Volume 38, Number 10 · May 30, 1991
Slouching Toward Bethlehem
By John Banville
Selected Poems
by Derek Mahon
Viking/Gallery in association with Oxford University Press, 194 pp., £14.99
Madoc: A Mystery
by Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 261 pp., $19.95
How is it that Northern Ireland, a little state within a state with fewer than two million souls, a not inconsiderable portion of whom, split into two tribal factions, spend much of their time and energies at each other's throats, has managed to throw up a volume and variety of poetic talent which countries twenty times the size would, and indeed do, find hard to match? This is not a rhetorical question; over the past decade or so it has been a topic of continuing and at times passionate debate, within Ireland, and sometimes outside, too. Even as I write, the opinion columns and the letters pages of The Irish Times are crackling with a furious exchange of fire over an essay in a recent edition of the newspaper questioning Seamus Heaney's right to his pre-eminent position in the Irish—and international—pantheon. Poets still matter here—more, alas, than poetry does.
Review, 3601 words
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