Review of Hidden World of Poetry from Sabotage Mag by Bethany Pope

Adam Wyeth’s The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry is a useful and intriguing introduction to both subjects mentioned in the title. The book is composed of a series of tightly-written essays that use close readings and the author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Irish mythology to parse poems by the best-known contemporary Irish poets. The essays are interspersed with Miriam Logan’s lucid, richly atmospheric ink-paintings and each essay is introduced with a quote from an appropriate expert on the psychology of myths, from Bjork to Yeats, and Italo Calvino.