- UCD School of English, Drama and Film
University College Dublin
Belfield
Dublin 4
Lucy Collins
University College Dublin, English, Drama and Film, Faculty Member
- Poetry, Irish Literature, Modern Poetry, Poetics, Irish Poetry, Northern Irish Poetry, and 33 moreContemporary Literature, Contemporary Poetry, Modernism, Ecocriticism, Memory Studies, Textual Criticism and Editing, Book History, Gender Studies, Digital Humanities, Literature of the 1930s, American Literature, British Literature, Canadian Literature, Scottish Literature, Eighteenth Century Poetry, William Butler Yeats, Irish Women's Writing, Irish Studies, Contemporary Irish Poetry, Eighteenth-Century literature, Environmental Humanities, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism, Environmental Studies, Climate Change, Cultural Studies, Art History, Literature, English Literature, Natural Disasters, Ecology, Gender, and Critical Plant Studiesedit
- I am Associate Professor of Modern Poetry at UCD, where I teach and supervise in the area of poetry and poetics, with... moreI am Associate Professor of Modern Poetry at UCD, where I teach and supervise in the area of poetry and poetics, with a particular focus on Irish poetry, and on work by women. I also publish on ecocritical topics, with interests in landscape studies and animal studies both in the early modern period and the contemporary. I am co-founder of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive, a national digital repository.edit
This study examines the intersection of private and public spheres through the representation of memory in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Collins explores how memory shapes creativity in the work of well-known poets such as Eavan... more
This study examines the intersection of private and public spheres through the representation of memory in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Collins explores how memory shapes creativity in the work of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian as well as in that of an exciting group of younger poets. This book analyses, for the first time, the complex responses to the past recorded by contemporary women poets in Ireland and the implications these have for the concept of a national tradition.
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This unique anthology of poetry written by women in Ireland 1870-1970 includes more than one hundred and eighty poems by fifteen women of diverse backgrounds, experiences and creative aims. Challenging the assumption that little poetry of... more
This unique anthology of poetry written by women in Ireland 1870-1970 includes more than one hundred and eighty poems by fifteen women of diverse backgrounds, experiences and creative aims. Challenging the assumption that little poetry of note was written by women during the period, this rich and original collection reveals the range of their achievement and the lasting value of their work. Some of these women were prolific writers in many genres, others wrote poetry for a brief period only: all produced imaginative and memorable work that sheds new light both on the lives of women and on the development of poetry in Ireland from the late nineteenth century onward. The poetry in this anthology reflects the political and social crosscurrents of the time—the divided loyalties, spiritual questioning and intellectual curiosity that shaped these women’s lives. There are personal concerns too, and a desire to combine the expression of feeling with attention to the craft of poetry itself. Some of these voices will already be known to readers: poets such as Katharine Tynan and Eva Gore-Booth were widely published during their lifetimes and have been regularly anthologised in the years since. Others will be discovered here for the first time, offering fresh insights into the inventive and forward-looking work of these women. From the nationalist ballads of Elizabeth Varian to the modernist lyrics of Sheila Wingfield, these poems show the range and accomplishment of poetry written by women in Ireland between 1870 and 1970.
Introduction
A Note on the Texts
Elizabeth Varian (b.1821, wrote 1851–1896)
Emily Hickey (b.1845, wrote 1881–1924)
Katharine Tynan (b.1858, wrote 1885–1931)
Dora Sigerson Shorter (b.1866, wrote 1893–1918)
Eva Gore-Booth (b.1870, wrote 1898–1926)
Emily Lawless (b.1845, wrote 1902–1913)
Susan L. Mitchell (b.1866, wrote 1906–1926)
Alice Milligan (b. 1866, wrote 1908–1953)
Winifred M. Letts (b.1881, wrote 1913–1972)
Eileen Shanahan (b.1901, wrote [1921]–1979)
Mary Devenport O’Neill (b.1879, wrote 1929–1967)
Blanaid Salkeld (b.1880, wrote 1933–1959)
Sheila Wingfield (b.1906, wrote 1938–1992)
Freda Laughton (b.1907, wrote1945–?)
Rhoda Coghill (b.1903, wrote 1948–2000)
Appendix 1: Women Poets 1870–1970
Appendix 2: Chronology
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
A Note on the Texts
Elizabeth Varian (b.1821, wrote 1851–1896)
Emily Hickey (b.1845, wrote 1881–1924)
Katharine Tynan (b.1858, wrote 1885–1931)
Dora Sigerson Shorter (b.1866, wrote 1893–1918)
Eva Gore-Booth (b.1870, wrote 1898–1926)
Emily Lawless (b.1845, wrote 1902–1913)
Susan L. Mitchell (b.1866, wrote 1906–1926)
Alice Milligan (b. 1866, wrote 1908–1953)
Winifred M. Letts (b.1881, wrote 1913–1972)
Eileen Shanahan (b.1901, wrote [1921]–1979)
Mary Devenport O’Neill (b.1879, wrote 1929–1967)
Blanaid Salkeld (b.1880, wrote 1933–1959)
Sheila Wingfield (b.1906, wrote 1938–1992)
Freda Laughton (b.1907, wrote1945–?)
Rhoda Coghill (b.1903, wrote 1948–2000)
Appendix 1: Women Poets 1870–1970
Appendix 2: Chronology
Bibliography
Index
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A fascinating portrait of Sheila Wingfield, the English-born neglected poet and memorist whose colourful and complicated life brought her into contact with some of the major literary figures of early twentieth-century Ireland. This... more
A fascinating portrait of Sheila Wingfield, the English-born neglected poet and memorist whose colourful and complicated life brought her into contact with some of the major literary figures of early twentieth-century Ireland. This selection of her poems represents the memorable achievement of her early creative phase, as well as revealing the increasing breadth of Wingfield's imaginative reach and her willingness to experiment with poetic form. The introductory essay highlights the significant contribution she made to the history of 20th century poetry.
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This critical work considers the role played by elements that might be considered aberrational in a poet's oeuvre. With an introductory essay exploring the nature of aberration, these fourteen contributions investigate the work of major... more
This critical work considers the role played by elements that might be considered aberrational in a poet's oeuvre. With an introductory essay exploring the nature of aberration, these fourteen contributions investigate the work of major 20th-century poets from the U.S., Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Aberration is considered from the standpoint of both the artist and the audience, prompting discussion on a range of important issues, including the formation of the canon. Each essay discusses the status of the aberrant work and the ways in which it challenges, enlarges or supports the overall perception of the poet.
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Clothing occupies a dynamic and varied role in poetry written in English from eighteenth-century Ireland, adding realistic detail and symbolic significance to many forms of verse representation. In this essay I examine the implications of... more
Clothing occupies a dynamic and varied role in poetry written in English from eighteenth-century Ireland, adding realistic detail and symbolic significance to many forms of verse representation. In this essay I examine the implications of this representation for our understanding of the interwoven character of individual subjectivity and commodity culture. Sartorial choices offer important insights into personal and political relationships, into the status of the wearer, and his or her individual or group identity. Clothing shapes domestic and personal transactions, where relationships-especially sexual relationships-are negotiated through processes of observation, praise and gifting. As well as its practical purposes, dress offers symbolic readings, and is linked to issues of representation itself: to the process of self-fashioning in times of social change, and to the relationship between appearance and reality. It is also, in this period, fundamental to the process of gender and national representation, and to our understanding of Ireland's economic place in the early modern world.
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Ecological crisis challenges the regenerative capacity of nature, revealing all life to exist in anticipation of death. In the face of this realisation, the human subject enters a melancholic state, which, in turn, permits deeper insight... more
Ecological crisis challenges the regenerative capacity of nature, revealing all life to exist in anticipation of death. In the face of this realisation, the human subject enters a melancholic state, which, in turn, permits deeper insight into the fate of the more-than-human world. The rhetoric of loss, identified by Juliana Schiesari as a key to melancholy, can be traced throughout contemporary poetry, which offers a means to contemplate the temporal rupture of environmental destruction at the same time as it acknowledges the challenges to representation it brings. This essay will explore these dynamics in a range of poems by contemporary Irish and British women, revealing an encounter between the embodied self and nature that has profound effects on the construction of the poetic subject, and on traditional approaches to form.
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The publishing history of Notes from the Land of the Dead is a complex one, heralding a change in Kinsella's attitude towards textual revision and volume publication. This article explores the ways in which the evolution of key poems from... more
The publishing history of Notes from the Land of the Dead is a complex one, heralding a change in Kinsella's attitude towards textual revision and volume publication. This article explores the ways in which the evolution of key poems from this collection demonstrates altering aesthetic priorities, while at the same time calling attention to the issue of continuity in Kinsella's work as a whole. His committed engagement with difficult and increasingly irreconcilable ideas can be traced in his rethinking and repositioning of these poems.
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puts it, ‘the environmental movement’s exploitation of the image of Native Americans as uber-environmentalists’ (128). The subsequent discussion of White Noise, another frequently studied text, reveals how DeLillo harnesses nostalgia for... more
puts it, ‘the environmental movement’s exploitation of the image of Native Americans as uber-environmentalists’ (128). The subsequent discussion of White Noise, another frequently studied text, reveals how DeLillo harnesses nostalgia for a broader social critique and the supposed loss of everything from nature to authenticity, from childhood to unmediated experiences. This kind of postnatural nostalgia – after ‘the end of nature’ declared by Bill McKibben in 1989 – draws on familiar nature narratives such as wilderness and pastoral but ‘compounds them, juxtaposing them alongside new circumstances and new ways of making meaning’ (168). Unfortunately, the sixth and final chapter of Reclaiming Nostalgia, on Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, is the least satisfying. Although Ladino again makes a strong argument for the connection between nostalgia and race, it seems to lack the force of the earlier chapters. Nonetheless, the chapter illuminates yet another incarnation of nostalgia, namely the longing for (racial) hybridity that challenges global American capitalism. Although the subtitle suggests that the book is just about ‘longing for nature in American literature’, Reclaiming Nostalgia ranges far beyond that. Through ingenious use of so-called ‘interchapters’ Ladino places nostalgia in a broader cultural context that includes Ansel Adams’ photo-series Born Free and Equal on Japanese–Americans interred during World War II, to a critique of the TV show Survivor. A good example of one of these interchapters is Ladino’s reading of Iron Eyes Cody, the iconic ‘Crying Indian’ from the 1971 and 1998 PSA campaigns. While in the 1970s this figure – of, as it later turned out, Italian descent –, merely referred back to the supposed environmentalism of Native Americans, a double nostalgia was at work in his 1990s reincarnation. By 1998, as Ladino shows, the image of Iron Eyes Cody not only signalled a longing for a greener past, but also gestured back to the birth of mainstream environmentalism in the 1970s. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, then, Ladino makes a convincing case for a renewed exploration of nostalgia. Although deemed archaic by many ecocritics and environmentalists, Ladino shows that particularly old narratives and genres – nostalgia, but also pastoral and wilderness – hold great power for a redefined engagement with the non-human natural world. The book consequently provides an inspiring example in demonstrating not only the potential of literature to redefine and reshape images of nature, but also, as Ladino concludes, that literary texts can redefine theory and show us that we ‘can be nostalgic and celebratory, cautious and forward-looking, sincere and humorous, at the same time’ (186–87). Reclaiming Nostalgia does an admirable job at showing just that.
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whilst also being suggestive and often multiple in meaning – words such as ‘leaves’, for instance, often resonate with both meanings, thus referencing both human and non-human spheres simultaneously. Occasionally, a rather more pompous... more
whilst also being suggestive and often multiple in meaning – words such as ‘leaves’, for instance, often resonate with both meanings, thus referencing both human and non-human spheres simultaneously. Occasionally, a rather more pompous and poetic tone creeps in, which is less successful – see, for instance, the piece ‘Decidua’with its latinate language and familiar references to seasonality and ‘falling off’. There is also a vein of surreality and humour here, which contributes to the pleasure we take in the work. The final section of this volume looks forward to Burnett’s ambitious current project on Icarus, Through the Weather Glass. Readers of Green Letters should look out for this forthcoming book. Here, she engages in further experimentation within poetry and genres beyond, including fiction and travel writing, and explores hubris as a central conceit for our relationship with our world, particularly in relation to climate change.
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In an essay entitled ‘Pathologies’ Jamie reflects on the role of the microscopic other in endangering human wellbeing and continuing life. This ‘inner natural world’ is both complex and contingent however; developments at the interface... more
In an essay entitled ‘Pathologies’ Jamie reflects on the role of the microscopic other in endangering human wellbeing and continuing life. This ‘inner natural world’ is both complex and contingent however; developments at the interface between creativity and technology have for some time problematized the concept of the body as singularly ‘human’ in character. Jamie’s engagement with the intricacy of bodily experience and representation, in particular with notions of the ‘other within’, is explored in a new way in a short sequence of poems published as This Weird Estate in 2007. These poems were written in response to anatomical representations of the early 19th century, several of which relate specifically to reproductive disease; they consider this most proximate of encounters—that of the child in the womb with the body of the mother—as a site within which other forms of nature exert an invisible yet powerful force. This chapter situates these poems at the interface of the poet’s engagement with generational change and ecological responsibility.
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Archives play an important role in preserving literary history, but they also have the potential to change that history, by making the papers of Irish writers, editors, and publishers available, as well as by documenting larger literary... more
Archives play an important role in preserving literary history, but they also have the potential to change that history, by making the papers of Irish writers, editors, and publishers available, as well as by documenting larger literary and social moments. By facilitating the preservation and arrangement of these materials, archivists support new ways of interpreting and communicating historical and artistic processes to a wide audience. Archives are themselves interesting subjects of study, helping us to understand how national traditions and intellectual priorities evolve. This essay explores the value of Irish literary archives to the contemporary scholar, and considers some of the factors that shape a writer's legacy.
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Maurice James Craig (1919–2011) is widely known as an architectural historian and biographer: those encountering his writing today may not even be aware that he was a poet of repute during his twenties, one expected to become a major... more
Maurice James Craig (1919–2011) is widely known as an architectural historian and biographer: those encountering his writing today may not even be aware that he was a poet of repute during his twenties, one expected to become a major figure on the Irish poetry scene. His poetry and reviews appeared regularly in both British and Irish literary periodicals in the nineteen forties, yet he published just one full-length collection, Some Way for Reason, with Heinemann in London in 1948. In 2011 Liberties Press published a new selection of Craig's poetry; this included poems from the Heinemann volume together with work that had previously appeared in journals or anthologies only. Since that publication, other previously uncollected poems have come to light, two of which are printed here. These poems first appeared, along with work by John Hewitt and W.R. Rodgers among others, in a pamphlet printed in Belfast in 1942 – 15 Poems in Aid of the Russian Red Cross. In my introduction to these poems I examine this publication and its contributors, and situate Craig's poems in the context of the Second World War and of his developing themes of personal responsibility and cultural dissolution.
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The middle years of the twentieth century are often perceived as a fallow period for Irish poetry, with work produced between the Literary Revival and the mid-sixties attracting comparatively little critical attention. Though Austin... more
The middle years of the twentieth century are often perceived as a fallow period for Irish poetry, with work produced between the Literary Revival and the mid-sixties attracting comparatively little critical attention. Though Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh are established figures in the literary chronology of post-partition Ireland, their achievements are often seen as singular ones, rather than as part of the larger cultural dynamic that gave rise to such poets as Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey and that also shaped poetic developments north of the border. This special issue of the Irish University Review seeks to reconsider poetry cultures in Ireland between 1930 and 1970, interrogating the patterns of journal and book publication, the development of critical cultures through poetry journalism and academic study, and to undertake new readings of established poets writing during these years. The relationship between the aspirations of the Revivalist period and the experiences of Irish citizens in the decades of the midtwentieth century is always difficult to reconcile. While artistic expression played an important role in the imaginative construction of independence, cultural concerns became subordinate to economic and social issues once the Free State was established. A rural identity remained pre-eminent, and without an industrial base Ireland’s poetry never developed the urban focus that inflected Anglo-American poetics. A problematic relationship existed between rural experience and poetic representation, however, and this is highlighted in Catherine Kilcoyne’s new reading of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger. She argues that this important poem oscillates between the treatment of Maguire’s experience as an authentic counterbalance to Revivalist mythmaking, and as a self-conscious representation of a man colluding in his own repression. This complex relationship between realistic and self-reflexive modes has shaped the writing of both poetry and criticism in Ireland throughout the twentieth century, and has a particular bearing on the muted years that followed the
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The extraordinary rise of Ireland’s economy during the Celtic Tiger years, and its no less spectacular crash in the autumn of 2008, is by now a familiar story. The last 20 years have resulted in a radical change in Ireland’s social and... more
The extraordinary rise of Ireland’s economy during the Celtic Tiger years, and its no less spectacular crash in the autumn of 2008, is by now a familiar story. The last 20 years have resulted in a radical change in Ireland’s social and cultural fabric that is reflected in its writing, art and built environment. Its capital, Dublin, has been the site of particular shifts in fortune during these years, and its evolution, both as a built space and a literary inspiration, is the focus of this essay. Today’s city is judged against its past, and its poetic representation often dwells on its imperfect state, whether as medieval settlement or twenty-first-century consumer playground. Many poets have seen continuities of past and present as essential to an understanding of the contemporary city, and their work interprets the recessionary space as part of a continuum—an ebb and flow of singular and collective meanings.
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Kathleen Jamie’s significance as a writer has, to a large degree, been predicated on the fortunate coincidence of the precision and clarity of her art and her engagement with important issues of identity in Britain today. A Scottish poet... more
Kathleen Jamie’s significance as a writer has, to a large degree, been predicated on the fortunate coincidence of the precision and clarity of her art and her engagement with important issues of identity in Britain today. A Scottish poet at a time when debates on the role of Scotland are to the fore in British culture, she has raised the awareness of readers not through polemics but with a minutely detailed approach to language and form. Her writings on ecological themes reveal a similar attention to acts of observation and representation, asking questions about the relationship between the interconnectedness of the natural world and the individuality that is necessary for creative work.
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The relationship between human and animal worlds has a long history of literary representation in Ireland, extending back to medieval texts in Irish and in Latin. Poems such as John Derrick’s ‘Image of Irelande’ from 1581 signal the... more
The relationship between human and animal worlds has a long history of literary representation in Ireland, extending back to medieval texts in Irish and in Latin. Poems such as John Derrick’s ‘Image of Irelande’ from 1581 signal the presence of precursors — his praise of falcons is linked to the importance of hunting birds in late medieval Ireland and, perhaps, to a lingering memory of the significance of the bird in earlier Irish literature.1 Typically, texts from the Renaissance period in Ireland deliberately blurred the boundary between animal and human life in order to emphasize the ‘barbarous’ nature of the Irish people: works by Giraldus Cambrensis, Edmund Spenser, and Sir John Davies were widely read in their own time as well as being influential for later writers.2 By the early nineteenth century, however, there was a significant change in the way that animals were perceived, founded on an increasing awareness of the close ties between human and nonhuman life. Thus, complex historical processes underpin the representation and reading of animals during this period, and the specific differences between humans and nonhumans in the Irish context must be set within the cultural and legal conditions of the time. This essay is concerned primarily with the relationship between the ideological and the aesthetic — specifically with how literary representations of shooting, hunting, cockfighting, and bull-baiting set the terms by which the subject of cruelty to animals in the long eighteenth century may be understood.
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Vona Groarke (b. 1964) is a contemporary Irish poet. Born in Edgeworthstown in the Irish midlands, and now resident in Manchester, Groarke is the author of five collections of poetry with Gallery Press; her sixth collection, X, will be... more
Vona Groarke (b. 1964) is a contemporary Irish poet. Born in Edgeworthstown in the Irish midlands, and now resident in Manchester, Groarke is the author of five collections of poetry with Gallery Press; her sixth collection, X, will be published early in 2014. Her work appears regularly in British and Irish journals, and has received numerous awards, including the Strokestown International Poetry Award and the Forward Prize. Four previously unpublished poems by Vona Groarke appear here, introduced by Lucy Collins.
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This annotated anthology of poems makes available a rich variety of Irish texts depicting the relationship between humans and the environment between the years 1580 and 1820. More than a hundred poems are printed here, together with an... more
This annotated anthology of poems makes available a rich variety of Irish texts depicting the relationship between humans and the environment between the years 1580 and 1820. More than a hundred poems are printed here, together with an extensive critical introduction, notes on each text, and a full bibliography. All the poets whose work is represented were born in Ireland or are identified as Irish. As well as re-publishing the work of major poets such as Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Whyte and William Drummond, this anthology includes many works by little known or anonymous authors. This volume also reflects current scholarship on the relationship between literature and the environment, enriching our understanding of attitudes in pre-Romantic Ireland towards changing landscapes and agricultural practices, towards human responsibility for the non-human world, and towards the relationship between nature and aesthetics. As well as adding considerably to existing knowledge of the printing and reading of poetry in Ireland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this anthology also traces the developments in sensibility in Irish poetry during this period, offering new perspectives on the advent of Romanticism in England and on the ways in which this revolutionised the relationship between nature and representation. The anthology fulfils the dual purpose of making a significant contribution to the study of literature and the environment, and of expanding our understanding of Irish writing during the period.
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New Transatlantic Dialogues, edited by Gregory Betts and Lucy Collins