Book excerpt: Taking the death of Yeats in 1939 as its starting point and ending in the 1980s, The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry offers unusually generous selections from the work of ten writers - Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian. Edited by Paul Muldoon, himself widely regarded as the leading Irish poet of his generation, this anthology provides a fine introduction to the most consistently impressive Irish poets after Yeats.