Seeing Wales Whole: Essays on the Literature of Wales: In Honour of Meic Stephens by Sam Adams (review)

Abstract

YES,31, 2o00 YES,31, 2o00 have adroitlyavoided earlierby including only translators).There is a logic to this epilogue though;Heaney and Mahon arepresent as representativesof what Mahon (who has the last word and is the book's hero in brief) in his tribute-poem to MacNeice calls Irish poetry's 'fragile, solving ambiguity', and Boland and Ni Dhomhnaill as distinguished culminations of the tradition of women poets traced throughthe book. In fact, although this kind of loose representativeness can be claimed for Schirmer'sbook, this is not where its primaryvalue lies. The narrativeit offersis a full one, from Swift to Richard Murphy, but it will be most valued as a useful referenceworkon poets who have had lessthan theirdue attention. Schirmerisbest knownfor his workon Austin Clarke,but (althoughClarkespanstwo chapters,like Yeats)he is not allowed to dominate here. Because the book is a long seriesof useful pen-pictures('of nearlya hundredpoets', its blurbproudlyclaims),it does not offer any original critical line. A measure of its orthodoxy, for example, is the frequent recourseto the ratherunscepticalcompound adjective'Irish-Ireland'for any sortof nationalist or Gaelic perspective post-19goo0. What is most useful is the attention to writersof allperiodswho tend to remain as names in most accounts of Irishpoetry, especiallywomen writerssuch as Mary Barber(I69-I 757) and Dorothea Du Bois (1728-74) in the first (and fullest) chapter who emerge as writers of real satirical edge. (Here Schirmerwiselyfollowsthe canon establishedby Roger Lonsdale.)Two hundred years later we have another powerful woman's satire, Blanaid Salkeld's remarkablelong feministpoem Fox'sCovert (I935): 'Fromthe cold and wild merman I have concealed well, IMotherly-wise.' There are also useful introductions to the half-familiar:to F. R. Higgins, for example, or Thomas MacGreevy who increasinglylooks the most importantof the semi-canonical Irish poets of the mid-twentieth century. There are good chapters too on some majorfigures:Goldsmith, Moore, and Swift himself, and on the poets of TheNationamongst writers somewhat censoriously headed 'Ireland Politicized'. The latter chapter gives proper significance to important figures such as Denis Florence McCarthy and the eloquent, metricallyexpert EdwardWalsh.And there is a reclamation of some accomplished eighteenth-century anonymous writing in Chapter 2. If this handsomelyproduced book is to become the standardworkof referenceit aspires to be, it will need some fairly vigorous sub-editing before its next edition. Disfiguringerrorsoccur throughout. The Irish is mostly carefullychecked, but the 'Bonnan Bui' goes awry. Still, the blurb'sclaim that this is 'thefirstbook of its kind' is reasonablebecause of the exhaustivenessof its coverage of the case for continuity in Irishpoetry from the eighteenth centuryto the present, even if it does not change the groundson which thatpoetry is canonized. WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD BERNARD O'DONOGHUE SeeingWalesWhole.EssaysontheLiterature of Wales:InHonour ofMeicStephens. Ed. by SAM ADAMS. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. I998. x + 224 pp. ?25. The main title of this Festschrift describes the vision of Meic Stephens, rather than the essays it contains. Only the opening biography is specificallydevoted to him; but a book on the literatureof Walesis a book about his life'swork. Emyr Humphreys writesfeelingly on 'Taliesin'sChildren': 'we all owe a debt of honour to our seniorlanguage. By being more or less irrelevantto power, profitand prestige, it has gone a long way to stockpile a spiritual inheritance to sustain us have adroitlyavoided earlierby including only translators).There is a logic to this epilogue though;Heaney and Mahon arepresent as representativesof what Mahon (who has the last word and is the book's hero in brief) in his tribute-poem to MacNeice calls Irish poetry's 'fragile, solving ambiguity', and Boland and Ni Dhomhnaill as distinguished culminations of the tradition of women poets traced throughthe book. In fact, although this kind of loose representativeness can be claimed for Schirmer'sbook, this is not where its primaryvalue lies. The narrativeit offersis a full one, from Swift to Richard Murphy, but it will be most valued as a useful referenceworkon poets who have had lessthan theirdue attention. Schirmerisbest knownfor his workon Austin Clarke,but (althoughClarkespanstwo chapters,like Yeats)he is not allowed to dominate here. Because the book is a long seriesof useful pen-pictures('of nearlya hundredpoets', its blurbproudlyclaims),it does not offer any original...