Sweet Cork of Thee

On the Banks: Cork City in Poems and Songs

edited by Alannah Hopkin

(Collins Press, €17.99)

WITH deep affection and recollection

  I often think of the Shandon bells,

Whose sounds so wild would, in days of childhood,

  Fling round my cradle their magic spells.

On this I ponder, where’er I wander,

  And thus grow fonder, sweet Cork, of thee.

The poem or rather song Shandon Bells by that wandering son of the Church, ‘Fr Prout’, otherwise the ex-Jesuit Francis Sylvester Mahony. His sentiment sum up the feelings of generations of Cork people about their city, which if the world were rightly run could be the capital of Ireland. (Of course, if it is rightly run, no-one in Dublin might think this might due to the number of Cork men in the Civil Service – there’s nothing better than  an old joke.)

The editor of this large and varied anthology of poems and songs is herself a native of Cork. Into these pages she has managed to pack all the familiar pieces about the city, by all the familiar names, which is only right and proper. But she has done more than that: she had added a host of less familiar items by many unfamiliar names.

So here is the comfort and joy of the much loved, along with the delights of new experiences and the discovery of writers to be looked out for in the future when their work comes the reader’s way.

The title comes from an anonymous song that was first heard at the Cork Opera House in 1933. This gives a clue to the contents in a real way, for much of it is from recent times and younger poets. But not for Alannah Hopkins a tame reprise of Victorian stuff. The result is amusing and astringent by turns, poems with sharp observation, songs with the sense of real people in them.

And there are real finds early poems by Frank O’Connor (or Michael O’Donovan as he was then) which have not be published before.

The book is so original and entertaining, that her publishers should set her to work at once on a prose counterpart – an anthology which would have to contain something from Robert Gibbings and from sculptor Seamus Murphy’s Stone Mad, Cork classics of the first order, however old they may be.

And a final thought for Dubliners: James Joyce’s father was a Cork man. If he had chosen to stay in the city and run his inherited properties soberly rather than moving up to Dublin to play the part of company secretary to a distillery in which he had a share, Ulysses might be set not in Dublin, but along the banks of  Jim’s own lovely Lee.