W.B. Yeats: Poems (Highbridge Classics)

I refer here to the Audio Cd of seventy minutes of Mr. Yeats's poetry as read by Mr. T. P. McKenna issued in 2006 from the 1995 Hodder Headline tape. The cover art upon this CD case is the portrait of Mr. Yeats from 1907 by Augustus John, one of the better portraits of the poet before gray.

There are a number of recordings of Mr. Yeats's poetry available here upon the amazon, and I find this the most straightforward and listenable issue, if you cannot locate the few readings by Mr. Seamus Heaney for the Poetry Room of Harvard. The several readings of Mr. Yeats within Caroline Kennedy's audiobooks recording of her The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis are also worth hearing. I discovered quickly that the Naxos recordings The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats (Naxos Audio) and its abridgement The Great Poets W B Yeats to be annoyingly presented with jarring and arguable narration between each poem, and the narration misplaced in the abridgement.

Here nevertheless we have the poems, straight up, as read by a wonderful Irish actor of Shakespeare calibre. The other review at present refers to a workmanlike quality of the reader, with one comment that it is boring. I find this untrue, but perhaps I am more accustomed to this style of reading. I found the expression of emotion at all times appropriate, and restrained, but present very expressively. It is not carpet chewing in the style of Naxos's Norton, but dignified reading well done. If anything, I found the pace a bit brisk, but then I believe Mr. Yeats is best sipped slowly, quite slowly, with careful attention to the metric scheme. Seamus Heaney in his recordings recalled Yeats's recordings of his own verse to be like chant, mystic, slow with emphasis on the metric beat. Thusly would I love to hear Yeats read, but this here by Mr. McKenna is so far the best I have heard, save Mr. Heaney's own reading.

Mr. McKenna began acting in Dublin in 1954, and has worked extensively upon the boards. He may be a familiar face and voice to you from movies and television. Among other things he has appeared in the Avengers series, in Valmont, in The Scarlet and the Black, in the series Lovejoy and in that wonderful series of Inspector Morse from the books by Colin Dexter. This broad and long experience upon the stage, the big and the small screen certainly establishes Mr. McKenna as an actor of great depth and intelligence. It was a joy for me to hear the profundity of meaning he is able to express in the often obscure, legendary and mystic poetry of Mr. Yeats. To hear him read Politics is an absolute joy; Easter 1916 immediately invites repeated listenings. As I say, I only wish he had read more slowly.

This selection of 52 poems leaves little wanting to the scholar of Mr. Yeats, each read as I say as it ought to be read. We hear:

Down by the Salley Gardens
The MEditation of the Old Fisherman
Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea
The LAke Isle of Innisfree
The Pity of Love
When You Are Old
The White Birds
The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner
The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart
The Song of the Old Mother
The HEart of the Woman
HE remembers Forgotten Beauty
HE Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
The Fiddler of Dooney
In the Seven Woods
The Folly of Being Comforted
Adam's Curse
Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland
The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water
O Do NOt Love Too Long
Reconciliation
The Fascination of What's Difficult
The COming of Wisdom with Time
At Galway Races
All Things Can Tempt Me
Brown Penny
September 1913
Running to Paradise
The MAgi
The Wild Swans at Coole
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
A Song
Her Praise
Broken Dreams
Two Songs of a Fool
Easter 1916 ("a terrible beauty is born")
The Second COming ("slouching towards Bethlehem")
A Prayer for my Daughter
sailing to Byzantium
A Prayer for my Son
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
For Anne Gregory
(from) vacillation
A Prayer for Old Age
What Then?
Beautiful Lofty Things
The Ghost of Roger Casement
The Spur
The Municipal Galley Revisited
Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?
Politics
Under Ben Bulben

As you can see the sweep is nearly chronological. Remember these readings are Yeats, straight up, no chaser and little pause for breath. Mr. McKenna reads the title, and the poem with great heart, mind and meaning. We can ask for little more.

I advise you very much to read Professor Helen Vendler's Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's selection for Faber in The Faber Yeats: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney (Poet to Poet: An Essential Choice of Classic Verse). Although Finneran is the standard complete collection with The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 1: The Poems, 2nd Edition, I find most enjoyable reading in the wonderful Everyman edition Poems (Everyman's Library classics) which also has excellent and lively commentary. I only wish I could afford the annotated edition at A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats.

But for now let us listen here, and dream, and remember, and love.

This is a single cassette in one of those tall boxes that could hold two. The notes are sparse - just a listing of the poems and a capsule bio of Mr. McKenna. The package also claims 80 minutes worth of poetry, but the timings printed on the tape itself for each side (35:29 for side A, 34:04 for B) leave us more than 10 minutes shy of that. I myself have not done the requisite timing, but tend to believe the (spurious?) precision of the tape's numbers.

The readings are workmanlike, and the selections are good. All the famous poems are there, and a good deal more. (Offhand, the only other one I would really like included is "Lapis Lazuli".) Unfortunately, the old recording by Siobhan McKenna (related?) and Cyril Cusack is no longer available. It was truly magical.

My gripe with this is the fact that you need to keep this oversize box around to hold your tape, and to preserve what scanty documentation there is. A regular cassette package with an included info sheet would have been better.