Colin Sheridan: Paradise lost? Today's teens miss out on beauty of yesterday's poetry

Soundings was dumped off the Leaving Cert curriculum in 2000, but was something lost in the move to make the syllabus more diverse and contemporary?

Leaving Cert students get to study a more diverse curriculum but are they being deprived of the beauty of poetry from days gone by? File picture

Sat, 31 May, 2025 - 01:00

Colin Sheridan

Colin Sheridan is a writer and columnist. A former officer in the Irish Defence Forces he has extensive deployment experience as a peacekeeper with the United Nations, having lived and worked in the former Yugoslavia, West Africa, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine.

Good weather can only mean one thing: Leaving Cert English paper one. Soundings. The Planter’s Daughter versus Paradise Lost. Emily Dickinson vibing on a funeral in her brain. Dylan Thomas’s point-blank refusal to mourn. Paddy Kavanagh counting the bicycles headed down to Billy Brennan’s yard, hornier than a goat, thirsty at the prospect of chasing a bit of skirt down Iniskeen Road on a July evening.

Feeling nostalgic, I reached for a copy of the great green book and started to leaf through its fabled pages. First published in 1969, Soundings — more cultural touchstone than simple poetry anthology — had more reprints than the King James Bible.