Missing the Point About Textbook Rental

Soundings was a sensation of Irish publishing two years ago. The Leaving Cert poetry anthology, long gone the way of the dodo, was swept from the shelves on its return to publication by people eager to reconnect. It was never entirely clear what it was the wanted to reconnect with – the Great Tradition, their lost youth, a Christmas present list run out of control – but Soundings touched a chord deep in the Irish nation. It is a beautiful book, and it really did make a magical present.

The publication last year of the Inter Cert short story anthology, Exploring English 1, was a little too obviously a rip-off for people to take. It was branded a little too much like the re-issued Soundings, with the cod drawings on the front and all, for people not to get a strong smell of old rope.

But then there was Deirdre Madden’s All About Home Economics. It had no connection for the Western Canon, and it didn’t have a pithy introduction by Joe O’Connor. Yet still it stormed off the shelves. Yes, there was charitable donation for the royalties, but that alone can’t explain the book’s success.

Nor can it explain the success down the years of the original Strunk and White or Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, when people bound photocopies of the original lecture notes and passed them about like contraband while the original texts were out of print.

The majority of textbooks are dull and workmanlike affairs. Some are just plain bad. But there are those which are transcendent, that bring the student to a world he or she could never have dreamed off. These are the textbooks that are loved almost as if they were actual people, because these are the books that have made people what they are.

One of the things about love is that you can never rent it. It has been bought, down through the years, but it has never been rented. Which sad truth makes the current small news story, lost in the empty bellowing of the referendum campaigners, all the sadder.

The Department of Education released a report yesterday claiming “Book rental schemes in schools could reduce family bills for school books by as much as 80%.” The Department is missing the point.

If you’re a disadvantaged child, your only hope of escape is through education. There is none other. If you’re going to be good as a student, you have to love your books, and how can you love something that you have to give back at the end of the year?

By imposing a book rental scheme the Department is subtly hinting that all this is a bit of a cod, really. We’re going to go through the motions for you Johnny, because we don’t want to be shamed on Prime Time, but once the school year is over we’re taking back our books and throwing you back to your damned flats.

Colm Toibín wrote a nonsensical piece in the Guardian recently claiming that it is an insult in Ireland to say that someone’s house had no books. That has never been an insult in Ireland, but Ireland would be better if it were.

If the Department of Education wanted to do those kids a favour they’d tell them to keep the books. They’d tell those kids that these aren’t books – these are magic carpets that can fly you to another world, way out of here, where you can make something of yourself and be all that you can be.

Would it cost money? Of course it’d cost money. But there’s always money. There are lots of subventions in education as it is. You can cut one to give to another. There are always ways.

Those cocktail making courses that were part of the Springboard initiative would be no great loss. Or how about the state subvention to private schools? I’m sure a bit of belt-tightening would do no harm there in these austere times. There are always ways to turn a shilling when you need it.

And these disadvantaged kids need it, because education is their only hope. Their only hope. What the Department has to realise at a very fundamental level is that education is the only thing that can save kids on the margins, and education can only come through school and schoolbooks.

If you want kids to love education, they have to love the books. And if they love the books, they can’t give them up at the end of the school year. They have to keep them and treasure them and know that they and they alone are the key to escape.

All that forcing children to give up their schoolbooks does is tell those children is that they’ve never been part of process, that this is all for show. That the world of books is only for those who can afford them, and not for those who just want to live a better world. And that’s a poor policy for any country.

Have Ye No Pomes to Go To? The Return of Soundings

The republishing of Soundings, the Leaving Cert poetry anthology that was discontinued at the end of the last century, tells us many things about our current culture. Not all of them are good, but there is a definite light of hope.

The general welcome that the re-publication has received has been fuelled more than somewhat by nostalgia. The already-doodled cover is redolent of schoolroom ennui, and the new introduction by Joe O’Connor assures us that it’s socially acceptable to be seen with the book. The O’Connor imprimatur means there is no need to sandwich your copy shamefully between volumes of Pynchion and Vargos Llosa when approaching the till in Hodges Figgis.

However. The fact remains that Soundings is a schoolbook, and bears all the fell taint of that. Every poem is accompanied by questions to increase understanding of the work, but reading those questions again is too redolent of wet winter evenings, copybooks, pencil cases, Barry Lang’s Hotline on 2FM and general misery.

“Would you agree that the poem has some striking combinations of sound, vision and sense?” Yes, yes, yes, I’ll sign anything you want – just get me away from this damned desk and somewhere within a hundred mile radius of Belinda Carlisle.

The fact that Gill and Macmillan saw fit to mail freebie copies of the book to many media outlets and left out everybody’s favourite Irish blogger does little to endear it also. Bastards.

Those cavils aside, the republishing of Soundings, the initial demand that made its republishing worthwhile in the first place, and the general warmth with which a secondary school textbook has been welcomed tells us something that’s been lost in recent years. That there is such a thing as a poetry, and there is such a thing as the Western Canon. And if there wasn’t, there ought to be.

People like pomes. They don’t always know what they are, because the goalposts shift from day to day. People are told Séamus Heaney is a great poet, but are at a loss to recite any of his poems. You could recite a line, certainly, but you could recite a line from the Simpsons too and that doesn’t make Homer ... er, never mind.

Soundings means certainty. Soundings was written before the Marxist critiques of the Western Canon and the general scorn of a Dead While Male establishment had taken hold. The Canon is based on the idea that, as Gus Martin puts it in his original introduction, there are such things as great poems written by great poets.

That a baton has been passed down the ages from Chaucer to Shakespeare and Johnson, Donne and Marvell, Pope and Dryden, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson and Hopkins, Eliot, Yeats and Dylan Thomas. That there is a shared culture that allows one generation to connect to the generation that preceded it and to pass something on to the generation that follows.

Because it’s so very difficult to define what poetry is, perhaps An Spailpín can suggest taking a leaf out of the American academic and critic and say that poetry is that which is fun to recite out loud? When he wrote How to Read and Why, Bloom remarked in passing that he had to declaim verse in private, on deserted beaches or in empty fields, lest the PC police that roamed US university campuses at that time caught him and send him to the gulag.

But those days are old now and poetry declaimers may safely return to the light, holding their pints close to their hearts as they tell of country pleasures, travellers from antique lands, the ten years’ war in Troy, the Sunday in every week, and all those other dead loves that were born for me.

Soundings is not a complete collection, of course, but no collection can ever be. A thousand year tradition is lot to cram into one book. But as a statement of value and worth and a jumping off point for lifetime's delight, Soundings is sheer solid gold. Hurrah for its return.