Poets of Modern Ireland, by Neil Corcoran (University of Wales Press, £10.99 in UK)

Neil Corcoran's valuable book After Yeats and Joyce received less attention than it deserved from Irish critics, and he has also written a useful study of Seamus Heaney. The late poetry of Yeats provides his launching pad for the present volume, from where he goes on to consider the work of Austin Clarke, MacNeice and Padraic Fallon. The remaining chapters are largely taken up with consideration of contemporary Northern poetry, from Heaney to Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson; the Southern generation of Kinsella, Montague and Anthony Cronin gets little space (Cronin, in fact, is not mentioned at all). Nevertheless in spite of this obvious lacuna, this is a scholarly, thoughtful study which is well worth reading in depth.