Let us first try to answer the obvious, practical questions. Is it a good book with lots of good poems in it? Yes ,you could take it anywhere. Does it give a reasonable picture of what is happening in Irish poetry since Clarke, Kavanagh and Devlin? Yes, almost. Does it do justice to the poets whom it chooses to represent that general picture? By and large, and with some reservations, yes. Does it exclude some poets whom we might reasonably hope would be represented? Yes, by God, it does. Are the reasons for these exclusions explained to our satisfaction, or at all? Not at all. So much for the catechismal overture.
  When practising poets are deputed to choose anthologies of their peers they must cope with curious, human pressures, personal, aesthetic, political. Yeats excluded such war poets as Wilfred Owen from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse on the grounds that they felt bound ‘to plead for the suffering of their men’ and, ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’. He preferred ‘swift indifferent men’ who didn’t give a damn, like Oliver Gogarty to whom he accorded seventeen lyrics. As if to prove himself of Gogarty’s party he inflicted a casual wound on Austin Clarke, from which the younger man never quite recovered, by excluding him altogether. He included Dorothy Wellesley and Margot Ruddock because he was currently infatuated with both, and found place for his latest guru the Shri Purohit Swami who was helping him to translate the Upanishads.
 Thomal Kinsella, in his recent Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986), having translated five centuries of Gaelic poetry into his own English style, treated the contemporary scene as a perfunctory afterthought, ‘a few poems that may confirm one of the themes or that have been personally important’. The coherence of his choices is evidenced in his last entry, Michael Hartnett’s ‘Farewell to English ‘ - still I wish he had included Brendan Kennelly. Paul Muldoon, in his Faber
 anthology, reduced the whole modern scene to six poets and having left out Longley, Kennelly and Richard Murphy, had at least the decency to exclude himself. Brendan Kennelly’s Penguin Book errs a little on the side of hospitality so that too many poets are represented by a single poem. Arguably the most balanced anthology of modern Irish poetry is Devin A. Garrity’s Mentor Book of 1965, done by a non-practitioner with no visible axe to grind.
 As for the present editors - they come to the task with hatchets honed. Among their voluntary exclusions are Desmond Egan, Micheal O’Siadhail, Dennis O’Driscoll, Dermot Bolger, Sebastian Barry, John F. Deane, Conleth Ellis, Paul Murray, Anne Hartigan and MacDara Woods. Eilean Ni Chuilleanain’s refusal to have anything of hers included is noted with regret in the notes on the contributors. Some of these exclusions are, to my mind, outrageous, but in poetry as in gastronomy one man’s meat is another man’s poison. The only perfect anthology is the one you select yourself.
 But, taken together, these exclusions call into question the editors’s stated ‘polemical purpose’ - to ‘correct imbalances created over the years by editors, publishers and critics, and to dispel the illusion that Irish poetry has been written exclusively by persons of Northern provenance’. A claim made more curious by the opening paragraph of their introduction which asserts that ‘contemporary Irish poetry has its figurative source ‘somewhere between "the mountains and the gantries" of MacNeice’s Belfast and the ‘;black hills’ of Kavanagh’s “Shancoduff”. That looks like pretty provincial provenance.
 Austin Clarke is accordingly dismissed from the field of influence as ‘something of a special case’. The explanation is couched in a sentence which I still find myself unable to make head or tail of, so I quote it in full:

His reputation has suffered many vicissitudes and, while the young Montague learned much from him, the tortured lyrics of Night and Morning (1938) and his too much neglected long poem, Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966) may now be seen as links in a chain connecting Joyce to Kinsella.

 Are we to conclude that the most technically accomplished of our poets has had little or no influence on his successors, or just on those beyond the planetary pull of the [?gantnes] and the drumlins? Or is it all part of the embarrassed shuffle of an enterprise that won’t come clean with its principles and prejudices? Is there a covert apology to SebastIan Barry and Dermot Bolger in stating that they have recently turned their energies with considerable success to other forms - fiction and drama’? Otherwise why draw attention to theIr exclusion? If the editors are really serious about the ‘vigorous exchange between contemporary Irish writers In Irish and English’ why ignore Micheal O’Siadhail who has written so well in both? In comparison with Kinsella’s, powerful overture to the Oxford Book or Montague’ vivid overture to his Faber Book this introduction is a poor thing, unworthy of the splendid body of poetry it introduces.
 It opens with a superb selection from Kinsella - placed first because of his ‘centrality’ and ‘iconic significance’ - and the subsequent choices from Montague, Murphy and Hutchinson are impeccable. The plaintive power of Murphy’s “Seals at High Island” and the lyric caress of Hutchinson’s “Malaga” providing that contrast of mood and climate that a skillful arrangement can so often deliver. Then follow Cronin, MacIntyre and Simmons with his telling subversion of the heroic in “From the Irish”:

Familiar things: you might brush against or tread upon
In the dally round, were glistening red
With the slaughter the hero caused, though he had gone.
By proxy his bomb exploded, his valour shone.

Shrewd choices from Desmond 0’ Grady, Kennelly and Heaney brings us to Longley, Deane and Grennan, three poets in whom technique is virtually flawless. Eamon Grennan is represented mostly by his most recent volume where he has opened his method to longer lines and expanded stanzas a development rewarded in his marvellous “Conjunctions” wherein New York’s City lights mirror the zodiac. Michael Hartnett leads on to Derek Mahon himself whose character grows with every new poem, deepens with every fresh reading. Michael Smith, with a few tantalizing miniatures, leads on to Eavan Boland whose allocation of seven poems I would have doubled. Entering increasingly on the risk area of self-analysis she has found intimate registers of voice to blend with her remarkable instinct for the precise visual image as themes of gender, race, class, memory and consciousness are probed and opened. To move from her hushed genre pieces to the windswept zaniness of Paul Durcan and his incomparable “Kilfenora Teaboy” is to realize what an extraordinary variety of individual talents our post Yeatsian tradition encompasses:

I’m the Kilfenora teaboy
And I’m not so very young ,
But though the land is going to pieces
I will not take up the gun;
I am happy making tea,
I make lots of it when I can,
And when I can’t - I just make do;
And I do a small bit of sheepfarming on the side
Oh but it’s the small bit of furze between two towns
Is what makes the Kilfenora teaboy really run.

After Durcan there are John Ennis, Richard Ryan, Hugh Maxton, Frank Ormsby, Ciaran Carson, Tom Paulin, Michael Davitt, Medbh McGuckian, Peter Fallon, Paul Muldoon, Harry Clifton, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Thomas McCarthy, Aidan Carl Mathews, Michael O’Loughlin, Peter Sirr and Sara Berkeley. Of these the most vivid is, of course, the Gaelic lyrics of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill translated in turn by Michael Hartnett, Medbh McGuckian and Michael Longley. Turning a page and finding Aidan Mathews’s “Minding Ruth” again was an emotional ambush, assuaged by the wit and tenderness of his “Spectrum” - so much depends upon a new washing-machine ... Peter Sirr’s “Beginnings” is impressively disturbing and Sara Berkeley’s “The Mass is Over” gives the book a poignant dying fall. Yes, it’s a good anthology but, as Mr Eamon Dunphy might put it, not a great anthology.