SOURCE: A review of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, in Review of English Studies, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 152, November, 1987, pp. 592-93.

In the following review, Pyle offers a tempered assessment of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, citing shortcomings in Kinsella's omission of women poets and several twentieth-century figures.

Just under thirty years ago The Oxford Book of Irish Verse first appeared, edited by Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox Robinson, an anthology that claimed it was ‘going back to the earliest times’ (otherwise the seventeenth century) and ‘finishing the day before yesterday’. The last poet to be represented in that collection was Thomas Kinsella. Thomas Kinsella, himself, is editor of The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse: but his view of ‘Irish verse’ is quite different from that of the former editors. For Kinsella, who, interestingly, omits Donagh MacDonagh from his selection along with many other expected...