"In Facing the Music, poet and critic Eamon Grennan gives comprehensive and imaginative life to the modern Irish poetic tradition. With Yeats as his starting point, these essays constitute a suite of intimate engagements with the matter and manner of the poetic intelligence as it declares itself in poets as diverse as Kavanagh, Muldoon, Kinsella, and McGuckian, and as it is found in the work of James Joyce and John McGahern. Sympathetic readings give the reader a powerful sense of how Irish poetry in this century has kept pace with the often intractable public and private life of the island, north and south. Facing the Music reveals the workings of the intuitive spirit of poetry in the moral life of twentieth-century Ireland."--BOOK JACKET.