The fragmented, multivoiced complexity of much mainstream Irish poetry is often dismissed as fatally hermetic; what is allusive is elitist and insincere, a latter-day art for art's sake. Iain Sinclair's polemical introduction to Conductors of Chaos, for example, makes the remarkable claim that in anthologies of Irish poetry, ‘[e]vent is adulterated by self-regarding tropes, false language’. Especially vituperative in his description of Irish anthologists’ (and, by extension, Irish poets’) self-interested preoccupation with ‘[b]og and bomb and blarney’, he dismisses their work as ‘a heap of glittering similes burnished for westward transit’. Although justified in voicing a general anxiety concerning the impact of commercial necessity upon artistic integrity, he is wrong in assuming that Irish-American publishers set the agenda for Irish poetry. His subsequent acerbic diatribe – that ‘[t]oo much contemporary verse arrives smirking on the page dressed up for the anthology audition. Pre-programmed and dead in the mouth’ – betrays an un-characteristic impatience with self-reflexivity and is a gross misreading of both the intentions and effects of Irish poetry that deals with the Northern Irish situation. It would, of course, be possible to empathise with Sinclair's criticism if it were limited to the minor poets riding on the coat tails of their more gifted contemporaries. Witness, for example, Stephen Smith's ‘Between Omagh and Cookstown’:

A poem about a poet in a time of violence unable to strain the resources of language may have been thematically fresh in the 1970s, but now is simply old wine in a new bottle. Similarly, Peter McDonald's ‘Flat Sonnet: The Situation’ is hardly subtle: