Writers who slip smoothly across national boundaries risk ending up with blurred identities. Seen from one angle, they are cosmopolitan; seen from another, they appear to belong nowhere. The brilliant novelist and shortstory writer Clark Blaise is one such example. Born in Canada, where he often sets his fiction, he has lived most of his life in America, and writes memorably about Pittsburgh and Florida, where he spent much of his childhood. Easily the equal of Alice Munro, who has prudently confined her fiction to southern Ontario, Mr. Blaise hovers somewhere in a vague limbo of repute. Neither Canada nor America firmly claims him. The same fate has befallen the wonderful Anglo-Irish poet Richard Murphy. The Irish won’t have him, but neither will the English, and yet his poems are among the best written in both countries in recent times. The great-granddaddy of such writers, however, may be Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) whose 100th birthday falls this year.

Amid the accolades that poured in to honor W.H. Auden, his friend and collaborator, whose centenary was two weeks ago, MacNeice has been unaccountably overlooked. Born in Belfast, MacNeice had no doubt about his identity. In “Carrickfergus,” one of his most famous, and memorable, poems he wrote:

I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in Country Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt.

You can hardly get more Irish than that. But it’s striking that MacNeice takes pains to mention not only other groups — the Normans, the Scots — but depicts himself as “the rector’s son, born to the Anglican order, / Banned forever from the candles of the Irish poor.” Such honesty wouldn’t endear him to nationalists. For MacNeice, nationality was meant to be commodious; it was supposed to embrace all the elements of his heritage.

To mark his centenary, Faber and Faber, his lifelong publishers, have now issued his “Collected Poems” (869 pages, £30) in a handsome new edition (not yet out here, but obtainable through amazon. co. uk), edited by Peter McDonald. Mr. McDonald includes both uncollected poems and juvenilia, so that the poet’s development, from prodigy to master, can be appreciated. Not a poem in this sumptuous volume is without its felicities of surprise. If MacNeice wrote a bad poem, I have yet to discover it. He was not only Auden’s equal but, in the opinion of many including myself, the greater poet.

MacNeice could write about anything, and in any conceivable form, from the threat of impending war to the sadness of empty shoes (“in hotels at night passing from door to door / There is something terrible in all those empty shoes”). And he posed questions that still pierce us today, as in “Galway,” where he asks

And why, now it has happened,
Should the atlas still be full of the maps of countries
We shall never see again?

What finally distinguishes MacNeice’s poetry is neither the prophetic music of “Autumn Journal,” perhaps his supreme achievement, nor the unfeigned compassion of his poems about the homeless, exiled, and down-and-out of the 1940s, but a kind of unanticipated looniness. This slightly cracked quality erupts out of nowhere in certain of his greatest poems. MacNiece wrote that he meant “to burgle all the turrets / of beauty as I choose,” but the loot he brought back often surprised himself as much as his readers. In “Snow,” the world itself unexpectedly commandeers the poem:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

MacNeice says “world” as though it were a proper name, and for him it was, looming “suddener” between incompatibles — snow and roses — like a familiar face seen truly for the first time. In “Autobiography,” this slightly wacky lyric upswing graces his evocation of his mother when he writes:

My mother wore a yellow dress; Gently, gently, gentleness.

The magic is made up of nothing weightier than a pair of adverbs and a noun, but we feel his mother’s whole presence. Did this delicate wizardry owe to the Irish in MacNeice or to the English? Or did it come from elsewhere entirely, from that realm beyond the windows where snow and roses meet?

eormsby@nysun.com