Christopher Cahill, executive director of the Institute for Irish American Studies at CUNY, has edited a wonderful book of poems entitled "Gather Round Me: The Best of Irish Popular Poetry." This slim but substantive volume is filled with familiar names such as Flann O'Brien and Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, as well as a number of anonymous, traditional songs, poems, slices of verse and more. Love, death, rebellion and emigration are among the themes we see here again and again. But as Cahill writes in his useful introduction: "The love of place, and the almost ritualistic telling over of place-names - of towns and townlands, rivers and streams, hills and mountains, counties and provinces - is a distinctively Irish concern and one that pervades the whole range of poems in this collection." ($16 / 144 pages / Beacon Press)