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Irish Poems
Irish Poems is a treasury of poetry from the Emerald Isle, stretching back fourteen centuries.
From the romantic ballad to the rebel song, from devotional Christian verse to revivals of ancient Celtic myth, poetry has long been Ireland’s most eloquent response to its turbulent and colorful history. Irish Poems gives us a dazzling selection from a long and distinguished poetic tradition, ranging from the earliest Gaelic bards up to the present. Organized around such themes as politics, religion, Gaelic culture, the Irish landscape, and matters of the heart, the poems collected here come from a wide range of writers old and new, including such literary giants as Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon, Evan Boland, Seamus Heaney, and many more.
From the romantic ballad to the rebel song, from devotional Christian verse to revivals of ancient Celtic myth, poetry has long been Ireland’s most eloquent response to its turbulent and colorful history. Irish Poems gives us a dazzling selection from a long and distinguished poetic tradition, ranging from the earliest Gaelic bards up to the present. Organized around such themes as politics, religion, Gaelic culture, the Irish landscape, and matters of the heart, the poems collected here come from a wide range of writers old and new, including such literary giants as Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon, Evan Boland, Seamus Heaney, and many more.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 18, 2016
3.5 stars
I picked up this book not only because I really enjoy reading poetry, but also because I've always been very interested in Irish culture, and I haven't read so much of their literature. Yes, I've read Wilde, Yeats and some Joyce, but I'm definitely not an expert, and I also wanted to get a feel of the lesser known Irish poets. It is quite difficult to review a poetry collection such as this one, because there were a lot of poems I enjoyed, but also a lot of others that didn't do it for me.
The book is divided into six different sections - respectively Religious Matters, Gaelic Matters, Political Matters, Place Matters, Experience Matters and Love Matters. And since it would be pretty complicated for me to go over each poem in each section, I've selected a few of my favorites that I think are most appropriate to give the feel of this collection. (I'm not including the lengthier poems, even though a few of them were really beautiful.)
LUNCH WITH PANCHO VILLA
'Is it really a revolution, though?'
I reached across the wicker table
With another $ 10,000 question.
My celebrated pamphleteer,
Co-author of such volumes
As Blood on the Rose,
The Dream and the Drums,
And How It Happened Here,
Would pour some untroubled Muscatel
And settle back in his cane chair.
'Look, son. Just look around you.
People are getting themselves killed
Left, right and centre
While you do what? Write rondeaux?
There's more to living in this country
Than stars and horses, pigs and trees,
Not that you'd guess it from your poems.
Do you never listen to the news?
You want to get down to something true,
Something a little nearer home.'
I called again later that afternoon,
A quiet suburban street.
'You want to stand back a little
When the world's at your feet.'
I'd have liked to have heard some more
Of this famous revolution. (...)
(Paul Muldoon)
DUBLIN
Grey brick upon grey brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals -
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.
This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.
The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.
She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.
Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me a time for thought
And by a juggler's trick
You poise the toppling hour -
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.
(Louis MacNeice)
THE NAMELESS ONE
(...) Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long
To herd with demons from Hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even death.
Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,
Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove. (...)
(James Clarence Mangan)
SNOW
The room was suddenly rich and the great
bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay that one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms
of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the
huge roses.
(Louis MacNeice)
HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silverlight,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
(W. B. Yeats)
Yeats' poetry always makes me feel immersed in a dreamlike atmosphere, but the one author I appreciated the most in this collection was definitely Louis MacNeice. I had never heard of him before, but he was apparently a friend of W. H. Auden (whose work I really like), and I look forward to reading more of his work. The collection was quite well-organized, even though I still sometimes found myself confused, since there were a couple of poems with Irish words that were not translated into English. Now, as most of us here, I do not speak Irish, and I still fail to understand why some words were translated, while some others weren't.
I usually say that everyone should read poetry, because it is not true that it's a genre that is 'not for everybody', but in this case I must say I am of a different opinion. Irish Poems is a collection that will mostly appeal to poetry lovers and to those interested in Irish literature, but it's not something I would recommend if you wanted to get into reading poetry for the first time.
I picked up this book not only because I really enjoy reading poetry, but also because I've always been very interested in Irish culture, and I haven't read so much of their literature. Yes, I've read Wilde, Yeats and some Joyce, but I'm definitely not an expert, and I also wanted to get a feel of the lesser known Irish poets. It is quite difficult to review a poetry collection such as this one, because there were a lot of poems I enjoyed, but also a lot of others that didn't do it for me.
The book is divided into six different sections - respectively Religious Matters, Gaelic Matters, Political Matters, Place Matters, Experience Matters and Love Matters. And since it would be pretty complicated for me to go over each poem in each section, I've selected a few of my favorites that I think are most appropriate to give the feel of this collection. (I'm not including the lengthier poems, even though a few of them were really beautiful.)
LUNCH WITH PANCHO VILLA
'Is it really a revolution, though?'
I reached across the wicker table
With another $ 10,000 question.
My celebrated pamphleteer,
Co-author of such volumes
As Blood on the Rose,
The Dream and the Drums,
And How It Happened Here,
Would pour some untroubled Muscatel
And settle back in his cane chair.
'Look, son. Just look around you.
People are getting themselves killed
Left, right and centre
While you do what? Write rondeaux?
There's more to living in this country
Than stars and horses, pigs and trees,
Not that you'd guess it from your poems.
Do you never listen to the news?
You want to get down to something true,
Something a little nearer home.'
I called again later that afternoon,
A quiet suburban street.
'You want to stand back a little
When the world's at your feet.'
I'd have liked to have heard some more
Of this famous revolution. (...)
(Paul Muldoon)
DUBLIN
Grey brick upon grey brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals -
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.
This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.
The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.
She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.
Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me a time for thought
And by a juggler's trick
You poise the toppling hour -
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.
(Louis MacNeice)
THE NAMELESS ONE
(...) Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long
To herd with demons from Hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even death.
Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,
Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove. (...)
(James Clarence Mangan)
SNOW
The room was suddenly rich and the great
bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay that one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms
of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the
huge roses.
(Louis MacNeice)
HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silverlight,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
(W. B. Yeats)
Yeats' poetry always makes me feel immersed in a dreamlike atmosphere, but the one author I appreciated the most in this collection was definitely Louis MacNeice. I had never heard of him before, but he was apparently a friend of W. H. Auden (whose work I really like), and I look forward to reading more of his work. The collection was quite well-organized, even though I still sometimes found myself confused, since there were a couple of poems with Irish words that were not translated into English. Now, as most of us here, I do not speak Irish, and I still fail to understand why some words were translated, while some others weren't.
I usually say that everyone should read poetry, because it is not true that it's a genre that is 'not for everybody', but in this case I must say I am of a different opinion. Irish Poems is a collection that will mostly appeal to poetry lovers and to those interested in Irish literature, but it's not something I would recommend if you wanted to get into reading poetry for the first time.
May 27, 2019
I will be honest, I didn’t understand a lot of these poems, and poetry in and of itself has never been one of my strong points. That said, I’ve always found poetry to be beautiful, and the thing about poetry is that there are so many different kinds, meant for different people. Here are my favorite ones from this book:
“The Fairies” – This is—obviously—about fairies, and not the nice kind. I’ve begun to have a certain fascination for fairies in the past couple of years, which are highly prevalent in Irish mythology. I also liked a lot of the nature descriptions in here, which is another thing I think about quite often when I think of Ireland.
“ ‘Tis the last rose of summer”—A very solemn poem where on the surface it’s just about Summer coming to an end and all flowers having died out (except the last standing rose), then deeper it seems to be a metaphor for someone wanting to leave the world because all of the people they love and care about are gone in some way or another.
“Dark Rosaleen”—I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what is going on in this poem. But I was interested all the same. I’m very curious about the meaning behind it (as I am with many poems in here). It has a very dark tone. I want to know who Rosaleen is!
“The Stolen Child”—Another fairy poem, sounds like the fairies are abducting a child underneath the promise of a happier world, unlike the human one that is “more full of weeping than you can understand.”
“Snow”—This one probably has a deeper meaning, but mostly to me it was a more lighthearted poem. It sounded very cozy ^.^ Snowy and cold weather, but warm inside with everything you need. 🔥☕
“Mid-term Break”—On the contrary, this one is pretty depressing. Midterm breaks are usually times people are looking forward to. I get the impression that this person, though, didn’t want to go home. My interpretation by the end of the poem (after realizing neither of the parents died) was that a child had died, perhaps the narrator’s younger sibling.
“Nocturne”—This is a good example of how you can make a poem and really weave words together even just when it’s about something as simple as a deserted quiet house. There is no big event or action in here, but it sounds just as poetic all the same.
“Turn Again”—I could be completely wrong, but this sounds like a nod to the history of Ireland and much of the turmoil that happened due to the conflict with the English.
“The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus On The Road Near Moone”—This one was extremely easy to follow, as it felt more like prose and a story than a poem :)
My people sure know how to write some interesting poetry 🍀
“The Fairies” – This is—obviously—about fairies, and not the nice kind. I’ve begun to have a certain fascination for fairies in the past couple of years, which are highly prevalent in Irish mythology. I also liked a lot of the nature descriptions in here, which is another thing I think about quite often when I think of Ireland.
“ ‘Tis the last rose of summer”—A very solemn poem where on the surface it’s just about Summer coming to an end and all flowers having died out (except the last standing rose), then deeper it seems to be a metaphor for someone wanting to leave the world because all of the people they love and care about are gone in some way or another.
“Dark Rosaleen”—I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what is going on in this poem. But I was interested all the same. I’m very curious about the meaning behind it (as I am with many poems in here). It has a very dark tone. I want to know who Rosaleen is!
“The Stolen Child”—Another fairy poem, sounds like the fairies are abducting a child underneath the promise of a happier world, unlike the human one that is “more full of weeping than you can understand.”
“Snow”—This one probably has a deeper meaning, but mostly to me it was a more lighthearted poem. It sounded very cozy ^.^ Snowy and cold weather, but warm inside with everything you need. 🔥☕
“Mid-term Break”—On the contrary, this one is pretty depressing. Midterm breaks are usually times people are looking forward to. I get the impression that this person, though, didn’t want to go home. My interpretation by the end of the poem (after realizing neither of the parents died) was that a child had died, perhaps the narrator’s younger sibling.
“Nocturne”—This is a good example of how you can make a poem and really weave words together even just when it’s about something as simple as a deserted quiet house. There is no big event or action in here, but it sounds just as poetic all the same.
“Turn Again”—I could be completely wrong, but this sounds like a nod to the history of Ireland and much of the turmoil that happened due to the conflict with the English.
“The Haulier’s Wife Meets Jesus On The Road Near Moone”—This one was extremely easy to follow, as it felt more like prose and a story than a poem :)
My people sure know how to write some interesting poetry 🍀
April 28, 2019
The best of the best. This is a book to be read frequently on an 'as needed' basis. And who does not need a poem to soften the hard edges of life as we sometimes know it?
This charming little book also provided me with a major discovery: that two of my favorite Van Morrison's songs are actually poems set to music.
"She Moved Through the Fair" by Padriac Colum and "On Raglan Road" by Patrick Kavanagh.
This charming little book also provided me with a major discovery: that two of my favorite Van Morrison's songs are actually poems set to music.
"She Moved Through the Fair" by Padriac Colum and "On Raglan Road" by Patrick Kavanagh.
March 6, 2022
Like most poetry anthologies, a few clunkers, a few beauties, and mostly just fine. Yeats, Heaney, Joyce, and many more I have not heard of from the past and (recent) present. One line from Heaney really struck me in these frightening times: "the voice of sanity is getting hoarse" (from "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing"). Poetry is lovely, and March always turns my mind and heart toward Ireland, Lent, and spring.
March 24, 2024
A great selection with a fascinating variety from old classics to underappreciated poems of living writers.
Personal favourites include The Archaeologist by James Simmons, Is it a Month by J. M. Synge, Sailing to Byzantium by Yeats, as well as Symposium by Paul Muldoon.
Personal favourites include The Archaeologist by James Simmons, Is it a Month by J. M. Synge, Sailing to Byzantium by Yeats, as well as Symposium by Paul Muldoon.
May 15, 2019
Brilliant anthology of some of the best ever poetry
October 24, 2021
This is a pretty volume of poetry but the poems didn’t do much for me.
January 14, 2023
Maybe it's because I've read a fair bit of Irish poetry before, but this didn't strike me as a particularly good collection, which is a bummer.
June 19, 2023
Decent collection of Irish poets.
May 16, 2024
Loved it very mellow and got the top rated poems in this book straight Irish Poetry right here
May 31, 2024
My favorite poem in this collection is The Stolen Child by W. B. Yeats.
August 12, 2014
I'll admit I've never been much of a poetry reader. But I picked up this small book of poems about Ireland and thoroughly enjoyed it. I don't think you can begin to appreciate Ireland without sampling its poetry. Poets have long been revered in that country and without sampling the poems of Ireland I don't think you can say you've truly been there. Many of the poems in this anthology are sad, gloomy, bordering on despairing. But given the history of that country it's not surprising. But they're all worth reading. I definitely recommend this book before, or maybe just after, a trip to Ireland.
August 12, 2017
I just don't have the attention span to give this book it's due. The few poems I did read were lovely.
May 1, 2017
A decent collection of poetry. I am not the biggest on poetry, but I want to change that. I am also fascinated by the Irish culture and history so I thought I would give this a shot. Well, I have learned I love 19th century and 20th century poets a LOT more than 18th century and past poets. I am just not keen on the style of language a lot of them used. So, I didn't LOVE all of the poems in here, but there is one poem I want to heavily highlight. "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats. I ADORE THIS SO MUCH. If you haven't read that poem, well, it is in here. Though, it is also free to read online so I hope you check it out. Other than that masterpiece of a poem, the rest are hit or miss, but the hits work really well! I do overall recommend it to those who are intrigued by it!
I am giving this one a 3 out of 5 stars.
I am giving this one a 3 out of 5 stars.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews