The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan By Joan McBreen Salmon Publishers, 297pp, £9.99
The Puzzle-Heart By Louise C. Callaghan Salmon Publishers, 62pp, £6.99
The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan offers a comprehensive survey of women poets born after 1920 who identify themselves and their work with Ireland. McBreen's criteria for selection is that the poet has published at least one collection, and each entry comprises a detailed biographical note accompanied by a poem and a photograph of the poet. This encapsulates the spirit of the collection, which is one of great personal affection and includes work by Sinead Morrissey, Marie Aine Nic Gearailt, Ann Zell, Sarah Berkeley, Moya Cannon and Medbh McGuckian.
The anthology is beautifully produced, and testifies to McBreen's dedication to and enthusiasm for Irish women writers. Not all of the work here is strong: some will not endure, but every fan of poetry and women's writing will find their own surprises and pleasures in this collection, which marks a particular historic moment in Irish literature.
More specifically the bibliography of monographs and special issues of journals covering Irish women's poetry is a useful resource for students and researchers. Overall this anthology offers a wealth of information about the publishing history of women poets since the 1970s, when only 13 of the contributors were in print.
The content seems to bear out the introductory editorial claim that the mid-20th century was a bleak period for women poets: of those anthologised here, only the late Eithne Strong and Maire Mhac an tSaoi were in print before the 1960s. Of the 113 poets McBreen catalogues, more than half published their first collections in the 1990s. Salmon, who publish this volume, have published more first collections by women than any single publisher during that decade. Other publishers such as Lagan Press and Coisceim stand out too. The anthology points to a need for a more critical evaluation of the breadth of Irish women's poetry. Another question that needs to be looked at is a seemingly persistent division between Irish language women poets - and the canon of women's poetry generally.
Louise C. Callaghan's contribution to McBreen's anthology, `The Palatine Daughter Marries a Catholic' is the poem that stands out in her first collection, The Puzzle-Heart. The poem is a crisp and elegant treatment of dissidence and perseverance, expressed with a precise lyricism: "Now I have not the least sense of place,/never wear the same colour twice.
The rhythm is rooted in an half-articulated resistance which marks Callaghan's most engaging poems. Other poems leave too little unspoken, and sometimes seem over-familiar in assuming the complicity of the reader, but such variation is unavoidable in a collection which gathers the work of a decade.
Kathy Cremin lectures in English literature at the University of Bradford.