The Ulster Anthology (Blackstaff Press, £25, 752 pp) is a big book, heavy enough, in the words of its editor, Patricia Craig, “to knock some sense into the heads of bigots and belligerents”. If I were a different sort of Ulsterman, I’d be banging it on the heads of literary editors, most of whom have so far shamefully ignored it since it was published in November. But I’m with John Hewitt, the father of Northern Irish poetry: I’ve had enough of all those “whose ready instinct is for violence in word and act”.

Craig’s intention is to present to the people of Northern Ireland, in prose and poetry, “an enlarging picture of themselves and their surroundings”, and to “alert other readers to rarities of spirit or milieu, beyond the confusions and commotions, that might otherwise get overlooked”.

She succeeds on both counts. If you’re a native, you can remind yourself that, while the politics of your homeland may be hateful, the geography (despite the worst efforts of developers) remains glorious. If you’re an interested but confused outsider, you should come to a better understanding of why our politics are the way they are, and why our politicians are so thran (perverse, obstinate, difficult to deal with). As
E Estyn Evans, former director of Irish Studies at Queen’s University, put it: “It is not that the Ulsterman lives in the past… it is rather that the past lives in him.”

Craig ignores political boundaries and draws on material about all nine counties of the ancient province of Ulster (not just the six that since 1921 have formed Northern Ireland). She doesn’t confine herself to Northern Irish writers, but takes in anyone who can “exemplify or clarify some facet of life in the North, at any moment from the seventeenth century on”, whether that facet be Plantation or rebellion, linen-making or shipbuilding, the soda farl, the ceilidh or the cry of the corncrake. The result is a richly textured portrait of both people and place — the best I have read in a single volume.

The “confusions and commotions” are not overlooked: one section is entitled “Sixty-Nine the Nightmare Started; another, “Darkest Ulster”, is filled with tales of blood and sectarian thunder. We are reminded, in Louis MacNeice’s words, that
“The blots on the page are so black
That they cannot be covered with shamrock”
– and those blots, recently, have included attacks by our two tribes, currently on ceasefire from their usual hostilities, on Poles, Lithuanians and others drawn to work in the province by that very ceasefire.
In general, though this is a book in which, while the fissure gets its due, there is more emphasis on the craic, and the waterfalls of the glens are louder than the guns. If you have the slightest interest in Northern Ireland, you should buy it.

I have more than a slight interest, but Craig’s book gave me a taste of writers I’ve been intending to read and introduced me to others I now want to read. Which brings me to one quibble: a biographical note on each contributor would have been useful. It would have saved me a search on the web to discover that Chris Arthur is “an Ulster-born, Buddhist-influenced, Scottish-educated, former Irish game warden turned essayist now living in Wales”.