Critical Essay | Critical Review by Hugh Kenner

SOURCE: "There's Music in the Ould Sod Yet," in The New York Times Book Review, January 26, 1992, pp. 3, 23.

In the following review, Kenner outlines the contents of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, assessing its strengths and weaknesses.

At four times the word count of the King James Bible, the new three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing makes an Irish Statement: We've been here from Time's Beginning, and we're silver-tongued. What else it states is harder to paraphrase, so tangled has been the long Irish story of co-opting some past to serve some present end.

Cu Chulainn for instance, a noted skull-basher; the way a scribe wrote the story down in Irish maybe a millennium ago, this hero, attacked by such a dog as needed to be held by nine men, simply "put one hand on the apple of the hound's throat and the other...
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