The flowering of poetry from Northern Ireland in the last half-century continues to attract the attention of readers and critics. That a strong poetic movement coincided with a historic period of political agitation—a kind of civil war—raises questions that are just as interesting as they are ultimately perplexing. By general agreement the outstanding figure in this movement is Ireland’s Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. But Heaney has not been a solitary star, as I have pointed out more than once in these pages. His contemporaries Derek Mahon, James Simmons, and Michael Longley are well worth reading, as are the younger Northern Irish poets Mebdh McGuckian and Ciarán Carson. There is no uniformity among these poets. Mahon brings an Augustan technique and a keen satirical edge to his verse while Simmons’s talents including singing and song-writing. His “Ballad of Claudy”—less nuanced than Heaney’s poems about similar atrocities—was an expression of plain outrage against the murderous ways of the ira. The song found a niche in the popular imagination: you can find Simmons singing his ballad on YouTube. At least one poet from the Republic of Ireland should be mentioned—Paul Durcan, whose work occupies a necessary space between “pure” poetry and journalism, a combination of which we have few examples in the United States.

The ira began murdering people in response to a genuinely unfair distribution of opportunities for the Catholic minority in the province, sparked by Bloody Sunday, when British troops shot and killed unarmed demonstrators. But both sides in