What an old Leaving Cert poetry book taught me about thinking
The Irish Times · Conor Murphy ·
We were forced to think for ourselves because there were no other options
My Soundings, the Leaving Certificate poetry textbook used from 1969 until 2000, has long been lost to time, but my wife’s – probably purchased in The Shelf bookshop on the quays in Cork – sits safely preserved in our little family library upstairs.
Bought for £2.50, the interior pages contain copious pencil notes. There are paragraphs and paragraphs of carefully written, still perfectly legible, notes from the first page on. Inevitably, the book also contains her sisters’ names, as it was handed down from one to the next, as well as those of various boys the three women were possibly interested in at the time.
Battered and venerable, the artefact harks back to a time before books of notes became the norm. Whereas now each student gets a few pages of notes on each poem in their textbook, the Soundings poems were followed by up to seven questions, and that’s it. The back of the book had short biographies and the odd word explained, but there were no notes analysing the meaning or language of the poems. This was up to the student and the teacher.
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