Northern Anthology: This is a big book. One wonders if Ulster writing deserves quite such a mighty compendium. Nearly 50 years ago Frank O'Connor managed in his wonderful A Book of Ireland to put together the best of Irish writing in a little over half this length.
Since then we've had Heaney, Longley, Montague, Muldoon, Mahon and several other fine Northern poets. But poetry is not the dominant form represented in this anthology, and the prose that fills much of its 700 pages is too often workmanlike rather than inspirational.
After all, Northern Ireland, Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan represent a small and not particularly significant region of this planet, and there is no reason why it should breed lots of great writers. It may have produced more good literature than its narrow, boggy ground of religious division and violent feuding would lead one to expect. But it is also a region which has provoked an enormous amount of sheer bad writing because of its unique and often obsessional interest as a modern English-speaking society that also suffers from post-colonial conflict and archaic religious division.
This makes for a frustrating "curate's egg" unevenness. For every piece of magic from MacNeice or Heaney or Longley, one has to endure the thoughts of justly forgotten writers such as Denis O'D Hanna (who thinks that Virginia, Co Cavan, is "among the intricate waterways of Upper Lough Erne") or Rev John Dubourdieu, with his turgid descriptions of country towns such as Larne, Ballyclare and Ballymena.
Then there are the writers, unionist and nationalist, who insist on seeing Ulster as the centre of the civilised world. Hugh Shearman - writing at the high-point of Northern Ireland's Unionist ascendancy in the late 1940s - is full of bombast about its "vigorous and strong people", and its prodigious production line of successful writers, painters, generals, scientists and administrators. For him, the Belfast of that time was "a quietly self-confident literary metropolis" rather than the narrow-minded puritan backwater remarked on by outsiders (a place of "one poet per century", noted Sir Samuel Ferguson's biographer).
Not to be outdone, Aodh de Blacam waxes lyrical about Derry in the early 1920s as a "tasteful continental city" full of handsome, well-dressed people, and looks back a thousand years to "when a university at Armagh gave hospitality like that of medieval Paris".
However, there are some real gems here too. John Hewitt, who is clearly one of Patricia Craig's favourite poets, has a savage 1984 postscript to his lovely meditation on Ulster place names: "Now with compulsive resonance they toll/ Banbridge, Ballykelly, Darkley, Crossmaglen/ summoning pity, anger and despair/ by grief of kin, by hate of murderous men/ till the whole tarnished map is stained and torn/ not to be read as pastoral again." His poem on the 1969 Burntollet ambush - An Ulster Landowner's Song - is one of the few examples included of the brilliant black humour of the Northerners. (Where are The Ballad of William Bloat or the writings of John Morrow and Newton Emerson?)
In an anthology like this everyone must be allowed their favourites. Among mine are Derek Mahon's North Wind Portrush for its bleak love of a comfortless place ("our hearts starred with frost"); Polly Devlin's description of flax's "lovely metamorphosis" from a stinking slime to an incandescent linen garment; Denis Ireland's charming juxtaposition of unlikely high jinks on a frozen lake with a Presbyterian high tea in middle-class south Belfast; and - inevitably - two Troubles poems from the masters, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. Heaney's is Two Lorries, the one from the past driven by a handsome coalman who used to flirt with his mother, the other, in the present, carrying a bomb meant for the local bus station. In Wounds, Longley recalls a shivering boy with a gun shooting dead a bus conductor in front of his family and the television, muttering "sorry Missus" to his bewildered wife.
One is never far away from the underlying themes of sectarian paranoia and conflict in this book. The journalist Cal McCrystal sums up the sad reality of everyday life in Ulster in a telling incident that everyone who knows and has a love-hate relationship with the North immediately recognises: his father being refused a drink in a pub in a Protestant village because he ordered Powers, distilled in the Republic, rather than the local Bushmills.
Andy Pollak is director of the Centre for Cross-Border Studies in Armagh. His latest e-newsletter, Thank God for Europe, is at www.crossborder.ie/home/ndn
The Ulster Anthology Edited by Patricia Craig The Blackstaff Press, 722pp. £25