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“... How you do go on About the politics Of Stockholm – About how too controlled, Too predictable Are the politics of Stockholm; How the politics of Stockholm Are like the citizens of Stockholm, Too careful, too clean. On, on, you go About the Swedish Academy; How the waters are awash With bobbing condoms. I doubt – but keep The thought to myself – That condoms ‘bob’, Whatever their content Or lack of content ...”

“... chuckle Halfway between a revelation and a peep. Goodbye, Francis – see you soon See you soon, Paul – you cry out. In my car at your gate I perch in the dark Under the orange streetlight a gnat in an Astra Facing downhill to The Great Wall of China – Your local corner takeaway – and the Scots pines High above the Central Mental Hospital kremlin ...”

“... in one respect, though: something is happening in recent British and Irish poetry. Poets like Paul Durcan, Ian McMillan and Peter Didsbury (all well represented here) are pushing the form towards performance and gaudy narrative. Many of the poets are writing long, stringy lines reminiscent of the American poet C.K. Williams, or having cartoonish fun ...”

“... works written by men. Not that poems about parents, for instance, can’t also be love poems, as Paul Durcan’s Daddy, Daddy shows. Faced with the problem that so many poets of recent years have written movingly about their fathers – Tony Harrison, Craig Raine, Hugo Williams, Paul Muldoon, Michael Hofmann – ...”

“... of two hands, and here they are: Kavanagh, MacNeice, Kinsella, Montague, Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Durcan, Paulin, McGuckian. No Muldoon, we notice straight away, which is understandable, if regrettable. Muldoon is famous for his oblique approach to things, and we see this feeling for indirection at work in the prologue to Contemporary Irish Poetry – not a ...”

“... to make reader-reception – or the most effective propaganda? – our arbiter of war. Shades of Paul de Man, perhaps.It would, for instance, be both a pity and a lie if another Irish anthology. Troubled Times: ‘Fortnight’ Magazine and the Troubles in Northern Ireland I970-91,† had left out ‘what really happened’: its bleak ‘Chronology of Events ...”

“... factor, with a mere three pages of the conclusion lamely attempting to consider their interaction. Durcan, McCarthy and Redman are enthused mainly by the task of testing the thesis of the Donovan Commission of 1965-8 (of which McCarthy was Research Director): that strikes were largely a reflection of fragmented negotiating procedures, and in particular of ...”

“... in the town in 1946. I knew some of these people: Dan Bolger, for example, whose grandfather, Paul, had donated money in 1846. Dan Bolger had a shop in the town. It was hard to think of him, or any of these people, having grandparents who knew ‘bitter hunger, starvation and death’. Most of them had inherited property and exuded a certain ...”