15 Ireland’s Afterlives in Global Anglophone Poetry Omaar Hena As this collection of essays attests, there is no disputing how Irish poetry is in and of the world, especially as outside pressures have shaped the formation of Irish poetry and as Irish writing has become an important inluence in shaping other poetries far beyond the island’s borders. In recent years, Irish studies has taken a global turn which is due to the established inluence of postcolonial studies and may further stem from globalization discourses in the humanities. But the worlding of Irish literature has a long history. We can look back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, given experiences of transatlantic migration due to the famine and Irish participation in British imperialism. This was followed by periods of exile, migration, and cosmopolitanism under “high” and “late” modernisms in the twentieth century. And now in the twenty-irst century, Irish cultural production in ilm, theater, iction, and poetry has begun to address the challenges facing “the new Irish,” considering the increasingly multiethnic, polyglot constitution of the polity.1 In the relatively smaller domain of poetry studies, 338 | Post-Ireland? Hena | 339 scholars have mapped the signiicance of US, Eastern European, Greek, French, and Japanese literary and cultural inluences upon contemporary Irish poetry as well as the institutional networks connecting Ireland with Caribbean, African, and South Asian spaces of poetic production in the post–World War II era.2 Whether looking outward by projecting the nation through transnational literary circuits and cosmopolitan interrelations or turning inward by representing local spaces and cultural practices as already saturated with outside inluences, Irish writers and artists have adopted a range of strategies to imagine Ireland both within and beyond the geographic boundaries of the island. “Post-Ireland.” At play, here, are at least two senses of “post” that, at irst blush, seem antithetical to one another: one sense carries with it a desire to announce (as in “to post”) the presence of Ireland and thereby drive “toward”; the other sense, conversely, describes an impulse to move “beyond.” What might it mean to pose “Post-Ireland” not as a declarative statement but, rather, as a still unresolved question concerning the various ways writers — Irish and non-Irish alike — have displayed an irrepressible “desire for” and a concomitant imperative to “think beyond” the nation by repeatedly returning to questions of difference and cross-cultural comparison? In light of the ways scholars have traced the global inlections informing contemporary Irish literature, this chapter switches focus by examining how contemporary global anglophone poets recurrently look to Ireland to contend with the contradictions of modernity as they are locally embedded and globally imagined. Overall, we can see several reasons for Ireland’s seminal position in postcolonial English-language poetry. For one, and as has been widely acknowledged, Ireland was one of Britain’s oldest colonies (after Wales) — stretching back, depending on one’s historical perspective, to the twelfth century when Henry II was declared lord of Ireland. This was followed by the series of invasions and plantations in the sixteenth century and onward, leading up to the Act of Union (1801), which formally incorporated Ireland under British colonial rule. It is by now a commonplace to acknowledge how the historical foundation of British imperialism in Ireland became a template for other colonial locations that have contended with the legacy of empire post-Ireland (or concurrently with Ireland). In the 340 | Post-Ireland? process, postcolonial authors have modeled their own struggles for political and literary independence through Irish authors. Given what Mark Quigley calls “Ireland’s much earlier entry into postcoloniality,” we need to “consider anew how the Irish experience might both inlect and be inlected by anticolonial and postcolonial formations emanating from other former imperial spaces.”3 It makes sense, then, that postcolonial authors would adapt Irish literary models to grapple with their own social, political, and cultural dislocations, as I discuss below. Another related reason stems from the centrality of Irish literature in the formation of world literature more broadly. In the ield of postcolonial studies and world literature, for instance, there have been extensive studies of the signiicance of Shaw, Wilde, Synge, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (to name only the most recognizable) upon canonical postcolonial authors, including Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Chinua Achebe, Samuel Selvon, Wole Soyinka, Mustapha Matura, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid, Arundhati Roy, Junot Díaz, and many others. These lines of inluence are due to a wide array of sociological, historical, and political contexts. In The World Republic of Letters (1999, 2004), Pascale Casanova looks to Ireland’s relatively “peripheral” relation to metropolitan, imperial centers of world literature such as Paris and London in the early- and mid-twentieth century. Over a short period of time, Casanova claims, modern Irish authors developed a series of strategies for contesting colonial rule and for subverting imperial centers of literary production, thereby forging an Irish national heritage and staging “a revolt against the literary order.”4 By linking “national” and “international” perspectives, Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, and Beckett furthermore staked a claim for their writing’s relative autonomy from the political world and, in the process, enabled the emergence of “Ireland” as a new center of literary production. “The Irish Paradigm,” for Casanova, has become exemplary for other minor literatures from the so-called peripheries. We might even go so far to say that once Ireland has become an institutional center in world letters (not such “the Irish Paradigm” but a paradigm), later postcolonial authors look to Irish writing to gain recognition and visibility in the literary marketplace. A third reason, though, is due to the sheer sophistication of Irish literature and the versatile strategies Irish writers deploy in handling the Hena | 341 lexibility of the English language, especially through a repeated emphasis on alterity and estrangement. As we will see, global anglophone poets repeatedly cite “the language issue” as a crucial means through which to relect upon questions over identity and difference, national belonging and cosmopolitan attachment, and an overwhelming preoccupation over aesthetics and politics. Like their Irish predecessors, the poets studied here similarly question how experimentations with the English language can both express a “desire for” and a wish to “move beyond” local, geographic boundaries with an eye to the global energies animating poetic production and reception. The generative possibilities encapsulated in “Post-Ireland,” I hope, will provide a broad analytic concerning the numerous ways global anglophone poets turn to “Ireland” — here understood as a densely layered, multifaceted site, comprising its historical, political, cultural, aesthetic, and imaginative dimensions — as a relay through which to mediate a host of social-political preoccupations and across a range of contexts, from postwar periods of decolonization through twenty-irst century globalization. “Literary texts,” Amanda Tucker and Moira E. Casey argue in reference to the transnational energies of Irish literature, “not only serve as representations of transnational subjects and themes related to cross-border movements, networks, and afiliations; they become transnational connectivities themselves.”5 I begin with a comparison between W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott (b. 1930, St. Lucia) before turning to Christopher Okigbo (1932–1967, Nigeria), E. A. Markham (1939–2008, Montserrat/UK/France), Sujata Bhatt (b. 1956, India/US/Germany), and Daljit Nagra (b. 1966, UK). Had I world enough and time, I would have also discussed A. K. Ramanujan (1929–1993, India/ US), Louise Ho (b. 1945, Hong Kong), Lorna Goodison (b. 1947, Jamaica/ US), Grace Nichols (b. 1950, Guyana/UK), Ingrid de Kok (b. 1951, South Africa), and Fred D’Aguiar (b. 1960, Guyana/UK/US). Though this chapter is by no means exhaustive, we can nonetheless see how English-language poets from around the world have contributed to a vibrant conversation over the many ways in which Irish cultural resources both survive (sur-vivre, “live on”) and lourish as they become uprooted, appropriated, recycled, and renewed in the global era. 342 | Post-Ireland? I would like to begin my exploration of Ireland’s afterlives through a close reading of a now familiar pairing: W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott. In 1936, Yeats composed his late poem “Lapis Lazuli,” which in many ways crystallizes, and even pre-igures, many of the critical debates over the cross-cultural energies animating the production and reception of Irish literature over the past two decades. Before World War II, Yeats was already looking globally in “Lapis Lazuli” to question the role of art in responding to human suffering. “For everybody knows or else should know,” Yeats memorably writes: That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten lat.6 In order to represent the pressing immediacy of political crisis, Yeats notably overlays earlier historical moments of European conquest so as to show, at one and the same time, the “provinciality” of Europe’s internal conlicts as well as the “globality” of the poet’s imaginative reach — irst to summon and then to yoke together discrepant temporalities and geographic spaces that otherwise would appear to be worlds apart. Indeed, the remainder of the poem proceeds, in its cross-rhymed strophes of varying length, to travel back in time and place to Shakespeare’s Renaissance England, even further back to Callimachus’s Greece in the ifth century bce, and then forward in time and across a continent to Emperor Ch’ien Lung’s Manchu Qing Dynasty in eighteenth-century China, where the poem ostensibly concludes. In the inal stanza, Yeats peers into the precious stone of lapis lazuli, given to him as a birthday gift by the poet Henry Talbot de Vere Clifton, and metaphorically transigures “Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent” into the semblance of natural tranquility, “a water-course or an avalanche, / or lofty slope.”7 All this happens before Yeats inserts himself into the exotic art object, where he shares company with the three distant Chinese igures who listen to “mournful melodies.” Together, they stare from almost planetary heights upon “all the tragic scene” of catastrophe below: Hena | 343 and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished ingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.8 So what does it mean for the Western Yeats “to delight to imagine” the ancient, Eastern igures that he sees in the stone of lapis lazuli, and that he holds in his mind’s eye? Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli,” even beyond relecting an ambivalent instance of orientalism, constitutes an incipiently globalized aesthetic whereby the Irish modernist, who is neither fully inside nor outside his Anglo-Irish identity, responds to the crises of modernity by imagining cross-cultural afiliations formed away from the imperial center and circulated transnationally, all the while remaining attuned to the spaces between cultures. Yeats goes to great lengths to preserve the gap between his speaker’s location and the subjects he imagines, especially through the repetition of “them,” “there,” “their.” Together, these words signify a self-conscious awareness of the singularity of cultural difference: that the Irish and Chinese experiences are neither identical with nor collapsible into one another. At the same time, Yeats’s distancing mechanisms also invite a correspondence between “there” and “here,” as when the arresting enjambment (“and I / Delight”) suspends the poem’s lyric “I,” who straddles in-between the Western, modern “here” of the site of composition and the Eastern, ancient “there” of the “tragic scene.” The poem compresses time and space so as to call into question the separation of spatial and temporal borders that usually cordon off cultures, geographies, and histories, all of which are, in truth, already entangled within one another, however unevenly. Here and across this work, Yeats routes Irishness beyond the IrishEnglish binary, outward to India, China, and Japan, and it thus is not reducible to orientalism, primitivism, or cultural imperialism, though these are admittedly part of the story. Surely Yeats appropriates Chinese cultural artifacts. “Lapis Lazuli” manifests an instance of “Irish Orientalism,” in 344 | Post-Ireland? Joseph Lennon’s phrasing: that is, the semiotic presence of the East in Irish texts which constitutes a distinct and separate discourse from Orientalism proper.9 Irish Orientalism simultaneously operates both within and at a distance from European Orientalism because of what Lennon calls Ireland’s “liminal” or in-between position as both colonized and colonizer, a position often enabling Irish writers to make productive cross-colonial identiications.10 “Celtic-Oriental comparisons,” he writes, “allowed Irish writers to rhetorically assert both their proximity to the metropole, or center of the Empire, and their proximity to the periphery, depending on the context, audience, and purpose of their argument or representation.”11 As we can see in this instance, Yeats “rhetorically takes advantage of both the Orientalist perspective of the colonizer and the nationalist convictions of the colonized.”12 But as much as Yeats exempliies Irish Orientalism the poem also Hibernicizes China, overlaying the Eastern signiier with Yeats’s own preoccupations within a “semicolonial” Irish context, in the words of Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes.13 In this sense, “China” becomes less a referent to real histories and subjects and more an imagined geography which Yeats channels along with “England” and “Greece”: even as Yeats strives toward the incorporation of foreign artifacts into a coherent world-view, the poem equally demonstrates how its world-making project is necessarily incomplete and provisional. This maneuver on Yeats’s part compels us to sustain a double vision: at once acknowledging the incommensurable differences between and the overlapping contiguity across discrete cultures and languages as they enter into conversation with one another. In poetry studies, readers are now well aware of Derek Walcott’s Irish afiliations and solidarities. He memorably describes the Irish as “the niggers of Britain” in a 1977 interview with Edward Hirsch. In his monumental epic Omeros (1990), the poet travels to Ireland, which he describes as “a nation split by a glottal scream.”14 Across his career, he repurposes Irish modernists to fashion what several scholars have described as a “discrepant cosmopolitanism,” a term borrowed from cultural anthropologist James Clifford.15 As Michael Malouf observes, Walcott looks to the migrant, exilic qualities of “Irish writing” to articulate the Caribbean as “a cosmopolitan culture of bricolage, where every individual part is only a igure for a larger whole located elsewhere.”16 But Walcott also looks to Irish authors Hena | 345 to self-consciously meditate upon the powers and limitations of poetic language to name “a world” still caught between the demise of imperialism on the one hand and the acceleration of globalization on the other. In the process, Walcott also questions the fate of locality in the midst of tourism and poverty in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Consider, for instance, his poem “The Lost Empire” from White Egrets (2010). In this later poem, the irst strophe recounts with bitter sarcasm how the British empire’s world-wide reach, previously encircling “Burma, Canada, Egypt, India, the Sudan,” became “all of a sudden” nothing more than “air,” “dirt,” and “silence.”17 The poem then proceeds to recount the pageantry of decolonization — “the whited eyes and robes of surrendering hordes” — and the lure of western metropoles for postcolonial migrants in the “glittering cities, / Genoa, Milan, London, Madrid, Paris.” The inal strophe shifts perspective, however. Reminiscent of the pastoral tradition extending back to Virgil’s Eclogues, the poem extols how: This small place produces nothing but beauty: the wind-warped trees, the breakers on the Dennery cliffs, and the wild light that loosens a galloping mare on the plane of Vieuxfort makes us merely receiving vessels of each day’s grace, light simpliies us whatever our race or gifts. I’m as content as Kavanagh with his few acres; for my heart to be torn to shreds like the sea’s lace, to see how its wings catch colour when a gull lifts.18 In these lines, Walcott’s hexameters enlist local topography, place-names inherited from British and French colonialism, and the sights and sounds of natural ecology to articulate the ways “light simpliies” — or, the ways poetic illumination suspends — the racial antinomies and political hierarchies that the poem had previously indicted and, signiicantly, capitalized upon. Indeed, the deixis signaled by “this small place” refers to the small place of the stanza that itself “produces” the quotidian “beauty” that the text construes as “each day’s grace.” After having dilated the time of globalization to include the history of imperialism, decolonization, and post-War global 346 | Post-Ireland? economic exchange, the inal lines turn to the local, ecological splendor of St. Lucia. It is as if the ceaseless lux of nature might gesture to a counter-discursive domain of globalism that would resist, or at least momentarily disrupt, the hegemonic effects of globalization. Put another way, his poem seeks to refresh the reader’s perception of globalism so as to call into question who and what populates a world, whether they be empires, nations, and cities, or wind-warped trees, the sea’s lace, and a lifting gull. Walcott does so, however, by positioning his writing in relationship with another exemplar of self-fashioned locality, Patrick Kavanagh. Interestingly, however, the speaker’s “content” in localism is betrayed by a quivering restlessness, which occurs on the levels of rhetoric and intertextuality. The simile comparing the speaker’s heart “torn to shreds” as if it were “the sea’s lace” might well signify the shreds of world literature that low through Walcott’s verse, producing redoubled localities that are threatened by erasure. Walcott’s title, “The Lost Empire,” signiies, along one interpretive line, the “lost empire of signs”: the lost power of language to name a world anew as a social-political necessity set against what is often perceived as the homogenizing logic of globalization, which lattens the differences between discrete times and places. Along another line, however, the poem also enacts “signs at liberty” signaling his writing’s participation in globalization through the wayward movement of literatures, thereby rejuvenating English-language poetry and expanding the domain of world literature. Yeats and Walcott unite in casting poiesis as a performative enactment that can draw linkages between disparate geographies, histories, and languages. What’s more, their trans-historical conception of poetic inluence — as when Yeats compares himself to “the Tibetan monk who dreams at his initiation he himself is eater and eaten,” thereby capturing the cyclical processes of consumption and production subtending the circulation of global culture;19 or when Walcott conceives of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce not as European precursors that need to be shucked off but, on the contrary, as simultaneous contemporaries driven by a “ilial impulse” through which literary language becomes a “living element” begetting new cultural attachments — seeks to advance polycentric models of poetic production and reception.20 Hena | 347 Before Walcott articulated the vacillations of postcolonial subjectivity through Yeatsian ambivalence in “A Far Cry from Africa” (1962), other world poets turned to the Anglo-Irish modernist during the era of decolonization and subsequent struggles for national independence in the middle of the twentieth century. We can think, especially, of Nigerian authors such as Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo. Born in 1932, Okigbo lived in Northern Nigeria before studying classics at University of Ibadan (his early poetic practice involved his own translations from Greek and Latin into English). After graduating in 1956, he became a school teacher, a librarian at the University of Nigeria (Nsukka), and a representative for Cambridge University Press before his untimely and tragic death ighting for the Biafran side during the bloody civil war (1967–70). While T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are typically named as the most dominant inluences (among the many Western inluences) upon his particular brand of postcolonial modernism, Yeats was also a seminal igure to Okigbo, at least in his “later” career. As Okigbo’s readers are well aware, he composed “Lament of the Masks” in honor of Yeats. The poem is featured in the opening pages of the collection W. B. Yeats: 1865–1965: Centenary Essays, published in Nigeria by the University of Ibadan Press and jointly edited by D. E. S. Maxwell and S. Bushrui. The table of contents lists essays placing Yeats in conversation with Shakespeare, Synge, Irish nationalism, and “the Oriental and Celtic elements” of his writing. But the collection also includes poems by South African writer L. D. Lerner and Northern Irish author James Simmons. These bibliographic details are well worth mentioning. As Nathan SuhrSytsma has shown, they form part of a broader pattern in which mid-century poets operate within transnational networks and institutions of print and, in doing so, address multiple and often overlapping publics at local, national, and international scales. Seeing Okigbo’s poem in this framework, Suhr-Sytsma argues that “ ‘Lament of the Masks’ looks less like evidence of a postcolonial African writer’s debt to European innovation than part of a lively conversation about Yeats’s legacy among anglophone poets from various non-metropolitan locations.”21 It makes sense that Yeats would have such a powerful effect upon Okigbo, particularly given Nigeria’s tumultuous political climate during the late 1950s and 1960s. Okigbo likely saw in 348 | Post-Ireland? Yeats the cosmopolitan modern poet-igure par excellence, one who also sought to forge a uniquely national consciousness against colonial rule by elevating local mythology and folklore into high art while, at one and the same time, maintaining a position of poetic autonomy by using masked personae to take on a public voice, or even many public voices, a feature which has become a hallmark of Yeats’s oeuvre. “Lament of the Masks” is written in the conventions of the Yoruba praise poem, or oríkì. The oral praise poem typically describes the features of the deceased hero or ancestor by listing his names and epithets, lauding his accomplishments and victories, and comparing him to animal symbolism and the natural world.22 As other scholars have established, Okigbo adopts all of these features but transforms the oríkì into a thoroughly hybrid and fundamentally print form.23 Okigbo’s speaker enunciates in “Warped voices” and “from throats of iron,” as if to signify the oríkì’s estrangement from itself.24 The poem casts Yeats as “WAGGONER of the Great Dawn” (alluding to his immersion in the occult) who pursues and subdues “the white elephant,” violently transforming its tusks into “ivory trumpets.”25 Throughout, Yeats takes on a sublime magnitude who evades containment, even at the level of lineation and enjambment: “They poured you into an iron mould / You burst the mould.”26 The poem concludes: But will a lutist never stop to wipe his nose? Two arms can never alone encircle a giant iroko. Night breezes drum on the plantain leaf: Let the plantain leaf take over the dance.27 Yeats’s monumental stature compels Okigbo to igure him as the “giant iroko.” In Yoruba myth, the iroko tree stands at the center of a forest and contains within it an ancestral spirit, often igured as an old man, a symbol of virility and strength. Any who dare to cut down the hallowed tree will release the man’s spirit, potentially bringing ruin to the community. In these lines, Okigbo encases the spirit of the Irish poet within the iroko. Now housed within the iroko, Yeats suddenly becomes an authentic origin of Yoruba culture, whose power inspires something akin to terrible beauty for those who might encircle him. Hena | 349 Having paid homage to Yeats, the inal lines, however, seem to displace him to clear a space for a new mode of praise poems that might blend Irish and Yoruba sources. It is as if the plantain leaf (a Yoruba igure of health and sustenance) might supplant (“take over”) the Yeatsian dance, despite the continuing reverberations which we hear from “Among School Children.” That is, the poem aspires for the local “breeze” and the native “leaf” to become its own lament for Yeats, thereby replacing the paltry artiice of song, dance, or poetry itself. In the end, the ambiguity of these inal lines makes it dificult, if not impossible, to know “Yeatsian” symbology from “Yoruba” mythology: masks, horns, drums, trees, and the dance are now “native” to both traditions through their mutual imbrication. Here, Okigbo taps into and extends the global reach of Yeats’s cultural storehouse, which now takes on new life when transplanted on Nigerian soil. In his later work, Okigbo seems to take on the role of the poet-prophet by fusing Igbo traditions with anglo-modernism (especially the T. S. Eliot of The Waste Land). It was after writing “Lament of the Masks” that Okigbo composed his apocalyptic sequence “Path of Thunder: Poems Prophesying War” (1965–66). Arguably, Okigbo’s engagement with the apocalyptic Yeats may have furnished him with a powerful model to intertwine indigenous Yoruba idioms and high anglo-modernist poetics in the context of the struggle for national independence and civil war and, in the process, made possible a thoroughly postcolonial Nigerian oríkì. Whereas Okigbo relates to Yeatsian sources from a distance, other poets have engaged Ireland — and its ambivalent relation to the British Empire — in more direct ways. E. A. Markham, for instance, was born in Montserrat, which he claims “is more organically Irish than any other [island] in the Caribbean” due to Ireland’s colonial presence on the island stretching back to the seventeenth century.28 Having grown up surrounded by Irish inluences in the Lesser Antilles, Markham moved to Britain in the 1950s and held a Senior Lectureship in creative writing at Shefield Hallam University. At different points in his life, he lived in France and Papua New Guinea but also spent time in Northern Ireland while writer-in-residence at the University of Ulster, Coleraine (1988–1991). During these years, he edited the literary magazine Writing Ulster and delivered a lecture (subsequently published as an essay) titled “Ireland’s Islands in the 350 | Post-Ireland? Caribbean: Poetry from Montserrat and St. Caesare” (1994). In his essay, Markham recalls how his home island was settled by a group of Irish dissidents leeing British and French rule of St. Kitts in 1632. “This was not,” Markham is clear to say, “a voyage of discovery.”29 Irish occupation of the island increased all the more in the aftermath of Cromwell’s vicious campaign later in the seventeenth century, transforming Montserrat into “an outpost of Ireland in the Caribbean.”30 While not arriving as colonists and subsequently subject to British legal restrictions and anti-Catholic discrimination, the Irish also participated in land ownership and plantation slavery.31 Markham bears a personal awareness of Ireland’s imprint on the “Emerald Isle of the Caribbean,” an imprint which quite literally appears through a number of national symbols. For instance, the ensign on Montserrat’s lag features the igure of Erin holding a harp and a shamrock is engraved on the Government House in the capital of Plymouth. Echoing Walcott, Markham likewise maintains that “Ireland’s proximity to England and complex relationship to English makes it easier for us, from outlying areas of Englishness, or Britishness, or English-languageness, to adopt and adapt its literary models without the political self-consciousness that would arise if those models were English — or perhaps, even American.”32 Unlike other postcolonial writers who receive Irish resources from afar, such as Okigbo or Linton Kwesi Johnson whose Jamaican dub rhythms were informed by Irish accents broadcast over the bbc, Markham goes so far as to claim that Irishness and Irish consciousness is already native to the Caribbean’s history of creolization. During his residency at Coleraine, Markham wrote and later published his ifth collection of poems, Letter from Ulster & The Hugo Poems (1993). As the title suggests, the book is divided into two parts: those poems written from an “Irish perspective” in Ulster looking out to the world (spanning the Caribbean, North America, the UK, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa) and, conversely, other poems situated in Montserrat concerning Hurricane Hugo, which devastated the island while Markham was living in Northern Ireland in 1989. His poem “Island” belongs to the irst group and indirectly comments on Ireland’s waves of invasions, from the Viking raids in the Middle Ages through the Early Modern and Modern era. “Island” places particular emphasis on the experiences of those who Hena | 351 remain broken and fragmented due to historical violence, perhaps up to and including the Troubles. The poem concludes: Those for whom cracks were never mended are here, bits of them trying to assemble bits of you they care to claim. They attack — guns, bombs, badverbs — evacuated arguments. On the horizon, another island aloat. Ah, in a sea of salt, a line, a rope, a plan of rescue: how best to invade?33 In these lines, “Island” contains the “cracks” and “bits” which refuse mending only to expose how these same linguistic elements (“badverbs”) risk perpetuating colonization. By underscoring the reversibility of “they” and “you,” Markham highlights the tenuous, arbitrary relation between colonizer and colonized. In many ways, “Island” questions how and whether the poem might offer a way out of this cycle through “a line” or “plan of rescue”: if anything, Markham seems to signal his own writing’s immersion in colonial legacies, whether situated in Ulster or in the Caribbean. If spoken from a Northern Irish perspective, the poem casts “Ulster” as thoroughly divided within itself due to its long history of conquest, stretching back to Cromwell, the Act of Union, and through the Troubles, the aftermath of which were still reverberating when Markham was writing in the early 1990s. If spoken, though, from a Montserratian perspective, Markham would seem to cast himself as a Caribbean invader of Northern Ireland, as if to return Ulster’s colonial legacy back to its British origins before it was transported across the Atlantic. And yet, it would seem as though Markham requires the reader to sustain both of these perspectives simultaneously. In doing so, the poem leaves open the possibility for a reciprocal intertwining of “Ulster” and “Montserrat” into one another, each “Island” now the uncanny double of the other, both in friction and harmony. Here and elsewhere in the collection, such as in the poems “Hinterland,” “Letter from Ulster,” “Maurice V.’s Dido,” and “Kevin’s Message to Montserrat,” Markham brings to the surface what he calls “the loating images, the buried memories” of Irish-Caribbean 352 | Post-Ireland? “alliances.”34 In doing so, he points to provisional and shifting models of intercultural subjectivity circulating across the Atlantic. Given the legacy of colonial education and mass migration in the postwar era, several poets from the Asian subcontinent have similarly grafted their own hybrid experiences of multilingualism and living-between-worlds through Irish sources. We can think, for instance, of the Yeatsian inlections informing the work of Indian-born poet A. K. Ramanujan (1929–93) and Kashmiri-born Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), both of whom made their careers while living in the US. Yeats’s sustained engagement with poetry and politics — combined with his global expansiveness and immersion in Eastern cultures — has been profoundly signiicant for these poets to mediate the divisions of diaspora and to fashion cosmopolitan subjectivities. South Asian diaspora women poets however face added dificulties given their triple condition of exclusion as female, ethnic minorities, and outside a male-centered lyric tradition. The Indian-born, US-educated, and now Germany-based poet Sujata Bhatt (b. 1956) takes up these and other concerns in her writing. In contrast to Ramanujan and Ali, Bhatt grew up primarily in the US (she learned English after moving to New Orleans at the age of ive due to her father’s profession as a virologist). Though less recognized than her elder male predecessors, Bhatt has published several collections with Carcanet Press: Brunizem (1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia); Monkey Shadows (1991); Point No Point (1997); Augatora (2000); and Pure Lizard (2008). Her writing has also earned recognition from the prestigious Poetry Book Society. Bhatt draws upon a wide range of references to write the conjunctures and disjunctures of gender, sexuality, and diaspora. For instance, she frequently switches back and forth between English and her mother tongue, Gujarati, to pattern the “foreignness” and “in-betweenness” of splitting periods of her life between the US, UK, Europe, and India.35 What’s more, she infuses her poems with allusions to classical Indian epic cycles such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, as well as poets in the American grain such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop, and British modernists including Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf. But she also cites “the importance of the Irish tradition,” including “Yeats, Joyce, and Kavanagh,” during her years pursuing an mfa at the University of Iowa.36 Hena | 353 The sheer multiplicity of geographies, cultural references, and languages suffusing Bhatt’s writing also carry a political edge. For her, they serve as her way of “‘writing back’ to history” and “break[ing] certain silences,” given the gender restrictions and sexual prohibitions she perceives as imposed upon South Asian diaspora women.37 Her poetry relishes in image, color, and sound, often imitating the visual and musical arts. Bhatt’s sensualism and eroticism moreover launt boundaries of decorum and aesthetic taste as much as boundaries of ethnic belonging. Consider, for instance, “The Kama Sutra Retold” from Brunizem, which begins: her thighs, beating stronger up her chest, the beak stroking her spine feathers tingling her skin, the blood inside her groin swells while wings are rushing to get out, rushing.40 You laugh, but I want to know how would we break the long silence if we had the same rules? It’s not enough to say she kissed his balls, licked his cock long how her tongue could not stop.38 Bhatt refuses a mere description of the sexual act (“it’s not enough”) through phallocentric discourse focusing on fellatio. In the subsequent verse paragraphs, the speaker proceeds to move back in time and recalls her seventeen-year-old self swimming out to an island with her male lover. Interestingly, Bhatt overlays the adolescent erotic encounter through Yeats, as the male igure in the poem “wishes they were swans / Yeats’s swans” who “glide across other worlds; magical yet rustling with real reeds.”39 In recounting a moment of mutual seduction, the inal verse paragraphs build toward “her” ecstasy, but now by way of “Leda and the Swan” (1924): She must have swallowed the sky the lake, and all the woods veined with amber brown pathways; for now great white wings are swooping through 354 | Post-Ireland? In what has become one of the most controversial poems in his oeuvre, Yeats deploys the igure of Leda to meditate on the relation between violence, sexuality, and women’s mythic “knowledge” of — and relative agency in — history. In his broken sonnet, Yeats looks voyeuristically upon Leda’s violation, questioning its horror all the while becoming “so caught up” in the moment of sexual conquest. We’ll recall how the poem’s onslaught of spondees (“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still”; “white rush”; “strange heart beating”; “brute blood of the air”) mimic the traumatic “suddenness” of Leda’s rape before the utter “strangeness” of the swan. Yeats leaves the speaker (and the reader) to question — in a moment of radical uncertainty as we are left vexed over the extent to which Leda is left utterly bereft — whether she took on “his knowledge with his power / before the indifferent beak could let her drop?”41 One strength of Yeats’s poem is, arguably, how it foregrounds the layers of mediation through which the speaker confronts, and inally fails to apprehend, sexual violence in its mythic proportions. Bhatt takes a different tack. In the lines above, she repurposes Yeats’s language by stripping “Leda” of her prior associations with masculine violence and now giving sublime expression to feminine sexuality in ways that are far more down-to-earth but nonetheless all-consuming. The swan, here, is for her pleasure. Consider, for instance, how Bhatt igures the multiple erotic zones of “her” body (“thighs,” “chest,” “spine,” “skin,” “groin”) and through her breathless jouissance, which we can see and hear through ongoing present participles (“beating,” “stroking,” “tingling,” “rushing”). Hena | 355 Her open-ended syntactical patterning enacts the spreading and diffusion of female pleasure unleashed in écriture feminine. The conclusion swells to climax, as line spills over line, until it seems as though the poem will endure beyond itself through the “rushing,” “rushing” low of orgasm. In these ways, Bhatt performs a double transgression. For one, her eroticism shatters taboos concerning the proper subject matter beitting South Asian women’s writing. But she does so, secondly, by interweaving The Kama Sutra and Yeats, appropriating masculinist mythic texts which now take on new kinds of signiicance in the context of postcolonial feminist concerns. Bhatt remakes “Leda” in her own diasporic image, rewriting the fecundity of feminine sexuality in the unruliness of everyday desire. As readers will have noticed, Yeats has igured prominently thus far in my discussion of Ireland’s afterlives in global anglophone poetry. This probably does not come as much of a surprise given the abiding inluence of anglo-modernism generally in shaping postcolonial poetics in English. But what about contemporary Irish and Northern Irish poetry? In the past two decades, especially, post-war authors such as Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon have gained prominent recognition through publications with elite presses such as Faber, international awards such as the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, appointments as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, university residencies at Harvard and Princeton respectively, and regular placement in university syllabi. Though both of these authors, in different ways, began at the margins of the poetry world in the US and UK, their writing’s inventive engagement with a range of problems — concerning poetry and violence, the poet’s divided relation to divided communities, the abiding question of the language issue, the problem of mediating between local and global perspectives, and self-relexive meditations on how their writing is produced through, circulated by, and received within literary institutions and late capitalist mechanisms of commodiication (to name a few) — has signiicantly contributed to their standing in the poetry establishment. For London-born, British-Punjabi poet Daljit Nagra (b. 1966), the preoccupations of his Northern Irish precursors have taken on urgent signiicance in the context of Black and Minority Ethnic (bme) cultural production in twenty-irst century Britain. After the publication of his award-winning irst collection, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (2007), 356 | Post-Ireland? Nagra was lionized as the voice of British-Asian poetry. In the pages of The Guardian and The Independent, he was lauded as rejuvenating English poetry through his buoyant humor, vibrant “Punglish,” and use of multiple voices and masked personae to pattern the contradictions of belonging and alienation. Nagra, though, faces a particular set of challenges. In light of New Labour imperatives promoting diversity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he writes with an awareness of how his writing will be perceived as “representative” of his South Asian community and used to advance multiculturalist agendas branded under “Cool Britannia.” (As a secondary school teacher based in North London, he is especially sensitive to the ways minority writing is put to the service of educating young adults about “other cultures,” such as in the General Certiicate of Secondary Education.) Nagra, like other bme poets such as Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi, and Lemn Sissay, emphasizes how many of the social disparities and racial exclusions stemming from the Thatcher era have remained intact. One problem Nagra confronts is how to draw upon now elite, canonical Irish precursors to question nagging inequalities confronting minority communities when, by adopting these same sources, he accrues signiicant cultural capital and may risk conirming multicultural ideologies of diversity and assimilation. Irish writers, overall, seem to serve a double function in Nagra’s writing. Citing the importance of Heaney, Muldoon, and Ciaran Carson, he returns repeatedly to Irish authors “because of their energized attitude towards Englishness” and the ways in which “the Irish tradition challenges Englishness and […] the English lineage.”42 From one perspective, then, Nagra repurposes Irish poetic sources to challenge and thereby insert himself into the English poetic tradition. And yet, from another perspective, Englishness is far from monolithic in his eyes, but igures instead through its inner alterity and ineluctable entanglement with myriad others due to the British Empire and the waves of migration in the post-war era. In poems such as “Yobbos!” and “Digging” from his irst collection, Nagra directly alludes to Muldoon and Heaney, respectively, to draw cross-cultural comparisons between “Indians’ and Irish people’s shared oppression.”43 To be sure, he is also careful to distinguish Irish from British-Asian experiences, particularly given the absence of a distinct literary-cultural lineage for a Hena | 357 newly arrived author such as Nagra. Still, Nagra forges Irish-Indian connections across his writing to invent lexible, capacious models of cross-cultural subjectivity for contemporary Britain.44 His second collection, Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White Man Eating Tiger Toy Machine!!! (2011), extends his exploration of the ways in which imperial conceptions of race and difference continue to frame and frustrate claims to “global Britishness.” While he does not allude directly to Irish sources in his latter collection, we can nonetheless detect the continuing signiicance of Muldoon to Nagra’s project. Consider, for instance, his poem “Octoroon”: of the World (1886), which became world famous as an advertisement for Pears’ Soap, newly retitled as Bubbles: Pears’ Soap, Bubbles, 1900–05, Digital Image. Reprinted with permission from The Advertising Archives (London), http://www. advertisingarchives.co.uk, accessed June 2, 2016. Ah sweet thing with yellow curls & aqua eyes the soapy bubbles that you blow gasp at your cocoa skin. I wonder do your True Blue parents still force a pompompomp for The Last Night of the Proms?45 Nagra’s playful title (referring to a racially derogatory term for a mixed race person of one-eighth African ancestry) likely invokes the nineteenth-century stock character popularized by Irish playwright, Dion Boucicault, in the antebellum melodrama The Octoroon (1859). But he also adopts a number of Muldoonian strategies. Indeed, the lines above may echo Muldoon’s dark meditation on miscegenation and hybridity in “Promises, Promises,” whose speaker imagines Sir Walter Raleigh returning to the lost colony of Roanoke “Only to glimpse us here and there / As one fair strand in her braid, / The blue in an Indian girl’s eye.”46 The irst stanza’s abrupt apostrophic beginning (“Ah sweet thing”) sets in tension the mixed race subject’s “yellow curls & aqua eyes” with his or her “cocoa skin.” However casual these lines may appear, they are densely layered through a chain of allusions and metonymies. For one, Nagra seems to allude to John Everett Millais’s painting A Child’s View 358 | Post-Ireland? In 1887, Millais sold his painting and its copyright to Sir William Ingram (the owner of Illustrated London News) who, in turn, sold it to A&F Pears of Pears’ Soap. As Anne McClintock has established, soap “lourished” in the nineteenth century “because, as a cheap and portable domestic commodity, it could persuasively mediate the Victorian poetics of racial hygiene and imperial progress.”47 Pears marketed soap as a racial commodity of imperialism, mobilizing discourses of whiteness to instruct precepts of cleanliness and to police the boundaries between the purity of white Englishness and the contamination of colonial alterity. We can see this quite literally through the caption in the advertisement above: “Pears’ soap beautiies the complexion, keeps the hands white and imparts a constant bloom of freshness to the skin.” In “Octoroon,” it is as if the soapy bubbles acquire a racialized subjectivity of whiteness, which stands in contrast to and yet seductively “gasp[s] at / your cocoa skin.” This last line insinuates yet another reference to empire’s racialized commodities, the “sweet thing” Hena | 359 of cocoa. Like soap, Britain’s cocoa trade in West Africa and advertising campaign would gain ascendency in the early twentieth century, at the very moment when the British Empire was about to collapse.48 In these ways, Nagra indirectly cues his readers into the ways imperial models of Englishness have reinforced racial hierarchies through the simultaneous disavowal of, fetishistic fascination with, and capitalist consumption of colonial otherness. “Octoroon” deliberately replays racial stereotype to uncover the fragile, insubstantial basis of Englishness itself, one whose soapy bubble might burst at any moment. The second stanza, in turn, questions how nineteenth-century imperial histories impinge upon contemporary celebrations of postimperial Britishness. The speaker, we read, wonders whether the mixed race child’s “True Blue,” Tory parents feel compelled to participate in the pageantry of patriotism, such as the Last Night of the Proms and performances of Sir Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” (whose title alludes to Othello’s speech praising the glory of war). These lines bear the most visible and audible mark of Muldoon’s poetics, especially through the repetition of the seemingly nonsense sounds of “pompompomp.” In To Ireland, I (2000), Muldoon names this feature as the “contagyious” impulse in Irish writing, which revels in “the slip and slop of language, [showing] a disregard for the line between sense and nonsense.”49 As Muldoon’s readers are well aware, his propensity for “contagyious” writing often works to mask a violent, traumatic reality as it is encoded through childlike sounds. In this instance, the “pompompomp” might invoke the sounds of the “pom pom” machine gun, deployed by the British in the Second Boer War in South Africa and World War I. It may further refer to a “pommy,” a derogatory term for a British citizen who migrated to Australia or New Zealand. Or, it may register how the perpetuation of Englishness (as symbolized by Elgar and the Last Night of the Proms) “still” requires a “forced” repetition of its perceived imperial greatness, as orchestral sounds both conceal and reveal the violent conquest of other peoples and spaces through “the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.”50 For all of the celebration of a post-racial British society through diversity campaigns such as Cool Britannia, Nagra slyly registers how imperial obsessions with racial classiication and the consumption of difference have 360 | Post-Ireland? not gone away. At irst blush, we may be tempted to perceive Nagra’s writing as the bastard offspring of “True Blue” literary parentage which we can see on the poem’s formal surface, its allusions to conventionally “English” literary lineages, and its shameless performance of stereotype. By titling his poem “Octoroon,” Nagra indirectly critiques the radical insuficiency and tragic inevitability of racial stereotype to approach the multiplicity of cross-racial subjectivity. At the same time, though, Nagra strategically reinscribes stereotype to alert his readers to the poem’s messy layers of alterity which refuse easy containment: “Octoroon” comprises a composite mixture of various cultural sources drawn from high and low, from an array of time periods, and spanning diverse geographies (Boucicault, Millais, Pears advertising, the cocoa trade, Elgar, Shakespeare, Muldoon). In doing so, Nagra implicitly “wonders” about the many ways his own writing might be put to the work of advancing the “pompompomp” of postimperial Britishness by necessarily disguising its “dark,” imperial underpinnings which reside just under the surface of the poem’s cocoa skin. We can take this one step further. If the title, “Octoroon,” marks the failure of labels to account for irrepressible differences as they are shaped and molded into coherent conceptions of “identity,” it equally registers how racialized labels — octoroon, British-Asian, bme, postcolonial, or global British — are also branding mechanisms for newly visible minority artists such as himself. In this way, Nagra performs his own self-branding to self-relect upon the ways his poetry is enmeshed within and cannot overcome the commodiication of difference through the commercialization of poetry in the contemporary British scene. This awareness on his part serves as his way of patterning global Englishness by carrying forward its imperial legacy, imagining it within and beyond strictly national frameworks, all the while underscoring how bme cultural production participates in the inequalities of the literary marketplace. The institutional centrality of Irish writing — what Casanova calls “the Irish paradigm” — has partly enabled a peripheral British-Punjabi poet to gain visibility and recognition within the contested domain of the contemporary English poetry scene. As I have shown across this essay, though, global anglophone poets repeatedly turn to Ireland due to its long colonial legacy, which has resonated in other spaces of imperial and postcolonial cultural production. Nagra clearly taps into and extends Hena | 361 these histories, recalling how the Irish have been othered. Like the other poets in this chapter, Nagra further recognizes how Irish writers estrange the English language, uncovering the differences, alterities, and mixtures which exist under the surface of “standard English.” In the end, the slip and slop of Nagra’s language octoroons — that is, sardonically stereotypes and others — the wily Muldoon, recalling to us the unruly cross-contaminations of poetic inluence as they spill across racial, national, and historical boundaries. To bring my discussion full circle, I would like to return to the phrase with which I began this essay. In my eyes, “Post-Ireland” functions less as a descriptive reality (political borders have decidedly not gone away, no matter how transnational our critical lens), than as an open-ended question, a horizon of possibility, even an ongoing problem for mediating difference and alterity. Earlier, I mentioned the worldly constitution of Irish literature, especially as Irish authors repeatedly display a double-movement, in their dual “desire for” and wish to “move beyond” the nation. At the center of this doubleness, however, is an insurmountable alterity that is not separate from but constitutive of Irish literature, revealing Irishness as non-identical-to-itself and criss-crossed through other times, other places, other inluences and conluences. In some instances, forms of otherness appear as foreign, non-Irish elements in the moment of cross-cultural encounter while, in others, they igure as modes of difference native to the local. In both cases, we can see how poets and poems mediate past and present, local and global, familiar and strange, self and other, so as to lay bare forms of difference already internal to “Irish” literature, given its long and varied histories of conquest and cross-cultural encounter at home and abroad. In these ways, “Irishness” has become a translatable identity, readily repurposed by other non-Irish writers and poets. If Irish literature has historically questioned diverse ways of signifying difference when the act of comparison is no longer a choice but a necessity, then it makes perfect sense why so many global anglophone poets have looked through the dark glass of Irish literature to see their own fractured relection in a wide array of social-political contexts. Across this chapter, I have charted a few pathways, both real and imagined, that English-language poets have pursued in turning to “Ireland” as a relay for making partial sense of their own personal experiences, historical 362 | Post-Ireland? circumstances, and social preoccupations. As has become clear by now, igures such as Yeats, Kavanagh, Heaney, and Muldoon loom large in this body of poetry. It seems likely that relatively peripheral poets need to draw upon now established, canonical Irish authors in order to gain literary recognition within the highly competitive domain of English-language poetry. Still, I have sought to emphasize how “Ireland’s afterlives” take on fresh signiicance as they are molded and adapted on both sides of the Atlantic and under disparate contexts of decolonization (Okigbo), migration (Markham), diaspora (Bhatt), resettlement (Nagra), the rapid acceleration of globalization (Walcott), and shared experiences of cultural in-betweenness and estrangement connecting all of these authors to one another. It remains uncertain, of course, what role Ireland will play in the writing of future world poets. What does seem likely, though, is that twentyirst-century Irish poetry will be written from increasingly cross-cultural perspectives. One such example is Nigerian-born, Irish poet Lind Grant-Oyeye, whose writing tends to focus on questions of globalization, social equality, and political justice. In January 2016, Grant-Oyeye won the Universal Human Rights Student Network award for “M-Moments,” a poem initially published in The New Verse News, an online magazine featuring “politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.”51 “M-Moments” takes its inspiration from May 2015 news reports concerning the conditions of 1,600 refugees who led religious and ethnic persecution in Myanmar and Bangladesh and were found (and subsequently detained) in Malaysia. The poem concludes: On strange lands were some feet planted. They kissed strangers and slept with enemies — red juices pressed against their lips, with the irm force of a heavy weight boxer’s strength, kissing Judas’ doppelgänger to the sweet sound of the language from Babel, spoken with a lover’s passion. Faint memories show M in the alphabet song, is for Migration, for marriage. Grant-Oyeye writes with an ethical awareness of the necessity of giving a textual face and a voice to the conditions of the dispossessed, especially for those who would otherwise seem invisible and insigniicant. At the same Hena | 363 time, she also signals how her poetry self-relexively transforms distant experiences of suffering and displacement into aesthetic forms, which we can see through the “some feet” of the poem’s meter and “the sweet sound” of her writing. In the process, “M-Moments” compels readers to question the discursive mechanisms which mediate social realities of migration — and how certain people’s lives are heard while others are silenced in the alphabet song of language. Given Ireland’s increasingly cross-cultural constitution in the present century, I delight to imagine how future Irish poetry will become transformed yet again to take on new voices, new idioms, and new ways of writing the complexities of being in the world. The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008); Michael Malouf, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, “Haiku Aesthetics and Grassroots Internationalization: Japan in Irish Poetry,” Éire-Ireland 45, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2010): 245–77; Irene De Angelis, The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2012); and Suhr-Sytsma, Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2017). 3. Mark Quigley, Empire’s Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form (New York: Fordham UP, 2013), 14, 24. 4. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004), 304–5. notes 1. 5. Irish Literatures (Cork: Cork UP, 2014), 9. The scholarship on transnational approaches to Irish literature is extensive. See Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: 6. W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner, Cambridge UP, 2005); Mícheál Mac Craith, “Literature in Irish, c. 1550–1690: from 7. Ibid., 295. the Elizabethan Settlement to the Battle of the Boyne,” in The Cambridge History 8. Ibid. of Irish Literature, Vol. 1, eds. Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: 9. Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse: Routledge, 1997); Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: 1996), 294. Cambridge UP, 2006), 191–231; Pilar Villar-Argáiz, ed., Literary Visions of a Syracuse UP, 2008), xvi. Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature (Manchester: 10. Ibid., xvii. Manchester UP, 2014); Aisling Byrne, “The Circulation of Romances from England 11. Ibid., xvi. in Late-Medieval Ireland,” in Medieval Romance and Material Culture, ed. Nicholas 12. Ibid., xxviii. Perkins (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, D. S. Brewer, 2015), 183–98; Nels Pearson, Irish 13. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and 2. Amanda Tucker and Moira E. Casey, eds., Where Motley is Worn: Transnational Cambridge UP, 2000), 1. Samuel Beckett (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015). 14. Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 199. See Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: 15. On Clifford’s notion of “discrepant cosmopolitanism” see Routes: Travel and The University of Chicago Press, 2001); Steven Matthews, “Translations: Difference Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), and Identity in Recent Poetry from Ireland and the West Indies,” in Irish and 36; on Walcott’s particular version of “discrepant cosmopolitanism” see Pollard, New Postcolonial Writing: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Glenn Hooper and Colin World Modernisms, 16–19; and Malouf, Transatlantic Solidarities, 132. Graham (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 109–26; Robert Faggen, “Irish Poets and the 16. Malouf, Transatlantic Solidarities, 171. World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew 17. Derek Walcott, White Egrets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 36–37. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 229–49; Charles Pollard, New World 18. Ibid., 37. Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite (Charlottesville: 19. W. B. Yeats, “A General Introduction to My Work,” in Essays and Introductions University of Virginia Press, 2004); Maria McGarrity, Washed by the Gulf Stream: 364 | Post-Ireland? (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 519. Hena | 365 20. Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 36, 62. 21. 22. 23. 41. 42. Daljit Nagra, “ ‘Meddl[ing] with my type’: An Interview with Daljit Nagra,” interview Suhr-Sytsma, Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge: with Claire Chambers, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 1 (2010): 94. Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2017). 43. Ibid. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, “The Poetry of Christopher Okigbo: Its Evolution and 44. On Nagra’s rewritings of Muldoon and Heaney, see Dave Gunning, “Daljit Nagra, Signiicance,” in Critical Essays on Christopher Okigbo, ed. Uzoma Esonwanne Faber Poet: Burdens of Representation and Anxieties of Inluence,” Journal of (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1984), 185. Commonwealth Literature 43 (2008): 95–108; and Omaar Hena, Global Anglophone Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Poetry: Literary Form and Social Critique in Walcott, Muldoon, de Kok, and Nagra Press, 2009), 102–3; Suhr-Sytsma, Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 133–36, 147–52. Literature. 45. Daljit Nagra, “Octoroon,” Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White Man Eating Tiger Toy 24. Christopher Okigbo, “Lament of the Masks,” in W. B. Yeats: 1865–1965: Centenary Essays, eds. D. E. S. Maxwell and S. Bushrui (Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press, Machine!!! (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 33. 46. Paul Muldoon, “Promises, Promises,” Poems 1968–1998 (New York: Farrar, Straus 1965), xii. 25. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan,” The Collected Poems, 214. Ibid., xiv. and Giroux, 2001), 85. 47. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 130. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., xv. 48. On empire and the cocoa trade, see Emma Robertson, “Bittersweet Temptations: 28. E. A. Markham, “Ireland’s Islands in the Caribbean,” in The Cultures of Europe: Race and the Advertising of Cocoa,” in Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism, The Irish Contribution, ed. James P. Mackey (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast, 1994), 142–43. 29. Ibid., 140. eds. Wulf D. Hund et al. (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2013), 171–96. 49. Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 107. 50. William Shakespeare, Othello (Folger Shakespeare Library) (New York: Washington 30. Ibid., 136. 31. Ibid., 143. 32. Ibid., 139. Square Press, 1993), 143. 51. Lind Grant-Oyeye, “M-Moments,” The New Verse News, May 16, 2015, accessed online May 3, 2016, http://newversenews.blogspot.com/2015/05/m-moments.html. 33. E. A. Markham, Letter from Ulster & The Hugo Poems (Lancaster, UK: Littlewood Arc, 1993), 13–14. 34. Markham, “Ireland’s Islands,” 143. 35. Sujata Bhatt, “In Conversation with Sujata Bhatt,” interview with Helen Tookey, PN Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 30. 36. Sujata Bhatt, “Interview with Sujata Bhatt,” interview with Vicki Betram, PN Review 138 (2001), accessed online Apr. 8, 2016, http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/ scribe?showdoc=4;doctype=interview. 37. Sujata Bhatt, “In Conversation with Sujata Bhatt,” 32. 38. Sujata Bhatt, “The Kama Sutra Retold,” Brunizem (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), 39. 39. Ibid., 40. 40. Ibid., 40–41. 366 | Post-Ireland? Hena | 367