Reading the Sunflowers in September by Mary O'Donnell; New Selected Poems 1966-1987 bySeamus Heaney; The Love Poems by W. B. Yeats; A. Norman Jeffares; A Golden Treasury ofIrish Poetry A.D. 600 to 1200 by David Greene; Frank O'ConnorReview by: Peter DenmanIrish University Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, Special Issue: Contexts of Irish Writing (Spring -Summer, 1991), pp. 154-156Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484412 .

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Mary O'Donnell, Reading the Sunflowers in September. Galway: Salmon Publishing, 1990. 122 pages. IR?8.00 (hardcover), IR?4.95

(softcover). Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1966-1987. London: Faber and

Faber, 1990. x + 246 pages. ST?11.99 (cased), ST?4.99 (paperback). W.B. Yeats, The Love Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares. Dublin: Gill

and Macmillan, 1990. viii + 146 pages. IR?5.99 (paper). David Greene and Frank O'Connor, A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry A.D. 600 to 1200. Dingle: Brandon, x + 214 pages. IR?9.95 (paper).

The four different places of publication of the above books, from

London to Dingle, tell their own story about the pattern of Irish book

production at present. From Galway and the increasingly assertive

Salmon Publishing comes the one collection of new poetry in this

batch, Mary O'Donnell's Reading the Sunflowers in September.

Although this is a first collection, Mary O'Donnell is no neophyte; she has been contributing to journals and anthologies for a number of

years, and had established both a voice and reputation in advance of

this book. Consequently her work gathered here has the assurance of

experience. Whether speaking through an adopted persona or out of

the self, her poems are characterised by an unsettling sensuousness, in

which the presence of a deeply-felt world is used to disturb the

complacencies of the customary. Simple activities such as dining,

cycling, even the acquisition dress-sense, become invested with

plurality; a monk, islanded in the chilly detail of his scriptorium, finds in calligraphy a passion that may be devotional or diversion

ary:

In dark, I see an unseen luminary. For all my reserve, I give myself, heart, soul, and scrawny limb, to the matter of light.

("Monk in the Outer Hebrides")

Indeed, one quibble about the poems in the book might be that when

a persona is adopted it still seems to speak with just the same degree and direction of intensity as those other pieces which may be

assumed to be written more directly from the poetic first-person. But

that is a consequence of the strength of an informing vision which

has established a presiding voice that does not allow for much

dramatic distance. This is a first collection of unusual power.

Seamus Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987 is a satisfyingly

plump volume which updates and replaces the Selected Poems 1965

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BOOK REVIEWS

1975, which has been through several reprintings since it first

appeared a decade ago. Both begin with poems from Death of a

Naturalist, and the one-year change in the terminus a quo seems to be

because the volume under review takes its dates from when the

poems were first gathered into a book, whereas the earlier Selected Poems began with the first printing of the poems in anthologies or

periodicals. Both selections are by Seamus Heaney himself. For the

period during which this New Selected Poems overlaps with its

predecessor, the representation of the first three collections, Death

of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark and Wintering Out, has been

trimmed to about half in each case, and the only poem added is

"Relic of Memory" from the second volume. The new selection from

North shows three additions and a significant deletion: out goes

"Kinship", a poem that has vexed more than one commentator with

its appeal to Tacitus to "report us fairly, / how we slaughter / for the common good", while in come "Bone Dreams", most of "Whatever

You Say, Say Nothing", and "Summer 1969", from the "Singing School" sequence that closed the volume. We now have five of the

six poems that make up that sequence, and while the short omitted

piece may not be of significance in itself, it would have been good to

have the grouping entire. Also rescued from the past are a few prose

poems from the pamphlet Stations published in Belfast in 1975, which add considerably to the understanding of Heaney's work.

These have not been reprinted before, and seeing them here caused a

pang, for I lent my own copy of Stations some years ago ..,. Later

volumes, from Field Work to The Haw Lantern, are more generously

represented, and there are five pieces from the version of Buile

Shuibhne, Sweeney Astray. The notes glossing some of the poems in

Station Island are mostly omitted. All in all this is an excellent

introduction for anyone wishing to catch up on Seamus Heaney's achievement so far, and leaves us looking forward to what his next

decade will yield.

At first sight, an anthology restricted to Yeats's love poetry seems to

offer an unnecessary parcel of his work, given that editions contain

ing all of the poems are available at more or less the same price.

Although likely to appeal in the first instance more to a reader on

the lookout for love poetry than to one engaging with Yeats, W.B.

Yeats: The Love Poems does in fact have two particular strengths. It

identifies an important strand of Yeats's work and allows us to see it

as element that underpins all his career; and Professor Jeffares sets

the poems in the perspective of Yeats's sexual and emotional life in

an Introduction that is succinct, tactful and comprehensive. There are

also forty pages of useful notes. "Love poem" is interpreted broadly,

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

so that the category includes both "A Prayer for my Daughter" and

the Crazy Jane verses. The poems are grouped under headings that

are at times thematic, at times indicative of the volumes from

which they are taken, but overall the chronology is preserved.

Finally ? and nothing to do with the poetry

? someone should take

both Faber and Faber and the publishers of this volume aside and

speak gently to them about the idiocy of their "penny-off" pricing.

A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry A.D, 600-1200 is a welcome

publication of an anthology originally issued by Macmillan in 1967.

It gives a lively selection of more than fifty poems in Old and Middle Irish, each prefaced by a brief note of commentary and

followed by a translation into English. Among them are "The Nun of

Beare" (more usually translated as "The Hag of Beare" or "The Old

Woman of Beare"), the brief lyric on "Winter", "The Scholar and his

Cat" about Pangur Ban, and a selection of triads. This is a standard

collection making available work from a formative period of Irish

literature. One drawback, carried over from the original edition, is

that the English versions are not on the facing pages but are placed at the end of the Irish texts in each case; given that this volume is

intended for readers unfamiliar with Old Irish, the layout makes

any flitting from the struggle with the original to the haven of translation an unwieldy process.

PETER DENMAN

Paul Muldoon, Madoc ? A Mystery, London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

261 pages. ST?14.99 (paper ?7,99).

"Seven minnows to one anaconda" might sum up the unusual propor tions of Paul Muldoon's new volume Madoc ? A Mystery. Since Why Brownlee Left Muldoon's volumes have opened with short poems and

concluded with long sequences, but, in this case, the long poem like a

giant anaconda consumes not only the minnows but even, it would

seem, the previous volumes. It is "Madoc", the poem, which will

obviously command most critical attention. It tells how Coleridge and Southey, as they wanted briefly in real life to do and as they certainly never could have done, pack their bags, cross to America, and found a Utopian commune by the river Susquehana. The story is related in snippets of action ? a man catches a fish, the fish coughs up a ring, a hunter skins a bear, the bearskin hunts him. In addition, there are maps, cryptograms, and all manner of clues* Replete with real people, bereft of real characters, the plot is entirely unlikely and yet surprisingly logical. To follow what occurs in one reading

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