When I showed my friend The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland (WIT School of Humanities Press) to impress upon him the enormity of the task of reviewing such a large book, his eyes widened and he laughed and said, “What the fuck?” The Echoing Years, edited by Stephanie McKenzie, John Ennis and Randall Maggs, contains nearly twelve hundred pages of Irish and Canadian poetry—and this is the third in a series of what must be equally hefty books on the subject. All three were funded in part by Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism—which also brought us those terrible commercials that tried to entice travellers east with promises of kitchen parties. Despite the size of the book, though, few of the poems stand out as writing you can really hang your hat on or marvel at. Some are good; others are fair. Even the poems by my favourite poets aren’t jaw-droppers. I didn’t feel the urge to read any of them out loud to a friend, which for me is the acid test of good verse. Some of the work is in French with no translation (there seems to be an explanation for this at the front of the book but I’m not sure because it too is en français). Other poems are in Gaelic with no translation, which means that the whole book can only be read by those who are fluent in all three languages.
