It is almost a truism of Irish literary history that the work of Austin Clarke (1896-1973), one of the Irish poets of the greatest range and achievement since Yeats, has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Somehow it still hovers both in and out of the canon, frequently more honoured in the breach of oversight than in the observance of university syllabuses, summer schools, anthologies and bookshop poetry sections. Clarke was excluded by Yeats from his Faber Book of Modern Verse in 1936; but while he was restored in most anthologies between The Oxford Book of Irish Verse in 1958 and Patrick Crotty's Modern Irish Poetry of 1995, it was still possible for Yeats's snub to be repeated half a century later in (or out of) Paul Muldoon's Faber Book of Modern Irish Poetry (1986). Clarke remains in print, yet precariously; a Selected Poems edited by Hugh Maxton, which was published in 1991, is still available, but the only Collected is the 1974 edition prepared by Liam Miller of Dolmen Press with the poet himself. The contrast with, say, Patrick Kavanagh (for whom complete and selected poems are currently, and recently, in print), is marked.