Review of Questioning Ireland in The Irish Times:
Perhaps since Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, poets have been using prose to understand how poems and poetry work. Something about the procedures of prose, its civilities and solidity, render it a serviceable means to tease out the more excitable properties of poetry and the ends they might serve.
Some poets use prose as a rhetorical crowbar with which to prise open their locked boxes of poems; others take a flightier approach, grafting creative fizz and sparkle on to the lumpier business of sentences and paragraphs. For both, prose may offer an earnest way of trying to think about (and possibly answer) questions posed by poems.
“We were all young once… and full of religious zeal to save Irish poetry from its own limitations,” writes Thomas McCarthy in an essay on Harry Clifton. Exactly what those limitations might be is left uncatalogued, McCarthy being a critic of uncommon generosity. Even the book is magnanimous, featuring 73 essays from almost 50 years, from 1978 to 2022. It’s a life’s work, and a good-natured and welcoming life at that: you’d go a long time before you’d find as positive a take on Irish poetry, or as warm a response.
Though the volume’s title may promise a wider lens, one will look in vain for a questioning of Ireland’s contemporary scandals (clerical and institutional sex abuse, the Magdalene laundries, Tuam babies, etc – and what a dark shadow is cast by that “etc”): it is poetry, poets and notable novelists that are the subjects here.
For McCarthy, nothing if not an idealist, poetry’s beauty is its “redemptive nature”, (as he writes in an essay on Annemarie Ní Churreáin). But the best poetry is also “the most purposeful”, a good part of that purpose being humanistic, as this most humane of essayists attests.
Preferences do sneak through and if, at times, the book seems less to question Ireland than to affirm Cork, perhaps this partisan adherence is to be expected. One whole section is devoted to The Question of Cork and if some of the subjects seem on the arcane side, even for so dedicated a librarian, two companion pieces on Sean Dunne confirm the value of the memorial impulse and its re-collected praise.
The Question of Women’s Poetry may not be quite so neatly answered and may indeed raise more questions than even this book can accommodate. One might be why poetry by women should be herded into a separate chapter while that of men is allowed to roam freely over the Irish poetic plain. The Question of Men’s Poetry is, apparently, one that needs neither asking nor answering.
As with any anthology spanning such a wide time-frame, the significance or, indeed, relevance of some of these essays’ subjects will have dimmed in the intervening years. The Party, as a term, may now need a footnote and, knowing what we now do about cash for ash, would anyone argue (as McCarthy did in 2012), that post Celtic-Tiger economic catastrophe would have been averted had Ulster “been in charge”? But this volume’s longer view of canonical writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Eavan Boland, and the close-up essays on younger poets not yet obliged to be reconfigured by the tradition, nicely balance scrutiny with enthusiasm.
If occasional notes of hyperbole creep in (”Here is all the art of poetry you will ever need”, he writes of Ciaran Carson, who would probably have been first to puncture that inflationary balloon), there is also a nicely counter-balancing humour (which pits Rudyard Kipling as “the Enoch Powell of poetry”, or recounts Muriel Spark setting fire to one of McCarthy’s own “execrable poems with her long cigarette”). What comes across most strongly is a clear-eyed understanding of how the best writing succeeds in style, substance and effect.
Cheery, enthusiastic and kind, McCarthy remains an indefatigable advocate for Irish poetry. This compendium shows him at his most unstinting best.
— Vona Groarke, The Irish Times
