E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Irish poet-critic David Wheatley - pictured above - to its wind-blown pages this blustery November day.  Wheatley, one of Ireland's impressive younger literary figures, was born in Dublin in 1970, and is the author of four poetry collections with Gallery Press : Thirst, Mocke r, Misery Hill and A Nest on the Waves . He has edited the work of James Clarence Mangan , also for Gallery, and Samuel Beckett ’s Selected Poems for Faber and Faber. He often reviews for, among others, The Guardian Review section - where his reviews tend to be judicious and thoughtful, and non-representative of his edgier side.  Wheatley is - as many of his Irish generation are - an outspoken opponent of the Catholic Church, and a far-ranging (sometimes madcap) satirist, at least on the Internet, where he has run a lively blog.  In his combination of erudition,  sense of play, and seriousness, he makes a tantalising offer to the future, of growing into t...

Who is Oliver Reynolds ?  We might still be asking that - but a new review of his latest book, by David Wheatley , partly rescues Reynolds from something closely resembling benign neglect.  Odd, since he had four books with Faber, starting in the mid-80s, after winning an Eric Gregory Award, then the Arvon Prize - proof that nothing is sure in the house of poetry.  Now, Reynolds, perhaps eccentrically working, in middle-age, as an Opera House usher, has a new collection out, Hodge . He deserves readers.  Why does he not have them (much) anymore?  I suspect that the poetry world's indifference to many good and even excellent writers is partly connected to the social networks that, naturally, flow about publications - going to a launch one is reminded that most books receive the reception not of all their peers, but those known to the editors, publishers, and authors - if lucky.  And, as poetry circles widen and contract, with age and circumstance, some poe...

Irish poet-critic David Wheatley has written well and long on the Letters of Louis MacNeice - long a key link between the poetries of the Auden England and the later Muldoon Ireland - his influence as talky-yet-lyrical common man of the time with a wounded heart and a stained sleeve has made him a dour-if-erotic Anglo-Irish version of Frank O'Hara (his journals and letters ways of doing this and that with poems, instead of journalism); and he connects so many strands and styles, not least the pre and post war ones, that he can't be left out of anyone's core anthology of the last century; and a few of his lyrics are as good as anyone else's.  It is good to hear he wrote well and long himself, in the letter form.

David Wheatley , a leading Irish critic-poet of his generation (those born in the 70s), is one of the poets selected to appear in the latest - and from the looks of it, invaluable (or at least intriguingly copious) - anthology of "modern" Irish poetry to appear .  Cynics might say these anthologies are as regular as "bloody buses" - but then again, if anthologies usefully update and revise canonical thinking, each one subtly or not so subtly, shifting the relations between poems, then, the more the merrier.  Eyewear looks forward to reading this one, edited by Wes Davis .

While doing research yesterday, I came across the recently-published The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford, 2007), edited by scholar-poet Tim Kendall . It is a hefty tome - likely to stop a bullet on the front if held close to the heart - and one that presents itself like an academic survey of the field. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I came across the essay by David Wheatley (UK-based younger Irish poet-critic), which basically takes a sten gun to an anthology I edited in 2003, and mows it down with the frenzied precision of Violette Szabo . But Wheatley does not merit a medal, nor does this particular critical effort on his part mean his name will be carved with pride. Mr. Wheatley says this about 100 Poets Against The War (Salt, 2003) - perhaps the most infamous UK poetry book to come out of the post-9/11 landscape (to be current), one of the most widely discussed and read, and surely the most derided - and he says it with the same definitive, indeed,...