Shane Ross (Trinity College Senator and Independent TD (1981–). As we head into the 2020s and beyond, Anthony White’s directory of legislators is a most valuable and worthy contribution to Irish politics and is an indispensable reference book for all students and observers of this fascinating subject. Tim Ryan is editor and publisher of The Irish Times Nealon’s Guide to the 32nd Dáil and 25th Seanad. The Five Quintets, Micheal O’Siadhail (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2018), xvii+357 pages. It’s a giant symphony, with vast sweeping tunes and small lyrical moments, building to a sustained climax. It’s an intellectual, cultural and political history of the modern, Western world. It’s a portrait gallery with over a hundred sharply etched miniatures – Cervantes, Donne and Rubens all the way to Kierkegaard, Levinas and Ricoeur. And these are talking portraits, since the poet not only describes them and addresses them but lets them answer him back. It is, above all, a party, with dancing and delight, with the rhythms of the poetry setting our feet tapping and our hearts soaring. It is Micheal O’Siadhail’s long-awaited magnum opus, entitled with justifiable chutzpah The Five Quintets. Chutzpah, because, of course, the title echoes T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, and also because, unlike Eliot, O’Siadhail has added the definite article. Accept no alternatives: these are the Five Quintets, five poetic masterpieces of a type, scale and content which, I think it’s safe to say, has never before been attempted, let alone so magnificently accomplished. I am, of course, a fan. Full disclosure, I am also a friend. But I don’t expect to be challenged on the basic assessment that this is the most important largescale poem to be written in English since – well, since Eliot himself. How do they compare? It is much longer: Eliot’s quartets, spare and restrained, take up less than fifty pages of large print; Micheal’s exuberant sequence keeps us entertained for over 350. The playful poet of Prufrock became, in the Four Quartets, an austere, private soul, working through sorrows and struggles to attain a quiet and faithful resolution. O’Siadhail, in his introduction, explains that he always felt Eliot lacked a final move to ‘the joy and let-go of an imagined heaven’. That, indeed, is where O’Siadhail finishes up, in a bravura Studies • volume 108 • number 430 229 Summer 2019: Book Reviews performance which uses Dante’s form (terza rima, much more difficult in English than in Italian) to express his own Paradiso, with the poet sitting in on an enchanting discussion with five final heroes. Thus, where Eliot always gives the impression of gazing wistfully out on the world from an upstairs window, O’Siadhail is already out on the street, perhaps in Dublin or New York, hailing old friends, buttonholing new ones, sketching them in a few strokes, teasing them and probing their strengths and weaknesses, pausing in a café to debate the big issues of politics and economics, dropping in on a laboratory to see what the scientists have been up to, and always pulling it together in the flow and tide of a poetic mastery so easy that we might almost miss the many subtleties of form, rhyme and rhythm. Eliot ends with the light fading in a small, rural chapel; O’Siadhail ends in an imagined heaven where sunrise greets another day of elongated breakfasts and the delight of developing friendships. Nor is this simply an Irish version of Plato’s heaven, where the philosophers talk philosophy all the time. ‘Remember heaven is a playful place’, the mother of Jesus reminds the poet; and, as he contemplates the joy of his own life, he recalls a schoolboy rugby match when ‘years of training paid off dividends’in terms of ‘the ball I intercepted and so scored’. We can’t imagine Eliot doing that, let alone remembering it half a century later as a moment of heaven-anticipating joy. The five ‘quintets’ take us into the worlds, respectively, of the arts, economics, politics, science and philosophy/theology. The first and last one might expect, knowing O’Siadhail’s earlier...