Sir, - Frank McCourt, in his June 20th column "Green in New York," laments that the New York Irish community has yet to produce "the voice of the poet".
Perhaps humility has forced Frank to overlook himself and his brother, Malachy, both of whose prose creations offer poetic flights that have refreshed the literary air here in America. But I fear that Frank's contention that, for whatever reasons, poets of Irish or Irish-American extraction are not addressing the experience of being Irish in America may lead to an accepted truth, when I think the opposite is the case.
Last year, I was editor of a book called The Irish in America. Both McCourts have essays in the book, as do Maeve Binchy, Pete Hamill, Tom Flanagan, Mary Higgins Clark and many others. In an attempt to chart the expanse of Irishness in America, we looked at politics, sport, religion, theatre, fiction, and also poetry. And what we found was a remarkable trove of poetic engagements with being Irish in America: Robert Creeley, discovering his Irish side; Derek Mahon, writing about New York City in his collection The Hudson Letter, from which we selected his great poem "To Mrs. Moore at Inishannon". We made use of several poems by Cork-born Greg Delanty, who now teaches in Vermont. His books Southward, American Wake, and the just-released The Hellbox Fall deal unblinkingly with being an Irish person living in America, with many of the poems set in New York City.
There are other examples, too, among them Eamonn Wall's "Dyckmann 200th St", about life as a young Irishman in the Bronx. And if one allows the poetry of the "narrowback" not to be narrow-mindedly about only Irishness, then the universe widens to include former Poet Laureate, Robert Hass, whose mother is from Ireland, or the late Frank O'Hara, perhaps the quintessential New York poet. There is Galway Kinnell, too, whose dark lyricism is a perfect mixture of Yeats and Kavanagh, and Eamon Grennan, who lives up the Hudson River, north of New York City.
Just as it is a shame to measure the value of any people by the extent to which they write about themselves, it is similarly so to overlook the often subtle ways in which people signal or betray just who they are. And there is more of it going on among Irish poets in America than Frank suggests. - Yours, etc., Michael Coffey,
New York.