Companion is a cosy word. It lacks the directive smack of guide, the utilitarianism of dictionary. Two predecessors of Robert Welch's welcome Oxford Companion to Irish Literature were Robert Hogan's Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979) and Anne Brady and Brian Cleeve's Biographical Dictionary of Irish Writers (1985). In building on the virtues of these earlier ventures, however, and perhaps also mindful of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (1991), Welch inevitably determined perspectives and priorities. He highlights Irish language, history, and, rather tediously, the plots of novels.

One truly companionable feature is a system of cross-references which makes the editorial categories more mobile than they appear at first sight. The entries are organised so as to open up relations not only between authors and between texts, but also between literature and its cultural-political environment.

For instance, asterisks in the entry for "RUSSELL, George William (pseudonym 'AE' from Greek 'Aeon')" refer to, inter alia, the Irish homestead and Irish statesman, Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Sir Horace Plunkett's Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, Constance Markievicz, Ulysses, Padraic Colum, Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike, and the Irish state.

AE, of course, was at the centre of literary affairs when literary affairs were more central. None the less, this entry epitomises the holistic opportunities that Welch, his assistant editor Bruce Stewart, and their team (152 strong) often seize successfully.

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For whom is the Companion designed? Up to a point it balances the needs of common readers, students and researchers looking for basic data outside their own fields. Some of the "selective bibliographical references", however, are more selective than others, the Joyce industry being over-indulged. There are helpful essays on such broad topics as the literary revival, mythology, Hiberno-English, Northern Ireland, publishing, Protestantism, translation from the Irish, the stage-Irishman (into whom the stage-Irishwoman is incorporated).

Yet the editor has not always asked what varied kinds of information the book's users - Gael and Gall - might casually or seriously seek. While some works, such as Castle Rackrent, are situated in wider contexts, the digests of others seem a waste of space. The tragic fate of Brian Moore's Judith Hearne is still more tragically reduced to euphemism: "Her nervous breakdown and eventual institutionalisation permit Moore to convey the ineffectuality of the Church in dealing with her problems." I admire the ingenuity of whoever digested Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, but need so many stories from Dubliners be summarised? (Individual collections of poems receive less attention than fiction and drama.) Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature recounts plots too, but also lists characters, and, occasionally, motifs. Here, not even Leopold Bloom gets a separate mention, although "Big House" and "gyre" are in. Perhaps, on the whole, it was wise to prefer the readable to the encyclopaedic.

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As an Oxford publication, Irish Literature implicitly complements Drabble's English Literature. This cedes much to the Other Island and its diaspora: genres, forms, classical and European authors, literary terminology.

Such matters may be raised by particular entries, but, in the absence of an index, that is not the same as indicating general sources, influences and traditions. Autobiography and the short story surely deserve essays. "Epiphany" is in because Joyce coined this aesthetic term, but not stream-of-consciousness or Thomas Aquinas (who is in Drabble). Despite a historical entry on Catholicism, and coverage of Louvain and Lough Derg, the Companion too often assumes that Irish Catholic theological and institutional points of reference are transparent to all. Where, for instance, is Jansenism?

But if this relativised apparatus might seem to deny national autonomy, it leaves more space for Gaelic culture, thereby subscribing to its special position. "Love poetry" points us to "danta gradha and folksong in Irish", rather than to more inclusive erotica. "Metrics, Anglo-Irish" focuses on where poets writing in English have supposedly tuned in to "Anglo-Irish rhythm" or "bardic" intricacies.

Yet, since so much genuinely crosses between the languages, both those who can read Irish and those who cannot will be grateful for the briefings on topics like Gaelic law, Lebor Gabala Erenn (Book of Invasions), the Fionn cycle, and sidh (fairies). I understand, too, why GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) is in, while IRFU (Irish Rugby Football Union) is not. Nevertheless, anyone who spots "political divisions" and "political poetry" might be disappointed to find their application limited to the "petty kingdoms" of medieval Ireland and to Jacobite writings by the "native intelligentsia". For the sake of non-natives, the pronunciation of Gaelic words should be given.

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A large undertaking like this is bound to have gaps and mistakes in its first printing. Checking up on some of my own interests, I found the coverage of journals patchy: no Irish Review in its early and late 20th-century manifestations, no Kilkenny Magazine or Lagan - the Belfast journal through which the poet John Hewitt (himself well-covered) promoted his regionalist ideas. As for 20th-century poetry: Paul Muldoon was born in 1951, not 1955; he went to school in Armagh, not Maghera; it was not classics that Derek Mahon studied at Trinity College, Dublin. Although his own entry gives the poet and prose-writer Monk Gibbon the remarkable dates 1876-1987, an entry for the Dubliner (1961-64) says: "The younger writers appearing there included Monk Gibbon, Brendan Kennelly, Derek Mahon . . .".

One expects Oxford Companions to be solid, tweedy (or Aran-knit) types, who reflect consensus and the status quo. Welch cannot be blamed for skirting the contested interface of literary canons, though he will certainly not satisfy Irish feminism, and could have been bolder about "isms" in general - Republicanism, revisionism, postmodernism, even.

The editor's preface records his desire to "purge all the writing, including my own, of slack opinion and knowing jargon", but to edit the contributions of others into a house style must sometimes alter their tilt. Nor is the preface itself ideologically innocent. Welch reproduces nationalist literary history when he encourages readers to cross "many of the internal boundaries that run athwart the corpus of Irish literature", but not to violate its unitary body: "one coherent but manifold cultural expression". Perhaps this explains why the Englishman Tim Robinson, author of the magnificent Stones of Aran is excluded, although the usual English suspects - Spenser, Arnold - make the cut.

While most of the history is written in as neutral a style as possible, a few slack political opinions infiltrate the literary entries (look up "field day"), and Irish-British relations predominate. According to the opening "chronology of historical events", nothing happened in the country between 1948 ("Irish Free State declares itself a Republic") and 1966 ("Nelson's Pillar in Dublin blown up"). The literary maps at the end are equally perfunctory, and the cover illustration - "Boy with Horses on Seashore" - panders to Romantic-pastoral Ireland, Ireland of the sidh. Yet, despite these cavils, the overall achievement remains extremely impressive. To adapt Yeats, I can foresee this book becoming "my close companion many a year".

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Edna Longley is professor of English literature, Queen's University, Belfast.