, it is brave and venturesome, and dares to push out to the very extremities the limits and definitions of what is possible in a poem in Irish. Biddy Jenkinson, in line with a long-held and morally impeccable policy, is not willing to have her poem translated into English in Ireland.
Peter Sirr's work to me does the same for poetry in Ireland in English. Having digested the best of what American poetry has to offer, here, in his fourth collection The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange, he really comes into his own. The poem I would have most liked to have chosen from this collection is the (very long) `A Journal', a very moving and technically brilliant variation on that great perennial theme in poetry, the growth and the death of love, but its length barred it from the limits of this book, and I would consider it nothing short of barbaric to chip and chop at it. Therefore I accepted as compromise `Trade Songs', not just for its exotic splendours, but because in its espousal of the best of American techniques, it makes a welcome change from the perpetually inward and often futile navel-gazing which is a constant risk in Irish poetry.
In a sense, through the sheer volume of his production both in poetry and prose, the 1990s are the decade of Ciaran Carson. Having hit his stride with the long line in the late 1980s with The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti, he has continued the run with First Language, Opera Et Cetera, The Twelfth of Never, HMS Belfast, not to mention three prose non-fiction books, Last Night's Fun, The Star Factory and Fishing for Amber.
Again the sheer choice of poems is prodigious but with my constant awareness of the sub-stratum of Irish that underlies even his most colourful displays of English fireworks, I could not help but be completely seduced by `Eesti', where the sepia-coloured nostalgia of an afternoon in Tallinn, the capital of Eesti or Estonia brings him back to a redletter day in his youth and his father's admonition in Irish to "Eist", which means at the same time both "Listen" and "Be silent".
NOTHING delights me more in the poetry of the 1990s than the resurrection of Derek Mahon, albeit so far only in rhyming couplets. After much consideration of many fine poems in The Hudson Letter and The Yellow Book, I finally decided on `To Eugene Lambe in Heaven', as my favourite. I never met Eugene Lambe personally, though I have heard a lot about him from many quarters. But this doesn't make a whit of difference, as this poem makes me think I knew the man, so subtly and completely is he rounded out before us. The last line too, haunts me and is one that I have heard myself whisper at odd moments, either climbing the stairs to bed or stalled at Dublin traffic lights:
Oft in the stilly night I remember our wasted youth.
And finally, but only chronologically, last - if we do not take into consideration the wedding-feast at Cana - the poem that I chose instead of `Incantata', is `Long Finish' by Paul Muldoon from his 1998 collection, Hay. This double "ballade" encompasses everything from the necessary address to the "Princess of Accutane" in the last verse, which is typical of and necessary to the original form, to a meditation on ten years of married life, and from there it takes off to some of the awful things that have happened in Northern Ireland during that period, and then returns by way of a digression through Japanese literature and the reality of waking up in Japan, to the virtues of married life, "and then some".
I have this poem pinned up beside my writing desk. I am deeply envious of it. So much so that every time I look up, it spurs me on to try again, another poem, or at least another stab at one. In its extraordinary technical virtuosity and depth of heart it sums up everything that I consider valuable in Irish poetry in the 1990s.
I am sorry I have not been able to make more room for the admirable new generation of those such as David Wheatley, Justin Quinn, Vona Groarke, Mary O'Malley, Rita Ann Higgins, Moya Cannon, Enda Wyley, Sinead Morrissey, Kerrie Hardy and others, some of whom have followed up remarkable debut collections with very good seconds. Given the wide range of this river of song as it reaches the end of 100 years, God forgive me for having acquiesced to choosing only ten poems for the last decade in the first place.
Watching the river flow: a Century in Irish Poetry edited by Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan is published this week by Poetry Ireland. Price £11.99