Abstract

Anyone who enjoyed Patrick Deeley's assured first collection, Intimate Strangers, will find here more of the same, continuing particularly some of the concerns in the first part of that book. The Stylized City offers selections from four earlier collections by John F. Deane, with revisions, and twenty nine new poems. The flowering Tree is a good selection of twentieth-century poems in Irish with translations into English, given a generous introduction by declan Kiberd. The Irish poems "of Faith and Doubt" gathered in The Cold Heaven are drawn from the last 170 years or so, but the nineteenth century is thinly represented - too much faith and not enough doubt, in public utterance at least.