SMALL PRINT:TEENAGERS AND poetry are like tea and biscuits . . . if the biscuits are narcissistic dross dunked in tea made by sharing a teabag to save money. When the Leaving Cert approached and Soundings was duly purchased (second-hand, with other people's doodlings therein), a world of words was thrown like confetti onto a sulking, pimply generation. Until then, anyone who hadn't written bad poems about existential blackness (c'mon, own up), could now read some of the greatest epics, stanzas and sonnets ever composed.
In an introduction to a new reprint of the book, Joseph O’Connor recalls “its awful cover like a hippy’s batik T-shirt”, the one most of us scrawled band names on. Spanning the 14th century (Chaucer) to the 1960s, it culminated with poems by Thomas Kinsella, the only living poet on its pages. It was edited by Gus Martin, who later lectured me in English at UCD, and it was at college I discovered Sylvia Plath and made a vital connection between the two.
Why wasn’t she in Soundings? Come to think of it, where were the women? Emily Dickinson, represented the sisterhood by feeling funerals in her brain and not stopping for death. No Aphra Benn, Eavan Boland or Amy Lowell? Dickinson, along with TS Eliot, flew the American flag, but overall it was a hugely Anglicised collection.
There’s also a bygone whiff, due to the lack of contemporary poets. The collection was never updated in its 26-year run and was officially retired, ironically, in the year Heaney (a huge omission) won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Despite its flaws, Soundingsencouraged my lifelong word-love and much of it stayed with me. As nail-chewing teens, we nodded sagely at Patrick Kavanagh's youthful rage in Stony Grey Soiland pitied Yeats' "tattered coat upon a stick". I still do.
Poetry rulz ok?
