Wake Forest University Press has taken quite a gamble. They have produced Volume 1 of what they call "The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry" and the names Heaney, Muldoon, Durcan or Yeats are nowhere to be found. As Jefferson Holdridge writes in the Preface, this series "is a representative anthology meant to introduce to a broader audience a number of Irish poets, some young, some in their prime, who have not appeared widely before in North America." Holdridge ultimately chose a mere five poets to depict Ireland from "the burgeoning economic realities of The Celtic Tiger to the burden of religious and political realignment, from urban scenes to historical landscapes." Harry Clifton, Dennis O'Driscoll, David Wheatley, Sinead Morrisey and Caitriona O'Reilly are the chosen ones. This inevitably makes the collection seem a little narrow, like some interesting poet or two is missing. Then again, this is only Volume 1. Either way, these poems do offer an impressive mix of humor, romance, history and more. Indeed, the poets "sensitively record the effects of writing in a society that has shifted dramatically in the last decades," as Holdridge argues. The American-based poems of Dubliner Harry Clifton ("America, your poisons and elixirs / I drink by the glass / On Bourbon Street / and watch the winter pass" from "Absinthe at New Orleans") stand out in particular for this reader. ($17.95 / 231 pages / Wake Forest University Press)