Volume 39, Number 12 · June 25, 1992
Irishness
By John Bayley
Seeing Things
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 107 pp., $19.00
The Rough Field
by John Montague
Wake Forest University Press, 95 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Mount Eagle
by John Montague
Wake Forest University Press, 75 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Gorse Fires
by Michael Longley
Wake Forest University Press, 51 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Yeats's words have been well heeded. English poetry written by Irish poets has a higher standard of perceived craftsmanship—usually indeed a very much higher standard—than the general run of poems produced today in England itself, or in America. Vernacular English, like old Latin, seems likely at some date to hive off into separate tongues and idioms, as spoken throughout the world, but unlike the Romance languages it will possibly keep most of its present forms. The 'best' English, that is to say its choicest and most precise speech, may in the future be spoken or written in Dublin or Edinburgh or Calcutta or New York. Or so people may say who take an interest in the language, read, or write poetry in it. Who knows?
Review, 2753 words
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