In Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity, Stan Smith has collected, revised, and updated a selection of essays on Irish poets dating from the 1970s to 2002, the earliest of which, the author modestly submits, “were regarded at the time as groundbreaking” (ix). Smith's purpose is to draw out “the specifically Irish implications of the account of Modernism” (x) charted in his 1994 book, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (London, 1994). This latest text shares much with Dillon Johnston's study, Irish Poetry after Joyce (Syracuse, NY, 1997), including its chronological organization and Johnston's contentions that “perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of Irish poetry resides in the dynamic relation between the poet and his tradition” (83) and that “Yeats and Joyce remain a major part of the tradition that their followers must revise and recreate” (11). Smith also begins his survey with the Irish high Modernists, including Beckett, and proceeds by arguing persuasively and elegantly for their abiding presence, whether as positive or negative influence, in the production of Irish poetry over the course of the twentieth century, by examining the work of Padraic Fallon, Austin Clarke, Brian Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin, Louis MacNeice, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and others.

Smith's close readings of the works are themselves prose poems, lambent with the reflected light and heat of the verse under scrutiny but also dazzling in their own right, evocative, and inspiring. However, perhaps ironically, considering the book's emphasis on the cosmopolitan, the readings here remain resolutely local. “History,” despite its terminal position in the volume's title, makes only a slender appearance in the text, and then almost exclusively as discursive practice. The claim is made from the outset for “two contrary impulses in Irish history” (1), and they are strictly exegetical: the past as assuasive “figment” or as essential story of who we are. “Both interpretations,” Smith observes, “have a common factor, discourse” (2). There is no denying the unusually urgent, exalted function of literary culture in the formation of Irish subjectivity and political identity, but this “specifically Irish” turn to the rhetorical and—or especially—the ahistorically aesthetic has itself an historical grounding. Smith neglects to mention Thomas Davis and the Young Irelanders of the 1840s or their project of cultural nationalism, so foundational to Yeats's political and literary development, and a project whose most prominent and active contemporary inheritor is Seamus Heaney, to whom Smith devotes two chapters.

The contentious legacy of Irish nationalism, which Smith argues Irish writers must confront through the figure of Yeats, the oppressive “grand narrative” or “prescriptive myth” of Irish identity, remains oddly truncated in this account. In it, modern Irish poetry's response to the past consists of merely formal assimilations and sublations that treat ideology as a “hermeneutic crisis” (19). This critical aporia may be related to another presence silently stalking the margins of the text—Ireland's experience of colonialism. Smith's study seals twentieth-century Irish poetry off from its nineteenth-century origins as hermetically, and no doubt for the same reasons of political hygiene, as it seals the “Troubles” off from their long incubation over centuries of Britain's occupation of Ireland, even though the Northern Irish conflict cannot completely escape notice when so many of the poets under review are from the North. Thus, the frequent reference and recourse made in modern Irish poetry to the politically charged traditional genres of aisling and ballad, and tropes such as Dark Rosaleen and the Hag of Beare receive no attention, even when these elements appear in quoted passages of verse. The more mundane particulars affecting twentieth-century Irish literary history are elided nearly as completely. The uninformed reader would not learn, for example, about the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929, the establishment of the Censorship Board in 1930, or that many of the writers Smith discusses lived through the “Emergency,” as the Second World War was known in Ireland. The issue of audience for Irish writers has always been fraught, but such materialist preoccupations as distribution and profit are not allowed to obtrude here, and, as a result, the crucial contributions made to the development of modern Irish poetry by journals in the Republic and in the North, like The Bell, Envoy, Lagan, Rann, and the Crane Bag, among others, go unremarked.

What, then, is “specifically Irish” about Smith's account? What comprises the Irishness shared by the poets surveyed? Irishness is a rarefied given, balanced on the book's recurring conceits of the hyphenate and the interstitial, when it is not simply a lost and absent quality. Certainly the Irish language figures at best as receding, only atavistically important to Irish verse, responsible for its distinctive “doubleness,” explained repeatedly by quoting the by-now stock “tundish” scene from Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist. But, in fact, there is a diverse, vibrant body of Irish-language poetry currently being produced by poets like Louis de Paor, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. This escapes Smith's notice as does the fact that several of the poets he does consider have translated Ní Dhomhnaill. The most alarming lacuna in a book about modern Irish identity and poetry, however, is the almost total omission of women poets. One woman, Medbh McGuckian, appears in the “Poets of the Postmodern” chapter and is given three and half pages. While gender and feminism each receive a single passing reference, no reference of any kind is made to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan, or Eavan Boland, arguably the Irish poet best known, after Heaney, outside of Ireland. Needless to say, no explanation is proffered for the absence of significant women poets in the Irish tradition until late in the twentieth century. One could almost suspect the tacit approval of such an absence, but it is more likely too tendentious a concern for the text's Arnoldian conceptions of poetry and critical “disinterestedness.” This book is indeed full of “sweetness and light,” a beautifully written work that offers compelling, insightful readings of individual poems, but which leaves them stranded, finally, between fantasy and history.