Soundings: Poems we did for our Leaving Cert
If anyone had told the Leaving Cert-ers of long ago that some time in the future they’d be looking for a copy of the English poetry book that probably drove them demented at times, how they would laugh. Books involved in that landmark exam tended to be consigned to the bin, or the resale pile, as soon as was humanly possible afterwards. But we live in a nostalgic age, and for the last few years, fond reminiscences about a certain poetry book have cropped up from time to time on boards.ie. Someone at the publishing house obviously noticed because, here, just in time for the Christmas market, is the book that thousands loved to hate. All that’s missing is the graffiti.
Joseph O’Connor has penned a foreword to the new edition of Soundings. In it he writes: “Soundings was the book that brought poetry into hundreds of thousands of lives. It was virtual reality, decades before the internet. It took you to places unimagined by Twitter.” Poets featured in the book include Alexander Pope, John Keats, Emily Dickinson (the only woman included!), T.S. Eliot and Patrick Kavanagh. A final word from the late Gus Martin himself, included in his introduction to the seminal book: “One might add that, unless delight is behind the learning and teaching of poetry … the entire exercise is in vain.”
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