Legendary Soundings poetry book back by popular demand

THE book that launched a thousand Leaving Cert meltdowns is making a comeback.

Poetry anthology Soundings is to be reprinted in all its original glory.

For anybody who sat the Leaving Cert between 1969 and 2000, the tattered tome often elicited strong emotions, and it wasn’t from the poetry. It is one of the few textbooks in Ireland that has achieved a legendary status. The fact is anybody who had to study it remembers Soundings.

However, for most people, the very loathing it evoked all those years ago gradually softens into a fondness, a grudging respect. So much so that people still root through attics all over the country just to pick it up again and peer at the hastily scrawled notes around the edges of poems like Sailing to Byzantium by WB Yeats and The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock by TS Eliot.

First published as a hastily arranged, interim anthology in 1969, Soundings stayed on the English Leaving Cert curriculum for a remarkable 31 years, from 1969 until it was put out to pasture in 2000.

Just how old-fashioned it was can be seen from the fact that in 1969 when it was published, it contained only one living poet and just one female poet.

Speaking on RTÉ radio earlier this week, Michael Gill of Gill and Macmillan, said he was stunned by the popular reaction to the re-issuing of the famous textbook.

“This really was an idea that a colleague of mine came up with just about a year ago and many of us here in Gill and Macmillan poured cold water on it thinking that who in heaven’s name would want to revive an old textbook.

“Then we realised that there was a great deal of chatter on the internet about it.

“We tried to find some second-hand copies and this was very difficult. They were very expensive, so we said we would experiment with it,” he said.

Mr Gill said the fact the book is still remembered 30 years on is a testament to its impact on generations of students.

“It’s important to remember there were several other anthologies for the Leaving Certificate at that time, but the only one that survived almost 30 years was Soundings.

“The extraordinary thing is that Soundings was an accidental success really. It was meant to be an interim anthology.

“The Department of Education couldn’t make up its mind as to what poems were to be permanently on the Leaving Certificate in the late 1960s, so they said ‘Let’s come out with this interim anthology’. Then it took the department 30 years to make up its mind as to a new anthology and the new curriculum wasn’t introduced until the late 1990s,” he said.

Soundings will be available to buy in the shops again in October.

Purists can rest assured, it will look exactly the same as the original.