A good rollicking measure is so rare in contemporary poetry that when we encounter one, it seems almost subversive. Our poets by and large prefer the flutey whisper to the full-throated chant. Yet the poems people tend to remember from high school or college are almost invariably those with emphatic beats, such as Poe’s “The Raven”: “Once upon a midnight dreary, / As I pondered, weak and weary / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”

This is a poem which I sometimes wish I could forget, but it’s no use. Like other poems by Poe – “The Bells” in particular still drives me crazy, like some Pepsodent ad penned for megaphone – and many by Longfellow (“This is the forest primeval”; you remember the rest!), such poems, while far from being great, cling to the memory like stubborn burrs on a tattered sweater. This tenacity is the result of the simultaneous, and shameless, use of every known poetic device: clanging alliteration, murmurous assonance, rhymes that chime like organ pipes. We call them bad poems, and we feel superior in doing so. But are we right?

The excellent Irish poet and translator Ciaran Carson has now revived this genial, if despised, tradition. His version of the 18th-century Irish poet Brian Merriman’s “The Midnight Court” (Gallery Press,63 pages; $11.99) has just appeared and is a total delight. Merriman was a successful farmer, tutor, and teacher of mathematics who died on July 29, 1805 – 200 years ago this year. He was also an ardent proponent of the Irish language, and a master of the aisling, that typically Celtic genre of dream-poem (which he here subverts for his own purposes). His original, composed in highly intricate Irish under the title “Cuirt an Mhean Oiche,” presented formidable challenges, as Mr. Carson notes in his charming introduction.

Though Irish was his own first language, he tells us, “sometimes I would work past midnight, or lie sleepless in bed, haunted by an elusive phrase. I would get up and scribble the words down; often, when I looked at them in the morning they would crumble into dust, like jewels brought back from an enchanted realm, that cannot bear the light of this world.” Enchanted the world of “The Midnight Court” may be, but the enchantment is pretty rough. This is a world of ribaldry gone bonkers. Merriman’s dream vision purports to be the record of a nocturnal tribunal, at which Irish women arraign Irish men for their failings, most particularly, for their reluctance to marry and produce offspring. This sounds fairly tame; it’s not.

Settled down for a doze on a grassy bank, the narrator beholds a monstrous sight:

In the blink of an eyelid – a thing I still see –
A female approached from the side of the quay,
Broad-arsed and big-bellied, built like a tank,
And angry as thunder from shoulder to shank.
Of her stature I made an intelligent guess
Of some twenty-one feet, while the hem of her dress
Trailed five yards behind, through the mire and the muck,
And her mantle was slobbered with horrible guck.

This nightmare hag drags our hero off to face the music at the tribunal presided over by Aoibheall “the truthful,” the “Princess of Craglee,” who wants to find out why Irish women are being made to suffer “the Irish reluctance to breed.” The court, she informs our hapless narrator, “is ruled by a civilized throng, / Where the weak are empowered and women are strong.” Why, Aoibheall wants to know most particularly, are “warmblooded, blooming, delectable maids” left to wither on the matrimonial vine?

If Aoibheall’s court is “civilized,” it manifests itself in a curious fashion. The witnesses wallow in denunciation, woman against man, man against woman. Each speech is a screed in a high-pitched verbal battle of the sexes. Rarely have the pleasures of vituperation been so wittily exhibited as in these bawdy testimonies, and we enjoy them all the more because – self-muzzled as we are by stifling protocols of euphemism – we’ve forgotten how exhilarating it can be just to let rip.

The first witness, a lovely young lass, lets rip with gusto. Her complaint is that Irish men wait forever to marry and when they do, they tie the knot with “some mangy old bag or a hatchet-faced bitch.” Worse, by the time they totter to the altar, these men are useless in bed, “for they’ll fumble the job, with no edge to their tools!” But she’s just warming up:

It bugs me, it baits me, it makes me feel sick,
It gives me the blues and it gets on my wick,
It gives me a terrible pain in the head,
It gets up my nose and it makes me see red,
When at market or Mass I would happen to spy
A well-built, intelligent, handsome young guy …
Entangled and tamed and in marriage entrapped
By a henpecking dragon, or crabbed old yap,
Or a slut, or a slabber, a half-witted slag,
A nutcase, a hoyden, a tight-fisted hag,
A know-all, a nincompoop, full of old guff,
A stony-faced scold, never out of a huff.

This witness is answered by “a dirty old josser, made nimble by rage” whose entire defense consists of an ad feminam attack. Now the men get in their licks, and it isn’t pretty. Not only this woman – a “feminine shark” he calls her – or womankind in general, but marriage itself is the problem. Rising (briefly) above an attack on everything from the witness’s “knickers and shift” to “the filth of her head,” he sings the joys of the single state:

O all you young men who are single and free,
Beware of that yoke until death guaranteed,
Where hope is deluded and jealousy’s rife,
As I learned for myself at a terrible price.
It’s well known to most how I used to live life,
Before I was squeezed in the marital vice

Merriman’s genuine radicalism shows not in the harrowing and very funny tale of the “old git’s” disastrous marriage but in the ensuing passages where he brazenly advocates that the clergy come to the aid of wilting Irish womenfolk and bed them, even if they produce bastards. Merriman even inserts a panegyric to bastardry (he himself may have been born out of wedlock), for “the offspring of unions no clergy has blest / Have a spring in their step, and a spark, and a zest.”

Mr. Carson maintains his agile dactyls without flagging, mitigating their occasional thumpiness by the judicious use of partial rhymes. Merriman’s themes, startling for their time, no longer seem audacious; the real audacity of “The Midnight Court” belongs to its translator. With skill and wit he has breathed new life into a poem that offers rumbustious pleasure from beginning to end; considering most contemporary poetry, that is radical indeed.