Volume 49, Number 8 · May 9, 2002
In the Puddles of the Past
By John Banville
Irish Classics
by Declan Kiberd
Harvard University Press, 704 pp., $35.00
Poetry & Posterity
by Edna Longley
Northumberland, England: Bloodaxe Books, 350 pp., $25.95(distributed in the US by Dufour Editions)
The ground bass of the great Irish melody is complaint. Successive waves of invasion by Celts, Norsemen, Anglo- Normans, English, have allowed us in Ireland always to lay the blame for the ills that beset us upon the Other; upon, indeed, a rapacious host of Others. Hence the acronym employed recently by the journalist and critic Fintan O'Toole: MOPE, that is, Most Oppressed People Ever. Yet as the historian Joseph Lee has pointed out, very many countries—for instance, in Eastern Europe during and after World War II—have suffered far worse injury to their populations and infrastructures than Ireland ever did, yet managed not only to survive, but to heal themselves and, in numerous cases, to thrive.[1]
Review, 3888 words
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