Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern ed. by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

Reviewed by: Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern ed. by Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair Peadar Kirby (bio) Samuel K. Fisher and Brian Ó Conchubhair (eds.), Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern (Winston-Salem NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2022), 963 pages. The title of this formidable tome comes from Seathrún Céitinn's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn in which he writes 'do bhrígh gurab i nduantaibh atá cnáimh agus smior an tseanchusa, measaim gurab oircheas dam cinneadh mar úghdardhás air' ('forasmuch as the bone and marrow of history are to be found in poems, I think it altogether fitting that I take them as my authority'). This sets a very distinctive and indeed unusual objective for this anthology: on the one hand, the editors assemble a collection of 183 poems from some 1,400 years of writing in Irish to illustrate 'the unconquerable vitality with which poets in Irish have responded to the world as they found it, confident enough to borrow from outside their own tradition and confident enough to remain within it even as they changed it'; on the other, however, they are also offering these poems as a privileged source for a view of the troubled history of our island from the inside as it was lived, reflected on and expressed by the Irish themselves. In their introduction to the second section on the bardic period (1200–1650), Peter McQuillan and Rory Rapple quote historian Brendan Bradshaw's view that bardic poetry is 'the only substantial body of contemporary documentary evidence available from inside Gaelic society'. The same could be said for most of the period from then until the early twentieth century, which emphasises just how uniquely valuable are these poems as historical sources. This takes on immense importance as so few of our historians speak Irish fluently enough to immerse themselves in the bone and marrow of the native culture and remain limited to English languages sources that are inevitably extremely limited as to the life experience accessible through them. As with so many anthologies that span distinct historical periods, this anthology is divided into sections that correspond to the main phases of the Irish historical trajectory, each written by experts in the period. Altogether there are fourteen chapters grouped into four sections. The section titles illustrate the book's range (with distinct differences in each of the two languages): Tús an Traidisiúin/The Origins, Filíocht na Scol/Classical Poetry, Ré Nua: Polaitíocht agus Guth an Phobail/A New Order: Politics and Popularization, and Sprid na Saoirse agus Saoirse na Spride/In the Age of the Local and the Global. The periodisation chosen is also interesting as the editors argue that [End Page 407] 'neat chronological boundaries create a false impression of change over time in Irish poetry, as if once a target date was hit the entire tradition transformed wholesale'. Therefore an overlapping structure was chosen as 'politics and culture are messy and malleable' and the editors want to underline 'the powerful continuities in the tradition of Irish-language poetry'. As one would expect, this overlapping structure applies particularly to the troubled sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with sections on Reformation, Conquest, and Exile (1534–1611), Poetic Response to Plantations (1609), Poetry, Politics and the Apocalypse (1641–1660) and Poems of the Restoration and the War of the Two Kings (1660–1691). Within each chapter, every poem has its own historical note. But unlike most anthologies, these commentaries focus as much (if not more) on the poems' role in some of the major themes that characterise different periods as on the internal qualities of the poem, though this is not entirely lacking. In this way, the editors and their team of twenty-two contributors succeed admirably in opening up each poem as a fragment of our lived history. It is noteworthy that contributors come not just from Irish universities but from Harvard, Notre Dame, Connecticut, Boston, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Prague and the Sorbonne, attesting to the global reach of the Irish language today. This range of contributors...