Edited by Lucy Collins, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2012, 316pp., ISBN: 978-1-7813-8001-7, £19.99 (Pbk)/ISBN: 978-1-8463-1756-9, £75.00 (Hbk).

Imagine you are an undergraduate taking a course on twentieth-century Irish poetry. By midterm, you’ve traced Yeats’ career from mythology to modernism. You’ve read Pearse’s blood-soaked nationalist verse and Kavanagh’s unsentimental portrayal of rural Irish life. You’ve crossed the border and studied Northern Irish poetry, exploring Heaney’s and Mahon’s political allegiances. You’ve even read translations of Irish language poems by Eoghan Ó Tuairisc and Máirtín Ó Direáin. Certainly, you’ve learned a lot. Would you notice what was missing from your class? Would you think anything of the complete absence of women?

Lucy Collins’ edited anthology Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 is a landmark achievement that attempts to correct a century of oversight in the publishing industry and the classroom. In a fifty-page introduction that could stand alone, Collins carefully outlines the sociopolitical contexts the poets engaged with in their lives and writing. Dividing the period of her collection into four parts, Collins’ introduction guides the reader through the minefield of changes taking place in Ireland from 1870 to 1970. Change is the key concept for Collins, on both a micro and macro level. She is devoted to showing how a poet has evolved throughout her career, opting to include more poems from a smaller number of poets. She also highlights their differing treatments of sweeping political, religious and social shifts.

The century Collins mines saw a war for independence, a civil war, large-scale urbanisation, mass emigration, a renewed commitment to Catholic doctrine, and the vote for women. Together, the collected poems demonstrate deep political and environmental activisms, provide lyric meditations on motherhood and friendship, and explore the emerging tensions between rural and urban life. Ranging from formally conventional to experimental, many of the more subversive poems interrogate the fraught relationship between nation and gender.

In ‘Any Woman’, for example., Katharine Tynan’s short, declarative sentences coupled with active verbs suggest the speaker derives power from a domestic role: ‘I am the house from floor to roof, / I deck the walls, the board I spread;/I spin the curtains, warp and woof, /And shake the down to be their bed’ (p. 95). Fifty years later, Eva Gore-Booth reacts against women’s relegation to the domestic sphere. In ‘Women’s Rights’, Gore-Booth merges her political activism with engagement in poetic tradition: ‘Frozen, frozen everywhere / Are the springs of thought and prayer / Rise with us and let us go/ To where the living waters flow’ (p. 125). Beginning the stanza with an allusion to Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and closing, as Collins’ footnote reminds us, with ‘echoes’ of Yeats’ ‘The Lake of Innisfree’, Gore-Booth claims a poetic inheritance that transcends national boundaries. Mary Davenport O’Neill also takes up the Yeatsian tradition. In ‘The Bell’, emerging modernist forms and themes take on a new resonance: ‘It seems to me / I live perpetually / On the cloudy edge of the sound of a bell / For ever listening’ (p. 201). Here, the modernist preoccupation with temporality is imagined as the ringing of a bell, an evocatively Catholic sound in the Irish context.

Davenport O’Neill’s modernist flare was shaped by her close friendship with Yeats, a provocative detail included in the half-page biography Collins provides for each poet. These brief biographies offer further contextualisation and carry out the important task of recovering the poets’ lives alongside their works. Coupled with her exquisite introduction, Collins’ own writing often shines as brightly as the poets she champions. Additional paratextual materials in the two appendices fill in the gaps necessitated by the anthology genre. As she is dedicated to representing the trajectory of each poet’s career, Collins’ anthology must leave out many other talented women. Appendix 1 is evidence of the author’s commitment to claiming and reclaiming Ireland’s female poets, and provides a more exhaustive list of women writing Irish poetry from 1870 to 1970, accompanied by a few sentences of context and biography.

Appendix 2 speaks to Collins’ desire to embed the poets within the context of their times, offering a year-by-year timeline of publications and world events. Coupling Blainard Salked’s Hello Eternity and Eva Gore-Booth’s Selected Poems with Yeats’ The Winding Stair and Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship makes a powerful statement on the page. Collins’ implicit argument is twofold: that the collected poets were deeply linked with both Irish literary and global political contexts, and that their work is as deserving of study as the more canonical volumes.

Not all paratextual material is created equal, however. Collins is too quick to conflate curiosity with confusion. She takes some of the fun out of reading poetry by herself performing so much of the interpretative work in the heavy-handed footnotes. Take, for example., the first poem in the anthology, Elizabeth Varian’s lyric meditation on the longing for independence, ‘Watch and Wait’. Collins’ first note contextualises the poem’s maritime theme and usefully elucidates the Jacobite trope of impending overseas political assistance. However, her last note deprives the reader of the joy of luxuriating in the rhythm of Varian’s verse. Collins too readily pins the sound of the poem on her interpretation of its meaning, saying in a footnote, ‘Varian’s repetition of words and phrases, together with her use of alliteration, reinforces the tidal movement of the poem and the relentless passage of time. Her rejection of a fixed scheme of repetition or refrain emphasises the sense of flow she wishes to evoke’ (p. 58). For Collins, Varian’s stylistic choices reflect the Jacobite focus on the endurance of the long-suffering Irish people. But surely there are other ways to read Varian’s tidal rhythms. What about Irish maritime mythology? Or the gendering of the sea? Collins’ notes leave little room for a more open and expansive reading.

Throughout the anthology, many such footnotes cross from simple explanations into full on explications. These glosses may prove frustrating to an academic readership that delights in a poem’s multiplicity of meanings. But Collins’ notes also create a critical baseline: they provide key contexts and offer up a kind of pre-standardised interpretation. Perhaps such work is necessary for a project that seeks to correct the systematic exclusion of women writers from the Irish literary canon and simultaneously appeal to a broad readership.

When Field Day published the first three volumes of their seminal Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, the almost total absence of women rightly ignited a scandal. Eleven years passed before the fourth volume, edited by Angela Bourke, was released to mixed reviews. The Field Day Anthologies were both symptom and problem: forged in twentieth-century Ireland’s environment of casual misogyny, the anthologies carried this legacy of neglect into the twenty-first century. The Irish canon has not been structured around the Field Day Anthologies but rather around the problems they represent.

Collins sets herself apart from the Field Day Anthology and similar projects. In her introduction she gives a disturbing rundown of the exclusion of women writers in recent anthologies. A select few female poets, most notably Eavan Boland, have had to bear the burden of representation in most anthologies of twentieth-century Irish poetry. Such an exclusive focus has done a disservice to both the neglected poets and the poetic canon as a whole.

The centennial of the formation of Cuman na mBan, the Irish republican women’s paramilitary organisation, has generated a renewed interest in Irish women’s political engagement. Recent books on Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan, two poet/activists represented in Collins’ collection, speak to the desire to know more about women’s roles in the creation of the Irish Free State. Collins’ collection will complement these or any other study of twentieth-century Irish politics or poetics. Engaging for scholars, accessible for students, and enjoyable for all, Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 is a major accomplishment deserving of further critical and classroom study.