Book Review: Ireland's Other Poetry

Ireland's Other Poetry. Anonymous to Zozimus, by John Wyse Jackson and Hector McDonnell (Lilliput Press)

Just so you know, I'm a bit of a poet myself. Once I spent an entire day composing haiku about one of my favourite political specimens. My proudest was the following: “The dual mandate/Big veins burst in fatter necks/Double Healy-Rae”. My favourite poets are Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and anyone who's ever written a dirty limerick and meant it. In other words, this book may be Ireland's 'outsider' poetry, but it's the stuff most worth reading, especially considering Ireland's strong oral tradition.

By the end of the eighteenth century, there was a clear distinction between the academic and the vernacular, but more than just silly recitations, the poems in this anthology are as essential to Irish literature, history and culture as Joyce and Beckett. It's too bad that humour is not more accepted as part of 'serious' art, when it is frequently as clever, if not more so in its avoidance of the obfuscating stuff that earns a place in the canon. And the real zeitgeist is in the urban streets and rural boreens.

Jackson and McDonnell have long been avid collectors of lowbrow and obscure poetry, and have already discovered enough gems to fill a library of compendia. This is a careful selection of favourites compiled, not as a book to read cover-to-cover, but for dipping into and out of again, maybe taking an inspired break to write your own. Or to sigh and flush, if you choose to keep it in the most vernacular room in your house, which could hardly be more apt if you're not embarrassed about chuckling as you go.

There are anonymous verses, 'lesser' poets, gems from Flann O'Brien (“The extraordinary thing about cows is/That they never wear trowsis”), Spike Milligan, and John Betjeman, a light lament from Seamus Heaney about the demise of Irish coinage, and lyrics from Christy Moore and Shane McGowan. Of course, there is 'A Scattering of Limericks', some deliciously filthy. But the best (to me) are poems that wee on the base of the ivory tower, like the anonymous 'ditty' from the 1920s that goes, “I'm a poet, God help me, and I must cry!/Genius goes with a watery eye./With a watery eye,/and a big bow tie;/I'm a poet, God help me, and I must cry!” Or, Who Killed James Joyce?, Patrick Kavanagh's send-up the Joycean scholarship industry: “What weapon was used/To slay the mighty Ulysses?/The weapon that was used/Was a Harvard thesis.”

I've always loved the playful approach to words and language in Ireland, the unpretentious lyricism of everyday speech, the ever-expanding horizons of vulgarity. In Ireland's Other Poetry, there is the dubious inclusion of lyrics to a Richie Kavanagh tune and there is the tragic exclusion of Dublin's Vinnie Caprani, but my frustration that I cannot reproduce the entire book here is enough to be sure that a pint of plain (verse) is your only man.