SOME FRESH TALES FROM THE GRAND STORYTELLERS\This St. Patrick's Day, Irish authors offer 3 new works.

Byline: Nancy Pate Orlando Sentinel 

Seamus Heaney won the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature. Brian Friel's plays are Broadway hits. Roddy Doyle, whose new novel will be out next month, won the Booker Prize for his last novel, "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha." Maeve Binchy's popular fiction is a staple of the best-seller lists.

What all of these writers have in common, of course, is that they're Irish. It's well known that Ireland is a nation of grand storytellers and silver-tongued poets and playwrights, and reminding us this St. Patrick's Day there are three new books: one landmark reference work - "The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature" - and two lively anthologies, "The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction" and "Ireland's Women: Writings Past and Present."

Although designed as a handy and comprehensive reference work with more than 2,000 alphabetically arranged entries, "The Oxford Companion of Irish Literature"; Oxford University Press (688 pages; $49.95) proves, like other Oxford companions, to be a browser's delight. Just reading the lengthy first entry on the Abbey Theatre brings up some of the most famous names in Irish literature - William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, among others - and refers you to their individual entries.

The Abbey's history, too, is part of Ireland's. What became Ireland's national theater grew out of the "literary revival" (itself a three-page entry beginning on page 311), the modern Irish literary movement that began after the fall of the nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell (page 465) in 1890. It lasted until 1922, which saw the end of the Anglo-Irish War (page 15) and the publication of Ulysses (page 576) by James Joyce (page 277). Part of the literary revival was a renewed enthusiasm for Gaelic literature, language and culture.

As editor Robert Welch of the University of Ulster reminds readers in his preface, Gaelic, or Irish, is one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Europe, going back nearly 2,000 years. While early Irish writers were influenced both by the Latin that came with Christianity, and to a lesser degree by Norman French, it was the arrival of English that had the most profound effect on Irish literature. By around the end of the 17th century, English had become the language of most Irish writers.

"Irish literature is one of those literatures that changed its language," writes Welch, "a circumstance of enormous difficulty, challenge and opportunity."

And so it is that this Oxford Companion includes Irish literature's Gaelic roots and periodic resurgences, as well as its more well-known Anglo-Irish practitioners, many of whom have drawn on Gaelic folklore and language in their works.

Cu Chulainn, for example, is the great mythic figure of the Ulster cycle, the group of heroic tales that are among the oldest stories in European vernacular literature, dating back to the Celts. In this century, he has inspired stories, plays and poems by such writers as Yeats, Lady Gregory and Thomas Kinsella.

Along with biographical entries and those on specific works, genres and institutions, the companion also includes entries on important historical and political events such as the Rebellion of 1641, the Famine or "Great Hunger" of 1845-48, the Easter Uprising of 1916. All have been the subjects of numerous literary works. A chronology of historical events - from 6000 B.C., the probable date of the first human settlements in Ireland, to the 1994 IRA and Loyalists cease fires - begins the book. Two maps marking sites of literary interest can be found at the end.

Readers also will discover among the entries a few names not native to Ireland but whose life and/or works are tied to the land of Eire. Londoner Edmund Spenser wrote "The Faerie Queen" while living in Ireland in the late 1500s; contemporary American writer Thomas Flanagan is known for historical novels of Ireland, including "The Tenants of Time" and "The End of the Hunt." Similarly, Iris Murdoch was brought up in London and has long been a fellow at Oxford, but she was born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, and two of her novels - "The Unicorn" and "The Red and the Green" - are set in Ireland.

Like all good reference books, the Oxford Companion makes you hungry for the works it discusses. The new anthologies offer a buffet of literary treats.

As its title suggests, "The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction" (Vintage; $14, 561 pages, paperback) emphasizes recent works by Irish writers. Editor Dermot Bolger has assembled short stories or excerpts from novels written in the last 25 years by 50 Irish writers. One of Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett's stories, "For to End Yet Again," with its incantatory rhythms, leads off the volume, which is divided into seven loosely chronological sections.

For any readers who think of Irish short stories in pastoral terms of yon green hills and country folk, the anthology is a revelation. Indeed, it revels in diversity of subject and approach. To be sure, that Ireland of yesteryear can be found in William Trevor's poignant "The Ballroom of Romance," in which a 39-year-old spinster who looks after her crippled father and a small farm finally puts away thoughts of love. But it's a gritty, urban Ireland that encompasses the characters in an excerpt from Roddy Doyle's vibrant "The Snapper." And several stories aren't even set in Ireland; Deirdre Madden's "Remembering Light and Stone" finds an Irish woman in Italy.

Not surprisingly, several stories deal with Ireland's recent political history and troubles. Random horror reaches out to touch a fruit shop in David Park's "Oranges From Spain," while in Dermot Healy's "The Death of Matti Bonner," a self-contained chapter from his 1994 novel "The Goat's Song," 13-year-old Catherine, a Northern Protestant and daughter of a police officer, discovers the hanged body of a Catholic neighbor.

The volume's most intense and powerful story, however, is an excerpt from Benedict Kiely's novel Proxopera, about a man given the impossible choice of driving a bomb to one of two places in his native town while his family is being held hostage. "The world is in wreckage and these madmen would force me to extend that wreckage to my town below, half-asleep in the valley, my town, asleep like a loved woman on a morning pillow, my town, my town, my town."

Many of the writers in the Vintage anthology also are represented in "Ireland's Women: Writings Past and Present" (Norton; $15, 552 pages, paperback), including Edna O'Brien, Mary Beckett, Val Mulkerns, Jennifer Johnston and Molly Keane. And there are male writers as well - Swift, Yeats, Trevor, Brian Moore and Frank O'Connor among them.

The emphasis, however, is on Irish women's lives as seen in extracts from poems, stories, novels, plays, letters, diaries, folk tales, articles and essays. As selected and arranged by Katie Donovan, A. Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly, these extracts add up to a kaleidoscope of experiences.

The selections are grouped in various sections - "Bodies," "Girly Years," "Marriage and Family," "Women Alone," etc. The section titled "The Bit o' Strange," however, doesn't refer to the supernatural but rather to illicit love, from the adulterous liaison depicted in an excerpt from Dermot Bolger's novel "The Woman's Daughter" to the schoolgirls chattering about their passion for Elvis Presley in an excerpt from Patricia Burke Brogan's play "Eclipsed."

Because of the book's panoramic scope, the selections are necessarily brief - just a couple of paragraphs in some cases, a couple of pages in others. They're also undated, which can lead to some confusion as to context.

Nevertheless, the editors, as Donovan remarks in her introduction, "have cast the net wide for the sake of variety." It's not every anthology, after all, that can lay claim to both Lady Gregory's translation of a 17th-century ballad about a love-struck girl's grief ("You promised me, and you said a lie to me,/ That you would be before me where the sheep are flocked"), and Julie O'Callaghan's "Yuppie Considering Life in Her Loft Apartment" (" 'No prob, no prob', and those were/ his last words to me on his way/ out of my orbit/ and into the gravitational pull of some dumb broad.").

The anthology is dedicated to Ireland's president, Mary Robinson, who is herself represented by an excerpt from her 1991 inaugural speech. Near its end, she affirms both Ireland's literary legacy and women's place in it and Irish history. She then quotes Yeats as he recalled the joyous refrain of a 14th-century Irish poet:

"I am of Ireland ... come dance with me in Ireland."

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