c on t e m p or a r y i r is h wom e n p oe t s
li v er pool english te x ts a nd st udie s 66
Contemporary irish
Women poets
memory and estrangement
luCy Collins
liv er pool u niv ersit y pr ess
Contemporary irish Women poets
First published 2015 by
liverpool university press
4 Cambridge street
liverpool
l69 7Zu
Copyright © 2015 lucy Collins
The right of lucy Collins to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, designs and patents
act 1988.
all rights reserved. no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
British library Cataloguing-in-publication data
a British library Cip record is available
print isBn 978-1-78138-187-8 cased
epdf isBn 978-1-78138-469-5
typeset by Carnegie Book production, lancaster
printed and bound by Cpi group (uK) ltd, Croydon Cr0 4yy
For Andrew
Contents
contents
Acknowledgements
ix
Abbreviations
xi
introduction: memory, estrangement and the poetic text
1
I Concepts
Chapter 1 lost lands: The Creation of memory in the poetry
of eavan Boland
23
Chapter 2 Between here and There: migrant identities and the
Contemporary irish Woman poet
49
Chapter 3 private memory and the Construction of subjectivity
in Contemporary irish Women’s poetry
78
II Achievements
Chapter 4 eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’s spaces of memory
111
Chapter 5 medbh mcguckian’s radical temporalities
139
Chapter 6 Catherine Walsh: a poetics of Flux
169
Chapter 7 vona groarke: memory and materiality
195
Conclusion: memories of the Future
218
Bibliography
225
Index
241
acknowledgements
acknowledgements
This book has been the product of a long period of reading and thinking
about contemporary women poets and i would like to thank those who
have supported this project. i am grateful to the following libraries for
access to materials: the British library, the national library of ireland,
trinity College library and university College dublin library. Thanks
to my colleagues at university College dublin for their comradeship
and encouragement, especially John Brannigan, danielle Clarke, sharae
deckard, Fionnuala dillane, anne Fogarty, Jane grogan, margaret
Kelleher, gerardine meaney and tony roche. emilie pine’s work in
the field of irish memory studies has been an inspiration and this book
has benefited greatly from her initiatives. to Catriona Clutterbuck i
owe a particular debt of gratitude for her interest in all things poetic
and for her generosity. other friends and colleagues both in ireland and
abroad have spurred me on: rebecca Barr, matthew Campbell, patricia
Coughlan, alex davis, gerald dawe, eric Falci, Borbála Faragó, luz
mar gonzález-arias, neil hegarty, peter Kuch, lucy mcdiarmid,
Jody allen randolph, hedwig schwall, moynagh sullivan and James
Woolley. i am grateful to colleagues at uCd library and special
Collections for their work with the poetry@uCd initiative, especially
ursula Byrne, evelyn Flanagan and eugene roche. my students, past
and present, test my ideas on poetry. i would like particularly to thank
recent and current graduate students Jaclyn allen, amanda Bell, paola
Benchi, Colleen english, Ken Keating, aoife lynch and Jacqui meisel
for their enthusiasm and conversation. at liverpool university press,
anthony Cond and his team have been very supportive of the project
and the readers of the initial manuscript offered many insights and
suggestions from which the book has benefited. Thanks to rachel
adamson and lucy Frontani at Carnegie Book production for their
attention to production and design; i’m especially grateful to irene Barry
for permission to use her work on the cover of this book. my greatest
ix
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
debts are to my family – to my father and my sisters for their interest
and support, as well as their patience. andrew Carpenter has, as usual,
worked harder than anyone to bring my scholarly planets into alignment.
This book is dedicated to him.
earlier versions of some sections in this book have appeared as: ‘a
Way of going Back: memory and estrangement in the poetry of paula
meehan’, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts
5.1–2 (spring/Fall 2009), pp. 127–39; ‘Joyful mysteries: language and
spirituality in medbh mcguckian’s recent poetry’, in elke d’hoker,
raphaël ingelbien and hedwig schwall (eds), Irish Women’s Writing
(Berne: peter lang, 2010), pp. 41–56; ‘What she lost and how: eavan
Boland’s london Childhood’, in Thomas herron (ed.), Irish Writing
London, vol. 2, Post-War to the Present (london: Continuum, 2012),
pp. 33–46; and ‘Being in span: The space of the subject in Catherine
Walsh’s City West’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 5.2
(2014), pp. 31–46.
For permission to quote the work of these poets, thanks are due to
the following publishers: Carcanet press for permission to quote from
the work of eavan Boland, paula meehan, sinéad morrissey and mary
o’malley. dedalus press for permission to quote from the work of eva
Bourke. gallery press for permission to quote from the work of sara
Berkeley, eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, vona groake, medbh mcguckian and
paula meehan. pan macmillan for permission to quote from the work
of Colette Bryce. random house for permission to quote from the work
of leontia Flynn. invisible Books and shearsman press for permission to
quote from the work of Catherine Walsh. Wild honey press, publishing
genius and miami university press for permission to quote from the
work of mairéad Byrne. W. W. norton and Company for permission to
quote from the work of eavan Boland.
x
abbreviations
abbreviations
BA
BH
BHT
BLH
CL
CW
D
DR
F
FE
FM
FRT
HB
HTL
IEMT
medbh mcguckian, The Book of the Angel (oldcastle, Co.
meath: gallery press, 2004)
mary o’malley, The Boning Hall: New and Selected Poems
(manchester: Carcanet, 2002)
sinéad morrissey, Between Here and There (manchester:
Carcanet, 2002)
mairéad Byrne, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven
(Baltimore, md: publishing genius, 2010)
medbh mcguckian, Captain Lavender (oldcastle, Co.
meath: gallery press, 1995)
Catherine Walsh, City West (exeter: shearsman, 2005)
paula meehan, Dharmakaya (manchester: Carcanet, 2000)
leontia Flynn, Drives (london: Jonathan Cape, 2008)
vona groarke, Flight (oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery press,
2002)
medbh mcguckian, The Face of the Earth (oldcastle, Co.
meath: gallery press, 2002)
medbh mcguckian, The Flower Master (oxford: oxford
university press, 1982; oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery press,
1993)
Colette Bryce, The Full Indian Rope Trick (london: picador,
2005)
Colette Bryce, The Heel of Bernadette (london: picador,
2000)
medbh mcguckian, Had I a Thousand Lives (oldcastle, Co.
meath: gallery press, 2002)
Catherine Walsh, Idir Eatortha and Making Tents (london:
invisible Books, 1996)
xi
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
eavan Boland, The Journey and Other Poems (galway: arlen
house, 1986; manchester: Carcanet, 1987)
JS
vona groarke, Juniper Street (oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery
press, 2006)
KW
mary o’malley, The Knife on the Wave (galway: salmon
press, 1997)
MMW paula meehan, The Man Who Was Marked by Winter
(oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery press, 1991)
MR
leanne o’sullivan, The Mining Road (tarset,
northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2013)
MSCM mary dorcey, Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers
(galway: salmon press, 1991)
NHB
mairéad Byrne, Nelson and the Huruburu Bird (Bray, Co.
Wicklow: Wild honey press, 2003)
OPH
vona groarke, Other People’s Houses (oldcastle, Co. meath:
gallery press, 1999)
P
eva Bourke, Piano (dublin: dedalus press, 2011)
PR
paula meehan, Painting Rain (manchester: Carcanet, 2012)
PT
paula meehan, Pillow Talk (oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery
press, 1994)
PX
sinéad morrissey, Parallax (manchester: Carcanet, 2013)
S
medbh mcguckian, Shelmalier (oldcastle, Co. meath:
gallery press, 1998)
SD
vona groarke, Spindrift (oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery
press, 2009)
SH
vona groarke, Shale (oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery press,
1994)
SPD
Colette Bryce, Self-Portrait in the Dark (london: picador,
2008)
ST
sara Berkeley, Strawberry Thief (oldcastle, Co. meath:
gallery press, 2005)
SV
eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, The Second Voyage (dublin: gallery
press, 1986)
TFV
sinéad morrissey, There was Fire in Vancouver (manchester:
Carcanet, 1996)
TG
eva Bourke, Travels with Gandolpho (dublin: dedalus press,
2000)
TP
mairéad Byrne, Talk Poetry (oxford, oh: miami university
press, 2007)
J
xii
a bbr e v i at ions
TV
V
VH
VR
VWE
WRU
X
eavan Boland, In a Time of Violence (manchester: Carcanet,
1994)
mary o’malley, Valparaiso (manchester: Carcanet, 2012)
sara Berkeley, The View from Here (oldcastle, Co. meath:
gallery press, 2010)
medbh mcguckian, Venus and the Rain (oxford: oxford
university press, 1984; oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery press,
1994)
paddy Bushe (ed.), Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on
Skellig Michael (dublin: dedalus press, 2010)
Colette Bryce, The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (london:
picador, 2014)
vona groarke, X (oldcastle, Co. meath: gallery press, 2014)
xiii
introduction
memory, estrangement
and the poetic text
introduction
For irish women poets, past and present exist in thematic and aesthetic
alignment, making their treatment of memory of enduring importance
to readers. since the process of remembrance reveals as much about
present needs as it does about past events, its conceptualization in the
work of women poets reflects contemporary critical debate, as well as
issues around the formation of irish poetic traditions. in this way, to
remember is to engage with a process of cultural evolution, perhaps even
more than with calculated political change: ‘images of the past change
or remain the same […] to the degree that they fit into a changing
or stable culture, a process that calls our attention away from cynical
manipulations to an analysis of culture sui generis’.1 This study of
contemporary women poets explores the function of memory in their
work, examining the impact that both individual and cultural memory
has on their creative processes. Their handling of poetic temporalities is
of fundamental importance in exploring, whether obliquely or directly,
their place in the tradition. all these women acknowledge poetic
precursors and their work engages with earlier poems – their own and
the work of others – in ways that constitute acts of textual memory.
in this sense the book also considers the broader temporal framework
within which the poetry must be read, in both political and aesthetic
terms. literary memory prompts exploration of the relationship between
poet and reader, as well as of the larger critical contexts that support
and impede the production of creative work. This study is concerned
with issues of tradition and innovation as well as with the negotiation
of public and private roles for these poets.
1
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
From these binary states emerge questions of belonging and
estrangement which continue to shape women’s perceptions of their
relationship to ireland’s culture and its languages. The generation of
irish women who began to publish in the 1960s were the first to attract
a wide readership both in ireland and abroad yet their work remains
alert to marginal states, to the silences at the edge of tradition. in their
poetry the relationship between self and other is frequently interrogated,
highlighting not only the place of the poetic subject but the process
by which subjectivity itself is expressed in language. Julia Kristeva sees
art, religion and psychoanalysis as the three main ways in which we
try to understand our encounter with the other, but poetry is another
important form through which ideas of the strange can be explored.2
By challenging unitary perspectives, many of these poets confront their
readers with an experience of estrangement that simultaneously probes
cultural exclusion and emphasizes the incongruity of language itself. in
this way, the dynamics of private and public remains at the heart of the
poetry explored here.
The development of memory studies in the irish context has drawn
attention to the relationship between individual and shared versions
of the past, and this difference has significance for the ways in which
literary tradition is perceived, especially by groups who have not had an
established role to play in these debates. increasingly we come to view
our engagement with the past through the lens of memory. For Barbara
misztal, since the end of the cold war there has been:
a newly important politics of identity, which proclaims memory as the basis
of the collective identity of a community and sees memory as a resource for
the construction and defence of cultural identities. memory is used strategically: not merely to explain the group past but also to transform it into a
reliable identity source for the group present.3
From an academic perspective, memory studies has brought the
disciplines of history, politics, literature, art history and sociology
into close proximity, as well as interrogating the relationship between
scholarly approaches in the sciences and humanities. more recently,
scholars of irish history and culture have found this field to offer
useful ways of engaging with the continued importance of the past in
contemporary irish cultural and political life. The irish memory studies
network, founded by emilie pine, has fostered debate in the field
among irish and international scholars and arts practitioners. Memory
Ireland, a four-volume collection of essays edited by oona Frawley, also
2
i n t roduc t ion
demonstrates the broad spectrum of scholarly interest in this area, as
well as highlighting the significance of key historical moments in the
formation of modern irish memory.4
This study of contemporary irish women poets does not posit the direct
intervention of poets in these debates. instead, it explores their continuous
engagement with the processes of remembering, both individually and
collectively, in their work. Their attention to the moral, political and
aesthetic dimensions of past, present and future overtly and implicitly
critiques received versions of history as well as problematizing simplified
acts of remembrance. as Charles maier has recently argued, the current
interest in memory studies is not evidence of historical confidence but
rather of a retreat from transformative politics, a concern to mediate the
present through reflection on the past.5 For contemporary women poets
this means that the role of memory acquires political significance, given
the uneasy relationship between women’s place in irish history and their
current position in literary culture. The period from 1980 has seen a
significant rise in the publication and reading of poetry by women and
a corresponding evolution of styles and themes in their work. although
the most important sources for the study of cultural memory have
historically been letters and diaries, literary texts offer specific insights
into the how cultural memory is produced and understood.6 in light of
the evolving role for women in irish culture, their poetic mediation of
the past is of considerable significance. it has also deepened our scrutiny
of the relationship between the politics of writing and its forms.
The concept of memory has come to indicate a wide range of
applications – as geoffrey Cubitt notes, ‘“memory” may be mental
or physical, natural or artificial, conscious or unconscious, individual
or social: it may be embodied in animal instinct, or in cultural
programming, or in electronic systems’.7 mieke Bal has gone on to define
memory as a ‘travelling concept’, one that moves between disciplines and
periods as well as between geographical locations; definitions of memory
are further extended by these different applications.8 This breadth of
inference can create critical problems: in this book the application
of memory acknowledges its relevance for the individual as well as
the group and considers its function in contexts beyond the island of
ireland. yet the treatment of memory here remains firmly grounded in
its relevance to literary production, as well as its specific potential to
extend our engagement with and understanding of poetic texts. The
first part of this study explores some of the key ways in which poetry’s
relationship to the past has been mediated by women poets. eavan
3
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
Boland is a key figure in this respect and the opening chapter is devoted
to an exploration of the dynamics of personal and cultural memory in
her work. her interrogation of the place of the woman poet in the irish
literary tradition has set the terms for these debates in recent decades
and has proved foundational to the study of gender and irish poetry.
These issues of identity and tradition are also relevant to the study of
migrant poets, whose mobility challenges our sense of a unified literary
tradition. Women poets born in ireland but living abroad, together with
those who have moved to the country from elsewhere, have extended
our sense of the poetic past in important ways. Their work, explored in
Chapter 2 of this book, raises key questions concerning the unifying
function of memory. next the role of private memory in constructing
subjectivity, and in changing the relationship between self and other, is
explored. For many poets the traumatic past is shown to link personal
and collective experience in key ways, so the debates in this chapter have
an important resonance for the study as a whole. in the second part of
the book, four individual poets are explored in detail. here there is a
growing emphasis on the relationship between memory and aesthetic
judgment in the works of these poets, and the extent to which the
textual past shapes their current practice is of central importance. This
trajectory demonstrates the necessity for examining individual responses
to memory and estrangement, as well as considering the shared dynamics
that these writers exhibit. The study as a whole confirms the importance
of sustained close reading in exploring the unique and considered
engagement of each poet with private and public pasts.
Remembering Place
in any study defined by concepts of a national tradition, attention
is immediately drawn to the role of place and belonging in how
identities are formed. The experience of space may be our first entry
into temporality and, some have argued, our predominant means of
remembering the world.9 Both maurice halbwachs and pierre nora have
signalled the importance of spatiality in the shaping of collective memory,
and, for the individual too, place may prove inspiring or inhibiting to
creative expression. engagement with both public and private spaces
is an important characteristic of work by contemporary irish women
poets. some are explicitly identified with particular locations: paula
meehan with dublin; mary o’malley with galway; sinéad morrissey
with Belfast. some draw creative sustenance from other cultures as does
4
i n t roduc t ion
eiléan ní Chuilleanáin from italy. These complex interrelationships
indicate the importance both of imaginative freedom and of creative and
critical space for the production of original work. The space of the irish
tradition has not always been hospitable to women and this feeling of
estrangement has been recorded by many of those who feature in this
book.10 under these conditions, women found it difficult to be easily
assimilated into groups or movements within the larger poetic tradition,
leading them to emphasize their individuality, rather than their feeling
of belonging. even poets who identify with specific group identities can
never be seen as simply representative but rather as individuals working
within the compass of their own experience to explore more public roles.
eavan Boland is the first poet of the older generation to draw repeated
attention to the important relationship between place and writing. she
uses memories of growing up in london and later new york as the
experiential foundation for an enquiry into the concept of belonging, both
personally and culturally, to a particular place. Boland’s interrogation of
the role of the woman poet in the irish tradition is directly related to
her engagement with the processes of memory and to her deepening
awareness of the exclusions practised within irish literary culture. Boland
understands her experiences outside ireland to be formative of her later
stance on this issue; in other instances, too, the diaspora has clearly
influenced the kinds of literature, in both form and theme, which have
been – and continue to be – produced by irish writers. For diasporic
women writers the dynamics of exclusion are formative. The crossing
of boundaries that bilingual poets and immigrant poets must enact
fundamentally questions the relationship between self and other. poets
are confronted with the notion of the stranger within – with the extent
to which their own creative self encompasses opposing perspectives.
identity debates are also shaped, at least in part, by those who live –
or have lived – outside ireland. Justin Quinn has noted the importance
of childhood to these writers and problematizes the role of memory in
retaining a connection to that earlier self.11 Women poets featured in
this study respond to this issue through the evolution of their craft:
dublin-born mairéad Byrne has lived in the usa for most of her adult
life; for her the geographical move offered opportunities to extend
her poetic practice beyond the lyrical into performance and electronic
modes. other poets have spent shorter periods abroad but their work
has been shaped in important ways by the experience: vona groarke,
sinéad morrissey and Catherine Walsh are just three poets whose work
explores personal memories of other countries as well as the larger
5
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
implications of this boundary-crossing for their creative process. all
reflect on the heightened relationship between self and other that such
experiences generate – groarke and morrissey by deploying different
forms of poetic sequence to record the experience; Walsh by extending
the inclusive shape of her experimental texts to facilitate a movement
between geographical locations. all these poets reflect deeply on the
relationship between individual and shared pasts and on the ways in
which different cultures and new experiences may suggest familiarity as
well as estrangement.
For other women the space of the past is shaped by the language
question. poets who have travelled to Britain or to america experience
no linguistic barrier. however, for those spending time in non-englishspeaking countries (such as sinéad morrissey in Japan), the journey
is not only geographical but also linguistic. likewise, poets born
outside ireland but making their home there must choose their creative
language. eva Bourke, for example, publishes originally in english
though she carries with her the rich heritage of her upbringing in
germany. Though they are not the specific focus of examination here,
irish-language poets such as nuala ní dhomhnaill and Celia de Fréine
must also consider the past in relation to its linguistic expression.
For these and other writers in irish the importance of that language
tradition in shaping the relationship between past and present draws
attention to the role of folklore and myth in the irish tradition.
Cultural memory, then, is deeply implicated in the language in which
the remembering is done.
Memory and History
The relationship between memory and history is a significant one and is
often conceived in oppositional terms: a historiographical process entails
a systematic examination of evidence in the pursuit of understanding,
while memory remains subjective and loosely formed. The contrast can
also be imagined in temporal terms – as material passes from living
memory it becomes subject to archival process and historical study. yet
this transition is not an unproblematic one. pierre nora has argued that
the archive is associated not with remembering but with forgetting:
once the material has been deposited it can be eliminated from personal
memory.12 in the same way, once the sites of memory become history,
rather than part of living commemorative experience, they cease to be
fully meaningful. For marginalized groups, such as women, this process
6
i n t roduc t ion
is a significant one since it affirms the important role of intervention in
the processes of cultural formation.13 it also marks a specific disjunction
between the material of everyday life and that of narrative history – a
division more profound in the experience of women than of men.
The complex relationship between remembering and forgetting
reminds us of the contingent nature of memory practices. The importance
of forgetting can also be demonstrated in the larger cultural arena,
especially where the handling of traumatic political pasts is involved:
every act of remembrance, whether individual or collective, necessarily
involves selective, partial, or otherwise biased forms of forgetting […] The
problem which is posed does not take the form of a clear choice for either
remembering or forgetting. instead, we are faced with concrete choices about
when, how and which events of the traumatic or guilty past will eventually
be recalled and faced by individuals, community and state.14
in the irish context there are a number of historical events that have
been subject to this difficult dynamic of memory and forgetting. The
northern irish troubles is among the most recent, and prominent,
of these. much research has been done in this area – since it is
within living memory there is ample opportunity for oral testimony
as well as detailed documentation of events. This memory-work has
been influenced by other models, such as south africa’s truth and
reconciliation Commission, and takes account of the important role of
individual as well as of collective memory. The important ways in which
these two are intertwined is reflected in the work of poets who had
direct experience of the troubles, such as medbh mcguckian, sinéad
morrissey and Colette Bryce. yet their poetry also demonstrates that the
violence in the province did not affect everyone in the same way, or for
the same duration. each of these three women responds to the events
in strikingly different ways, from mcguckian’s explicit commemoration
of earlier revolutionaries to Bryce’s memories of childhood encounters
with members of the British army. even when expressing states of
collective consciousness, the poets acknowledge the importance of private
perspectives on events of enduring historical importance.
The versions of the past that emerge from such situations of violence
and trauma may be closely linked to the formation of the nation
state and to its cultures of memory. eberhard Bort has commented
thus on the multi-layered purpose of the practices of remembrance:
‘Commemorations may serve competing goals – to pay tribute to the
dead, to console the bereaved, and to incorporate mourners’ individual
7
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
memories into a larger political discourse’.15 The last of these aims has
been the most contentious, especially in its tendency to reduce the
significance of individual experiences that may not serve this larger
narrative. Women poets are especially attuned to the effects of exclusion
from commemoration and, conversely, to the powerful impact that
recognition – however belated – may have.16 seamus deane was a
prescient critic of the commodification of irish history17 while more
recent work by guy Beiner has explored the problematic intersection
between contemporary political discourse and the public commemoration of ireland’s past.18 From the end of the nineteenth century the
rise in nationalism demanded an increased emphasis on the concept of
a shared history, including the deliberate elision of elements that would
prove disruptive to idealized unity. The practice of popular commemoration was designed to enhance this development.19 as eric hobsbawm
and terence ranger have argued, the legitimization of existing class
structures in the face of a rising proletariat necessitated the invention of
traditions that would emphasize a shared history.20 While ian mcBride
has problematized any simplistic reading of this tendency, it helps to
situate irish state formation in a larger political context, and to see the
place of women in this dynamic as historically determined, at least in
part.21 it also sheds light on how the discipline of history intersects with
the process of cultural formation, confirming ernest renan’s contention
that historical study poses a threat to nationality by revealing differences
between shared memories and actual events.22
For women this process of elision has had serious consequences. as
well as confronting the same difficulties as other citizens of the newly
independent nation state, women faced a form of cultural marginalization that quickly became an integral part of irish identity-in-process:
‘Womanhood and irishness are metaphors for one another’, eavan Boland
would later declare, ‘there are resonances of humiliation, oppression
and silence in both of them’.23 yet the relationship between political
challenge and a politically engaged poetics is not a straightforward one.
as guinn Batten has pointed out, an emphasis on representation of the
revolutionary spirit may prevent the actuality of revolution.24 For this
reason there is little direct correlation between a feminist aesthetic and
specific activism.
Boland’s insistent return to the concept, as well as to the material, of
history, signals its importance for the construction of female subjectivity
among ireland’s writers. Boland detects a moral difference between the
male-determined histories and the kind of history that women will
8
i n t roduc t ion
write. Women, as they move from being objects within poems to being
authors of poems themselves, raise questions of poetic motive and ethical
direction.25 gerardine meaney takes this issue further:
anxiety about one’s fitness for a (masculine) role of authority, deriving from
a history of defeat or helplessness, is assuaged by the assumption of sexual
dominance.
Women in these conditions become guarantors of their men’s status,
bearers of national honour and the scapegoats of national identity. They
are not merely transformed into symbols of the nation. They become the
territory over which power is exercised.26
as this comment reveals, the woman writer must renegotiate her
position within the national imaginary with care. perhaps for this reason
Boland’s poetry is more responsive than her prose to the ambiguities
of this dialogue. as her poem ‘outside history’ suggests, the process
of connecting with something beyond the self is crucial, even though
this connection may deepen the subject’s awareness of the significance
of individual perspectives. This testing of association has important
implications for the exploration of shared memory and for the creation
of imaginative worlds that will be open to a wide range of readers. The
biases of history are inevitable results of the subjectivity of all narrative
acts, yet the imbalances are clearly not confined to gender issues: racial
identity and class affiliation also influence representation crucially.
many women poets address these issues directly in their work both in
their rewriting of historical material and in their recognition that their
encounter with the past is often through texts which, by their very
nature, must cause women to question their relationship to tradition.
This is especially true for irish-language poets and for migrant writers.
it is important to recognize that memory is historically embedded
and is shaped by the expectations of its own time and place. in this
way, memory can tell us as much about the conditions for those
remembering as it can about the past. Women poets writing in ireland
since 1980 have witnessed the most far-reaching changes in the lives
of women in this century. The significance of ireland’s modernization
– its movement away from the conservative Catholic past towards
a liberal european future – is an important part of this transition.
The generations of women considered in this book, from those who
paved the way, such as eavan Boland and eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, to
younger poets including Colette Bryce and leanne o’sullivan, reveal
the remarkable transition in the role and the expectation for women
both in ireland and abroad.
9
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
Cultural Memory and the Irish Woman Poet
‘memory is more than the act of recollection by recollecting persons’,
writes edward shils, ‘memory leaves an objective deposit in tradition’.27
it is this continuing role for memory within the dialectic of past and
present that is most significant in the study of contemporary poetry
in ireland. halbwachs’s views on the transformation of social memory
within a group confirms that this memory is always in danger of erosion,
whether by the loss of members or by conflict amongst them. he argues
that past events and people are not forgotten due to indifference but
because the group remembering them fade away.28 This notion of shared
or collective memory, while foundational to modern memory studies,
is also controversial. Critics have argued that halbwach’s concept of
collective memory limits the role for the remembering self – a significant
limitation when reading poems that, for the most part, present complex
individual responses. Wulf Kansteiner is among those who have suggested
other ways of understanding the relationship between the individual
and the group here: he distinguishes between ‘collective memory’ and
‘collected memories’ – the former are shared communications, the latter
‘an aggregate of individual memories which behaves and develops just
like its individual composites’.29 This dynamic permits us to address
productively the complex relationship between the individual poet and
the term ‘irish women poets’. This study does not attempt to create a
unified sense of this term, nor does it argue that all the women whose
work is explored here prioritize gender as a shaping force on their work.
What it does suggest, though, is that all these poets write with some
awareness of the irish tradition – and of the woman poet’s place within
it – and in this way are implicitly in dialogue with writers and readers
on these terms. some of the figures explored here are conscious of the
implications of writing out of a shared context for women’s experience:
eiléan ní Chuilleanáin explores the relationship between individual
and community especially in a religious context; Catherine Walsh’s
innovative poetics challenge our perception of the boundaries between
self and other. even poets from the younger generation are concerned
with the networks of belonging that shed new light on contemporary
individualism.
eavan Boland is perhaps the most outspoken of contemporary poets in
dealing with the role of the woman poet in irish society. she drives the
inquiry away from broad social issues towards more exclusively artistic
ones but in doing so highlights the role of creative individuals in giving
10
i n t roduc t ion
expression to political, as well as to personal, positions. A Kind of Scar
(1989) – her pamphlet on the role of the woman in the irish poetic
tradition – blends poetry, personal anecdote and critical reflection;
here she acknowledges the vexed role of memory early: ‘memory is
treacherous. it confers meanings which are not apparent at the time’.30
The past, then, is another country, yet one that cannot easily be removed
from contemporary maps. Boland’s continuing engagement with the
representation of women from the past emphasizes the connected nature
of women’s lives across time. Boland is acutely aware that – as Jacques
derrida has argued – gender, race and class determine those who are
allowed to write and those whose work is preserved in archives.31 our
access to memory is profoundly shaped by social factors and Boland
wishes to draw specific parallels between the exclusion of women in
the past and conditions faced by women today. her poem ‘The Famine
road’ is one example of shifting historical perspectives that operate
in subtle and original ways. in combining a narrative concerning the
building of famine roads with the story of a woman learning that she
is unable to bear children, the poem itself represents the intersection of
historical and personal, public and private worlds. This imagery links
directly to the evocation of famine through the figure of the starving
woman and child: in folklore, as patricia lysaght has commented, ‘this is
often tempered by the parallel image of the generous woman who comes
to their assistance’.32 here Boland creates a poem that simultaneously
speaks to the contemporary reader and examines a familiar folk image,
marking the combined intellectual and emotional power of her work.33
The role of folklore in extending the range of cultural memory is a
significant one, not only for irish language writers – who have, historically,
the closest connections to the folk tradition – but for all modern poets
who enquire into the representation of the past.34 a number of women
poets explore the past by means of folklore. nuala ní dhomhnaill is
renowned for her engagement with a folk past that is full of vigour
and energy – breaking with tradition to create strong and outspoken
female characters. mary o’malley also draws on the folk materials of
the western seaboard to explore the dynamics of land and sea and of
belonging and estrangement in such poems as ‘The maighdean mhara’
and ‘song of the Wise Woman’ (BH 70, 92). in a similar way, much of
Boland’s poetry presents, though it does not constitute, an improvisatory
practice that ventures into areas of the past from which no definitive
readings can be produced. Boland returns to this theme again and again,
most memorably perhaps in ‘lava Cameo’ from her 1994 collection In a
11
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
Time of Violence, where the story ‘is not a story, / more a rumour or a
folk memory, / something thrown out once in a random conversation’
(TV 35). The distinction she draws here between story and folk memory
is significant in that she claims both less certainty and more significance
for her poems of family pasts. many scholars have drawn attention to the
specific role of folklore in the reclamation of the past. Cormac Ó gráda
has questioned its value in exploring ‘what really happened’, suggesting
instead that it reveals much about people’s attitude and feelings.35 guy
Beiner has also drawn attention to the problems inherent in wholesale
dismissal of folk material by historians:
Though useful in putting insular misconceptions into perspective, such
realist iconoclasm, which is founded on a sweeping dismissal of popular
beliefs as ‘harmful mythology,’ proves to be of limited value for studies of
mentalité that seek to decode conflicts sustained by intransigent mindsets.36
The need to consider not only what can be known about the past but also
how its practices can be decoded is an important part of the contribution
of poetry to memory debates.
The Body and Traumatic Memory
The importance of experience in the formation of memory is especially
prominent in the context of contemporary poetry, and the extent to
which this experience might involve the recollection of traumatic events
is significant. This form of memory has a very different relationship to
thought than do other modes; in this case, as david Farrell Krell has
argued, memory is both the source of the malady and the therapy it
requires.37 This doubleness is also expressed in the recurrent nature of
the experience itself, as Cathy Caruth writes:
trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an
individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature –
the way in which it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns
to haunt the survivor later on.38
The necessity of continuous engagement has important cultural ramifications too. dominick laCapra emphasizes this dimension of historical
trauma, in which ‘the hauntingly possessive ghosts’ of traumatic events
affect not just individuals but society at large.39 While acknowledging
the importance of truth claims to this process, laCapra argues that these
must be ‘cogently related to other dimensions of historiography, including
empathic, responsive understanding and performative, dialogical uses of
12
i n t roduc t ion
language’.40 The latter observation leads him later to indicate the value
of literary texts in providing insight into the emotional response to
trauma.41 in this respect, poetry plays an important role in the exploring
of traumatic conditions, since it facilitates the representation of complex
and changing emotional states, as well as interpretative positions.
For some women the personal past is a difficult space; while not
experiencing specific trauma these women might register their childhood
or earlier adulthood as troubled or deprived. This experience may have a
larger cultural or existential resonance – writers such as paula meehan
and mary o’malley are aware of the power of this darkness to both
inspire and overwhelm creative achievement. The importance of the
body in the mediation of traumatic states is one of the reasons why it
has been an area of representational difficulty for women writers who
struggle at once to present and to re-think the symbolic reading of the
female body in irish myth and history. suffering is expressed in these
poems in both occluded and explicit ways: sometimes the expression of
taboo subjects at once confirms and breaks the silence of oppression.
eithne strong, an important precursor for women in this volume, speaks
of the prohibitive attitudes towards bodily pleasure that overshadowed
her upbringing in the ireland of the 1930s. This control was felt by some
poets of the first generation explored in this study. mary dorcey, one of
ireland’s most prominent lesbian writers, has written about the trauma
of repressed sexuality on her work; though her use of language and form
is often comparatively conventional, many of her poems use repeated
lines and syntax to emphasize the relentless nature of the conditions she
describes. since political and moral restraints on the body have been a
significant feature of irish social development, writing about the body
is an important way for irish women poets to initiate new forms of
self-representation. The body expresses not only lived experience but an
influential range of symbolic readings and is a way of investigating the
links between actual experience and metaphorical understanding. For
many women poets the body provides a useful axis in considering both
biological and cultural identities, as well as in articulating important
tensions between past and present.
as the bearer of experience, the body itself – through the revealing of
wounds or scars – may be the means by which the trauma is expressed.
in the words of maud ellmann: ‘pain without marks is like speech
without writing, doomed to pass into oblivion.’42 The representation of
the disfigured self alerts us to the process of change at the same time
as it refuses to allow such change to obscure the moment of suffering.
13
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
violence against the body also disrupts the normal dynamics of private
and public, revealing what is normally hidden from view.43 The representation of pain is itself a process burdened by problems; it is difficult to
express pain adequately in language and almost impossible for another
to understand fully the impact of that experience. in many ways, pain
reflects the disintegration of language and exposes its inherent limitations.
The rendering of pain in poetic form, therefore, not only pushes poetry
to the limits of its aesthetic capabilities, it also bridges that important gap
between private and public realms, between past and present, between
the body and the imagination, between nature and culture.
physical illness also has accompanying psychic and bodily wounds
and presents a particularly interesting case, since it represents the body
in rebellion, the part threatening the life of the whole. While the
relationship between actual and metaphorical readings is suggestive,44
the representations of illness to be found among contemporary women
are usually bound closely to personal experience. What Kerry hardie
calls the ‘ancient practice’ of sickness has exerted a shaping force on her
body of work as a whole, which often catalogues the slow process of
overcoming debilitating illness. The exact knowledge, brought about by
the slowness of time and of death, allows the pain and diminution to
remain in the private realm yet imbues it with a significance that exceeds
a purely personal connection.
The importance of experience is central to many of the debates on
the definition of the woman poet. ironically, critical views here at once
particularize experience and highlight its shared nature. The drawing
together of the act of writing and that of experience is a notable one,
permitting experience to become not just the inspiration for the poem
but the poem itself. as Boland had commented, ‘for somebody like me,
who thinks of herself as a lyric poet, writing is not an expression, it is
an experience’.45 it is a position that restricts the development of form
in key ways; however:
the feminist poetry that has been institutionalized within women’s studies
programs and teaching anthologies can be restrictively organized around
a normative concept of ‘experience’ that renders all but the most tentative
formal innovation by women inadmissible and anathematizes theoretical
reflection on poetic practice.46
These limitations highlight the tendency to attribute to women experiential rather than textual memories and therefore to confine them to a
relationship with the past which is stripped of its cultural significance.
14
i n t roduc t ion
Memory and Poetic Practice
in spite of the pre-eminence of experience in the critical framework
applied to women’s poetry, the extent to which these poets remember
through the agency of poetic texts is considerable. Writing itself is an
act of memory as well as one of interpretation:
all texts participate, repeat, and constitute acts of memory; all are products
of their distancing and surpassing of precursor texts. in addition to manifest
traces of other texts and obvious forms of transformation, all contain cryptic
elements. all texts are stamped by the doubling of manifest and latent,
whether consciously or unconsciously.47
many of the women whose work is explored here are in dialogue with
earlier texts, whether with major irish figures such as W. B. yeats, louis
macneice or Thomas Kinsella or international artists – John Berryman,
elizabeth Bishop, sylvia plath. yet in spite of the stimulus provided by
these texts, some irish women poets specifically register a lack of literary
foremothers. Their sense of working creatively without the sustenance
which earlier female achievement would bring can emphasize their
estrangement from literary tradition. anne ulry Colman argues that
these precursors can easily be found, especially among women writing
during the nineteenth century: ‘Contemporary women poets may be
writing out of silence, but it is the silence of ignorance, brought about
through the time’s neglect of their maternal literary heritage.’48 Thus
Boland’s contention that women writing today have little sense of their
own precursors is at once a limited view on the question of influence
and an accurate presentation on the perception of writers working in
the field. This dynamic is not only confined to women, though; it has
contributed to a division between generations in terms of the operation
of memory, as paul Connerton has observed:
across generations, different sets of memories, frequently in the shape of
implicit background narratives, will encounter each other; so that, although
physically present to one another in a particular setting, the different
generations may remain mentally and emotionally insulated, the memories
of one generation locked irretrievably, as it were, in the brains and bodies
of that generation.49
This necessary work of reclamation constitutes an important part of any
study of women in literature, not only in shaping critical perceptions but
also in altering the individual poet’s sense of their relationship to others,
past and present.
15
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
The state of women’s history in ireland has been undergoing progressive
change. This, in turn, demands a re-evaluation of women’s relationship
both to their personal past and to the narratives of the past that persist
in their psyche, as well as to their creative work. as renate lachmann
points out, ‘literature becomes the bearer of actual, and the transmitter
of historical, knowledge and it construes intertextual bonds between
literary and non-literary texts.’50 Thus any re-evaluation needs to take
account of the intertextual nature of the relationship between past and
present, and of the ways in which women have interpreted the literary
models open to them. it is often in more experimental works that
the relationship between private and public realms is most obviously
problematized. Clair Wills argues that experimental poetry by women
often reveals:
not the absence of a sphere of privacy but the ways in which that private
or intimate realm of experience is constructed ‘through’ the public, and
therefore elements of ‘expressivity’, though radically divorced from notions
of authenticity, are present.51
This uncoupling of ‘expressivity’ from authenticity is an important one
for women and a decisive step in freeing them to participate in more
innovative creative practices. in this study the integration of lyrical
and avant-garde poets, as well as the inclusion of poets from different
generations, seeks to overcome the unproductive categorization of women
poets. This strategy also emphasizes the aesthetic choices made by these
women as formative of their response to the past and their perception
of its larger political ramifications.
The craft of poetry is foremost in the elucidation of memory in the
work of contemporary irish women poets. marked by a wide variety of
techniques and influences, these texts negotiate the relationship between
past and present in unique ways, revealing the vital importance of the
moment of writing and the changing dynamics that shape all creative
processes.
Notes
1 Jeffrey K. olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical
Responsibility (london: routledge, 2007), p. 8.
2 Julia Kristeva’s work on estrangement underpins this investigation. richard
Kearney’s Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (london: routledge,
2002) situates the philosophical dimensions of estrangement in ways that illuminate
the work of Jacques derrida, emmanuel levinas, immanuel Kant and Kristeva
herself. all these thinkers form an important basis for the discussions here.
16
i n t roduc t ion
3 Barbara a. misztal, ‘memory and history’, in oona Frawley (ed.), Memory Ireland,
vol. 1, History and Modernity (syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2011), p. 3.
4 Memory Ireland covers a wide range of material, from conceptual considerations of
postcolonial memory to explorations of the impact of the great Famine, the War
of independence, the troubles and institutional child abuse on national identity.
Key essays by guy Beiner, oona Frawley, elmer Kennedy-andrews, emilie pine,
david lloyd and Barbara misztal are referenced here.
5 Charles maier, ‘a surfeit of memory: reflections on history, melancholy and
denial’, History and Memory 5.2 (1993), pp. 136–52.
6 ann rigney stresses the vital role that literature plays in the production of cultural
memory. see rigney, ‘plenitude, scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural memory’,
Journal of European Studies 35.1/2 (2005), pp. 209–26.
7 geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (manchester: manchester university press,
1981), loc. 198 [Kindle edition].
8 mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (toronto: university of toronto,
2002), p. 24.
9 see elizabeth grubgeld ‘topography, memory, and John montague’s “The rough
Field”’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 14.2 (January 1989), p. 26.
10 The publication of the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (derry:
Field day publications, 1991) revealed how marginal women writers remained
within the irish tradition, even to recuperative projects such as this one. The
limited number of texts by women in these volumes caused a protracted critical
debate which resulted in the production of a further two volumes devoted to irish
women’s writing and traditions.
11 Justin Quinn, ‘introduction’, Metre 3 (autumn 1997) – ‘irish poetry and the
diaspora’.
12 anne Whitehead, Memory (london: routledge, 2009), loc. 2431 [Kindle edition].
13 eavan Boland’s choice of a cyclical structure for her book, Object Lessons: The Life
of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (london: vintage, 1996) builds on this
necessity for repetition and continuous engagement.
14 aleida assmann and linda shortt, ‘memory and political Change: introduction’ in
aleida assmann and linda shortt (eds), Memory and Political Change (Basingstoke:
palgrave macmillan, 2012), p. 5.
15 eberhard Bort (ed.), Commemorating Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (dublin:
irish academic press, 2004), p. 2.
16 in February 2013, the taoiseach, enda Kenny, made a public apology to the
women who had suffered abuse in ireland’s magdalene laundries. mr Kenny had
been criticized by survivors for his initial failure to make an adequate response
to the mcaleese report, which investigated state involvement with the laundries.
This apology, together with the announcement of a compensation scheme, was
welcomed by those who had fought for acknowledgment of the state’s responsibility
in these events. The official nature of the apology significantly increased its impact.
17 seamus deane, ‘Wherever green is read’, in máirín ní dhonnchadha and Theo
dorgan (eds), Revising the Rising (derry: Field day, 1991).
18 see guy Beiner, ‘Commemorative heritage and the dialectics of memory’, in mark
mcCarthy (ed.), Ireland’s Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity
(london: ashgate, 2005), pp. 55–69; ‘Between trauma and triumphalism: The
easter rising, the somme, and the Crux of deep memory in modern ireland’,
17
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Journal of British Studies 46.2 (april 2007), pp. 366–89; also ‘modes of memory:
remembering and Forgetting the irish rebellion of 1798’, in oona Frawley (ed.),
Memory Ireland, vol. 1, pp. 66–82.
anne Whitehead, Memory (london and new york: routledge, 2009), pp. 63–5.
some writers of the early years of the twentieth century, including george Bernard
shaw, were particularly critical of the urge to memorialize, judging it to be at the
expense of principled attention to present and future.
eric hobsbawm and terence ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge university press, 1983), pp. 1–14.
ian mcBride, ‘memory and national identity in modern ireland’, in ian mcBride
(ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge university
press, 2001), p. 8.
see ibid., p. 1.
eavan Boland, in gillean somerville-arjat and rebecca e. Wilson (eds), Sleeping
with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets (dublin:
Wolfhound press, 1990), p. 84.
guinn Batten, ‘Boland, mcguckian, ní Chuilleanáin and the Body of the nation’,
in matthew Campbell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2003), p. 170.
eavan Boland, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (dublin:
attic press, 1989), p. 6.
gerardine meaney (Un)like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction (london: routledge,
1993), p. 233.
edward shils, Tradition (Chicago: Chicago university press, 1981), p. 167.
maurice halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. ditter and vida yazdi
ditter (new york: harper Colophon Books, 1980), p. 82.
Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding meaning in memory: a methodological Critique of
Collective memory studies’, History and Theory 41.2 (december 2002), p. 186.
different modes of conceptualizing shared memory are outlined in Whitehead,
Memory, loc. 2103–600 [Kindle edition].
Boland, A Kind of Scar, p. 74.
see Jacques derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: university of
Chicago press, 1998).
patricia lysaght, ‘perspectives on Women during the great irish Famine’, Bealoideas
64/5 (1996–7), p. 76.
For further exploration of the role of famine memory, see david lloyd, ‘The indigent
sublime: specters of irish hunger’ and margaret Kelleher, ‘Commemorating the
great irish Famine: 1840s-1990s’, both in oona Frawley (eds), Memory Ireland,
vol. 3, The Famine and the Troubles (syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2014),
pp. 17–58; 91–120.
niall Ó Ciosáin’s essay on famine memory explains the ambiguities that are central
to the Folklore Commission itself: ‘on the one hand, the Folklore Commission and
its archive were established precisely as a repository of national memory, manifest
in the oral tradition, and can itself be considered a form of institutionalized public
memory. on the other hand, the work of the Commission in practice conceived
of memory as personal recollection’. niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Famine memory and the
popular representation of scarcity’, in ian mcBride (ed.), History and Memory in
Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2001), pp. 95–117.
18
i n t roduc t ion
35 Cited in Ó Ciosáin, ‘Famine memory’, p. 99.
36 Beiner, ‘Between trauma’, p. 369.
37 david Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge
(Bloomington, in: indiana university press, 1990), p. 106.
38 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore,
md: Johns hopkins university press, 1996), p. 4.
39 dominick laCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, md and london:
Johns hopkins university press, 2001), loc. 52 [Kindle edition].
40 ibid., loc. 74 [Kindle edition].
41 ibid., loc. 278 [Kindle edition].
42 maud ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (london:
virago press, 1992), p. 85.
43 For further discussion of the implications of this transition between private and
public, see elaine scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(oxford: oxford university press, 1987).
44 These analogies have been explored by susan sontag in Illness as Metaphor (new
york: Farrar, straus and giroux, 1978) and AIDS and its Metaphors (new york:
Farrar, straus and giroux, 1989).
45 eavan Boland, in somerville-arjat and Wilson, Sleeping with Monsters, p. 82.
46 lynn Keller and Cristanne miller (eds), Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and
Theory (ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press, 1994), p. 1.
47 renate lachmann, ‘mnemonic and intertextual aspects of literature’, in astrid
erll and ansgar nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook (new york and Berlin: Walter de gruyter, 2008), p. 304.
48 anne ulry Colman, ‘Far from silent: nineteenth-Century irish Women Writers’, in
margaret Kelleher and James h. murphy (eds), Gender Perspectives in NineteenthCentury Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (dublin: irish academic press, 1997),
p. 203.
49 paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge university press,
1989), loc. 121 [Kindle edition]
50 lachmann, ‘mnemonic and intertexual aspects’, p. 306.
51 Clair Wills, ‘Contemporary Women’s poetry: experimentalism and the expressive
voice’, Critical Quarterly 36.3 (september 1994), p. 41.
19
i
Concepts
ch a p ter one
lost lands
The Creation of memory in
the poetry of eavan Boland
lost lands
The importance of a specifically irish identity is central both to the
critical trajectory eavan Boland has traced for herself as a poet and to
the way in which her work has been received and read. Boland’s earliest
investigations of the process of identity formation are shaped by her
awareness of the concept of nation as foundational to her sense of self.
an important facet of these explorations is Boland’s perception of the
exclusion of irish women from the political and the cultural history of
their nation. her work registers the desire to draw attention to this act
of exclusion and to the sense of loss it has created for later generations
of women. estranged from the national narrative of the past, women
create alternative ways of articulating their relationship to history, both
individually and collectively. implicated in this project is Boland’s
presentation of her own experience as an irish woman, and more specifically as an irish woman writer. in her writing the relationship between
creativity and literary tradition assumes an enduring importance.1
The concept of memory has been crucial to Boland’s developing
political thought for many years; it is with reference to memory that
the interwoven states of private and public in her work must be
problematized. This dynamic highlights the importance of gender to
larger debates on memory, as marianne hirsch and valerie smith have
indicated: ‘What a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget
are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus
with gender.’2 as well as providing inspiration for Boland’s work, the
process of memory is reflected upon directly: as Catherine Kilcoyne
has suggested, her oeuvre constitutes ‘a critique of memory as poetic,
23
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
linguistic device’.3 as this chapter will argue, Boland first privileges
the personal significance of memory before placing remembrance and
memorialization at the centre of a larger debate on the limits of a national
tradition. This progression is not a naturally evolving one, however, but
rather a strategic reinforcement of the validity of lived experience as a
foundation for cultural authority; it is Boland’s early estrangement that
legitimizes her continued identification with a marginalized position in
spite of her creative and critical reputation. as a young child Boland was
brought to live in london, and was educated there and later in new
york before returning to dublin to complete her school and university
education. These london years, though representing a brief period in
Boland’s biography, are portrayed as formative of the child’s sense of
self and therefore significant for Boland’s developing identity as a poet.
This early experience of difference is linked to the poet’s later preoccupation with cultural estrangement, and her determination to explore it
in her work. The complex relationship between personal memory and
intellectual exploration shapes this discussion of the poetry.
The Spaces of Memory: Creating Childhood
The urban environment as both historical entity and life experience
has exerted an important influence on the writing of poetry in the
modern period. The city is a space of acknowledged heterogeneity, and
london, at the time that Boland experienced it, presented a geographically extensive and historically rich environment. it was also a city in
a state of profound transition, owing to the period of reconstruction
that followed the end of the second World War.4 Though the damage
left parts of london derelict, these were years of high employment and
comparative prosperity. The large-scale immigration that was a feature
of the post-war decade was beginning, yet the child of Boland’s prose
and poetry remains remote from these contexts, seeing the experience in
deeply personal terms.5 living at the irish embassy, Boland was at once
sheltered from the normal life of the post-war capital and continually
reminded of the significance of its political relationships. The cultural
differences that she senses have a striking effect on her both at the time
and later. indeed, her memories of london are shaped by the feeling of
strangeness, of otherness, that permeated her childhood as a whole; this
is understood by Boland primarily in linguistic terms – ‘i had moved
around as a child. i had lived in other cities. i had learned no dialect
of belonging; i knew no idiom of attachment to place or its purpose.’6
24
l os t l a n ds
such disengagement from the living environment can create obstacles to
the formation of normal human bonds, but it can prompt more positive
processes too, including a reflective, observant position. For James
Conlon, ‘the bountiful confusion of reality’ that the city condenses into
one place leads the mind to rethink its assumptions, to philosophize.7 so
it may be that the confusion that Boland experiences as a child – this
lack of an adequate ‘dialect’ or ‘idiom’ – is as much a feature of the life
of the city itself as it is a circumstance of her sudden uprooting from
her birthplace. That memory rewrites the text of the past to produce
a form of representation that can be ‘read’ suggests that it offers an
essential ordering process for the adult poet, who can use her formal
skill to retain disorder within her method.8 The function of memory as
representation reinforces both its conceptual richness and its strategic
purpose for the poet. it permits her not only to reflect on the processes
of identity formation but to change them at will. For this reason Boland’s
use of personal memories in her writing helps to consolidate her critical
identity at the same time as it permits her to remain in a productively
marginal position in relation to ireland’s poetic tradition.9
a crucial aspect in the literary construction of london for Boland is
her use of the dynamics of place as a way of debating ideas of inclusion
and exclusion. By invoking both the physical spaces of the city and the
interior of the house in which she lived during her time in the British
capital, Boland gives visible contours to the process of identity formation:
my childhood, certainly in the london years, wasn’t happy. That isn’t to
say it wasn’t a privileged childhood, because it was. But it was fictional and
desolate in an odd way … there was this huge, compartmentalised house.
and i felt thoroughly displaced in it. i never believed i belonged there.
i never felt it was my home. some of the feelings i recognise as having
migrated into themes i keep going back to – exile, types of estrangement, a
relation to objects – began there.10
since concepts of home, in particular of the unified family, have
been central to the construction of an irish national imaginary, it is
noteworthy that Boland expresses her unease through the metaphor of
the compartmentalized house. her sense of displacement is double: the
family of the diplomat is identifiably irish, yet always at a distance from
ireland, and within this complex dynamic Boland is further displaced by
the lack of permanence and intimacy of this life. to call her childhood
‘fictional’ is to draw attention to its creative potential; rather than these
memories ‘migrating’ into her poetry, therefore, they are formed by her
adult preoccupations. although english experiences and education have
25
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
had an impact on the poet – and are seen to shape the day-to-day lives
of her child protagonists – they are used in her work to confirm the
sense of cultural difference that lies at the core of the perceiving self,
and that later validates Boland’s persistent, yet questioning, location of
herself in an irish cultural tradition. Though recapturing the instinctive
experiences of childhood and youth, these processes of remembering
form part of a body of work with distinct aesthetic and political aims.
The city space remains a significant dimension of Boland’s handling
of these ideas. roland Barthes figures it as the place where we come
face to face with difference: ‘The city, essentially and semantically, is the
place of our meeting with the other.’11 This ‘other’ is both conceptual
and individual, encompassing the notion of difference as well as the
living being that embodies these characteristics, a combined identity
that will later prove important to the poet in her use of particularized
female experience to interrogate larger political positions. The city
provides a locus for the arriving stranger, historically and metaphorically,
creating an environment in which the other can be accommodated
without either forced assimilation or an exaggerated sense of difference.
The inclusive dimension of this experience is reinforced by Boland’s
diplomatic background; in personal terms, though, the transition is
far from seamless. ‘hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be
treated in a hostile manner by another upon his arrival on the other’s
territory’, writes Kant,12 yet if, as derrida argues, crossing the threshold
is always a transgressive step, then both visitor and guest experience
this sense of transgression when moving into a space in which they do
not (yet) belong.13 such a contravention may have been liberating for
Boland, at least in retrospect, offering her new ways of construing the
poetic subject. it also forms the basis of the ethical turn in her work:
her use of these memories suggests an enduring concern with otherness
and exclusion that contextualizes her later interrogation of the place of
women within the irish literary tradition:
Writing about the lost, the voiceless, the silent. and exploring my relation to
them. and – more dangerous still – feeling my way into the powerlessness
of an experience through the power of expressing it. This wasn’t an area of
artistic experiment. it was an area of ethical imagination, where you had
to be sure, every step of the way – every word and every line – that it was
good faith and good poetry.14
in contrast to emmanuel levinas, for whom the ethical challenge is
presented to the spontaneous, free subject,15 Boland’s moral questioning
26
l os t l a n ds
is part of a continuous process, one that is designed to broaden the
intellectual and historical contexts of her work as well as to refine her
ideas through evolving forms of reflection and representation. Boland’s
repeated return to key memories and themes in both her poetry and her
prose works reveals the deliberate nature of her construction of ethical
and political questions.
This questioning has its roots in an emotional response to place,
however, and the continuing importance of spatial metaphor in Boland’s
work draws attention to the problematic dynamic of incorporation
and expulsion that is closely linked to the issue of hospitality.16 For
levinas, the ethics of proximity invoke the interpersonal dimension
of hospitality, the need for it to exist on an experiential rather than a
conceptual level, and in Boland’s case the state of difference invoked
by her london childhood creates a productive tension not only for her
personal creativity but also for her understanding of ideas of community
and belonging. in this way, Boland’s repeated return to these scenes of
childhood insists on the all-encompassing character of this dynamic
for ethical debates in both gendered and post-colonial settings. This
form of memory reflects the prevailing power structures, and Boland’s
concern for the exclusion of women from cultural and political history
in ireland reveals her awareness of the effect this exclusion has on all acts
of representation: it is thus ‘neither marginal nor specialist’ but ‘concerns
all of poetry, all that leads into it in the past and everywhere it is going
in the future’.17 as identity is shaped both by individual experience and
by a web of social and behavioural expectations, so public narratives
reveal the texture of private experience. The importance of both personal
and collective identities in the formation of memory is demonstrated in
the subtle ways in which Boland investigates the relationship between
subjective perception and shared understanding, as well as in her
contemplation of the lives of earlier generations.
The yearning for origins is also the yearning for self-knowledge. as
the child grows and questions, so she increasingly turns to the past, in
search of a crucial dimension of her identity which remains occluded
in her present life. This need to construct the self, not from an ongoing
series of life experiences but from a barely reclaimable past, and from the
personal histories of one’s parents and grandparents, is itself a source of
challenging inspiration for Boland. especially important is her formation
of the female continuum that will later provide her with a personally
and politically sustaining narrative. she begins her autobiographical
work, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time
27
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
(1996), not with the story of her own experiences, but instead those of
her grandmother, acknowledging the complex temporality of identity
formation, especially in contexts of hardship and dramatic social change.
While the urge to form a unified self – and the political significance of
this urge – appears to motivate much of Boland’s writing, it is always
overshadowed by doubts; doubts that reflect both the impossibility
of the coherent subject and the limited perspectives that the attempt
to construct it might perpetuate. This dynamic is important to an
understanding of Boland’s conviction that her writing should connect
with the lives of other women, of both past and future generations. The
presence of these women – who are at once ‘other’ to Boland’s sense of
selfhood and indicative of the importance of relational understanding –
becomes a central part of the poet’s own narrative, with an ambiguity
suggestive of Julia Kristeva’s exploration of the foreign:
With the Freudian notion of the unconscious the involution of the strange
in the psyche loses its pathological aspect and integrates within the assumed
unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and
becomes an integral part of the same. … uncanny, foreignness is within us:
we are our own foreigners, we are divided.18
The incorporation of otherness within the self testifies to the permeability of the subject and to the resultant complexity of the singular
being. Boland’s interest in the hidden lives of her female relatives, and
the composite nature of women’s identity more generally, is matched by
a growing awareness of the self-division that is an inevitable part of this
identity. in this way, her representation of childhood instincts prefigures
her later interrogation of gendered positions. Boland’s mother, however,
chose to distance herself from her past:
unlike most people, she treated the past as an opportunity for forgetfulness
rather than a source of definition. she had no photographs, not one, of herself
as a child. no copybooks from school. no pantomime tickets. she talked
of her childhood rarely and without sentiment. almost, it seemed, without
interest … Childhood was a place of unreadable signposts and overgrown
roads. The language could not be retrieved.19
By contrast, Boland’s own early experiences of estrangement must be
both expressed and interiorized in order that they can be transformed
into conscious political thought. london plays an important role in
the psychic development of the biographical and, indeed, fictional self
for Boland in the way that it propels the speaker towards identification
with her irish past yet impedes her from embracing this past without
28
l os t l a n ds
equivocation. We know that the process of childhood identification with
ireland has been substituted by the poet’s actual adult life in dublin,
and that Boland’s relationship to london is shaped by the temporary
nature of her time there. The brevity of this experience is at odds with its
creative significance in expressing the personal condition of estrangement
that, for Boland, provides the foundation for her investigation of the
marginalization of women in modern irish culture. For the attentive
reader of Boland’s work the repeated tropes of her london childhood
will become more resonant as the poet’s parallel exploration of the fate
of women in irish history proceeds.
Remembering the Self: Text and Image
in chronological terms, the first consideration of Boland’s childhood
outside ireland occurs in the poem ‘after a Childhood away from ireland’
in the ‘domestic interiors’ sequence from Night Feed (1982). in The Journey
and Other Poems (1986) these experiences begin to exert an important
shaping force: ‘i remember’ is the first poem in this collection and gives
an important indication of how the space of the volume will be defined.
light is an immediate consideration here and it will become a significant
compositional technique for Boland, both at this stage and later. in this
poem light is used to aestheticize the past, extending the imagery of
painting outwards from the mother’s easel to encompass the entire scene.
This scheme reveals not only the resonance of childhood memories but
also their susceptibility to conscious manipulation. The influence of life
beyond the windows – ‘the iron railings and the ruined evenings of
/ bombed-out, post-war london’ (J 9) – is slight, though its mood is
crucial to the heightened sensual awareness of the anxious girl. Boland
has often referred to the significance of her mother’s artistic practice to
her, both as a child and as a young writer, and here this world of making
creates alternative energies to the post-war city in which it takes place.20
identity is under construction in this poem: the face on the canvas is
only a partial representation of the sitter who arrived and left, and its
‘scattered fractions’ testify not only to the fact that the representation is
incomplete but to the conviction that selfhood is inherently fragmented.
This fragmentation is further realized in the alienation of the child:
and i remember, i remember
i was the interloper who knows both love and fear,
who comes near and draws back, who feels nothing
29
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
beyond the need to touch, to handle, to dismantle it,
the mystery; and how in the morning when i came down –
a nine-year-old in high, fawn socks –
the room had been shocked into a glacier
of cotton sheets thrown over the almond
and vanilla silk of the French empire chairs.21
(J 9)
The ‘i’ of this poem, as in so many poems by Boland, is a layered and
complex position. in the present, the ‘i’ is the adult recalling the past,
so that the act is not just one of remembering but of creating out of
that past – an imagined synthesis of the present consciousness of the
speaker and her earlier experiencing self. in the process the contexts of
feeling become unclear: ‘i was the interloper who knows’ the ‘voice’ of
the poem asserts. it is not the child who feels the need to dismantle
the mystery, however, but the adult, the poet: yet both are caught
between the need to live with ambiguities and the equal need to expose
and understand them. at the moment of writing it seems that Boland
uncovers a fruitful trope for the collision of cultural and personal
divisions: the irish girl in london, privileged yet excluded; one country
recovering from the trauma of war and another building its identity
independent of this harrowing experience. in this opening poem the
focus is on the room – the locus of creativity where the making of
meaning is central, both in the london of the poet’s childhood and
in the memory of that place. This containment facilitates not only the
impression of separation from the culture in which the family now
lives but also the distillation of the image: the self-conscious transformation of life into art. These moments of stillness become touchstones
in Boland’s art, beside which the broader experiences of childhood are
situated with care.
Both at that time and today london differs from dublin in key
political and aesthetic respects: it is large enough for the act of defamiliarization to take place, and is often termed the ‘strange city’ in Boland’s
work. despite its familiarity over the creative span of Boland’s career,
it retains this strangeness and the child’s experiences there are intense,
at once alienating and formative. They are resonant because they are
‘other’ to her irish identity, but they are carefully particularized and
recurring memories that mark moments of self-realization, even symbolic
meaning. in ‘The source’, the initial search for where a river rises yields
instead an altogether different starting point: the image of a mirror in
which a kneeling child is shown discovering a coil of her mother’s hair,
30
l os t l a n ds
saved carefully in a box. For the poet this image is both inescapable
and compelling: it marks a surprising release of the past, freighted with
private meaning and with suggestions of lost youth and beauty. yet in
conjuring up this image the poet also contemplates the gap between
it and the real circumstances of the life it reveals, and considers the
impossibility of rendering existence in simplified forms:
as the light goes,
i hold in my hand the coarse weight and
hopeless safe-keeping
and there comes back to me
the adult language for mystery:
Maybe. Nearly. It could almost be.
(TV 37)
This ‘hopeless safe-keeping’ speaks of the pointlessness of holding on to
the past, when its meanings remain so elusive.22 yet it may also suggest
that the attentiveness of the discovering imagination is capable of raising
to significance the least promising of objects or narratives. it is this
capability that convinces Boland of the importance of retrieving the
lost narratives of women of preceding generations, and her return to the
life and memories of her mother is a testament to her sense of herself as
facilitating this important act of witness – what Boland would call ‘that
shining i. That obdurate and central witness of the poet’.23
in spite, or perhaps because, of the complexity of the child’s response
to her early displacement, london itself would be a site of awakening
for Boland, though not always consciously so. ‘The Briar rose’ evokes
a child on the brink of knowledge. The link that is made here – and
repeated in the poem ‘The Women’ which follows it – is between the
flower and the crêpe-de-Chine of sophisticated underwear. it is the
presence of the roses in a dublin garden that evokes sudden and vivid
memory within the speaker:
i could be
the child i was, opening
a bedroom door
on irish whiskey, lipstick,
an empty glass,
oyster crepe-de-Chine
and closing it without knowing why.
(J 26)
31
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
These are suggestive details, yet the child is not consciously aware of the
sexual intimacy that they imply, but rather of the sense of a private space
into which she has strayed. in this case the child’s innocence includes
unconscious impressions, which are vital in testing the boundaries not
only of childhood and adult experience but also of innocence and sophistication, tradition and modernity. even the speaker’s continuity with her
own past is conditional – ‘i could be / the child i was’ (my italics); she
acknowledges the past as the matter of both memory and invention.
While subjective experience is significant here (only the child glimpses
the scene, though the adult reader interprets it) there is always the sense
in Boland’s work of larger currents just beneath the surface of the text.
The deliberate simplicity of the poem – its short lines, two balanced
sentences, its refusal to complicate the moment of discovery – maintains
the directness of the child’s observation and openness to experience. yet
it also displays its own artifice: the isolation of the phrase ‘i could be’
tantalizes the reader and its ‘oyster crepe-de-Chine’ is too painterly for
this naive form.
The negotiation between the desire to record loss and estrangement,
and the level of poetic self-possession required to express it, has always
been a delicate process for Boland. in her london poems the layering of
adult and child selves and the repetition of key images and experiences
from childhood are vital to the realization of the child’s experience, while
permitting the synthesizing consciousness of the adult poet a significant
presence. This is important, not only in drawing attention to the
sophisticated framing of experience that is so central to the relationship
between Boland’s work in poetry and prose, but in emphasizing the
temporal nature of this understanding. temporality is an important
aspect of Boland’s construction of herself as a poet: she positions herself
as at once part of a continuum (of carefully documented experiences)
and excluded from one (the continuum of valid poetic tradition). so the
passage of time exerts a significant force not only on how the individual
poet situates herself but also on how these very problematic traditions are
constructed and reconstructed in contemporaneous critical narratives.
it is possible to construe questions of belonging and estrangement, of
hospitality and exclusion, in these terms too, as Clive Barnett writes:
what is most at issue in the encounter between levinas and derrida is the
temporality of intersubjective relations. Figures of temporality – of memory,
inheritance, anticipation and surprise – are central to the alternative,
non-hierarchical evaluation of the value of proximity and distance that
emerges in this line of thought.24
32
l os t l a n ds
The complex relationship between self and other in Boland’s work
emphasizes at once the sameness and the difference that the singular
subject, located in time, can encompass. it also creates an important
sense of proximity to past generations and a commitment to understand
and represent them with care. The past and history have a complex
relationship with one another, as Boland herself points out, and the
divergence of lived experience from the narrative that records it is
a significant preoccupation for the poet. maurice halbwachs draws
attention to the break in continuity ‘between the society reading this
history and the group in the past who acted in or witnessed the events’,
and it is this break that Boland seeks to address.25 her reclamation of
individual figures from the past suggests that proximity to key experiences
alters the ethics of self-expression: the memory of participants is an
important way in which an alternative understanding of events may be
reached. memory is inevitably selective, where history attempts coherent
analysis: ‘memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural,
and yet individual’, writes pierre nora, ‘history belongs to everyone and
to no one’.26 For Boland, history belongs more specifically to those with
continued political agency.27 her earliest realization of this occurs at
the interface of British and irish histories, where the narrative of empire
predominates. later, it is the foundation of the irish state and its shaping
of social values that is the focus of her attention. Both the complexity
and the fragility of personal recollection offers a counterbalance to the
certainties of a male-dominated republic, and a poetics of reflection
emerges in place of fixed narratives of national identity.
if the city is a bearer of history, and a showcase for the achievements
of a culture, it is unsurprising that london should express the contrast
between Britain and ireland in pronounced ways. Boland – as the
daughter of a diplomat – is an invited guest, not an unexpected visitor,
so her presence does not threaten to destabilize the self-possession that
renders Britain capable of hospitable action. The historical relationship
between the two islands is a vexed one, however, and these tensions
underpin Boland’s growing determination to bring to light the limited
perspectives that certain historical representations encode. maps hold
a particular fascination for Boland in this respect. They are pictorial
references to the historical terms in which the world is seen yet they
give only a partial view and a static one, refuting the dynamic nature
of the world and its relationships. The linen map that features at the
opening of ‘in Which the ancient history i learn is not my own’
has this air of permanence, yet seems newly fragile – it is ‘cracked in
33
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
places’ and suspended by knotted cotton (TV 28). The colours of empire
are faded out, indicative both of the length of time these assumptions
of power have been in circulation and of the fact that they may now
be diminishing – a view supported by intervening events which have
helped to shape the vantage point of the poet. The temporal aspect of
the relationships on the map is marked by the speaker’s own conviction
that ireland is ‘farther away every year’, as its significance in her life
is overtaken by her english education and her absorption of english
history. That ‘god’s grace’ should shape history suggests that a divine
wish determines the acquisition of power, and that a moral imperative
underpins the fate of nations. ireland’s ancient history cannot take the
place of Classical narrative and thus it cannot be reclaimed: no oracle
exists to validate its meanings and the fatedness of its events. The
roman empire is described as the greatest ‘until our time of course’,
noting the satisfaction of British confidence, though the date named
in the poem, 1952, reveals just how precarious that self-confidence is.
The child’s need to repeat the place names of her own country, to use
language to bring this experience to reality and to locate her home with
its sensory identity – the flight of steps to the door and the scented
lilac tree – is noteworthy. But this yearning for what is almost lost is
challenged by the final mention of the oracle, and the ambiguity of its
messages to those who travelled far to consult it. even as Boland draws
out the emotional intensity of lost experiences, she doubts the certainties
that such emotions may suggest, both for the child-subject and for her
readers. By leaving the interpretation of these elements open, she avoids
over-determining the interpretation of the past, while continuing to
affirm the importance of the act of remembering itself.
The inevitable entanglement between emotional states and political
realities, and the tensions inherent in this relationship, will be an
enduring concern for Boland. her contemplation of subjectivity is always
inflected by an awareness of the complex cultural forces shaping the self,
and by a sense of the contingent nature of self-realization. in this respect
the intersection of spatial and temporal concerns help to shape both
the experiencing and the writing self. This is especially evident in ‘The
game’ from Outside History (1990). The perspective on the world outside
is important in drawing attention to the forces brought to bear on the
child. important too is the need to stress cultural particularity – the
english spring that by inference is so different from the irish one. The
poem begins as the fog is clearing, and the vision of the speaker asserts
itself, and with this, her ability to see herself and to locate herself in a
34
l os t l a n ds
sensory world: ‘i was a child in a north-facing bedroom in / a strange
country’ (OH 16).28 The observations of the child are acute, yet her vision
is doubly limited by circumstance – when the fog has cleared, the railings
become visible, both containing the child and protecting her. at night
what she hears is ‘quarrelling and taffeta creaking and the clattering /
of queens and aces on the inlaid card table’: tensions made manifest in
discord, in the strain of social fabric and the anxieties of risk-taking.
These sounds, like the visual image of the late winter fog, are strangely
timeless: it is as though the child is trapped, not just in a place, but also
in a time not her own. These effects combine to create an atmosphere of
foreboding; a stillness that heightens the child’s feeling of entrapment.
The illusion of flight that the wakeful child conjures up is her way of
escaping these fears, yet she has to return from this clear created space,
stimulating to the senses and without imaginative boundaries; she must
go back to the sharply delineated world of her london home, full of
edges and surfaces, with the cards of chance scattered. This is a life
of hierarchy and social order: the King is prayed for in chapel, a king
notably missing from the pack of cards that provides a recurring trope
in the poem. likewise the sculpted archangels are part of the structure
of the church, at once transcendent and trapped in space and time. yet
this is a poem that shows the will and imagination that are necessary
for the child herself to transcend circumstance, and to gain perspective
on the life she is living. and its impulse matches the collection from
which it is taken: Outside History explores the exclusion of women from
recorded history, while at the same time suggesting both the imaginative
freedom that this exclusion might take and the freshness of perspective
open to a poet such as Boland who is free from some of the weight of
established narrative.
Boland herself notes the difficulties in her writing process in the
early 1990s. in spite of increasing metrical skill on her part, she ‘lost
command’ of her working methods and began to work in circular
ways, endlessly rewriting poems.29 yet this creative disturbance may
have been the direct result of a newly emerging voice in her poetry and
a growing confidence in her formal powers: ‘i was always a hand-tomouth technician and command of the line was never exactly mine’;
without such command, ‘i don’t think you have confidence that you
can put together the poem you want in the voice you want’.30 her sense
of speaking clearly, as though for the first time, emerges decisively in
the decades that followed as does her awareness that those women who
did live and write before her have their own distinct understanding of
35
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
these creative challenges. The subjectivity that we encounter in Boland’s
poems through the nineties is an increasingly complex one, and its
relationship to its ‘others’ is deliberately unfixed. Though much of the
material of Boland’s work from Night Feed (1982) onward can be linked
to biographical detail, there is no transparent connection between the life
of the poet and the position of the speaker in her poems. anne Fogarty
has problematized ‘the assumption that the voice of the lyric poem is
coterminous with the poet’s all-informing subjectivity’, arguing instead
that Boland’s speakers combine aspects of both subject and object.31 in
this scheme the voice bridges the gap between self and other: it ‘renders
audible, but never pretends to embody or comprehensively envision’ the
experience of another.32 earlier, Catriona Clutterbuck had noted that
Boland’s ‘ideology of estrangement is paradoxically present in the very
language of “solidarity” that is used by the poem’s politically capable
speakers’,33 so that an underlying detachment persists, and is cultivated
in sophisticated ways, even when the broad thrust of the work affirms
strong female connection.34
many exiles, as derrida argues, see language as ‘their ultimate
homeland’,35 but for Boland this position is complicated. The language
with which she identifies is hiberno-english, expressive of her own
experience and noticeably different from the language of her london
years:
language. at first this was what i lacked. not just the historic speech of
the country. i lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; i
returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing. The street
names, the meeting places – it was not just that i did not know them. it
was something more. i had never known them. i had lost not only a place
but the past that goes with it and, with it, the clues from which to construct
my present self.36
yet the loss of language is not a personal one only: language itself is
already compromised by a history that records the decline of irish and
its superimposition by english. The loss that Boland experiences as a
child, therefore, is recognized by her adult self as indicative of the
larger losses of the irish, and more specifically of the irish woman, in
history. The third section of the volume The Journey and Other Poems
(1986) contains two poems on school experiences in london, modelled
closely on material that Boland recalls ten years later in Object Lessons
(1996). one locates itself clearly as ‘an irish Childhood in england:
1951’. language is the first consideration in this poem, and it will be
the last. it begins with the ‘bickering of vowels’ heard on london
36
l os t l a n ds
buses, the important auditory shift that the child’s relocation from
dublin to london occasions. it is part of a strange sensory landscape
– the glimpse of the navy-skirted ticket collector, the taste of the
‘ration-book pudding’, the sound of english songs. The child’s awareness
of difference is limited, however; she suffers from ‘some malaise / of
love for what i’d never known i had’ (J 50). The temporary nature of
human perception becomes important here. The moment of recollection
extends to encompass the present – the child becomes the mother,
caught in a passing reverie. ‘We are what we have chosen’ marks the
power of individual decision-making, yet it remains a question, and
the powerlessness of the child’s perspective re-emerges. The elliptical
structure of the poem is important here. The digression prompted by
memory is reprised in another return to the conditions of the poet’s
london childhood:
did i choose to? –
[…]
let the world i knew become the space
between the words that i had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that i
came to in nineteen-fifty-one
(J 50)
The relationship between remembered experience and its representation
in language is addressed here in complex terms, deliberately made
convoluted by the turn of the line, the passage of poetic time, and the
variable interpretations it generates. The poem addresses the varieties of
representation itself – the difference between words known ‘by heart’ and
the practical evolution of lived language. in doing so it hints too at the
historical loss of the irish language and traditions in favour of english,
the language of modernization, of commerce, and of international
literary representation. yet the lost world of the speaker’s irish childhood
is also ‘the space / between the words’ – what is ultimately incapable
of representation. england becomes no more than a record of loss, in a
poetic move that makes the ‘freckled six-year-old’ indicative of a culture
that must see its neighbour as a corrective to its own limitations. This
corrective is placed finally in the mouth of the teacher, rectifying the
speaker’s grammar, so a hibernicism becomes wrong, and the need to
abandon the language of the irish past is emphasized.
Without the language of the past, how can its experiences be
rendered with honesty and exactness? much of Boland’s developing
37
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
style as a poet, and as an essayist and memoirist, reveals the inevitable
self-consciousness of language use, the extent to which language cannot
‘match’ the world it interprets but creates a unique world, a world of
the imagination that shares characteristics with the lived past but is
not the same as it. ‘Fond memory’ inhabits some of this same territory.
again it begins in the past, in a setting of styleless uniformity, ‘a
school where all the children wore darned worsted’ (J 52). Though the
speaker is part of this anonymous scene, she is separated, in thought
and syntax, from the rest: she too ‘ate rationed food’ and ‘played
english games’, a description setting her apart from the rest, and
one that echoes the old distinctions of cultural nationalism. history,
it seems, is slanted in favour of the english but poetry is suggestive
of more neutral positions – ‘measure’ and ‘complexity’. in opposition
to these considered processes is placed the speaker’s father and his
rendition of the ‘slow lilts’ of tom moore. But this happens in the
margins of the child’s experience, only occasionally, and ‘at a piano
pushed into a corner of the playroom’ (J 52). The apparent return to
cultural innocence seems at first to hint at the sentimental nature of
moore’s work, but the speaker is brought close to tears not by the easy
emotions that her father’s performance evokes, but by the cigarette
smoke drifting up from between his fingers. nostalgia is troubled by
modernity, though this may be an adult construct: as Boland would
later write, ‘it never occurred to me that eventually the power and
insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of
not belonging’.37
‘Let Me Repeat Myself’: Later Sequences
The preoccupation with childhood experience confirms the pivotal role
that memory will play in the formation of Boland’s poetic and critical
persona. her repeated return to the landscape of loss, exemplified in
london’s post-war strangeness, indicates her early imaginative grasp of
the combined effects of individual experience and cultural distinctions
in shaping the self as writer. more importantly, in this case, it revealed
the resonance of particular tropes and images in recapturing the personal
and historical past, and inaugurated Boland’s practice of reiterating these
images in the course of her creative life. she intends this act of creative
return to disclose the past to present readers – not only the past of irish
history but also the past of her own texts. her desire to create a space
in literary tradition for those hitherto excluded from it also remains
38
l os t l a n ds
a strong one. For Clair Wills this is a questionable aim: she argues
that a more fundamental critique of the relationship between private
experience and the dominant tradition is warranted; inclusivity is not
in itself sufficient.38 yet though Boland seeks to articulate the kinds of
experience elided by narrative history, she wishes to retain this flawed
version; the gap between present and past must remain, even as it is
imaginatively bridged:
The past – in its silence and inconvenient completeness – should not be
remade. it should not be open to version-making. That is what history is.
The past is not a version of events. it is a record of reality. For that reason,
if we are to be true to the experience of a people, the past must remain the
past. it must remain in the suffering, powerless place it surely was and is. let
me repeat myself. The relation between the past and history – that awkward,
charged, and sometimes mysterious distance – should be a crucial care of
postcolonial studies.39
This view of history as a fixed entity has important ramifications
for how Boland’s poetry is read, not least because of the tension that
emerges between the ‘facts’ of the past and the aesthetic success of their
rendering. her strategy of repetition has divided critics: some believing it
a necessary means to highlight the injustices of the past; others judging
it evidence of Boland’s incapacity to evolve as a poet, either formally or
thematically. The Lost Land, published in 1998, was the collection that
crystallized these critical differences. appearing less than three years
after Object Lessons, The Lost Land returned to the themes and images of
Outside History (1990) and In a Time of Violence (1994) to reinforce the
rejection of exclusionary mechanisms in national and cultural history;
it did so by adopting many of the same aesthetic strategies of Boland’s
recent prose work – repeated images and phrases, declarative modes
and the use of sequences and circular narrative patterns. its polarization
of critics indicated the extent to which these strategies, far from being
universally judged intellectually demanding and politically necessary,
were often dismissed as limiting or indulgent. Katie Conboy, writing in
Poetry Ireland Review, reinforces this view:
even when [Boland] tries to accomplish something new with her material,
she continually echoes her own earlier subjects and styles. The images of
wounding and scarring, of heroism and its discontents – the themes of poetic
surrogacy, of recovering ‘what we lost’, of divided languages and loyalties –
have already been so thoroughly explored in both her poetry and her prose
that, for her loyal readership, these poems read almost like a parody of her
earlier work.40
39
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
For better or worse, The Lost Land indicates clearly Boland’s conviction
that the literature of political confrontation requires a style of relentless
reinforcement. This, as the volume’s title suggests, is a new aesthetic
territory formed from old, and the deliberate invocation of geographical
metaphors here will come to dominate Boland’s later poetry. her aim, as
the form of Object Lessons suggests, is the integration of specific memories
within larger political and personal constructs: ‘the lost land is not a
place that can be subdivided into history, or love, or memory’.41 The
representation of childhood estrangement in earlier poems can therefore
be seen as a necessary precursor to its realization as a link between the
personal and the political, and to the acknowledgment that political
awareness must have a counterpart in instinct and experience. yet in this
scheme the landscape of Boland’s personal and creative past also becomes
fixed, closing down productive self-reflection and creative dialogue.
From this unmoving position the vivid recollections of childhood can
take on a filmic quality, their predetermined course confirming, rather
than challenging, the reader’s understanding of the role of memory here.
yet Boland herself refutes this impression by suggesting that even the
familiar image has the power to elicit fresh meaning. ‘Watching old
movies as Though they were new’ uses the grey and white half-tones
of the old films to invoke the speaker’s muted apprehension of her
earlier life – as though the story they tell could only now be realized
by the adult woman recalling them.42 maturity can only be attained
by confronting the question of identity, Boland seems to suggest here;
likewise the transition towards a self-conscious creative act is a marker
of artistic development.
What is most significant in The Lost Land, however, is the role of the
sequence in reflecting the poet’s own realization that the return to ireland
does not assuage, but instead deepens, the feelings of estrangement
registered by the child in london. The dynamics of loss, around which
the collection is shaped, express just this: that the growth to emotional
maturity – and in this case to aesthetic achievement – involves the
recognition that personal experiences of loss are indicative of the grief
inherent in the human condition itself. yet in Boland’s understanding
this realization is more complex: the extent to which cultural loss fuels
her art, yet prevents its complete attainment, creates the unresolvable
tension at its heart. Critical recognition is an important dimension of
Boland’s engagement with the national tradition, and is an integral part
of the success of such an interaction: in order to redress the historical
imbalance of power, the validity of her ideological and artistic position
40
l os t l a n ds
must be agreed. such an endorsement, however, inevitably reduces the
emotional power of her appeal. in other words, the broader the support
for Boland’s ethical and artistic position, the less reason she has to
continue advocating it.
These tensions are played out in the sequence of twelve poems with
which The Lost Land opens. titled ‘Colony’, this group traces the
relationship between the geography of the past and the lives dramatized
there. one text in the dozen refers explicitly to her childhood experience
in london as formative of such an enquiry – that is ‘a habitable grief’.
By the time this poem is written Boland is sure of the resonance of these
memories; rather than writing her way into meaning, she finds it already
present in the moment of recall: ‘long ago / i was a child in a strange
country: / / i was irish in england. / / i learned a second language there’
(LL 29). The fairy-tale construction of ‘long ago’ reminds us that this is
a story told before, and that its preliminary facts can now be presented
without embellishment. This stylistic attenuation limits the emotional
power of the material, however, and the painful process of acquiring
a new language is diminished here: in ‘mise eire’ it struck readers
forcibly but now it is a familiar trope.43 The grief, the scar, the nation:
all now constitute a familiar network of meaning in Boland’s work
and become, for the reader, a form of memory. yet this is a deliberate
strategy on Boland’s part, giving her own texts the power of popular
recall. ‘a habitable grief’ is in direct dialogue with ‘mise eire’ and the
achievement of that earlier poem is made the greater by this recognition.
The value of repetition, then, is not only to articulate the political
position anew, but also to give her earlier poems an almost incantatory
power. ‘a habitable grief’ confirms this emphasis: its incontrovertible
statements concerning the past give way to awareness of the contingent
relationship between language and experience; it is not the life lived but
the life expressed that creates lasting dynamics of intellect and emotion:
a dialect in which
what had never been could still be found:
That infinite horizon. always far
and impossible. That contrary passion
to be whole.
(LL 29)
The creative force of language is shown to extend into the past and
future here, uncovering a history that never existed and projecting an
unattainable desire. Conversely, though, the intertextuality that is now
41
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
part of Boland’s practice reminds us that this has already happened, that
new poetic forms will stage this ‘far and impossible’ state and render it
no more attainable than before.
The sequence expresses this sense of duration, of living (and reading)
through a series of historical circumstances that not only shape the
creative sensibility but the literary culture of Boland’s time. to open
the sequence she returns to the darkness of seventeenth-century ireland
and to the decline of the gaelic order.44 here she endorses the need
for poetry to engage with the brutality of experience, rather than its
metaphorical substance only. Cautioning the reader against believing
poetry to be ‘a gentle art’, the speaker argues instead that it must
confront the bitterness of personal suffering and cultural loss. The
sequence as a whole does not engage long with this period of history
but goes on to confront the mixedness of the colonial heritage: the
next three poems use the image of dublin Bay to express the links
between the two islands in spatial terms and in doing so to signal the
radical differences between these cultures. The harbour conveys the
dichotomy of safety and risk; made ‘by art and force’, it reveals Boland
to be increasingly attuned to the necessity of these two processes –
acts of creation and discipline that both mirror historical circumstance
and permit it to be rendered in good faith by the poet. The act of
making is an important one: the harbour itself took more than 25
years to build and the stone used was locally quarried, emphasizing
the materiality of Boland’s use of history. The poem’s neat four-line
stanzas at first exemplify a carefully maintained order but this structure
cannot contain the force for change: ‘the irish sea rising / / and rising
through a century of storms’ (LL 14). here the energies of revolution
overtake the stanza break – an enjambment that once more subsides
into regularity yet continues to shape the poem, together with the
ships that remain beneath the water as ‘slime weed and cold salt and
rust’ (LL 14). declaring herself a citizen of dublin, the speaker ends
‘The harbour’ by recording the city’s ‘contradictions’ and returns in
‘Witness’ to ‘its old divisions’ (LL 15). she again affirms herself as part
of its compromised history, describing her speech acts as expressing
both dispossessor and dispossessed. The form of the poem captures
this doubleness – its stanza length reducing from six lines to four
then to two. after its central acknowledgment of the divided self the
poem builds again towards its six-line exploration of its own mixed
language, alerting us to the power of this combined contraction and
expansion in the construction of the poetic voice.
42
l os t l a n ds
in ‘daughters of Colony’, the harbour is again invoked and the solidity
of the built environment is set against the mobile and ephemeral figures
of the colonial women, whose faces are sheltered by hats ‘made out of
local straw’ yet who remain entirely remote from their environment.
i see the darkness coming.
The absurd smallness of the handkerchiefs
they are waving
as the shore recedes.
i put my words between them
and the silence
the failing light has consigned them to
(LL 16)
The speaker has the benefit of hindsight; she situates the women
within the larger trajectory of history, knowing that their fate is to
leave ireland and to be unremembered, thus twice removed from the
national imaginary. The sea creates a perspectival instability though; for
a moment it is difficult to discern what is moving and what is staying
still and this means that both the poet and her subjects are temporarily
past and present. Their shared contingency is the means by which Boland
signals her affinity with them but also the way in which she ensures that
she, as poet, remains the object of her own poem.
another important space of memory that this sequence confronts is
that of the city street. Throughout Object Lessons dublin’s geography,
as well as its history, shapes the poet’s treatment of the process and
material of memory, and in these poems the city is also the locus of
the political and military past – ‘the long ships, the muskets and the
burning domes’ that the poet summons from history (‘The scar’, LL
19). in some cases these are visionary moments: ‘suddenly, / without
any warning, i can see them. / / They form slowly out of the twilight.
/ Their faces. arms. greatcoats. and tears’ (‘The Colonists’, LL 25). in
others, human figures are turned to stone, commemorating the past
in the city’s monuments. The dynamics here are very different: the
ephemeral figures emerge and fade in the mind of the poet, whereas
the statues testify to a version of history that privileges the heroic male
past – ‘a lost land of orators and pedestals’ (‘City of shadows’, LL 21)
and then ‘a street of statues: / iron orators and granite patriots. / arms
wide. lips apart. last words’ (‘unheroic’, LL 23). The key contrast here
is not between the colonial and the national, between ireland before
and after independence, but between the fixed power structures of
43
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
history and the mobile figures of ordinary men and women: the man
‘on the road from youghal to Cahirmoyle’ (LL 13), the speaker walking
through ‘City of shadows’ or bound for home. it is a contrast that
evokes the dichotomy between the fixed forms of the printed text and
the repeating images we find there.
The sequence continues to be an important dimension of Boland’s
recent work. A Woman Without a Country, published in 2014, has a
title sequence of thirteen parts – seven poems and six prose ‘lessons’.
again it revisits key tropes and stories from the past 30 years of her
writing: her grandfather’s life as a seaman; her grandmother’s death in
the national maternity hospital; her mother’s marriage; irish women
born and made. The structure of the sequence charts a movement
between poems that paradoxically calls attention to the difficulty in
bridging these glimpsed encounters with the past. The prose lessons are
condensed pieces exhibiting a characteristic combination of statement
and question; they encapsulate Boland’s desire to restate the details of
her personal history at the same time as she questions its place in the
larger cultural context.
The spaces of the past here move progressively from the experiential to
the symbolic, while the idea of legacy informs the whole. ‘sea Change’
questions the poet’s inheritance from her grandfather: ‘What did he
leave me, my grandfather, / […] / / With his roof of half-seen stars /
his salty walls rising higher and higher / […] / he built nothing that i
could live in’ (WWC 29). The importance of the habitable space, serving
past, present and future is contrasted here to the mobility of the ocean
and its ever-changing perspectives:
and no one lay at night
seeing these unfold in their minds with
That instinct of amendment history allows
instead of memory.
(WWC 29)
The suggestion here that history is open to revision, in a way that
memory cannot be, places the apparently fixed points of the national
past in question. yet the ‘remembered hatreds’ of the landscape and its
buried dead are persistent in Boland’s imagination, making her unable
‘to bring land and ocean together’ (WWC 29). it is the power of experiential memory that separates the generations here and that stimulates the
prose reflection on her grandmother’s life that follows. she died in 1909
at the age of 31 and the details on her death certificate form lesson 2 of
this sequence. Before that, though, the silence that surrounded her life is
44
l os t l a n ds
contemplated in ‘art of empire’. The end of empire is made possible by
the contingent nature of memory: ‘if what was not said was never seen /
if what was never seen could not be known’ (WWC 31). acts of witness
are conditional here. The course of history is changed, it seems, by the
deliberate diversion of memory and the silencing of speech.
There are images to be gleaned from these fractured histories, though,
and these combine those already familiar from Boland’s earlier writings
and the new poems to which we bear witness for the first time as we read.
The late nineteenth-century photograph compels the grandmother not
only to silence but also to stillness. For once the compulsion of history
(‘our old villain’) is not to blame; instead it is the photographer himself,
‘muttering under black cloth’ (WWC 32). increasingly in this sequence
it is not the narrative of history that excludes marginal experience but
the specific acts of representation that fix the past: the carved figurehead;
the ‘figures in glass cases’; the ‘whole woman’ as a copperplate figure of
destitution. Boland’s endless return to the processes of representation,
then, may be seen as a desire to keep the past always in motion, always
in productive exchange with the present.
Boland’s achievement as a poet is closely linked to her realization of
these complex relationships and to her awareness of the necessity for
continuous re-engagement with the processes of memory. her representation of childhood experience is an important means of linking personal
and cultural memories and thus of transforming a remembered experience
into an interrogation of the nature of memory itself. halfway through
a recent essay on the woman as citizen-poet, Boland states that her real
subject is reading: ‘how we read a poem. how we fail to read it. Beyond
that, my subject is the moral responsibility of the poetry reader.’45 The
significance of the reader’s position – and its close proximity to that of
the poet – are essential aspects of Boland’s poetic imaginary, reflecting
the importance of relationships in all aspects of her personal and creative
life. The personal past comes to embody the precarious nature of both
emotional attachment and the intellectual processes needed to interpret
it. it is a testament also to the interwoven conditions of remembering and
being remembered which are crucial to how eavan Boland is positioned
in irish poetry criticism today.
Notes
1 Jody allen randolph, in the introduction to her study of Boland, explores the
significance of the poet’s work – and her critical reception – in setting the agenda
for many of the debates on irish women’s poetry in the past 30 years. see Jody
45
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
allen randolph, Eavan Boland (lewisburg, pa: Bucknell university press; Cork:
Cork university press, 2014), pp. xv–xxxi.
marianne hirsch and valerie smith, ‘Feminism and Cultural memory: an
introduction’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.1 (2002), p. 15.
Catherine Kilcoyne, ‘eavan Boland and strategic memory’, Nordic Irish Studies 6
(2007), p. 90.
The profound changes in Britain’s social and cultural life in the immediate post-war
period can be traced in the diverse responses of writers living and working in the
capital during these years, from texts that reflect anxiety at the loss of political
power to those exploring avant-garde modes to engage directly with the processes
of cultural change. see alistair davies and alan sinfield (eds), British Culture of the
Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945–1999 (london: routledge,
2000) and robert hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945–60 (london:
methuen, 1988).
Boland’s isolation from the more dynamic aspects of london’s culture during this
period is due both to her geographical location and her social position within the
city. she lived at the irish embassy in grosvenor place and went to a convent school
in hampstead and in this way she remained largely insulated from the lives of the
less privileged. Just as the embassy itself is irish ‘territory’, so Boland’s experiences
are markedly different from those of other london citizens. i am grateful to Jody
allen randolph for clarifying some details concerning Boland’s early years.
eavan Boland, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (manchester:
Carcanet, 2011), p. 48.
James Conlon, ‘Cities and the place of philosophy’, in sharon m. meagher
(ed.), Philosophy and the City: Classic to Contemporary Writings (new york: state
university of new york press), p. 203.
For further elucidation of the transition from memory as reproduction to memory
as representation, see richard terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory
Crisis (ithaca, ny and london: Cornell university press, 1993).
Catherine Kilcoyne has suggested that Boland’s movement from margin to
mainstream has the potential to threaten the poetic authority she derives from
being outside ireland’s (male-dominated) poetic tradition. Kilcoyne argues that
memories of Boland’s own past exclusions allow her continued identification with
a marginal position. Kilcoyne, ‘eavan Boland and strategic memory’, p. 90.
Jody allen randolph, ‘interview with eavan Boland’, Irish University Review 23.1
(spring/summer, 1993), p. 117.
roland Barthes, ‘semiology and the urban’, in mark gottdreiner and alexandros
p. logapoulous (eds), The City and the Sign (new york: Columbia university press,
1986), p. 96.
immanuel Kant, ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’ and Other Writings on Politics, Peace and
History, trans. d. l. Colclasure (new haven, Ct and london: yale university
press, 2007), p. 82.
Jacques derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. rachel Bowlby (stanford, Ca: stanford
university press, 1997), p. 75.
Jody allen randolph, ‘interview with eavan Boland’, p. 129.
simon Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and
Contemporary French Thought (london and new york: verso, 1999), p. 63.
Clive Barnett discusses the ways in which derrida problematizes this dynamic
46
l os t l a n ds
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
– and levinas’s treatment of it – in his essay, ‘Ways of relating: hospitality and
the acknowledgement of otherness’, Progress in Human Geography 29.1 (2005),
pp. 5–21. The presence of intention means that acts of hospitality are often ones of
incorporation, designed to eliminate the specific otherness of the visitor. a failure
on the part of a visitor to enact such a smoothing out of identity difference will
result in rejection.
eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time
(london: vintage, 1995), p. 234.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. leon s. roudiez (new york: Columbia
university press, 1991), p. 181.
eavan Boland, Object Lessons, p. 101.
eavan Boland’s mother was the artist Frances Kelly. Born in drogheda, Co. louth,
in 1908, Kelly studied at the metropolitan school of art in dublin and later with
léopold survage in paris. Critically acclaimed from an early stage, her first solo
exhibition in 1934 was praised for the ‘delicate, subtle observation of her work’.
later, her role as ambassador’s wife took precedence over her career as an artist.
she exhibited no work after 1954 (Dictionary of Irish Biography).
Boland recalls learning the Thomas hood poem: ‘i remember, i remember / The
house where i was born’ (Object Lessons, p. 38). here she reprises part of the key
phrase, replacing the comforting sense of origin with a recognition of displacement
and loss. The poem also echoes philip larkin’s ‘i remember, i remember’ and its
articulation of the emptiness of the past.
it exemplifies Catherine Kilcoyne’s assertion that ‘the poetic originality of Boland’s
use of memory is the gap that it creates … between the sought after memory and
the same memory unattained, the memory which is desired but always out of reach’.
Kilcoyne, ‘eavan Boland and strategic memory’, p. 90.
Boland, Journey with Two Maps, p. 20.
Barnett, ‘Ways of relating’, p. 6.
maurice halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. ditter and vida yazdi
ditter (new york: harper Colophon Books, 1980), p. 79.
pierre nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations
26 (spring 1989).
sam Wineburg’s distinction between memory as ‘knowing the past using the
ordinary sense-making capacities’ and history as ‘knowing it as the result of
disciplined habits of mind’ adds support to the linking of the writing of history
with specific agency. see sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural
Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (philadelphia, pa: temple university
press, 2001), p. 248.
This material is elaborated upon in Object Lessons (1995), pp. 38–9:
the vista was almost always, that first winter anyway, of yellow fog. if the windows
were open, it drifted smokily at the sill. if the doors were open and you went into
the street, you entered a muddled and frightening mime. passersby were gagged
in white handkerchiefs. The lights of buses loomed up suddenly. all i knew of
the country was this city; all i knew of this city was its fog … it was march, my
first one in england. a swell of grass, a sort of hummock, ran the length of the
window and beyond. it had been planted with crocuses, purple, white, yellow. i
may not have seen them before; i had certainly never seen so many. There and then
i appropriated the english spring.
47
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
29 allen randolph, ‘interview with eavan Boland’, p. 128.
30 ibid., p. 127.
31 anne Fogarty, ‘“i was a voice”: orality and silence in the poetry of eavan Boland’,
in elke d’hoker, raphael ingelbien and hedwig schwall (eds), Irish Women Writers:
New Critical Perspectives (Berne: peter lang, 2010), p. 10.
32 ibid., p. 18.
33 Catriona Clutterbuck, ‘irish Critical responses to self-representation in eavan
Boland, 1987–1995’, Colby Quarterly 35.4 (1999), p. 278.
34 Boland herself has acknowledged the self-consciousness of the poet, of the need ‘to
create an artifice to replicate the way i built my thoughts’ (Journey with Two Maps,
pp. 19–20) so that the immediacy of experience can be combined with a measure
of objectivity.
35 derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 89.
36 Boland, Object Lessons, pp. 55–6.
37 Boland, Journey with Two Maps, p. 51.
38 Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (oxford:
oxford university press, 1993), p. 59–60.
39 eavan Boland, ‘daughters of Colony: a personal interpretation of the place of
gender issues in the postcolonial interpretation of irish literature’, Éire-Ireland:
A Journal of Irish Studies 32.2/3 (summer/autumn 1997), p. 13.
40 Katie Conboy, ‘lays of the land’. review of The Lost Land by eavan Boland, and
Meadowlands by louise gluck, Poetry Ireland Review 60 (spring 1999), p. 97.
41 eavan Boland, quoted on cover of The Lost Land (manchester: Carcanet, 1998).
42 Though this poem evokes the years Boland spent in america as a child, many of the
techniques of recollection are similar to those describing her london experience.
43 ‘mise eire’, from The Journey and Other Poems, ends: ‘a new language / is a kind
of scar / and heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before’
(J 11).
44 The poem was inspired by the life of dáibhi Ó Bruadair, who was born in 1625
and, though an accomplished poet, ended his life as an impoverished labourer. Ó
Bruadair was an inspiration to michael harnett, whose translations of his work
were published by gallery press in 1985. see Jody allen randolph, Eavan Boland,
p. 136.
45 eavan Boland, ‘a Woman Without a Country: a detail’, PN Review 41.2
(november/december 2014), p. 49. This issue of PN Review features a celebration of
Boland’s work, edited by Jody allen randolph and michael schmidt. Contributors
include mark doty, lorna goodison, máighréad medbh and paula meehan.
48
ch a p ter t wo
Between here and There
migrant identities and the
Contemporary irish Woman poet
between here and there
ireland’s dual tradition is a catalyst for debate on cultural diversity in
both language and literary production. For more than a century ireland’s
relationship to its diasporic populations has been important in the
formation of a body of literature that exceeds the territory of ireland itself
and facilitates new relationships between the irish tradition and writing
in other languages and from other cultures. From the 1990s until the
onset of recession in 2008, the direction of this movement was reversed,
so that ireland became home to a significant immigrant community,
enriching its cultural and linguistic life.1 in an era of global mobility,
geographical movement becomes an important part of artistic formation,
as well as a human experience shared by many; recent critical perspectives
reflect the significance and connective potential of this phenomenon.2
This mobility can vary in expression from writers who choose to live
and work abroad for months or years, to those who, for economic or
political reasons, need to leave their place of origin. irish writers have a
long history of emigration, and for the most famous exemplars – James
Joyce and samuel Beckett – both exposure to new cultural environments
and distance from ireland provided a fruitful perspective for innovative
creative work. in recent decades migrants coming to ireland have also
challenged traditional representations and offered collaborative potential
to resident writers.
migration has often been linked to marginality, as both the cause
and the effect of the journey away from a place of origin. This dynamic
calls attention to the subjectivity of the individual migrant, and to their
particular relationship to place: for this reason the migrant’s ‘departure’
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
from their home may precede the actual journey, marking a detachment
from that society which is later articulated in geographical movement.3
For contemporary irish poets who have chosen to live abroad, the decision
to leave is often framed by careful reflection – a process exemplified by
Thomas Kinsella’s long poem ‘phoenix park’ that immediately preceded
his departure for the usa.4 For women poets there may be less textual
deliberation, though attentiveness to the journey itself and to the early
days in a new country can yield significant poems as mairéad Byrne and
vona groarke have shown in their writing of america. often, questions
of identity, and of belonging, are raised by the process of movement itself
– it is the experience of being an outsider that prompts the individual
to reflect on his or her own subjectivity in new ways. exposure to forms
of thinking and expression that are distinctly different from our own
also challenges our customary intellectual and creative practices. For
some writers, such as Byrne, this has meant an increasingly innovative
approach to form and style; others choose to extend theme and idiom
within the lyric mode. For any artist or writer, not consciously knowing
‘what she or he will be in the next time and space’ has a significant
impact on both the imaginative roots and the aesthetic execution of
the work.5
temporality is key to the interpretation of the migrant state, and to
the way in which home is conceptualized. philosophical writings by
martin heidegger and gaston Bachelard, among others, develop an
understanding of home that is bounded and therefore marks a special
relationship between the individual and place.6 more recent thinking,
however, construes home as dynamic and in flux, as globalization
changes the nature of attachment to place and community. This change
has prompted a radical re-evaluation of the concepts of home and
belonging:
‘Being home’ refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe,
protected boundaries; ‘not being home’ is a matter of realizing that home
was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific
histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even
within oneself.7
This fundamental change in how home is read finds expression in
the work of contemporary women poets through their questioning
of private or domestic spaces,8 as well as through their reflection on
connections to place that are simultaneous and overlapping: ‘rather
than movement from one place to another uprooting or deterritorializing
migrants’ identities – as has been intimated – what scholars witness
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be t w e e n h e r e a n d t h e r e
among contemporary migrants is a strengthening and deepening of
ties to multiple places.’9 Thus migrants themselves do not have singular
identities but rather networks of connection with the places where they
have lived. mairéad Byrne exemplifies this condition, as her comments
in a conversation with rob mclennan suggest:
Before i lived [in providence, rhode island], i lived in oxford, mississippi,
before that ithaca, new york, and before that lafayette and West lafayette,
indiana … i’m very aware of place but move on easily, or at least i have so
far. But i still think about the places i have lived; and the places members
of my family have lived: all their smells and atmospheres.10
Byrne values the mobility that her life choices have offered but still
retains an artistic, even sensory, attachment to the places of the past.
similarly, mary o’malley’s work reflects her close links to the west of
ireland, but also to lisbon and to paris – places where she has spent
formative periods of her life; in a somewhat different mode, Celia de
Freine moves among different geographical spaces of reflection and
creativity.11 For some the new place quickly becomes ‘home’ and the
self/other binary that informs all migrant experience is changed by the
process of integration. For others, the idea of returning home remains a
stable element in their ever-changing life, and its articulation emphasizes
what John steinbeck has called the ‘outward sign of want’ that marks
all migrant lives.12
migrants may come to express the problematic boundaries between
individual and collective positions in important ways, and in doing so
to highlight the role of language, and of literature, in exploring these
dynamics. to join an immigrant community is often to question the
relationship between individuality and group identities, in part because
of the discursive tendency to homogenize diasporic experiences in spite
of their ‘contradictions, diversities and instabilities’.13 For example,
none of the contemporary irish women poets who has lived in the usa
identifies directly with irish america, preferring instead to reflect on
cultural difference in more contingent ways. yet many of these poets
do contemplate their life outside ireland as one of private and public
significance, insofar as their cross-cultural movement prompts reflection
on patterns of historical and cultural particularity. For this reason
there are close, if subtle, links between the consideration of personal
experience and identity politics in these poems. The concept of home
at once shapes private aspirations and operates as a founding principle
of the nation state that in turn unifies the spatial and temporal aspects
of home. Though this association has tended to obscure its personal
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
resonance, ordinary people nonetheless ‘engage in theorizing about and
acting in the narrative(s) of nation’.14 This privileging of the conceptual
over the experiential may itself mask the capacity for individual circumstance to be delimited by larger symbolic structures, an issue that relates
not just to nationalism but also to movements specifically hospitable to
the marginalized. some of the key critical interventions in this area,
including Chandra talpade mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders, have
problematized the identification of feminism itself as a ‘home’: mohanty
expresses the desire to unsettle ‘not only any notion of feminism as an
all-encompassing home but also the assumption that there are discrete,
coherent and absolutely separate identities’.15
salman rushdie sees migrants as metaphorical beings, suggesting
that the spatial journey is expressive of less visible forms of border
crossing – between one political or ideological belief and another, for
example, or between the past and the present.16 This temporal shift
is an important one for migrants, giving memory a particular valency
in defining their past selves and in recording the transition they have
undergone:
memory – understood as the complex relation of personal experiences, the
shared histories of communities and their modes of transmission – must
be seen as a privileged carrier of diasporic identity … it is not by chance
that the right to remember, the responsibility to recall and the ‘sense of
the dangers involved in forgetting’ are central issues of debate among
diasporic communities and in their relations to their cultural and political
surroundings.17
The originary identity of the migrant is held in memory and is
capable of transcending the specific circumstances of his or her present
experience, yet it does not facilitate the direct retrieval of the past but
rather a continuing state of being that juxtaposes the lost past and a
yet-to-be-achieved future. The process of remembering is an unreliable
one, however, further adding to the instability that displacement
brings.18 since memory is not reproduced from the original conditions
of experience, but rather represented from the perspective of present
conditions,19 it becomes transcultural, interweaving distinct forms of
habit and identity together. The mixed character of memory’s form and
function leads to original perspectives from migrating poets.
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Remembering the Future: Mairéad Byrne in America
mairéad Byrne’s work shows a complex alignment between her evolving
poetic style and the cultural space in which this occurs. Born in dublin,
she moved to the usa in 1994 (with $400 and a seven-year-old child)
and now teaches poetry at the rhode island school of design.20 The
relationship between ireland and america plays an important part
in her work, especially in the earliest poems, which combine lyrical
elements with found poems to create formally challenging texts, laying
the groundwork for her more radical experimentation of recent years.
The evolution of her style is crucially linked to her cultural position, and
this is often the subject of deliberate scrutiny in her poems. ireland is
at once past and present in these texts – a memory of earlier experience
and a continuing part of her creative life. Nelson and the Huruburu
Bird, published by Wild honey press in 2003, expresses the importance
of these transitions in shaping Byrne’s ongoing work. The poems in
this volume are taken from three unpublished books, An Interview
with Romulus and Remus, Cycling to Marino and The Pillar – all are
maintained as separate groupings in this printed volume. This structure
does not privilege a narrative of poetic influence and development,
however, but rather presents an intermingling of irish and american
material and experiences. This is indicative of Byrne’s close creative
connection to her immediate environment, which questions, rather than
affirms, notions of national affiliation and tradition.
many of her early poems engage directly with dublin, specifically the
dublin of her childhood and early adulthood. ‘Cycling to marino’ begins
with an evocative description of cycling to school in autumn, but soon
becomes more concerned with the classroom as a place of difference:
‘We know someone’s / not clean, and someone’s poor … Where are
those places / other people live?’ (NHB 46). The shift from a singular to
a collective viewpoint marks the speaker’s arrival at the school and her
entry into an undifferentiated world of childhood experience, where the
individual conditions of each child’s life become visible only when they
mark a variation from some unstated norm. Both the particularity and
the ephemeral quality of these early experiences are rendered here, and,
with these, a sense of what the craft of making can yield:
We’re learning how to sew, to knit,
each stitch has singularity, then holds its shape
in partnership with the next, and next –
(NHB 47)
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
The initial yeatsian resonance here (‘The children learn to cipher and to
sing, / to study reading-books and histories, / to cut and sew, be neat
in everything’) is turned against itself in the singularity of the young girl
learning a craft.21 as the metaphor demonstrates, the unique creation
becomes an essential part of the collective entity, just as the individual
perspective is inextricably linked to its cultural context. The complex
relationship of part and whole may be framed aesthetically too: each
line of the poem ‘holds its shape / in partnership with the next’. The
energies of the young girl give rise to abrupt and exhilarating changes
in language and perspective from ethically curious ‘but what does poor
mean?’ to the self-consciously poetic ‘i dismount, / escorting her through
the bowers that i know best, / stern arch of branch, cascade of leaf’
(NHB 46–7). in the child’s response to place the sensory immediacy of
present engagement – the sound of rain beneath the tyres of her bicycle,
the ‘metallic taste of ink on lips’ – is tempered by a growing awareness
of the need to withhold these experiences from adult awareness. in this
way the personal past remains interiorized until the poem at once records
and breaks this privacy.
elsewhere too, the relationship between individual and collective
experience is probed. ‘The pillar’, explores dublin in both space and
time, using nelson’s pillar as a pivotal point around which private
and public observation moves.22 in this way, Byrne uses the physical
environment of the city and its monumental history to create a dynamic
space in her poem, in which the relationship between what is fixed and
what is changing is a key both to ideas that circulate in the poem, and
to the formal strategies she adopts.
Clouds scud, what else, in the gray sky, and yes,
gulls hang all the way out, to the bay, i guess,
[…]
that old familiar drizzle
emptying the dawn, down all the days,
the yellow city nights; and his head sleek
like a lizard, like a cobra, like a basilisk
inserted in our heavens, in the bells’
clamor, clangor, nelson, lord of us all.
(NHB 82)
nelson’s head, in the sky, typifies British ambition, but offers a point
of surveillance that serves the poet well in her investigation of the
relationship between the larger patterns of history and the materiality
of lived existence in the city – a concern that will persist in her later
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be t w e e n h e r e a n d t h e r e
work. even in this early poem her treatment of temporality is already
striking: dublin life is first seen in dynamic terms ‘battering’, ‘clattering’,
‘clip-clopping’ and then with a kind of trapped energy – ‘henry street,
/ the gorge chock-a-block, rain melting down its windows, / and the
women’s rough mouths like o’s roaring Toblerone or / Get the last of this
or that’ (NHB 82). in this crowded sensory world, words and phrases in
the irish language brim over at intervals, together with the hibernicisms
that bridge the two languages with sound patterns familiar to the irish
ear:
so this was dubh le daoine and we were shoulder to shoulder
ag baint dhá thaobh den bóthar, drink or no drink, for sure,
we were íseal, right enough, as íseal as íseal could be
beneath our uasal, casting his long shadow on us, and we
in our stew, in our soup, in our mate and potatoes mess.23
(NHB 83)
sounds are vital to the energy of this poem and internal rhyme is
often used as a vehicle for wit, and to knit together a wide range of
experiences, past and present. This strategy demonstrates the uneasy
mix of tradition and modernity that shapes dublin. events – both
historical and everyday – are telescoped, leaving nelson on his pillar as
the still monumental centre around which frenetic action takes place:
‘he was there all that time and before that time. / he was there through
Cinerama and panorama and senssurround / he was there in all the
pantomimes’ (NHB 85). nelson’s omnipresence in the life of the city robs
him of his real significance, however; all his exploits – both attested and
apocryphal – are denied: ‘he never routed privateers from montego to
honduras / nor terrorised americans as captain of the Boreas / […] /
nor lost an eye at Calvi an arm at tenerife / in the dog-days in the lion
sun nor his heart to lady hamilton’ (NHB 86). in 35 lines, his rich and
varied career is reduced to his symbolic presence at the centre of dublin,
a testament to the capacity of the irish to make all things relevant to
their predicament. yet the textured and jaunty rhyme scheme at once
makes much, and makes light, of the admiral’s exploits. The blowing up
of nelson’s pillar by the ira in 1966 dismantles the myth of nelson and
the literary associations of the monument. Though Byrne does not dwell
on the political connotations of this event, it is nonetheless present in
the poem and resonates with the social instabilities also revealed through
observed detail.
This view of dublin, and of ireland, is far more complex than the
energetic, often flippant, tone suggests and it is a hallmark of Byrne’s
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
work that difficult social and emotional states are carried by a vivid
materiality in her texts, highlighting the varied human responses to
place. as rebecca seiferle has commented, Byrne ‘eschews the poetic “i”
in favour of a listening to other presences’.24 This dynamic reveals her
awareness of the relationship between physical and creative spaces, and
her recognition of the distance between her work and much of what was
being published in ireland at that time:
before i left ireland, a poet called Joan mcBreen said to me, ‘your poems are
not lyrical.’ i was surprised but it seemed true. in the context of irish poetry
it was sort of like hearing, ‘your poems are not poems.’ it was time to go.25
humour is vital to Byrne’s creativity and often determines the way she
frames her work: ‘humor in women isn’t valorized. humor in poetry
isn’t valorized’, she observes in her 2010 conversation with sina Queyras;
later she admits ‘i should be thinking about global warming but i like
to laugh’, a comment ironically revealing the seriousness of conviction
underpinning her poetry. This playful quality is present from her creative
beginnings. in Nelson and the Huruburu Bird memories of her early
working life – ‘Cycling to marino’, ‘early morning, dublin’ – mingle
with alphabet games that play with the cultural resonance of car brands:
‘a is for acclaim. / B is for Buick. / C is for Chevy’ (NHB 34–5). in
this way Byrne productively disturbs the linearity of memory, which
would place the structures of childhood in an irish context and those
of more recent adulthood in america. This mingling of effects shows
the broader cultural interpenetration of ireland and america, especially
from the 1960s onward, and the extent to which globalization subverts
narrow national boundaries.26 in ‘The irish discover america’, Byrne
reflects directly on her own move to america, emphasizing the sensory
nature of the experience:
We hit land and suddenly
everyone has an american accent.
how did i get here?
i traveled the few inches, thousands of miles,
in my own skin boat, my currach, my Boeing.
For the first time i look at the outside world.
(NHB 32)
in likening her journey to america to the Brendan voyage, which
claims that irish saint Brendan traveled across the atlantic ocean before
Christopher Columbus, Byrne not only highlights the importance of the
step but also its perilous nature.27 From the beginning, a sense of the
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provisional shapes the poem – ‘if saint Brendan crossed the ocean … if
i have flown the same trail’ (NHB 32) – and this act of questioning is
matched by the fragmented memory of the journey itself: ‘i have turned
the world inside out. / i know it in my bones but can recall fragments
only’. Contemporary and historical perspectives mingle in the poem,
linking the insular experience of flying across the ocean to the physically
and psychologically demanding character of early voyages. language
is one of the casualties of this radical experience – ‘language, / at this
altitude, ceases to exist’ (NHB 33) – and with it the historical perspective
necessary to understand complex cultural relationships. here the ‘red
indian’ is envisaged arriving on a jumbo jet in a strangely disorientated
version of american history. yet this native girl ‘who stares so calmly and
so long’ may be linked to the speaker’s young daughter, so that what was
once so intimately known becomes other in this new and strange space.
‘reflex’ is another poem that links geographical change with important
alterations of personal circumstance. its title suggests the instinctive
reaction that the subject may make to such changes. From its opening,
then, this poem interleaves the immediacy of emotional response with
the considered process involved in the making of a poem, and alerts us
to the fact that so much of Byrne’s work keeps these elements in delicate
balance:
it is not, after all, the water,
slate of the bay, nor the promontory,
curve of the regulated city,
salt rush, that i miss,
nor heading out somewhere with you.
(NHB 45)
The remembered place is already a boundary, a place on the edge of
land, telling us much about the speaker’s sense of being in the world.
The first line of the poem also foregrounds the relationship between
feeling and thinking – on reflection, it is not the sight and smell of the
coastline that evokes the sensation of loss, nor even the experience of
sharing that place with someone. instead it is what is beyond description
– ‘some things which never / got a name’ – which tethers the speaker
to the past (NHB 45). yet by the end of the poem we learn that this is
only part of the story. it is the ‘you’ invoked in the opening stanza whose
loss finally moves the speaker: the sight of the ‘full / lips of a stranger’
calls forth a strong emotional response that relates not only to similarity
of appearance but the complete sensory connection to another person,
and the tears this prompts are an answering response from the eyes
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
that witness the scene. in this short and seemingly simple poem Byrne
conjures the circulation of emotions between places, objects and people,
and, though the poem suggests the displacement of loss from the deeply
personal connection to one more broadly cultural, instead we might read
all forms of connection as valid – each one proximate to the others.
Byrne’s american poems in this volume have a dramatic energy
that partakes of the confidence of the culture in which she has settled.
marked by the prevalence of verbs, and by their exclamatory style, they
are indicative of the ways in which language itself is shaped by shifts in
culture and perspective, as the poem ‘Commercial street’ demonstrates:
This is not home and i don’t have to stop
to pass the time of day or night with you
or anyone. i’m free of that, home too,
and greedy for the sights
(NHB 40)
By linking ‘home’ with the demands of community and connection,
Byrne at once suggests the freedom and limitation of american
materialism. her new twist on an old-fashioned phrase, such as ‘to pass
the time of day’, shows american expansiveness in subtle ways – ‘day
or night’, ‘you / or anyone’ – calls up the range and multiplicity of
american experience over its more muted irish counterpart. This variety
is figured in terms of appetite – the speaker is ‘greedy’ for the sights,
wants ‘to gobble this week’s crop / of extras’ – and she devours the new
vocabulary as eagerly, wanting to ‘cruise / the block, the beat, this neat
new england zoo’ (NHB 40). This particular line exemplifies not only
the incorporation of an american idiom but the desire to play with this
language shift as constitutive of the poetic line. her choice of the ‘block’
as a descriptor of urban space invokes the origins of rap music, which
has already been rendered in the tightly repeated sound patterns of ‘shop
… sort … sift’ and is in turn reinforced in the alliterative ‘beat’, with its
suggestion of the cruising car, loud with rhythm. The ‘beat–neat’ rhyme
is the outcome of this mCing technique but is only made possible by
the american meaning of ‘neat’ as pleasant or excellent, marking a shift
away from urban subculture towards small town american boosterism.
in taking in this new language – in its many forms – Byrne also
transforms her tone towards the cheerful exclamatory presentation that
is associated with the positivity of american life, a strategy that for her
combines optimism and irony. This ‘trying on’ of language is both a
sharp cultural observation and a natural play of voice that will become
still more important in her later work.
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The adaptation of lifestyle and of language that Byrne’s poetry
fundamentally addresses can be seen strikingly in Talk Poetry, a volume
of short prose poems published in 2007 and which Byrne herself
describes as a ‘breakthrough’.28 The volume itself, like the 2010 The
Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven, reveals how Byrne’s innovative approach
to language drives her handling of found and imagined texts. she has
commented on the importance of performance to her creativity and this
clearly influences the combined intimacy and reach of her work: ‘public
readings are integral to my practice and process … [They] are a type of
interdisciplinarity, or collaboration for me’.29 her evolving practice has
shaped the reception of her work in other ways too. The Best of (What’s
Left of) Heaven is a volume comprised of blog poems, intensifying the
role of the internet in Byrne’s writing. she discusses how this has shaped
her practice in the Queyras interview, revealing the role of technology
in the change:
as far as writing goes, the title or concept and a cluster of lines, maybe
the first few lines, usually came first. i collected those immediately in a
notebook. Then i’d put them in Word documents … These days i am much
more inclined to compose in html, or photoshop. i like to compose in
the medium of publication; it’s also a way to learn.30
in this way the poem, as well as the poet, are shown to have
migrated to a new environment – one that is closer to the energies of
the public space. The present moment shapes many of Byrne’s preoccupations too, yet, though much of her recent material emerges from
the immediate environment, there are other, less direct, influences at
work. These demonstrate how significant the act of border crossing can
be in shaping aesthetic practice: ‘The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven
doesn’t mention ireland once,’ she observes, ‘but it’s an intensely irish
book, in structure and attitude’ (Queyras interview). The virtual world
has also helped her to create a new kind of mobility as an artist:
‘regarding ireland: i did not fit the role of poet in ireland in any way
… The internet gave me a shoe-horn. now i can walk around quite
happily there’.31 in this way, cyberspace, though less intimate than a
personal encounter in real time, offers Byrne a way of dealing with
the estranging effects of exclusion from a national literary culture. it
does this not only by reconfiguring the concept of community but
by offering a compositional space that validates her desire for experimental modes. likewise, ‘a hive of home’ from Talk Poetry returns
to the idea of home as a concept constantly remade. The person who
is ‘unreasonably fond of home’ (TP 37) is not rendered immobile but
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
rather seeks home everywhere: ‘libraries are de facto homes. Bookstores
are hotels. hotels are homes though i don’t usually stay in them in
providence. a bus can be a good home’ (TP 37). This attitude obliquely
clarifies the relationship between ireland and america in her work –
both environments are constantly evolving and thus the relationship
between them is in a productive state of flux.
‘after valentine’s day’ is a poem that examines the dynamics of
separation and connection more distinctly. it captures the beginning
of the thaw, towards the end of a harsh winter, suggesting both the
potential for greater ease and a degree of exposure as the insulating snow
retreats. The formal regularity of the poem – four stanzas alternating
between ten and twelve lines each – marks the containment of the
subject position, and the structures underpinning this uncertain life.
From the beginning, though, the thaw suggests a transition with power
to disturb: the opening image of lost gloves ‘sprouting’ on the sidewalk
hints at the speaker’s own sensation of being separated or adrift in a
strange landscape. The possibilities for communion with others are
impressive but fleeting:
strangers move toward me
as if to say hello;
they carry their faces like cups,
which tilt, at the instant of passing,
spill out such radiant smiles!
(NHB 67)
The neighbours who come bearing red roses, in an approximation of a
valentine’s gift, make no impact on the speaker, however, who ‘takes[s]
what’s given’ and resumes her work. The poem suggests the difficulties
in giving and receiving the appropriate meaning in a culture within
which one is isolated: neither poetry nor roses functions as a means
of communication, except to the extent that they provide material
for this poem. This consciousness of the poem as the space within
which life unfolds, at once randomly and deliberately, sees language
as an instrument of estrangement as well as of connection. Byrne’s
increasingly self-reflexive mode of writing suggests that this may be
the truest reflection of mobility and change – a poetics always aware
of its own contingency and attentive to the larger cultural meanings
this generates.
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Sinéad Morrissey between Belfast and Japan
sinead morrissey is a poet for whom movement, transition and
adjustment are key explorations. her most recent collection, the
award-winning Parallax (2013), draws attention in its title to the
relationship between the object under scrutiny and the angle of view.32
a collection filled with visual and material signifiers of the past – from
dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal to John Wright’s electroplating
workshop – it marks the poet’s awareness that material culture offered
more evidence of the world’s flux than of its stability. Throughout
morrissey’s work to date, that sense of changing perspectives has been
key to the responsiveness of her poetic voice as well as to her aesthetic
evolution. growing up in Belfast, she was struck early by the complications of religious faith and the difficulties involved in the growth
towards autonomy. many of the poems in There was Fire in Vancouver
(1996), her first collection, are strongly anchored in childhood – in
the streetscapes of Belfast and the communist politics important in
the lives of her parents. This ideological background, to which she
returns in later poems, meant she identified with neither community
in northern ireland and was beginning to problematize the process
of identity formation before she ever left the province. gerald dawe
has drawn attention to the capacity of poetry to transcend simplified
forms of cultural memory,33 and in mediating these political territories
morrissey acknowledges their importance for poets and readers: even
indirect representation reveals the subtle ways in which memory is
politicized. The violent weather of this first book – with its ‘frightening
rain’ (TFV 12) and a wind that blows ‘as though the angels are angry,
sitting in the sky / With heads in hands and howling it out all over
us’ (TFV 17) – contributes to its risky handling of spiritual matters as
well as of the realities of terrorist violence. at times, this early poetry
lacks subtlety but it provides an important foundation for morrissey’s
later, more assured and complex poems and prepares the reader for the
unflinching quality of her art. This early work also prompts reflection
on the role of textual memory in morrissey’s work; the way in which
later poems return to images and ideas already explored.
one of the enduring strengths of sinéad morrissey’s work is her
exploration of the poet as a conduit between people and cultures.
morrissey’s 2002 collection, Between Here and There, captures formally
the sense of liminality that has been present in her poems since the
start. The second of her five published collections to date, this book
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marks a significant consolidation of both theme and form. The structure
of this collection traces the specific cultural transition that lies at
the heart of this volume: the period that morrissey spent living and
teaching in Japan.34 The second half of the book is dedicated to this
experience and presents a series of poems with interwoven themes and
images, rendering her engagement with Japanese culture in succinct,
even minimalist ways. The extent to which her own poetic style is
shaped by this cultural encounter indicates the formative nature of this
period for morrissey, and reflects both the strange and enlightening
quality of the experience. she has acknowledged the extent to which
Japan helped to shape her creative development at this time: ‘When i
went to live in Japan my writing changed immediately and profoundly.
my line became much longer, the imagery more surreal. The poetry
became a great deal more ambitious.’35 Between Here and There is
prefaced by a poem that contemplates this significant change of voice:
‘My voice slipped overboard and made it ashore / the day I fished on the
Sea of Japan’ (BHT 9). This prefatory poem is divided into two parts,
mirroring the shape of the collection and suggesting the precision
and balance required in embedding these experiences in the larger
trajectory of her work. The escape of the voice, and its ‘lonely sojourn’
on the honshu coast, happens almost imperceptibly while the speaker
is preoccupied with the mastery of a new language and of different
and challenging circumstances. The return of the voice, now marked
by its new experiences and discoveries, is essential to the achievement
of this volume, suggesting that shifts not only in culture but also in
language, are essential to creative development.
The first poem in Between Here and There is ‘in Belfast’, so that
it suggests a writing process that is both other to, yet the same as,
her initial collection, which also places Belfast in the foundational
opening text. This act of ‘writing back’ to her first book reminds
us that the Here and There of the title are not only spatial but also
temporal; morrissey wants to remember her earlier poetic self and to
contemplate obliquely what this growth and change have meant for
her as an artist. ‘in Belfast’ is a poem in two perfectly balanced parts,
affirming the dialogue between the halves of morrissey’s creative life
at this point. Just as the voice of the prefatory poem goes out and
returns, so this poem concerns itself with the place and the dynamic
movement associated with it. in the first part of the text the relationship
between place and history is investigated through the city’s architecture
and the atmosphere that surrounds it: City hall is a ship ‘steered’
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by Queen victoria; shop fronts breathe the air of the city, while the
headquarters of the transport Workers’ union ‘fights the weight of the
sky’ (BHT 13). here the elements seem to encroach on the city, shaping
its mood and indicating the challenges of pursuing normal life there.
The opening line of part ii of the poem declares the speaker’s return
‘after ten years to a corner’, interweaving ideas of shelter, entrapment
and punishment in that single word. This process of return is a sensitive
one for the migrant: as paul Walsh acknowledges, to return may in
fact be to begin again, in a place that resembles the past but can
never be identical with it.36 at first morrissey must convince herself
that the city is ‘real’ before concluding that it is ‘more real, even, with
this history’s dent and fracture / / splitting the atmosphere’ (BHT 13).
This sense of Belfast as a place apart complicates the poet’s treatment
of it as home, since not only the physical structure of the city and
the lives of its people but the very mood of the place is shaped by its
history of division and violence. The speaker’s own ambivalence adds
to the feeling of uncertainty – the ‘unravelling of wishes’ suggests
a reluctant re-engagement with the city of her birth, but with an
‘unencountered’ past and an ‘unspoken’ future it is the immediacy
of the present moment that strikes the reader most vividly. in some
ways she remembers the city only through the evidence of its troubled
past, not through her direct recollection of these actions unfolding.
its intensity is also a form of privacy, so that in spite of its visibility
to the world it is hard to ‘see’ clearly.
‘in Belfast’ is balanced by the text that follows it. ‘tourism’ positions
the speaker now on the inside of this city, observing the influx of visitors
with an ironic air. This pairing of poems is significant in drawing
attention both to the shift in perspective and to the complex temporality
that morrissey invokes in this collection. Though our attention is
directed towards transitions between spaces, the poet is also concerned
with the passage of time, and with the severance between different
stages of experience. as astrid erll and ansgar nünning have argued,
past events can be remembered in many different ways; this often
reflects both temporal and spatial relationships to these occurrences.37
‘tourism’ deliberately exoticizes irish heritage sites from its opening,
linking newgrange – a stone age passage tomb in County meath –
with eastern markets and purification rituals. From the start, commerce
and spirituality are yoked together, and their impact on space and its
representation obliquely suggested: ‘the relief of markets’ captures the
vibrant, uneven texture of a foreign city at the same time as it hints at the
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financial stability brought about by the ceasefire in northern ireland.38
The manipulation of meaning through image suggests the power of
visual culture to influence public perception and the role of language
too as a way of mediating the presence of the past in everyday life.
The arrival of ‘the spanish and the dutch’ is a testament to the ability
of northern ireland tourism to return the province to the european
tourist map and a hint at earlier politics of allegiances with spain and
holland that helped to shape the fates of both Catholic and protestant
communities in ireland.39 in declaring ‘our day has come’, the poet
ironically resituates the catchphrase of resurgent nationalism – tiocfaidh
ár lá – in the context of renewed commercial buoyancy. The optimism
offered by this new status remains in a language caught between holy
war and political negotiation – ‘They bring us deliverance, restitution’
(BHT 14) – but northern pragmatism prevails and the people provide
what the visitors want: a complex combination of global sophistication
and primal violence:
We take them to those streets
they want to see most, at first,
as though it’s all over and safe behind bus glass
like a staked african wasp. unabashedly, this is our splintered city,
and this, the corrugated line between doorstep and headstone.
(BHT 14)
The containment of past violence here is illusory: the subtle shift
between four-line and three-line stanzas suggests only a tentative stabilization and the ‘corrugated line’ is a crude and temporary barrier between
life and death. nevertheless, the tourist strategy – which begins by
touring the sites of the troubles, and ends with a visit to the shipyard
where the ill-fated titanic was built – permits a convivial interlude, ‘a
pint with a Bushmills chaser’, to contain the visitors’ engagement with
the violence of Belfast’s recent past. This movement is a microcosm of the
longer journey envisaged in the poem ‘in Belfast’, and its containment
limits the potential for deeper reflection. The approach in ‘tourism’
also signals a position that is the opposite of the emphasis on present
experience in the previous poem – the tourist version of the city treats
everything as though it is safely past; a practice in direct opposition to
the notion of trauma as belated experience, always present to the affected
person.40 as aleida assmann has argued, however, forgetting becomes
a crucial means of overcoming violent cycles of history.41 Thus absence
proves more potent than presence here and ‘our talent for holes that
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are bigger / than the things themselves’ suggests the hollowing out of
cultural meaning in the exhibition of loss. Finally, the poem presents
a deal to the tourist: an unpredictable optimism in exchange for the
paraphernalia of ‘the european superstate / we long to join … new
symbols, / a new national flag, a xylophone’ (BHT 14). The emptiness of
imported symbolism and the incongruous appearance of the xylophone
suggest the limits of superficial engagement with the other.
The Japan sequence marks a significant shift of tone and perspective
from the sharp observation of Belfast at the turn of the twenty-first
century. its more meditative approach reveals the shaping effect that
a new cultural experience has on the observing self. not only is the
sense of the past radically changed for morrissey by this experience
but her relationship to language is reshaped to accommodate a strongly
visual dimension that reflects not only this important stimulus in her
adopted culture but the poet’s specific interest in the pictorial qualities
of the Japanese alphabet. ‘goldfish’ begins by recording the complex
imaginative debt that morrissey owes to Japan:
The black fish under the bridge was so long i mistook it
for a goldfish in a Japanese garden the kind the philosophers
wanted about them so much gold underwater to tell them what waited
in another element like breathing water they wanted to go
to the place where closing eyes is to see
(BHT 43)
The transition recorded in this opening stanza is accompanied by
a new fluidity of line and a renewed openness to other states of
being. This aligns the act of observation with that of inner perception
that transcends the limitations of the material world. The significant
relationship between self and environment is mirrored in the attention
of the philosophers to the particular conditions in which they live
and work. The speaker herself enacts this close connection to her
surroundings by realizing the power of all her senses. Closing her eyes,
she learns what it is to ‘see’ with her hands, to apprehend the smallest
changes in her surroundings and to ‘read’ their meanings. The language
of the eyes (‘i closed my eyes … i saw … saw what i had seen’) gives
way to a more tenuous grasp on presence and absence, and with it
a more finely tuned awareness of the self’s place in the world. The
endless speeding freight trains configure the space–time continuum in
a completely different way. They exemplify the continuous presence of
commodity culture in all parts of Japanese life, even while the meditative
connection with the natural world is revered and preserved. led by the
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‘you’ who offers a narrative to guide the speaker through these new and
diverse experiences, a kind of synaesthesia is produced whereby images
are communicated in a range of sensory ways: ‘i saw / music as pulled
elastic bands drums as the footprints of exacting gods’ (BHT 43). Just as
the Zen masters descend into an element devoid of sensory distraction,
so this poem reveals the emotional significance of a similar deepening
of meaning through storytelling – ‘i, / falling into you, story by story’
(BHT 43). The otherworldly quality of the love connection here sees
the encounter with otherness as a profoundly sustaining one in which
difference is a mark of unity and growth.
The title poem marks another form of engagement with Japan’s
complex spiritual identity. in four stanzas separated by asterisks morrissey
explores the sacred spaces she encounters, questioning the symbols and
practices she observes and exploring a form of cultural memory that is
entirely new to her. This encounter creates both exhilaration and anxiety
in the speaker; if, as minnie Bruce pratt suggests, loss of home is a fear
of loss of selfhood – a fear of ‘going too far’ – then involvement in the
ritual of a strange religion faces the possibility of such loss directly.42
From the opening lines, symbolic and pragmatic merge: the stone babies
in temples are dressed in aprons and consoled with teddy bears and
toys. This warm human response is starkly contrasted to the graveyard
for miscarriages in the second stanza. ‘[a]s stark as a bone field’, this
process separates the head from the body, fundamentally severing the
unity of personhood. The breaching of these structures reveals the
impossibility of containing life – no matter now briefly manifest – in
rigid categories. even the dead possess energy here, and a corresponding
ability to inspire. The encounter with ‘Japan’s greatest Buddha’ in ‘the
biggest wooden building in the world’ is at once transcendent and
ironic: enlightenment is figured as an act of falling but this fall is also
an elevation to the heights of the very building within which the Buddha
is found. so the meaning must be constructed in material human terms:
the limits of human understanding risk belittling the spiritual power of
the experience and morrissey captures both the possibilities of spiritual
growth and its material containment here. This dichotomy is developed
in the final depiction of nagasawa who must set aside essential parts of
himself in order to reach a prayerful state.
When nagasawa visits the house of the dead
he leaves at the door his camera and tripod
his champion karaoke voice his miracle foot massage
his classroom dynamics his rockhard atheism
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and slips onto the tatami of the prayer room
as the man who can chant any you-name-it soul
between here and ogaki to paradise
(BHT 46)
The coexistence of both atheism and spiritual connection in the single
being is testament to the capacity for dual perspectives, so that the
form of the poem itself, its dialogic arrangement, reveals the essential
importance of doubleness, not only in the observer but also as an integral
part of the culture itself.
The four-part structure of this poem is mirrored in ‘night drive in
Four metaphors’, which uses the form of the pictogram as an organizing
principle for unfamiliar landscapes and experiences. This process by
which lived experience and the artifice of language itself are drawn
together reveals this country in vivid ways and examines how form is
used to create meaning. The landscape, viewed through the window
of the car, is creatively reassembled by the speaker to approximate the
shapes of Japanese writing and thus to create meaning directly out of
the strangeness of unfamiliar territory. The rhythm of the poem itself
indicates the delicate balance that exists between observed reality and the
imaginative schemes that shape metaphorical meaning. The speaker and
her companion are being driven at night ‘by rice fields on the narrowest
roads’, but once the likeness between the straight road and one stroke
of the pictogram has been established the sky is read solely in terms of
its visual meanings:
a moon on its back under the shadow of its circle is a unique moon.
it means home is under the weight of a stone and that brightness can come
from under a shadow –
The whole weight of a cold ball breathing on it and look how it smiles.
(BHT 45)
By interspersing these metaphorical structures with the vivid image
of the shirts of Brazilian factory workers hanging over balconies to dry,
morrissey grounds the larger meanings of the scene in its specific cultural
conditions, tethering cosmic metaphor to the reality of clothing and hair.
This diversity is expressed in the vastness of the scene that the poem
attempts to comprehend: from the window at the other side of the car, a
different sky can be seen and a different reading of the cosmos formed.
The final image of the poem is important in bringing these readings
together, however: ‘Two worlds split open to each other, stars spilling from
each’ (BHT 45) suggests spaces that are at once distinct and together.
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in asserting their separateness, these worlds reveal their secrets to one
another, just as the intimate relationship that is glimpsed in this poem
does not overwhelm the singular vision of the speaker but prompts her to
reflect on the nature of perspective itself. morrissey’s attentive treatment
of cultural transition here signifies the growing maturity of her aesthetic
and a deepening of her engagement with a variety of material contexts
in her work.
Eva Bourke: The Music of What Happens
as well as irish-born poets who have travelled and written abroad,
there are others, born outside the country, who have made their homes
in ireland and built a creative life there. eva Bourke, a german-born
poet resident in ireland for many years, carries with her a european
past that is a complex blend of personal and culture references. her
imaginative engagement with the phenomenological world does not
employ morrissey’s strategy of setting real and imagined in dialogue
but rather uses observation and experience to engage with philosophical
concepts which themselves attempt to tease out human meaning in
its particular context. While much of her work is grounded in irish
landscapes and materials, the european city – and its intellectual
traditions – is a recurring presence in her work. Just as eavan Boland’s
work draws on the city as a space in which to explore the dynamics of
familiarity and estrangement, Bourke considers the temporally layered
and spatially complex character of urban life. ‘Berlin notebook’, the
final sequence from Travels with Gandolpho (2000), exemplifies her
engagement with european history through the unifying lens of place. it
reveals the vital importance of cultural memory to her aesthetic, explored
by means of transporting the reader back in time to the lived experience
of the past. like so many of Bourke’s poems, it uses the epigraph to
prompt the reader to think deeply about key issues underpinning the
poem. This strategy emphasizes the ways in which intellectual and experiential processes are entwined and makes us consider too the relationship
between philosophical and poetic discourse. ‘Berlin notebook’ has not
one epigraph, but two; the first is from samuel Beckett – ‘There is no
escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us or been deformed by
us’. it is significant that memory is linked here to a practice of mutual
distortion: here the extent to which the past is shaped by the needs of the
present is clearly suggested. The second epigraph, from Walter Benjamin,
roots our thinking further in the tradition of german intellectualism:
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in using a photographic trope to argue that only the future is capable of
developing the images of history he also sees the relationship between
present and past as a two-way process. Bourke’s eight-part sequence
probes this important dynamic in a variety of ways.
The poem opens with a vision of order that at once evokes the military
discipline of germany at the start of the First World War and the
imaginative power that draws aesthetic order from disparate energies.
The regularity of the huzzars who ‘clack down the streets / in twos
and twos, strait-laced as rhyming couplets’ (TG 80) suggests a discipline
at once purposeful and elegant. yet in spelling this ‘strait-laced’ rather
than ‘straight-laced’ here, Bourke chooses not to send us back to the
opening image of the poem – ‘drawing board avenues in straight /
double rows’ (TG 80). instead, she emphasizes the perilous consequences
of military confidence. These young men who are ‘trying to steal a march
on death’ confirm the gulf between reality and ideal states, yet they
exist in a charmed world held in delicate balance between the hellish
underground, complete with Cerberus and overheated air, and the sky
‘closed as the grave’ (TG 80). This image provides the title for the second
poem, which opens in contemplation of anti-war graffiti on a graveyard
wall. at the centre of this poem, e. t. a. hoffmann lies buried – a
name that subtly draws together the literary and musical references
here, and whose gothic significance increases the deathly quality of the
sequence.43 yet it is nature, rather than art, that binds this poem with the
next. The dead rabbit found in the graveyard draws animal life into the
orbit of human activity, emphasizing the uncanny witnessing of death.
This is picked up in the nightingale whose song shapes the third poem
in the sequence – a poem in prose with the wrought sentences of the
sensitive observer. potsdam at midnight offers a means to contemplate
the relationship between present and past, the ‘old music box city’ set
alongside the ‘to and fro’ of train engines. This poem presents a moment
of delicate balance for the individual standing on the railway bridge
viewing the city below: ‘down there my old life con- / tinues while here
on the bridge i have started something new’ (TG 82). This doubleness
of perspective exemplifies the multiple existences of the migrant writer,
who draws life and inspiration from both ‘there’ and ‘here’. Though the
speaker is stopped and asked for identification, the elevated perspective
of the poem is suggestive of freedom, in contrast to the underground
dimension of ‘Bunkers’:
no other place seems so versed in death and water –
so many graveyards, so many rivers, canals, watertowers
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and the soil light to the spade, liquid almost.
a special gate in every street for refugees, asylum seekers,
another admits winter only sailing down from siberia on its ice plough.
(TG 82)
here the dampness of the city is not suggestive of its fertile or
regenerative nature, but rather of transience, of its capacity to degenerate
or be swept away. yet this urban space is a guarded one, with its ‘special
gate’ for refugees. moses ben mendel (renamed mendelssohn)44 must
pay to be admitted: though the subject of his writing is transcendence,
he too must attend to the commercial side of personal and political
freedom. The city has been regenerated with ‘glass, marble and steel
… like polished crystals dropped from the air’ (TG 83), yet the centre
of this poem remains below ground, in the bunkers and cellars that
provided hiding places for the persecuted. in this way, the city space
becomes an important repository of cultural memory, which – though
buried beneath a new and glossy surface – remains present to contemporary urban life. The deathly current that runs through the sequence
sparks through the character of lily, who unites sex and death in her
tenement existence. she draws death into the life of the city, telling ‘how
coffins used to be stored in trees, / market was held in the graveyards’
(TG 85). This acknowledgment of the darkness of the past is important
in that it moves the interpretative centre away from the speaker and
towards a character permanently inhabiting Berlin and a part of its
evolving history. here networks of memory connect those still living
in the city to those who have moved away, confirming the possibility
of both imaginative and actual return. ‘Kreuzberg nuptials’ has a
similar focus on the life of the building, and the wedding celebrations
that mark an important moment of transition in the lives of those
living there. as well as developing the investigation of Jewish–german
heritage, this wedding scene draws together ideas and images from
elsewhere in the sequence: the contrast between family and community
and the built space of the city, in particular its bleaker elements; the
‘outburst of cymbals’ and ‘clashing bells and gongs’ are closer and more
vigorous version of the ‘tin- / kle and chime of bells and gongs’ in
‘nightingale’ (TG 82). The name ‘meyerbeer’, barely discernible above
the door of an adjacent building, echoes the figure of mendelssohn in
being the name of his great-grandson. These details record the subtle
ways in which the relationship among the sequence of poems becomes
closer as we read, the laces of history tightening on the city.
The auditory quality of these poems does not just add to their
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sensitive rendering of the city space but is suggestive of the need to be
attentive to the past as it emerges in word and sound. This dimension
of the sequence becomes thematically important as this work draws to
a close: ‘The nightsinger’, the second to last poem, directly addresses
the meaning carried in sound, especially as night draws in and the
city’s soundscape becomes more subtle. The singer, who turns up ‘at
exactly the hour / / when ears are most receptive’ (TG 88), is a universal
figure, tantalizing the urban listener with the power of song. yet part
of this power is the fleeting quality of the experience, the fact that the
singer may already have passed before we become aware of the song. it
draws particular attention to the relationship between the song and the
listener, and implicitly then between poem and reader. Bourke’s art is
one requiring concentration and a mind open to ideas and associations,
at once involving us in the world of the poem and reminding us of the
necessary distance that reflection demands. in closing the sequence with
a poem on amber, Bourke draws us back towards the spatial configuration of time. The opening image of the bright train rushing through
a submerged space is a startling reminder of the relationship between
material meanings and the act of observation itself. This image is striking
by virtue of its ability to conjure at once what is seen and unseen: the
fast-moving object ‘below the water table’ challenges the actual power
of witness, but it can be seen in the eye of the imagination, which
emphasizes the fixed yet dynamic character of the scene. in the train, a
woman fingers an amber pendant, an object that conjures multiple layers
of memory from ‘mother’s necklace from holidays / at travemunde’ to
the ancient insects embedded in its glowing substance (TG 89). recalling
the flea markets where polish women sell amber, the speaker links the
female figure (as purveyor and wearer) to this capturing of the past, in
both its deliberate and random forms. opening with the very shape and
order of the city, and its masculine, military dimension, this sequence
moves gradually inwards towards enclosure and acute observation of the
private lives of subjects, tracing the necessary centring of perception and
concentration of meaning in the individual figure.
more than ten years later, Bourke is representing that city again, in
‘a view of Berlin’ from Piano (2011). This poem presents an interesting
counterpoint to ‘Berlin notebook’ in its return to key elements of the
city explored in that earlier poem. as a single unified work, though,
‘a view of Berlin’ presents a smoother perspective and highlights the
visual quality of the act of present and past engagement. it is sunset
in late may and ‘wispy grey / fabrics are lowered over rooftops, dreary
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post-war / tower blocks. darkness embraces the lindens’ (P 14). The
watery quality of the city persists, both in the situation of the speaker,
seated on the deck of a boat, and in the ‘flow’ of darkness across the
city. This trope has a less sinister dimension here than in the earlier
poem, and the movement of the past through the built and human
spaces of the city has a stimulating though not a traumatic effect.
The small boats are buffeted by the wake of the coal barge, just as
the different dimensions of the city record and respond to the actions
of others. once more we sense city and poem operating on different
levels, and, just as Bourke dwelled on both submerged and elevated
perspectives in ‘Berlin notebook’, here too the speaker watches ‘tourist
boats being lifted to the next level, / strings of light bulbs looped
around prow and rail’ (P 14). The new ‘diaphanous’ city can be seen
in the distance and once again the lightness of glass is contrasted with
the signs of war, here in the recollection of bombers ‘spilling their
cargoes’ on the blacked out streets (P 14). The onset of night gives
these cultural memories particular power:
and now the night releases its spillage of black
oil and the gas lanterns lining the long
streets spread the dim glow of bad
memories. again the rough drafts of yet
another beginning – but how could one on such nights,
you ask, imagine the perfect machinery of control
that severed the river once
(P 15)
yet even in this dark mood the speaker acknowledges how distant
the images of war and the terrible aftermath of a divided germany have
become – the ‘barbed wire, mines / watch towers, guards’ to prevent
people attempting to swim across the river to freedom. This imaginative
distance is bridged, however, by the power of poetic language itself to
conjure up these vivid scenes, and to strike both poet and reader with
their capacity to shape present experience. This power is broken by
music: the nightingale – already heard in ‘Berlin notebook’ – ‘strikes
up its midnight song’ (P 15) swelling to fill stanzas with its Classical and
romantic associations and its arresting beauty ‘calling across distances
as the world goes round / on tiptoe forgetting all about its business’ (P
15). as all who can hear it pause to listen, the song becomes associated
with the wildness of nature and thus with a beauty that precedes
human power and wilful destruction. The bird calls ‘to return to the
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unmutilated garden’ and thus is both a reproof to human vanity and a
potential agent of transcendence.
For Bourke, Berlin itself carries an enduring capacity to prompt
reflection on the relationship between the weight of history and the
immediacy of lived experience. While the legacy of the second World
War plays an important role in her work, it is mixed with a longer view of
Berlin’s cultural identity and a strong sense of personal connection. her
treatment of ireland has very different resonances, moving away from a
concern with family and cultural history towards acute observation of
the radical changes that ireland has undergone in the years that she has
been resident here. ‘notes from henry street’, a two-part poem from her
most recent collection Piano, again constructs a dialogue with her earlier
collection from 2000 and uses the concept of ‘notes’ to create a sense
of continuous thoughtful engagement, as well as an auditory dimension.
in the opening section, henry street, near the centre of galway city,
becomes the epicentre of recessionary affect. opening in the aftermath
of a storm, the speaker observes the detritus in the garden, a microcosm
for ‘our street of Club paradiso, sex shop / plus blackjack club’ with its
For sale signs and dispiriting new apartment blocks. The speaker here is
a letter writer, and addresses someone due to return home to this scene:
‘the fireplace / with its dusting of ashes, the veins / of slug slime and
mould’ (P 71). again, dampness pervades the environment, because this
is a coast on the edge of europe and its exposure – climatically and
economically – is intimately linked to this location. The speaker’s own
life is ‘full of bluster’ suggesting both the turbulence of contemporary
existence and the need to talk over and around it, to avoid confrontation with the darker realities of experience. The poem acknowledges
‘apologies to montale’, perhaps referring to the tendency of the italian
poet to address poems to an absent other. The second part of the
poem directly addresses montale himself, contrasting the fountains and
courtyards of italian urban life to the texaco stations and investment
premises of Celtic tiger ireland. Though this night is as bright as day –
aided by the omnipresence of street lighting – it again prompts sombre
reflection on Bourke’s part: ‘memories return nocturnally, sere and raw’
(P 72). For this reason, the speaker welcomes the return of storm winds
as a way of clarifying ethical and personal quandaries and introducing a
cleansing energy into a world racked by endless political and economic
strife. instead, the movement remains muted, as the striking rhyme
between ‘flickering’ and ‘bickering’ suggests, together with the parallel
juxtaposition between ‘critical mass’ and ‘trickling down the glass’
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
that mark these four lines out in rhyming containment. ending with
an affirmation of speaking to the dead, Bourke interweaves the poetic
conversation with montale with her habitual sensitivity to familial
precursors. yet, in asserting the presence of the dead in contemporary
life, she at once emphasizes the continuities of inspiration and experience
and the haunted quality of contemporary life in ireland.
all three poets show how the processes of travel and migration alter
their understanding of the past, bringing concerns of time and space to
the forefront of their creative work. Their poems constitute a dialogue
with distant cultural spaces and in doing so embrace the particular formal
and linguistic challenges that this diversity brings. These experiences
have proved productive of experiment for these poets, whether formally,
in their engagement with new poetic modes, or philosophically, in the
dialogue they construct with their earlier selves. to live in an entirely
new culture is to court estrangement, but also to be made sensitive to
both cultural and linguistic differences. These poets show how a migrant
perspective not only informs a particular phase of their work but also
alters their aesthetic development in fundamental ways.
Notes
1 The growth of significant migrant communities in ireland has given rise to a greater
diversity in literary production. Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland, an
anthology edited by eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó (dublin: dedalus press, 2010),
represents a range of poetry produced by writers born outside ireland. some of
these settled in the country decades ago; some are recent arrivals. see also Borbála
Faragó, ‘“i am the place in Which Things happen”: invisible immigrant Women
poets of ireland’, in patricia Coughlan and tina o’toole (eds), Irish Literature:
Feminist Perspectives (dublin: Carysfort press, 2008), pp. 145–66.
2 nadia setti notes that the crossing of borders ranges in significance from ‘an
ordinary act without consequences (study, business, tourist journeys) [to] … an
act of survival for those who leave their homes to escape disease, war and poverty’:
‘migrants’ art and Writing: Figures of precarious hospitality’, European Journal of
Women’s Studies 16.4 (2009), p. 326.
3 paul White discusses this dual process of departure in the introduction to russell
King, John Connell and paul White (eds), Writing Across Worlds: Literature and
Migration (london: routledge, 1995), p. 2.
4 This poem was first published in Nightwalker and Other Poems (dublin: dolmen
press, 1967).
5 setti, ‘migrants’ art and Writing’, p. 327.
6 among more recent critics, douglas porteous, david sopher and yi Fu tuan offer
a stable, even soothing, reading of ‘home’, argues rosemary marangoly george, The
Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-century Fiction (oakland,
Ca: university of California press, 1999), p. 22.
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be t w e e n h e r e a n d t h e r e
7 Chandra talpade mohanty (with Biddy martin), ‘What’s home got to do with
it?’, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonising Theory, Practicing Solidarity (durham,
nC and london: duke university press, 2003), p. 90.
8 The idealization of home is linked to its significance as a gendered space, to which
men may choose to come for comfort and sustenance but to which women remain
tied.
9 This changing philosophical conceptualization of home is traced by david ralph
and lynn a. staeheli in ‘home and migration: mobilities, Belongings and
identities’, Geography Compass 5.7 (July 2011), pp. 517–30 (p. 521).
10 rob mclennan, ‘12 or 20 Questions: with mairéad Byrne’ (november 2007),
http://12or20questions.blogspot.ie/.
11 de Fréine has participated in writing residencies in the usa (Connecticut),
portugal (Coimbra) and slovenia. These periods abroad have shaped her work since
2010 in important ways.
12 White, ‘introduction’, in King, Connell and White (eds), Writing Across Worlds,
p. 7.
13 sheobhushan shukla and anu shukla, Migrant Voices in Literatures in English (new
delhi: sarup, 2006), p. 2.
14 mary layoun remarks on this apparent contradiction. see marangoly george, The
Politics of Home, p. 16.
15 mohanty, ‘What’s home got to do with it’, pp. 85–105.
16 salman rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991
(harmondsworth: penguin, 1992), p. 278.
17 marie-aude Baronian, stephan Besser and yolande Jansen (eds), Diaspora and
Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics
(amsterdam: rodopi, 2006), pp. 11–12. This includes a quotation from paul gilroy,
‘diaspora and the detours of identity’, in Kay Woodward (ed.), Identity and
Difference (london: sage, 1997), p. 318.
18 Baronian et al., Diaspora and Memory, p. 12.
19 see richard terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (ithaca, ny
and london: Cornell university press, 1993).
20 mairéad Byrne in conversation with rob mclennan. at the opening of a 2005
interview with rebecca seiferle, Byrne is described as ‘both an irish and an
american poet; the first by birth and the second by choice’. rebecca seiferle, ‘an
interview with mairéad Byrne’, The Drunken Boat 5.3/4 (spring/summer 2005),
www.thedrunkenboat.com/byrne.html.
21 W. B. yeats, ‘among school Children’, in daniel albright (ed.), W. B. Yeats: The
Poems (london: everyman, 1992), pp. 261–3.
22 nelson’s pillar was a key dublin landmark. erected in 1808–9 at the junction of
sackville street and the Carlisle Bridge, it was blown up by an ira bomb in 1966.
it appears in many literary representations of dublin, most notably James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). see yvonne Whelan, Reinventing Modern
Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity (dublin: uCd press,
2003), pp. 44–50.
23 Dubh le daoine means ‘black with people’, that is, crowded. Ag baint dhá thaobh
den bóthar, ‘taking both sides of the road’ or weaving from side to side, whether
from drink or another cause. Íseal and uasal are antonyms: íseal meaning lowly
or common, uasal noble or lofty – this is especially suitable given lord nelson’s
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
social and physical elevation here. ‘stewed’ as slang for drunkenness leads easily
to soup (redolent of the soup kitchens of the nineteenth century) and to ‘mate and
potatoes’, meat and potatoes hibernicized. This movement between languages and
registers makes use of patterns of alliteration and assonance in both languages as
well as the auditory links between íseal and uasal, suggesting the noble and the
common may not be so far apart after all.
seiferle, ‘interview with mairéad Byrne’.
Kent Johnson, ‘poetic Comedy, september 11, truth, the lyric, mississippi, the
persecution of gabe gudding by trent lott radio, the Cohabitation of poets, and
prison teaching: an interview with mairéad Byrne and gabriel gudding’, VeRT
6, http://epc.buffalo.edu/mags/vert/index2.html.
Christopher morash’s examination of irish media from the 1960s onward shows
telefís Éireann’s reliance on american programming. he attributes this to
economics – the cost of screening an american series was just £20 per hour and
this proved the only way that irish television could compete for viewers with its
British counterpart: ‘to put it simply, without american television, there would
have been no irish television’. Christopher morash, A History of the Media in Ireland
(Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2010), p. 175.
st Brendan is known for his legendary journey in search of hy Brasil, or the
island of the Blessed, described in the ninth-century manuscript ‘The voyage of
st Brendan the navigator’. Though the location of the island is unknown – and
often assumed to be allegorical – it has been speculated that it is north america.
tim severin’s 1978 film The Brendan Voyage demonstrated that it would have been
possible for st Brendan to have made the crossing to america in a leather boat.
see also glyn s. Burgess and Clara strijbosch, The Legend of St Brendan: A Critical
Bibliography (dublin: royal irish academy, 2000).
‘patrick Kavanagh used to talk about wanting to “play a true note on a slack string”.
There’s some of that in Talk Poetry … The textured, collaged, appropriated work
of my chapbook An Educated Heart (palm press, 2005) seems a long way from me
now’. rob mclennan, ‘12 or 20 Questions: with mairéad Byrne’.
rob mclennan, ‘12 or 20 Questions: with mairéad Byrne’.
sina Queyras, ‘a few words and poems: mairéad Byrne’, Harriet, april 30, 2010, www.
poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/a-few-words-and-poems-mairead-byrne/
seiferle, ‘interview with mairéad Byrne’.
‘parallax’ is defined as ‘the effect whereby the position or direction of an object
appears to differ when viewed from different positions’ (Oxford English Dictionary).
Fran Brearton draws attention to the relevance of this to morrissey’s poetic practice
in her review of the volume in the Guardian, september 6, 2013. Parallax won the
t. s. eliot prize and the poetry now award for 2014.
gerald dawe, ‘poetry as Commemoration’, in eberhard Bort (ed.), Commemorating
Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (dublin: irish academic press, 2004), pp. 216–17.
The influence of Japan on irish poetry has been explored in a number of
publications, most notably in irene de angelis and Joseph Woods (eds), Our Shared
Japan: An Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry (dublin: dedalus, 2007) and in
irene de angelis’s monograph, The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry
(london: palgrave macmillan, 2012).
irene de angelis, ‘sinéad morrissey: Between northern ireland and Japan’, Journal
of Irish Studies 20 (2005), www.carcanet.co.uk.
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36 White, ‘introduction’, King, Connell and White, Writing Across Worlds, p. 14.
37 erll and nünning point out that a war can be remembered as a mythic event, an
aspect of political history, a traumatic experience or as a part of family history.
Cultural Memory Studies, p. 7.
38 in december 1993, a Joint declaration on peace, more commonly known as
the downing street declaration, was issued by John major, then British prime
minister, and albert reynolds, the irish taoiseach at that time. on august 31,
1994 the ira announced a cessation of military activities; this lasted until February
1996 when an ira bomb was detonated in the london docklands. after a renewed
ceasefire in July 1997, the good Friday agreement was reached in april 1998. This
agreed mechanisms for devolved, inclusive government in the province as well as
arrangements for prisoner release and decommissioning. see paul Bew and gordon
gillespie (eds), Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles, 1968–99 (dublin:
gill & macmillan, 1999); also graham spencer (ed.), Forgiving and Remembering
in Northern Ireland: Approaches to Conflict Resolution (london: Continuum, 2011).
39 The involvement of the spanish in the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, which saw the
defeat of gaelic ireland by the english, situated this event within the larger conflict
between protestant england and Catholic spain. nearly 90 years later, the Battle of
the Boyne was fought between two rival claimants of the english, scottish and irish
thrones – the Catholic James vii and the protestant William iii who had deposed
James in 1688. William was also governor of holland, Zeeland, utrecht, gelderland
and overijssel of the dutch republic. The battle, fought near drogheda, was won
by William. This ensured the continuation of protestant ascendancy in ireland. see
pádraig lenihan, 1690: The Battle of the Boyne (london: The history press, 2003).
40 see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore, md and london: Johns hopkins university press, 1996), p. 7.
41 aleida assmann, ‘to remember or to Forget: Which Way out of a shared history
of violence?’, in assmann and shortt, Memory and Political Change, pp. 153–71.
42 marangoly george, The Politics of Home, p. 27.
43 e. t. a. hoffman (1776–1822) was a german romantic author as well as a
composer and music critic. offenbach’s opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, was loosely
based on his writings; he also wrote the stories from which the famous ballets The
Nutcracker and Coppélia were derived.
44 Though this poem depicts ‘the gate keeper’ as changing the name from ben mendel
to mendelssohn, the decision to do so was in fact taken by moses mendelssohn
himself. see michael p. steinberg, ‘mendelssohn and Judaism’, in peter mercertaylor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn (Cambridge: Cambridge
university press, 2004), p. 35.
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ch a p ter t hr ee
private memory and
the Construction of subjectivity in
Contemporary irish Women’s poetry
private memory and the construction of subjectivity
The relationship between private and shared memory is a complex one
and the search for a way of conceptualizing it has preoccupied theorists
of memory in recent years. maurice halbwach’s perception of collective
memory is both a foundational and a controversial construct, especially
in the ways that it links individual psychology and group practice.1
as astrid erll has acknowledged, however, ‘societies do not remember
literally; but much of what is done to reconstruct a shared past bears
some resemblance to the processes of individual memory’.2 in its layered
construction of subjectivity, poetry has the potential to extend how the
dynamics of self and other can be understood, offering new ways of
reading the relationship between the emotional life of the individual
and the larger social and political contexts that have shaped these
perceptions. This chapter explores the role of private memory in the
work of contemporary irish women poets, examining it as a catalyst for
philosophical and social enquiry. These poets use acts of remembering
to investigate subjectivity in challenging ways; they reveal aspects of the
personal past while problematizing its relationship with the lyric mode.
This potential to move beyond individual experience without negating
its importance can be traced in the way these poets situate deeply
personal material in a larger cultural context, contemplating not only
close personal relationships but also the capacity for empathic connection
with the stranger. in doing so they confirm the representation of personal
suffering as an important dimension of ethical reflection and a means of
understanding one’s place in the world.
Three poets explore these dynamics in important ways: the work
of mary o’malley (b.1954) and paula meehan (b.1955) shares some
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important characteristics, including an understanding of the relationship
between personal experience and collective responsibility. Close in age,
yet drawing inspiration from very different environments – the streets
of inner city dublin and the coastal communities of galway – these
poets came to creative maturity at a time when the gap between the
public perception and the actual experiences of women was coming
under particular scrutiny. For both poets memory serves to investigate
the bonds of family and community and to recognize these as the
sites of both supportive and damaging relationships. to the work of
these two women, the poetry of Colette Bryce (b.1970) provides an
interesting counterpoint. growing up in derry during the troubles,
Bryce’s understanding of the relationship between personal and political
has been shaped by the claustrophobic nature of domestic and civic life
in the province and by the impact that sectarian violence has on the
lives of individuals. her recent representations of the familial past are
formally innovative in their investigation of the spaces between private
and public experience. in this respect, the poems exemplify the need to
create a new story from the ordered narrative of history.3 The generational difference reflected in the choice of these three poets, together
with their changing perspectives on the relationship between individual
and community in different parts of the island of ireland, offer new ways
of reading the poetic representation of the traumatic past.
Poetry, Memory, Selfhood
The personal and the political are entwined in different ways in the work
of all three poets examined here. While Bryce’s upbringing in derry
draws attention to her presence there at a time of particular political
significance, both meehan and o’malley are also concerned with the
processes of bearing witness to one’s own place and community. yet
this act involves self-scrutiny too. if poetry is for meehan ‘an act of
resistance, an act of survival’, it aptly demonstrates that with human
endurance must come an acknowledgement of the fragmentary and often
inexpressible self.4 many of her poems – from the earliest work through
to the recent Painting Rain (2009) – return to a difficult personal
past in order to explore the fraught attempts of the individual to find
meaning in a hostile and confusing world.5 memory is at the core of
this exploration, not just in providing significant material for the poet’s
art, but in emphasizing the continuing dynamic between present and
past selves; a dynamic that relates not only to individual self-identity but
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
also to how this is mediated in the creation of larger communities and
national groupings.
all identity debates involve the concept of alterity, it is in response
to this that personal and cultural boundaries are determined. The
relationship between self and other is often ethically constructed,
placing the ‘other’ in an adversarial position. This dynamic inflects
national self-perception as well as definitions of community and family,
and its significant shaping of class and gender debates informs meehan’s
work at all levels. The concept of estrangement itself foregrounds the
responsibilities of the self and the implications of the self’s boundaries.
richard Kearney, in tracing these issues through the work of emmanuel
levinas and Jacques derrida, considers the consequences of any obstacle
in the relationship between self and other. in derrida’s terms there
can be:
no hospitality, in the classic sense, without sovereignty of oneself over one’s
home, but since there is also no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can
only be exercised by filtering, choosing and thus by excluding and doing
violence.6
in figuring home as the place where the processes of inclusion and
exclusion begin to occur, derrida draws attention to that most personal
of spaces as the foundation of larger phenomena – a process that is
central to meehan’s own poetic. For meehan the dynamics of exclusion
and violence overshadow a real world of social deprivation and economic
struggle, so that her consideration of otherness and estrangement is
always shaped by an understanding of their actual social effects.
For both meehan and o’malley home is experiential rather than
conceptual, however, and it is central to how selfhood can be
investigated and understood. in o’malley’s case, the fact that she has
spent a significant amount of time – perhaps even the greater part of her
adult life – outside ireland has shaped her awareness of the importance
of choice in the formation of relationships between individuals and
places. her Connemara home, though on a geographical periphery, is
in no sense isolated from the sustaining network of places that have
supported her creative life. many poets of the younger generation
have also made homes outside ireland;7 Colette Bryce’s sense of self
is shaped by periods in Barcelona, london and dundee, as well as
in the north of england where she now lives. her 2008 collection,
Self-Portrait in the Dark, depicts a dislocated self, fleetingly glimpsed
in cars, in planes, on railway lines, taking a ‘zig-zag route along a
scrawl of narrow, stony roads’ (SPD 23). Though the memories these
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poets invoke are often firmly rooted in personal experience, their
approaches exceed a narrow biographical focus, exploring instead the
philosophical and cultural implications of the concept of privacy and
its role in larger constructions of identity.
The passion for justice that underpins meehan’s poetic explorations
is one that requires openness to the other – what levinas would see as
the infinite responsibility of self to other. yet such a state of openness
is rendered more complex by the difficulties of establishing a clear
perspective on the self, a full understanding of what ‘the self’ actually is.
For meehan, an awareness of the problematic nature of self-representation
is always to the fore: ‘i don’t use a trustworthy I in the poetry … i’m
playing all the time with I because i don’t have an identity.’8 american
poet annie Finch writes of a similar need to question the unitary self
in her work:
i now see language as a place where the poetic self can dissolve without
throwing the world the poem represents into chaos. i appreciate poems
that ‘problematise’ the self, to use one common critical term, rather than
pretending that the selves of the speaker of the poem and its reader are
simple, solid entities.9
meehan’s declared lack of identity has not yielded to poems of radical
instability; instead, they seem, in Finch’s terms, to emphasize the
contingent nature of the self without rupturing linguistic coherence. in
addition, this lack of singular identity may indicate not an absence but,
in fact, an excess of identities – an endless movement among different
versions of the self that emerge under the pressure of situation. The
treatment of alterity, then, is not only a function of experience but also
an existential concern that is repeatedly mediated through attention to
the immediate world of the poet.
For o’malley, this excess of identities is expressed through attentiveness
to personal evolution; many of her poems recognize the disjunction
between past and present selves though the depiction of a woman on
a journey, moving between spaces that are at once real and imagined.
From the early poem ‘The Journey’, through ‘a Question of travel’
(2001) to the ‘resident at sea’ sequence from Valparaiso (2012), o’malley
uses this process to explore creativity, so that an evolving understanding
of writing and selfhood become intimately connected. This emphasizes
the notion of the creative self as always in a state of process – a condition
that shapes the dynamics of private and public in this work, so that,
though o’malley’s poems are in and of the world, a dimension of her
work resists easy disclosure. as the poet explains:
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The world of the poems is a very intense and total world and i suppose i
don’t really share that with anybody, actually. i don’t usually write about
domestic things, not because i want to deny them but because i don’t allow
myself those poems, maybe … The forces that make me write are darker and
deeper and infinitely more powerful – to use a very inadequate word – than
can normally be expressed in any kind of domestic setting.10
This rejection of the domestic has meant that even very personal
experiences mark a departure from realism or, as eamonn Wall has
argued, are conceived in a ‘magic-realist mode’.11 her openness to the
material of the irish folk tradition helps to shape the imaginative aspect
of this transition and she sees this as an important and continuing aspect
of her art: ‘the possibility of a visit from the marvelous is part of being
a poet’.12 The marvellous may also come from a receptiveness to other
cultures, and just as eva Bourke’s dialogic relationship with german
life, both past and present, raises important philosophical questions so
o’malley’s european attachments ensure that the experiencing ‘i’ must
be seen to take many contingent forms.
Colette Bryce’s work expresses itself in similarly transformative ways.
many of her early poems, from ‘day’ to ‘Cabo de são vincente’ depict a
movement through landscapes and across national borders. uncertainty
attends this dynamic, though; while the energies of these poems suggest
the freedom of self-invention, there is a subtle sense of entrapment in
the apparent necessity of return. if ‘[t]he journey back was a nightmare’
(‘epilogue’, HB 26), there is all the more reason to refute this dynamic
completely: ‘if you think that i’ll be coming back / you’re on the wrong
track’ (‘riddle’, FRT 43). These impressions conspire to suspend Bryce’s
speakers in an unresolved space or show them to be ‘pulled in several
different directions at once’.13 This ambiguous relationship to place also
troubles the sense of a unitary self, so that the speaker is simultaneously
visible and concealed from the reader; at once here and elsewhere. in this
way, past and present selves can rarely be distinguished with certainty
in Bryce’s work.
such an awareness of the multiplicity of selves leads away from a self /
other binary; instead, the other is enclosed within the self so that self and
non-self become one and the same. For this realization, Julia Kristeva’s
work on the stranger within the self is of vital importance. in seeing the
unconscious as vitally shaped by the other, Kristeva posits the response to
the stranger, or the foreigner, as a manifestation of unresolved dynamics
within the self: ‘The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my
difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves
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pr i vat e m e mory a n d t h e c ons t ruc t ion of su bje c t i v i t y
as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.’14 The difficult
negotiations between individual and community that take place in
meehan’s work testify to this tenuous integration. Both her poems and
many of o’malley’s too investigate the deepest reaches of the self, where
the painful struggle between the desire for intimacy and the terrible price
its loss exacts continues to be felt.
Freud is a significant precursor here: his concept of the unheimliche
or the uncanny speaks of that which comes from within, that which
would otherwise be repressed: ‘Unheimliche is the name for everything
that ought to have remained hidden and secret and has become visible.’15
in Freud’s terms, clear boundaries between the familiar and the strange
cease to exist. This aspect of estrangement is central to Kristeva’s work
on the stranger within – the idea that what we recognize as strange is in
fact a crucial part of the self, one that demands recognition. however, as
sara ahmed argues, the failure to recognize the stranger does not in fact
mark a lack of knowledge since the stranger is not someone we do not
recognize but rather ‘someone we recognise as a stranger’.16 in each case,
the concept of estrangement is one linked to scrutiny, not only of the
present situation but also of the cumulative nature of knowledge itself.
This is the point at which the act of memory becomes one of particular
philosophical importance, not only in relation to poems of clear personal
significance but also to those that deal with the larger boundaries of
identity on a community or national level.
By introducing the role of memory into this dynamic, the question
of growth becomes central: how far is our understanding of otherness
based on deeply rooted convictions that emerge repeatedly through our
interactions with the unknown. maurice halbwachs has highlighted
the cultural aspect of the act of remembering: ‘it is in society that
people normally acquire their memories. it is also in society that they
recall, recognize and localize their memories’.17 his controversial work
on collective memory emphasizes the need to contextualize even the
most personal of past experiences, and meehan’s explorations of the
pasts of family and community seem to bear out this necessity. yet
they also reveal the importance of local memory as a counterpoint to
the national narrative, and in this they are consonant with contemporary efforts on the part of nation states to respond sensitively to
the perceptions of the past in previously marginalized communities.18
meehan herself fundamentally questions the notion that memory can
be separated from subjectivity: ‘is there such a thing as the past? or is
there only a relationship with that past?’.19 it is a form of interrogation
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that emphasizes the idea that the past is contained within present
perception. in this respect, the act of memory becomes crucial to the
process of estrangement. For meehan, it is the paradox of identification
with, yet separation from, the past self that is the model for the complex
relationship between self and other that exists in much of her poetry.
The concept of experience requires probing here, since the splitting of
present and past selves suggests interpretative discontinuities. The role of
experience within feminist debates itself reveals divided critical opinion: it
may be read as a sign of authenticity or as an entirely private phenomenon
that cannot be extrapolated into a form of collective representation.20
in the same way, experience can be seen to exist as either an interior or
an exterior perspective – as a process that is unique to, and internalized
by, the individual, or as one that is marked by the interaction between
the subject and the real world. ernst van alphen asserts not just the
close connection between experience and its expression but the idea that
experience exists only in its representation and that, in turn, subjectivity
itself is constructed in this way.21 For writers, then, subjectivity is a particularly complex phenomenon, since the discursive construction of their
reality is a highly self-reflexive one. meehan’s return to past experiences
– a practice that forms an important part of her most recent collection,
Painting Rain (2009) – has resulted in the concept of estrangement
becoming internalized. yet, ironically, this internalization has yielded
a more philosophical approach to the need for self-understanding. For
o’malley, the interweaving of language and place reveals a preoccupation with the relationship between individual utterance and human
connection. increasingly, her work explores the responsibility to self
and other that emerges through engagement with threatened landscapes
and ecologies. it is by interrogating the self, then, that both poets reach
sustained understanding of the world around them. in the same way the
traumatic past must be confronted individually and culturally so that the
extent and nature of its impact may be comprehended.
Family Histories: The Poetry of Witness
The passage of time shapes these difficult acts of self-interrogation in
important ways. as dominick laCapra points out, ‘the experience of
trauma is … bound up with its belated effects or symptoms, which
render it elusive’.22 something of this delayed response is recorded in
meehan’s ‘This is not a Confessional poem’, which indicates her struggle
to come to terms with the revelatory dimension of poetic representation
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as well as with the ways in which the finished text will be read and
understood. The poem’s title challenges us to reflect on the assumptions
we make concerning the personal underpinning of the modern lyric.
Though the text begins in the midst of an act of writing, the speaker
hesitates before continuing – ‘i do not know that i’ve the right to say such
things’ (PR 78). such tentative claims to the right to speak stem from
the need to exercise caution in bearing witness to the past, together with
an increasing awareness of the inadequacy of a singular perspective on
complicated human dynamics. yet the speech act also indicates the desire
to come to terms with the past by ceasing to repress its truths: ‘traumatic
silences and gaps in language are, if not mutilations and distortions of
the signifying process, ambivalent attempts to conceal’.23 The poem tells
of a mother’s attempt on her own life, a memory that emerges suddenly
in a warm and evocative greek landscape and thrusts the poet back in
time to a Finglas garden on a winter’s night, where her mother lies ‘curled
to a foetal question’ (PR 78) in the eerie silence of the sleeping estate,
after having been rescued from the kitchen by her father: ‘I found her
with her head in the oven. / I dragged her outside’ (PR 79). The sight of
her exhaled breath in the cold air is proof both of her continuing life and
of the irreversible change that her action will bring to the family: ‘We
carried her in between us, / my father and i, never again that close, / or
complicit. never again the same as we were’ (PR 79). The bonds created
by this shared act of witness do not alter the poet’s singular responsibility
in representing the experience in language, however. part of this process
involves an acknowledgment of the past as past and an assertion of the
distanced perspective of the present self: ‘and that is how i leave them
now: / i pull the door behind me firmly closed’ (PR 80).
Bryce’s ‘re-entering the egg’ also offers a glimpse into the private
space of the family past but in a less explicit mode. presenting the home
like a doll’s house – the front of which can be opened to reveal all the
rooms at once – the poet gives us a version of the past at once innocent
and audacious. each figure appears as a circus performer but separated
from the rest of the troupe:
a tiny family fills the rooms.
in one, a wife is breathing fire,
genies whirling in the air.
in one, we hear the strong man’s snores
rumbling under a mound of clothes
like a subterranean train.
(WRU 6)
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a series of children appear as ‘spangled girl’, conjoined twins and
mermaid. Though living in close proximity, all these figures seem to
inhabit separate worlds just as, on the topmost bunk, ‘the smallest girl’s
soft breath / knits round her like a shell’ (WRU 6). identifying with this
girl, and her creation of a protective cocoon, the speaker asserts the right
to privacy of these diminutive figures: ‘out of time, they go about their
lives / unaware of our scrutiny. / Close it up. That’s enough for now’
(WRU 7). This last stanza reveals that the difference between observer
and observed is not one of scale only, there is also a temporal distance
between them. The family is made tiny by the fact that its actions belong
to the past. it is a past that can be revisited, but prolonged exposure
to it – and of it – is unwise, recalling Freud’s allusion to what ought to
remain hidden. The ethics of breaching family privacy remain a concern
for all three poets.
van alphen sheds light on the role of trauma in destabilizing the
subject position, so that speakers in recounting their experience may
deny their own role as subjects, seeing themselves as acted upon rather
than acting. Conversely, the failure to act can erode a sense of self, so
that the anxiety as to whether one has been ‘enough of a subject’ can
become overwhelming.24 The difficulties that have existed for meehan,
on both social and domestic scales, reveal an acute awareness of these
tensions. This is why Dharmakaya (2000) is such a significant volume
for the poet – because it is the book in which meehan embraces the
idea of non-being, not fearfully, but with an awareness of its necessity in
the creation of meaning; as Catriona Clutterbuck puts it: ‘[meehan] can
“find her centre” only through the risk of freefall, not, as her previous
work suggested, despite that risk.’25
meehan has long been concerned to trace the complex dynamics of
belonging and estrangement and their effects on her own subject position
in language. The poem ‘return and no Blame’, collected in The Man
who was Marked by Winter (1991), indicates the importance of family
relationships in determining identity. The poem is addressed to the
father, who represents a fixed place of return for the speaker here. This
dynamic is immediately seen as a cyclical one: the father’s ‘sunny smile
/ is a dandelion / as i come once again through the door’ (MMW 23).
The seemingly endless renewal of this common flower is matched by the
pattern of the speaker’s disappearance from and return to her father’s
life – movement that reflects the ever-changing nature of the speaker’s
own subjectivity. like so many of meehan’s poems, the work seems at
first to lay bare its meanings, yet this is fundamentally a poem about
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concealment: the father’s eyes holding ‘a question / [he] will not put’
(MMW 23). This reluctance to question shows a willingness to allow the
speaker her own space, yet it also reveals the gulf that exists between
the two of them:
Father, my head is bursting
with the things i’ve seen
in this strange, big world
but i don’t have the words to tell you
nor the boldness to disrupt your gentle daily ways,
(MMW 23)
here the ‘i’ in the poem has split into two: the ‘i’ that has witnessed
the strangeness of the world and the ‘i’ that struggles to find language
adequate to the experience. The failure of language here is partly willed,
however. Just as meehan chooses words for this poem, so the speaker
acknowledges that language is more than freedom of expression: it
is a conscious means of constructing relationships. The process of
estrangement represented here is complex too. it is the world outside that
generates this feeling, yet it is brought into the home so that exposure to
the extraordinary now makes all things, even the most familiar, strange
in their turn. The key dynamic that exists in this poem, then, is between
what is spoken and what is unspoken, perhaps unspeakable; between the
significant experiences of ‘elsewhere’ and the difficulty of assimilating
these; between the experiencing and speaking selves that constitute the
field of the poem.
The maternal relationship is not often evoked in meehan’s work, but
an early poem, ‘The pattern’ – also from The Man who was Marked by
Winter – is important in exploring the poet’s construction of the female
subject in her work. The poem begins with estrangement, marking first
the small number of objects and experiences that connect the speaker to
her mother: ‘a sewing machine, a wedding band, / a clutch of photos,
the sting of her hand / across my face in one of our wars’ (MMW 17).
here the materiality of the past is linked to bodily experience, and the
lingering effect of this remembered slap carries over to the second stanza,
where the mother’s death is also recorded. her short life is rendered in
the dozen lines of the first section of the poem, giving us the ‘pattern’
of her existence before she is remembered in evocative detail. The
contraction of time here mirrors that of the mother’s own foreshortened
life but meehan’s unsentimental treatment highlights not the pain of
loss but rather an instinct for survival. The decision of the speaker not
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to return to her mother’s grave marks her resistance to the past as a site
of grief in favour of a continuing creative present.
This decision is reflected in the form of the poem itself, which is
episodic. its seven sections are a mixture of fixed and open forms –
some rhythmically regular with full rhyme; some deliberately halting
with no discernible sound pattern. in keeping with this shape the
intimacy of mother and daughter waxes and wanes, so that tenderness
and estrangement are in dynamic relation throughout the poem. The
mother’s cleaning rituals situate these memories in the context of a
house-proud, working-class woman, yet the speaker is more concerned
with the goal of self-knowledge. We glimpse the self-consciousness of
this process: ‘i have her shrug and go on / knowing history has brought
her to her knees’ (MMW 18) (my italics). elsewhere, though, the poet is
notable for her apparent absence. The mother’s story of punishment at
the hands of her father is presented directly, so that we cannot read the
emotional response of the daughter who is ‘sizing / up the world beyond
our flat patch by patch’ and exercising her imagination on the exotic other
– ‘Zanzibar, Bombay, the land of the ethiops’ (MMW 19). The mother’s
creativity emerges through sewing and then knitting; it is practical and
down-to-earth – ‘she favoured sensible shades: / moss green, mustard,
Beige’. her daughter dreams about ‘a robe of a colour / so pure it became
a word’ (MMW 20). This relentless difference between the earth-bound
and the transcendent, the need to follow a pattern and the urge to explore
freely, marks both a personal and a generational difference. it reveals a
connection to the past at once repressive and grounding; a female subjectivity that must be acknowledged though it remains in the past.
Colette Bryce’s most recent collection returns often to the figure of
the mother, so that she becomes an almost ghostly presence, keeping the
book anchored in the personal past. in ‘a little girl i Knew when she
was my mother’ the gulf between mother and daughter is invoked by
the older woman’s removal into a space between sleeping and waking; a
fairy-tale world resonating amazement and fear. The form of the poem
expresses the dissociation felt by both speaker and reader witnessing the
girl–mother as she
emerged from the pages of a bed
from sheets the colour of old snow
crawled from the petals of the Weeping rose
from silks suffused with smoke
and sweat
(WRU 37)
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The room, with its tossed bedclothes and swirling-patterned carpet,
mutates to an ephemeral world of snow and rose petals. The sheets
alter their substance to become silk, then virgin’s robes, winding cloths
and finally black flags. sound patterns assist this transformation: the ‘s’
sounds of ‘snow’, ‘silks’, ‘smoke’ and ‘sweat’ slipping down through the
poem; the movements shaped by the opening out of lines:
uncurled her limbs
like an opening fist
ravelled
free of the winding cloths
(WRU 37)
at the turn of a page, the poem contracts into single-spaced couplets
as the mother reaches a dressing table, where she is reflected in a
triptych of mirrors. The multiple images intensify the gulf between
the inner self and the outward appearance – the many versions of the
individual on display to the world suggested by the pronoun shift here:
‘There’s a woman trapped in the centre of their body / that no one can
remember’ (WRU 38). The second part of the poem also recalls its title,
which invokes the childlike quality of the elderly and the blurring of
the generational divide. The title in turn is borrowed from the artist
and sculptor louise Bourgeois, whose works evoking sexualized bodies
and emotionally troubled childhood experiences are consonant with the
arresting treatment of the mother’s body in Bryce’s poem.
a more conventional, though equally uneasy representation of
the mother can be found in o’malley’s ‘poem for my Birthday’. its
opening line, ‘This is between you and me alone, mother’ confirms
the privacy of this address as the source of its difficulty yet denies the
relationship a space of personal resolution, entering it instead into the
public realm of printed language (BH 18). The speaker renounces the
poetry of maternal intimacy – ‘i have never liked those fleshy poems
/ wet milk and birthslime’ (BH 18) – and in doing so rejects not
only the embodiment of this closest of human ties, but the forms of
expression available to address it. like meehan, o’malley often seeks
not only to represent a new perspective on familiar experience but also
to challenge our expectations regarding poetic voice. in representing
herself as ‘no easy infant’ and as ‘a scrawny crow’, the speaker offers
a form of subjectivity already restless and dissatisfied and a lively
precursor to the questioning adult artist. The mother here is the figure
specifically associated with the suppression of the child’s voice: the
‘crowtalk’, even the ‘odd sweet note i hit’ offer no means to connect
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(BH 18). Both childhood confusion and adult pain remain unassuaged
by the mother, signalling a separation not bridged by time or shared
experiences. The unasked question in the poem – ‘what right have
i now … what right have i to ask?’ – is a measure of the yet-to-be
established right to speak; one to which the poet’s own career stands
as testament.
Stories of Love: Remembering Loss
adult relationships also give rise to the states of estrangement for all
three poets, signalling the deepening of turbulent emotional states.
again, relationships of intimacy trouble the boundaries of the self and
the ability of the speaker to consign the relationship to the past becomes
an important indicator of her capacity to transcend this trauma. a
number of o’malley’s poems from the early years of the new century
explore the pain of marital breakdown and interrogate a loss of home
that has still larger cultural and linguistic significance. here the role
of memory is a subtle one, an unstated perspective of long attachment
from which the grief of separation grows. ‘The ice age’ renders this
emotional change as a seismic shift, as a new form of weather that
sweeps all familiar structures away. The icy temperature speaks of
long-felt alienation coming to expression at last: ‘here we are after the
real winter. / it froze so deep that the meltwater / / runs thick with old
debris’ (BH 17). This debris contains both actual and psychic material,
yet the protagonists seem trapped in the position of witness:
The stark
truth seems to be that we are ourselves stuck
among things that will not float yet, artefacts
of the constructed life, its seams unravelled.
(BH 17)
here the current of the poem, its rhythm, runs counter to its
observations: emotional blockages hold up the momentum towards a
new mode of existence. The overheard song is in a language the speaker
can’t understand, yet the line – part of mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, or
Songs on the Death of Children – means ‘now i see clearly’, even though
such clarity is not acknowledged directly by the speaker. This is increased
by the ambiguities of the english language: ‘it has been twenty-two
years. Cleave, / i think. Cleft. The words pitch like holed vows’ (BH 17).
The verb ‘to cleave’ means both to split and to adhere, so that the speaker
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is drawn towards her husband at the same moment as she is divided from
him. The leaky vessel of language cannot fully express this state, yet its
variability captures the mixed emotions poignantly.
meehan’s ‘“not alone the rue in my herb garden …”’ also addresses
the breakdown of a marriage but from the perspective of hindsight,
on a return visit to the speaker’s former home (PT 42–4). once more,
the act of return, whether literally or imaginatively, prompts meehan
to re-engage with the experiences of the past and to consider the
relationship between her present and former selves. The garden provides
the governing metaphor of this poem, highlighting the contrast between
the creativity and nurturing that shaped the marriage in its early
days, and the neglect that is both cause and effect of the relationship’s
collapse. as one of meehan’s longer poems it handles the passage of time
deftly, moving between present response and past memory in ways that
illuminate the alteration of the relationship and the sustaining growth
of the individual.
The garden is the place of difficult and important work for the speaker:
the labour of shaping nature is analogous to the building of the marital
bond, to the corresponding ‘poetry and story making’ that are both part
of the texture of this relationship and the means by which it is reflected
upon (PT 42). Though the speaker considers herself ‘the luckiest woman
born’ to have forged this existence, the ‘fatal rhythm of the atlantic
swell’ hints at the turbulence that marks the finite nature of such an
idyllic life (PT 43). it is significant too that the growth of the individual
means relinquishing aspects of personal history: the integration of her
life with that of her husband permits her both to nurture and to bury
past events:
i did not cast it off lightly,
the yoke of work, the years of healing,
of burying my troubled dead
with every seed committed to the earth,
judging, their singular, particular needs,
nurturing them with sweat and prayer
to let the ghosts go finally from me.
(PT 43)
The evocations of the cycle of birth and death here are telling. Just
as regrowth is predicated on letting go of dead matter, so the present
inevitably becomes a new form of past which must be confronted in its
turn. The past of this poem is thus multilayered, and its final appeal
does not speak only to the ‘abandoned husband’ but to every facet of
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the life that has been left behind (PT 44). The reality of such a history
must be accepted in order for the appropriate meaning to be reached:
‘oh my friend, / do not turn on me in hatred, / do not curse the day
we met’ (PT 44). This is an unusually declarative poem for meehan and
the direct personal voice is an important facet of the poem’s success in
negotiating difficult emotional territories. its shifts mark the existence
of poetic conventions and their interiorization: the poetic voice moves
smoothly between the demotic (‘Cranky / of a morning when the range
acted up’) and the lyrical (‘oh heart of my husband’) (PT 42; PT 43).
The poem also reminds us that, though the lyrical impulse commonly
evokes a coherent self, it is possible for a poem that is not experimental
in formal terms to highlight the limitations of this subject position with
a subtle slippage of temporal structures.
Bryce offers a more overtly fractured subject position in her ‘self
portrait in the dark (with cigarette)’. here the end of a relationship
prompts the speaker to turn to self-scrutiny, becoming her own ‘other’,
a solitary observer of the night scene. as in so many of her poems, the
starting point is literary: ‘to sleep, perchance / to dream? no chance: /
it’s 4 a.m. and i’m wakeful / as an animal’ (SPD 4). here the line breaks
disrupt the natural flow of meaning, reinforcing the restlessness of half
rhymes – ‘perchance’–‘chance’, ‘lack’–‘insomniac’, ‘amber’–‘downpour’
(SPD 4). The sight of the headlights of a distant vehicle draws the
speaker’s attention to her lover’s car, still parked in the street outside.
invoking, then dismissing, the self-help terminology of ‘moving on’, she
suggests that she has been ‘driving it illegally at night / in the lamp-lit
silence of this city’ (SPD 5), thus projecting herself into the ‘slow vehicle’
which prompted her original reflection. But, no, reader and ex-lover are
reassured, the car is fine, ‘gleaming’ and ‘upright’, the small flashing
light confirming its security system has not been breached. Though the
apparent reality of the poem reinforces the distance between the speaker
and the object of the beloved, its metaphors bridge the gap: the tiny
red light is likened to the speaker’s cigarette, flaring in the dark. in this
way, the emotional distances that have opened up in the poem appear
foreshortened and the trick of representation signalled in the poem’s
title is made meaningful. While the poems by meehan and o’malley
configure the end of a marriage in terms of slow and cyclical change,
Bryce’s retains the raw energy of recent loss, together with the whimsicality of the still unsettled perspective.
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Transforming the Past in Language
The work of the two older poets, as well as representing more gradual
change, reflects directly on the role of memory as an important agent in
the process of self-understanding. This process highlights the intersections
between the acts of remembering and writing, emphasizing the power
of poetry not only to engage with the past but also to reflect upon the
transformative capacity of language. increasingly, meehan returns to
childhood trauma as a means of investigating the practice of writing
itself.
if this poem, like most that i write,
is a way of going back into a past
i cannot live with and by transforming that past
change the future of it, the now
of my day at the window
(D 13)
The transformative power of poetry is asserted directly here, yet ‘past’
– as the final word of two consecutive lines – slows the pace of change
with a weighted, reflective pause. The idea that re-engagement with past
experiences can change the course of a personal narrative suggests too
that both past and future are fundamentally shaped, if not created, by
the act of writing itself. meehan herself acknowledged this possibility
in interview: ‘remembering for its own sake wouldn’t interest me, but
memory as agent for changing the present appeals to me greatly.’26 in
‘Fist’ the return to the past self is not a point of estrangement but rather
one of positive difference, within which an emotional continuum is
established between child and adult. The threatening fist that the poet
experiences in the present propels her immediately to the childhood
experience of anger and helplessness. The cupping of the child’s fist
between the adult’s two hands reshapes the gesture to one of support
and connection. By erasing the time between present and past selves,
meehan obliquely investigates the continuing presence of the child in
shaping adult perceptions and creativity. By turning the child’s fist into
an open hand, meehan shows how language can enact – from a point
of distance – what could not be done literally and in time; it reveals too
how the cycle of violence can be broken through imaginative connection.
her bloody mouth becomes ‘a rose suddenly blooming’ as present pain
is used to mend past suffering (D 13). rather than allowing violence
to estrange and fragment the self, meehan’s writing of memory offers
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redemptive possibilities, not only through confronting past trauma but
reimagining a response to those circumstances.
another striking representation of the experience of physical distress
is o’malley’s ‘miss panacea regrets’. in contrast to meehan’s technique,
o’malley chooses the form of the sequence to mark the rhythms of
pain and the attempts of the speaker to endure its near-impossible
challenges. The shape of the poem therefore works both with and against
its language, since poetry itself is the redemptive element set against the
deadening force of physical pain.
They have pierced my breast.
The wound, unstitched, blossomed
and like philoctetes i am unhealed.
all that lovely month i limped on half-sail,
half-life in the rose-scented mornings,
a hot-house virgin on a may altar
(KW 22)
This wound, like meehan’s, is likened to a blossom – an abjection that
can yet be seen as a thing of beauty and promise. The estrangement that
necessarily grows from this experience is one that brings the speaker to
a stark realization of the fragility of the self. The struggle to represent
physical ordeal yields a text divided between description and apostrophe,
as the speaker addresses the medics into whose hands her body has been
delivered: ‘You will not stitch breath / with such blunt instruments. / […]
/ What you hear with your stethoscope / Is not the true beat of her heart’
(KW 24, 25). yet the poem is also a dialogue with a literary precursor:
prefacing her text with a quotation from marina tsvetayeva, o’malley
goes on to question the solidarity of sufferers – ‘Marina, I would
hold your pain / but who would contain mine?’ (KW 22). in directly
addressing the poem’s epigraph, its speaker moves closer to the poet’s
own perspective, preparing us for the later exploration of poetry’s power
to represent suffering. From the start, biblical and mythical references
are an important means by which o’malley retains coherence in the
escalation of physical turmoil: ‘They have pierced my breast’ is repeated
with slight variations throughout.27 This practice suggests that the
necessity of return can be formative of the sequence structure itself,
much as eavan Boland has used it as a means to renew her engagement
with a seemingly irresolvable dynamic.
later, in ‘miss panacea regrets’, poetry itself acquires this penetrative
power: ‘poems like spears / pin me between earth and sky. / The moon
sneers’ (KW 32). sound patterns shift and repeat to emphasize at once the
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immediacy and the extent of the pain – the ‘p’ and ‘s’ sounds interspersed
with pulsing broad and narrow vowels. poetry itself is implicated in the
suffering. The self that is so repeatedly cut and pierced is invaded also
by language, a replacement for faith in this poem but one that is rife
with ambiguities and oppositions:
it has been excised,
a weak spot in my breath
cut out and the tear stitched.
it is healing well. in time
it will become a faint mark,
my stolen language, an echo that tugs,
the need for a word not known
like grá or brón for love or pain.
(KW 31)
The required excision marks a loss that is not only physical but also
linguistic, since the poem is written in english rather than in the irish
to which the poet feels drawn. The representation of bodily trauma does
not assuage distress but instead confronts the poet with the inextricable
ties between language and self-understanding. The removal of language
is a direct negation of the knowledge that this operation might have
offered: instead of being laid bare, words are excised from memory. as
well as the battle with uncontrollable pain, the poet must also grapple
with the creative process itself, with the difficulties of expressing the
intensity of pain in words.
Writing Estrangement: Changing Selves and Environments
The complexity of the subject-position in the poem is revealed through
the layering of forms of self-representation throughout the oeuvres of all
three poets under consideration here. each articulation of self must be
seen not only in the context of its immediate realization but in relation
to the poet’s earlier representations of the subject position, so that
self-representation becomes an acknowledgment of one’s double existence
as object and subject of the poetic process. This results in a heightened
perception of the role of writing, and of reading, in the construction of
an estranged position; the intensified absorption in language is not at
first an expressive asset but one that may separate the speaker from her
peers. This dislocation from ordinary life forms a parallel to the idea of
the stranger as ‘between’ languages, with speech and actions that may
be incomprehensible to the onlooker.28 it also reflects the more subtle
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relationship that the stranger bears to poetic conventions and traditions.
meehan’s ‘swallows and Willows’ illustrates this gulf of understanding
powerfully. once more the childhood memory of the speaker expands
– this time to include the power of poetry not only to represent the
self but in certain contexts to mark the reading self as ‘other’. at the
opening of the poem, the speaker has already been caught ‘at the
corner / with the curly headed green eyed boy’ and the punishment
for this forward behaviour is to copy a poem a hundred times (D 53).
in choosing an extract from sylvia plath’s ‘The Jailer’ – and not from
a ‘set’ text, as required – the speaker refuses to allow poetic language
to be put to mechanical use, instead determining that as reader, as
copyist, and ultimately as poet herself, she allows both plath’s poem and
her own to express the truth of her situation. ‘The Jailer’ itself marks
a fundamental estrangement from a powerful male presence, yet what
eludes the reader here is the meaning that follows from the five copied
lines. The ‘impossibility’ referred to in the final phrase is, in fact, ‘being
free’.29 plath’s poem concludes with a fierce reflection on the destructive
nature of interdependence: ‘What would the dark / do without fevers to
eat? / What would the light / do without eyes to knife’.30 The speaker
in meehan’s ‘swallows and Willows’ at first tries to be neat, then yields
to disaffection and its freer expression, ‘a looping downward scrawl’ (D
53). alienated by the teacher’s refusal to accept her efforts, she becomes
‘sulky, lonely, and cruel’, manifesting not just passive or internalized
feelings but finally an outwardly directed one. like Kristeva’s stranger
she is ‘[b]etween the two pathetic shores of courage and humiliation’.31
in her estrangement from the class and from the processes of learning,
she turns to nature: ‘out the window – swallows / and willows and sun
on the river” (D 53). This provides not only a form of imaginative escape,
but reflects (while seeming to prefigure) the importance of nature for the
adult poet, in whose work it becomes a vital aspect of self-development
and cultural critique.
This poem, like so many of meehan’s, tacitly engages with both past
and future, vividly rendering the shaping events of the later writing self
after that later self has in fact been formed. in doing so, it emphasizes
the continuing importance of the other within the self and reminds
us of the fact that identity is always in formation. it is this awareness
that drives meehan’s rewriting of particular landscapes of experience in
order to understand them more fully. one of the most striking poems
in Painting Rain also concerns the continuing significance of the act of
reading in the formation of self. ‘a remembrance of my grandfather,
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Wattie, Who taught me to read and Write’ is a sonnet that renders
the familiar landscape of meehan’s poems in a new way. The speaker
is traversing a snowy streetscape on her way to the natural history
museum, when looking up into the branches of a tree she sees a book:
There, like a trireme
on an opalescent ocean, or some creature of the upper air
come down to nest, a cargo with a forest meme,
only begotten of gall, of pulp, of page, of leaflight, of feather.
(PR 46)
The irony that the book, coming from the same material as the tree,
should ultimately come to rest in it marks a perfect unity of meehan’s
commitment to her art and to the environment. That it appears while she
is on her way to the natural history museum reinforces the restorative
power of momentary observation, of what is brought to the poet by
chance. The wonder of this sign makes it a fitting tribute to the man who
introduced her to the wonder of all signs: this poem allows the speaker
some measure of comfort in that important connection and a sense of
freedom from her own history, which the use of the present tense in the
poem itself enacts.
Throughout her career to date, meehan’s attentiveness to the city of
her birth has created some poems of extraordinary vividness, and has
also released the possibilities of transcendence in the midst of estranging
experience. as luz mar gonzález-arias has demonstrated, meehan’s
response to dublin is both physical and adaptive.32 in ‘a Child’s map
of dublin’ the speaker’s failure to find ‘Connolly’s starry plough’, either
in ‘nightskies’ or in the national museum – where history itself is being
renovated – is matched by the feeling that the city itself has changed
radically from the place of her memory:
i walk the northside streets
that whelped me; not a brick remains
of the tenement i reached the age of reason in. Whole
streets are remade, the cranes erect over eurocrat schemes
down the docks. There is nothing
to show you there
(PT 14)
meehan has always constructed selfhood in terms of place, both
in the problematic relationship with the family home and in the
larger dynamics of city and country. even in this poem of urban
community, she is imaginatively drawn by creatures – ‘oriole, kingfisher,
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sparrowhawk, nightjar’ – and finds creative sustenance and an extended
sense of belonging from this connection. The trajectory of this poem is
associative, so that the spatial quality of the city experience is expressed
directly in poetic form. These imaginative shifts ultimately affirm human
intimacy; at the close of the poem the speaker bids her companion to
slip ‘between the sheets’ and then to ‘play in the backstreets and the
tidal flats’ (PT 15). There is potential double-meaning here, since the
‘flats’ more commonly encountered in meehan’s poems are places of
overcrowded city dwelling, while we, as readers, are accustomed to the
spaces between her sheets. such interpretative slippage marks the ease
with which different environments are rendered in meehan’s work, yet
it is an ease that reveals an acute sensitivity to the relationship between
individual and environment. For meehan, even the public spaces of this
poem have the intimacy of combined familiarity and new discovery.
elsewhere, though, the private/public relationship is less easily
assimilated. in the sequence ‘City’, this dynamic is reflected both in the
relationship among the poems and in the shape of individual works.
‘hearth’, which contains an early image of the ‘fire’ of sexual expression,
is balanced at the close by the cooler: ‘you slip your moorings, cruise the
town’ (PT 19). here the woman out in the street merges with the night
city in both familiarity and invisibility:
you take Fumbally lane
to the Blackpitts, cut back by the canal.
hardly a sound you’ve made, creature
of night in grey jeans and desert boots,
familiar of shade.
(‘night Walk’, PT 20)
in spite of the integration between the figure in the poem and the
anonymity of the night, the work itself contemplates the oscillation
between the desire for intimacy and for escape, a movement that is
integral to meehan’s exploration of estrangement. The sexual affirmation
of the third poem, ‘man sleeping’, is muted by the evocation of the man
deep in sleep, as though under the sea, and therefore remote from all but
physical response. The shift of perspective in the following poem plays
with the female identification of the moon: ‘she’s up there. you’d know
the pull, / stretching you tight as a drumhead’ (‘Full moon’ PT 22).
The repetition of this phrase at the opening of the final poem, after the
woman has deduced her lover’s infidelity, accentuates the shift in tone and
image pattern that follows: ‘Choose protective colouring, camouflage, /
know your foe, every move of him’ (PT 23). here the intimacies of the
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earlier poems are permanently ruptured and the estrangement of the
woman is marked most strikingly by the divergence of her private and
public personae: while outwardly she is ‘dead casual’, inside an unsprung
wildness is coiled. The internalization of this manifestation of alterity
is significant for meehan, in that it affirms the psychological depths at
which these dynamics operate.
For Bryce, memories of place are linked to the trauma of growing up
during the troubles in northern ireland. her 2014 collection, The Whole
and Rain-domed Universe, is preoccupied by the intersection between
domestic and political worlds, envisaging the family unit within a wider
context of violence and instability. This connection reflects complex
relationships of authority that are expressed both within the family and
in the wider world. as Jenny edkins explains: ‘events seen as traumatic
seem to reflect a particular form of intimate bond between personhood
and community and, most importantly, they expose the part played
by relations of power’.33 Bryce’s long poem ‘derry’ situates the tension
between belonging and estrangement in these terms. mimicking the
opening lines of louis macneice’s ‘Carrickfergus’ – ‘i was born in Belfast
between the mountain and the gantries / to the hooting of lost sirens and
the clang of trams’ – Bryce’s poem invokes both the sensory immediacy
of the older poet’s work and his status as an outsider.34 published in
1937, against the backdrop of escalating political tensions in europe,
macneice’s poem dwells on memories of childhood upheaval during
the First World War. Bryce’s poem likewise explores insecure identity
within a set of domestic and historical co-ordinates: ‘i was born between
the Creggan and the Bogside / to the sounds of crowds and smashing
glass’ (WRU 2). The poem remembers and interweaves inherited text and
immediate experience, breaking and re-making both in the process. The
smashed glass of this first stanza becomes the ‘fixed’ looking-glass of the
second, in which the face of the speaker cannot be told apart from those
of her siblings. other boundaries are equally blurred: the overlapping
nature of religious and regional affiliations is reinforced by remembered
prayers and poems: ‘hail holy Queen’ combines with st Columba’s poem
of derry to prefigure the scene of children singing in the back of the
family’s red Cortina. This scene of innocent play is interrupted by the car’s
arrival at a checkpoint and by the transformation of the landscape of the
poem into a desolate and threatening scene: ‘the ancient walls with their
huge graffiti, / / […] snarling crossbreeds leashed to rails’ (WRU 3) – the
enduring nature of the city’s violent past exacerbated by the crowded
consonants of now barely restrained aggression.
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The dark mood that permeated the province in the 1980s is expressed
in the poem through the close interaction between different forms
of violence: the hunger strikes in the maze prison, the crowning of
Barry mcguigan as World Featherweight Champion and the domestic
violence in the speaker’s own home.35 it is only at the realization
of this private conflict that the shared perspective gives way to the
singular – the ‘we’ becomes ‘i’ – and the syntax begins to reflect the
immediacy of the disturbance: ‘my bed against the door, / i pushed
the music up as loud / as it would go and curled up on the floor / to
shut the angry voices out’ (WRU 4). This acknowledgment of domestic
strife marks a transition towards maturity on the part of the speaker
and a greater attentiveness to the ways in which political ideologies
and actions are mediated. one of the significant achievements of this
poem is its retention of youthful energy, even light-heartedness, in the
midst of serious retrospection. For Bryce, to confront what is concealed
in a close-knit family structure is to acknowledge that estrangement
is felt most acutely in a context of shared experiences. This combined
sense of intimacy and distance is an important dimension of traumatic
representation in all these works.
The Lives of Others: Intimate Strangers
For o’malley, intimacy and estrangement are also closely intertwined,
but the landscapes in which she chooses to explore these conditions
are not those of domestic suburbia but rather coastal communities
where the familiarity of the place is balanced by a sense of being on
the margins of shared experience. as eamonn Wall suggests, ‘to be on
the sea is to be liberated from the constraints that underline life on
the land, and to enter the realm of folklore and mythology’.36 many
of o’malley’s poems, such as ‘The maighdean mhara’ (WRF) and
‘The otter Woman (KW ) are inspired by this transition, yet she also
represents the western seaboard as a place of continuous vibrant life,
rather than as a community essentially lost to history.37 This space is
both the one that she is most familiar with and the one that has shaped
much of her creative life, marking her poetic fidelity to lived experience:
‘nothing that you can conjure, or manufacture, or make up, is anywhere
near as powerful as the [images] you bring with you out of childhood’.38
yet as well as being a place of familiarity and inspiration it is also a
place where the awareness of security and threat meet, exemplified in the
poem ‘seascape, errislanaan’. here a wild sea yields flotsam, including
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a strange object gathered by the speaker’s companion – ‘a pretty toy or
case / powder compact size but thicker’ (BH 23). This turns out to be an
anti-personnel device that floated in on the tide; a mechanism especially
treacherous for children who are curious about them and unaware of
the danger. Both speaker and reader experience the same distress at the
unfolding of this narrative, and then sudden fear:
There are times when the world empties of sound.
When you said, ‘disarmed, of course,’ and smiled
the tight skin on my hand tasted almonds. Then the rush
of wind falling, the words’ backthrust.
(BH 23)
even in a place of safety, the speaker is reminded of the sudden proximity
of death and destruction. Though the threat is an impersonal one, its
immediacy is striking and, like meehan, o’malley registers both the
need for vigilance and the exhilaration of risk. This tension acknowledges
the subject position of the poem as one of potential exposure that can
only be reversed with the power of hindsight.
There are other poems by o’malley that register the fate of the innocent
in war, but few are more thought-provoking than ‘The abandoned
Child’. The poem evokes the starkness of its circumstances from the
outset: ‘This is a simple photograph, a black and white picture / of
a child lying in the dust. she has no name. / Call her Baby, Beauty,
unbeloved, she is the face of our time’ (BH 101). in the choice of this
subject matter, and in the framing of this girl as a symbol of modern
strife, o’malley show how individual experience must be of universal
concern. yet she moves beyond this symbolic construct. Though ‘[e]very
poem pauses here’, o’malley continues by asking the crucial questions,
most pertinently, perhaps, ‘how long / do the doomed beauties last with
the cameras gone?’ (BH 101). acutely aware of the act of representation
as one that brings responsibilities, the poet imagines the futures of this
girl from washerwoman to physicist. The recurring image of the cosmos
draws together this ambitious intellectualism with the disappearance of
the marginalized from view ‘into the black hole of heaven’. Though light
streams into heaven it emits no signs of hope:
she has no name, this beauty lying in the dirt
between well made sonnets and free verse,
without an i or you or us, between the hand’s release
and the rattle of the gorta box. read her eyes
(BH 102)
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This unnamed woman has no subjectivity except that provided by art
or charity, yet in being invited to read her eyes we enter into intimacy
with her, forced by the perspective of the poem to draw close to her
human plight. This alters the treatment of estrangement significantly,
confronting us not with the other within the self, but instead the self
within the other. in this way self-knowledge is shaped as much by the
response to the suffering stranger as it is to one’s own suffering.
This dynamic is also central to meehan’s most widely read poem,
‘The statue of the virgin at granard speaks’.39 The poem focuses on
the death of ann lovett in childbirth: in life, lovett concealed her
pregnancy; her death brought the double standards of irish sexual life
to national attention. in voicing the divine, meehan not only draws
attention to human failing, but to the complicity of religion in the girl’s
victimization. The isolation of the statue from human life hints at the
experience of the girl herself and her loneliness in death:
The whole town tucked up safe and dreaming,
even wild things gone to earth, and i
stuck up here in this grotto, without as much as
star or planet to ease my vigil.
(MMW 40)
The desolation of the landscape combines realism and pathetic fallacy
– meehan’s layered poetic process is capable of working as direct
representation and for symbolic purposes. The violence that is such an
important part of meehan’s social critique is evident here both in the
‘ghetto lanes / where men hunt each other’ and in the bloody Christian
imagery of the ‘man crucified: / […] / the thorny crown, the hammer
blow of iron / into wrist and ankle, the sacred bleeding heart’ (MMW
41). By juxtaposing these dark and terrible scenes, meehan emphasizes
the distorted nature of potent Catholic mythology. in doing so she also
renders the perspective of the virgin as one of passivity and alienation,
one whose being ‘cries out to be incarnate, incarnate’. yet her vision of
the ‘honeyed bed’ of human sexuality is an ironic one, since her very
presence excludes the free expression of love, valorizing instead the
self-denying figure of the virgin. The early moments in the poem, when
the positions of statue and girl could be conflated, are tellingly refuted
at the close:
though she cried out to me in extremis
i did not move,
i didn’t lift a finger to help her,
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i didn’t intercede with heaven,
nor whisper the charmed word in god’s ear.
(MMW 42)
The relentless nature of this denial simultaneously marks the girl’s
estrangement from all the sources of support and comfort that should
have been available to her, and the alienation of religion from humility
and compassion.
This deeply felt conviction on meehan’s part is at the core of her
poetic achievement: that the world of the spirit has an important role to
play in addressing human suffering and deprivation. ‘dharmakaya’, the
title poem of her groundbreaking collection published in 2000, moves
towards a direct engagement with the spiritual through a meditation
on death. influenced by Buddhist thought, both poem and collection
consider the relationship between being and non-being: inseparable
conditions, together constitutive of meaning. as Kathryn Kirkpatrick
has pointed out, the breath is the structuring device of this poem,
marking its stanzaic structure.40 it could also be argued that the entire
poem exists after the last breath, since it begins ‘When you step out into
death / with a deep breath’ and ends with death as the ‘still pool’ in the
midst of the ‘anarchic flow’ (D 11). poised thus on the threshold between
being and non-being, the poem releases its tensions through the slow
trajectory of its meaning and the deliberate pauses, such as those that
take place between the second and third stanzas: ‘Breathe / slow- / ly out
before the foot finds solid earth again’. The poem is also significant for
drawing together urban and natural worlds – ‘the street’ and ‘the woods’
– to approach human experience in its essential states. it is possible to
argue that all the states of estrangement represented in meehan’s work
are leading here: to an awareness of the fundamental sameness of self
and other. The representations of estrangement within familial and love
relationships are not only traumatic memories reclaimed in language,
they also represent the perfect ambiguity of the familiar and the strange.
They are suggestive too of the incorporation of the stranger within the
self, which is such an important part of meehan’s poetic journey.
This poem, which expresses so eloquently the ways in which the
individual woman is failed by the culture of which she is a part, speaks
to an element of o’malley’s work which also seeks to unite private grief
with patterns of trauma and loss brought about by the great Famine. as
a native of Connemara, o’malley feels a close affinity with the patterns
of death and emigration that shaped irish experience in the wake of the
famine. ‘The Boning hall’, title poem of her 2002 collection, sets these
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historical events in a specifically feminist framework, invoking american
poet adrienne rich’s demands to reach the material substance of the
past, rather than its narrative presence.41 her poem, ‘diving into the
Wreck’, is used by o’malley to contemplate the horror of the coffin
ships on which so many died journeying to america:
no one goes diving into coffin ships but if they did
with the desire for pearls quelled they’d see wonders:
limbs streaming by, the rush of blood, oxygen, water,
bubbling with the slipstream.
(BH 14)
Juxtaposing underwater treasures with the loss of human potentiality,
o’malley does not flinch from the immediacy of the abject body, its
loss of integrity the direct result of social injustice. in this poem she
rejects the metaphorical rendering of underwater life – the essence of
what has been lost slips past the clichés of the submerged world with its
‘fabulous galleons’ and gold coins. Though ephemeral, it is relentlessly
itself, bearing witness to the sufferings of history that are not distant
but immediate and individually felt. This experience is represented by
the song of the bone-harp, ‘not of the names for things you cannot say
/ but the long round call of the thing itself’ (BH 14).
This confrontation of what is traumatic in the irish past acknowledges
what is traumatic in the lived present. These three poets, from different
backgrounds and regions, articulate the complex and changing relationship
between writing and the realization of self-knowledge. all three meet the
aesthetic and ethical challenges that attend the representation of private
matter in poetic form, either by addressing the practice of representation
directly or by creating an imaginative world within which subjectivity
itself acquires new perspectives. These practices allow the representation
of the personal past to shape more extensive forms of ethical questioning
in the work of many irish women poets writing today.
Notes
1 some of halbwach’s contemporaries, in particular marc Bloch, objected to this
transition from individual to group perspectives. recent scholars have questioned
the value of the concept of collective memory itself. see astrid erll, ‘Cultural
memory studies: an introduction’, in astrid erll and ansgar nünning (eds),
Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (new
york and Berlin: Walter de gruyter, 2008), pp. 1–2 and Barbara a. misztal,
‘memory and history’, in oona Frawley (ed.), Memory Ireland, vol. 1, History and
Modernity (syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2010), pp. 4–6.
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2 erll, ‘Cultural memory studies’, p. 5.
3 Jenny edkins, in Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
university press, 2003), argues that traumatic memory fundamentally disrupts the
linear view of history by keeping the past alive in the present and creating a ‘new
story’ of these experiences (p. xiv).
4 eileen o’halloran and Kelli maloy, ‘an interview with paula meehan’, Contemporary
Literature 43.1 (spring 2002), p. 7.
5 For an examination of meehan’s work from a psychoanalytic perspective, see
anne mulhall, ‘memory, poetry and recovery: paula meehan’s transformational
aesthetics’, in An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts 5.1–2
(spring/Fall 2009), pp. 142–55.
6 Jacques derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. rachel Bowlby (stanford, Ca: stanford
university press, 1997), p. 55.
7 among the younger generation of irish women poets, sara Berkeley, Colette Bryce,
vona groarke, sinéad morrissey and Caitríona o’reilly have all lived abroad for
extended periods.
8 paula meehan, untranscribed interview with danielle sered, special Collections
archives, Woodruff library, emory university, atlanta, ga, 1999. Quoted in
Kathryn Kirkpatrick, ‘Between Country and City: paula meehan’s eco-Feminist
poetics’, in Christine Cusick (ed.), Out of the Earth: Eco-Critical Readings of Irish
Texts (Cork: Cork university press, 2009), p. 124.
9 annie Finch, ‘Coherent decentering: toward a new model of the poetic self’,
in Kate sontag and david graham (eds), After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography
(saint paul, mn: graywolf press, 2001), pp. 137–8.
10 ‘to the island: mary o’malley in inishmore’, rtÉ radio 1 documentary, produced
by lorelei harris, 1994 [28:22].
11 eamonn Wall, ‘tracing the poetry of mary o’malley’, Writing the Irish West:
Ecologies and Traditions (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2011),
p. 84.
12 patricia Boyle haberstroh, My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and
Art (syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2001), p. 44.
13 Charles Bainbridge, ‘The great escape’. review of The Full Indian Rope Trick by
Colette Bryce, Guardian, January 29, 2005, www.theguardian.com/books/2005/
jan/29/featuresreviews.guardianreview12.
14 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. leon s. roudiez (new york: Columbia
university press, 1991), p. 1.
15 sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. david mclintock (london: penguin, 2003),
p. 125.
16 sara ahmed, ‘Who Knows? Knowing strangers and strangerness’, Australian
Feminist Studies 15.31 (2000), p. 49.
17 maurice halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. ditter and vida yazdi
ditter (new york: harper Colophon Books, 1980), p. 38.
18 see ian mcBride, ‘memory and national identity in modern ireland’, in ian
mcBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge
university press, 2001), p. 7.
19 o’halloran and maloy, ‘an interview with paula meehan’, p. 13.
20 negative critical responses to eavan Boland’s repeated use of personal experience
in both her prose and poetry often comment on the poet’s privileged position,
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21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
suggesting that private revelation can affirm an experiential gap between speaker
and reader rather than the desired affinity. see Batten, ‘Boland, mcguckian, ní
Chuilleanáin and the Body of the nation’, pp. 173–86; also Charles i. armstrong,
Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space, and the Past (Basingstoke: palgrave macmillan,
2009), pp. 160–6.
ernst van alphen, ‘symptoms of discursivity: experience, memory and trauma’,
in mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and leo spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall
in the Present (hanover, nh: university press of new england, 1999), p. 25.
dominick laCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (ithaca,
ny and london: Cornell university press, 2004), p. 117.
gabriele schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma
(new york: Columbia university press, 2010), p. 4.
van alphen, ‘symptoms of discursivity’, pp. 28–30.
Catriona Clutterbuck, ‘The artistry of Freefall’. review of Dharmakaya, Metre 10
(autumn 2001), p. 111.
o’halloran and maloy, ‘an interview with paula meehan’, p. 13.
in ‘to the island’ o’malley comments on the importance of the poetic process in
shaping the representation of trauma: ‘good poetry refines the pain that is felt – it’s
a constant refinement and cutting away’ [29:11].
Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 15.
sylvia plath, ‘The Jailer’, Ariel: The Restored Edition (london: Faber & Faber, 2004),
pp. 23–4.
ibid., p. 24.
Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 8.
luz mar gonzález-arias, ‘in dublin’s Fair City: Citified embodiments in paula
meehan’s urban landscapes’, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture and the
Arts 5.1–2 (spring/Fall 2009), pp. 34–49.
Jenny edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, p. 4.
louis macneice, ‘Carrickfergus’, Collected Poems (london: Faber & Faber, 1966),
pp. 69–70.
over the summer of 1981 ten republican prisoners in the maze prison died on
hunger strike. The campaign, which demanded special Category status for political
prisoners – including the right to wear their own clothes and exemption from prison
work – was called off after the families of the remaining hunger strikers indicated
their intention to seek medical intervention for the men. Barry mcguigan, a
monaghan-born boxer, became World Featherweight Champion in 1985 after he
defeated Juan laporte in london. mcguigan, a Catholic married to a protestant,
was popular across both communities in northern ireland, as well as with both
irish and British audiences. he became a symbol of neutrality at a time of sectarian
tension.
Wall, ‘tracing the poetry of mary o’malley’, p. 74.
ibid., p. 79. Wall compares o’malley’s poetry to Boland’s in this respect: where
Boland sees the voices of women from the west as in need of recovery, o’malley
‘does not separate the historical West from its present condition’.
‘to the island’ [8:38].
on the afternoon of January 31, 1984, 15-year-old ann lovett was discovered in a
grotto just outside the town of granard, Co. longford by passers-by. she had given
birth to a baby boy, who had already died. ann herself was suffering from shock
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pr i vat e m e mory a n d t h e c ons t ruc t ion of su bje c t i v i t y
and died later that day in hospital. Coming just months after a divisive referendum
on contraception and abortion, ann lovett’s death became the focus for national
debate on attitudes towards single parenthood. see ‘ann lovett: The story that
Wouldn’t remain local’, Scannal, rtÉ 1 television documentary, produced by
sarah ryder, 2004.
40 Kathryn Kirkpatrick, ‘“Between Breath and no Breath”: Witnessing Class trauma
in paula meehan’s Dharmakaya’, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture and
the Arts 1.2 (Fall 2005), p. 50.
41 ‘i came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / i
came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.’ adrienne
rich, ‘diving into the Wreck’, The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001
(new york: W.W. norton, 2002), pp. 101–3.
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ii
Achievements
ch a p ter four
eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’s
spaces of memory
eiléan ní chuilleanáin’s spaces of memory
eiléan ní Chuilleanáin is one of the most significant poets to emerge
in ireland in the second half of the twentieth century. The relationship
between past and present is important in her work, not only because
memory often shapes her subject matter but also because of the uncanny
ways in which temporal difference is elided, creating gaps in meaning,
or places where language is used in cryptic ways.1 These give rise to the
formal challenges of her work: ‘the world she creates in a poem has an
enigmatic centre’, writes eamon grennan, ‘one sees the facts clearly
enough, but the purpose and point of these clearly realised facts aren’t
easy to pin down’.2 For ní Chuilleanáin the overlapping territory of
memory and history is often marked by silence – many of her poems
are concerned with what is withheld from expression and what this
means both for the individual and the community. in her work there
are aspects of the private that can never become fully public: experiences
or phenomena that remain resistant to observation and analysis. her
engagement with these elements creates a pattern in her work – a
repeated concern with the ways in which knowledge materializes in the
lives and practices of both individuals and communities. This chapter
examines her poems as objects that carry the past without giving direct
expression to it. in this way, ní Chuilleanáin’s oeuvre provokes us to
consider how the past is mediated, and in particular how the private,
unstated past relates to ideas of shared narrative.
This emphasis on privacy has important ramifications for the
operation of memory in ní Chuilleanáin’s work. in particular, it
draws attention to the relationship between private and shared spaces
as both physical and linguistic entities. The recurrence of personal and
familial memories draws attention to the question of shared narratives
and their broader implications for how we might understand the past.
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psychologist Frederic Bartlett found that people recall ‘not the presented
[narrative] material directly, but a judgment which they made about
this material when they saw it originally’.3 This dynamic is applicable
to some of the processes of remembering in ní Chuilleanáin’s work,
where perspectives slip between a story recalled and other, more fleeting,
impressions. For her the political is not judged to be outside the private
sphere but is an important dimension of it – an understanding that
has its roots in her family history.4 Born in Cork to a literary family
with a republican lineage, ní Chuilleanáin gained an early appreciation
of the significance of the gaelic past, especially for munster literary
history: ‘history’, she writes, ‘has been particularly alive for me as
for many irish people. We are […] told it is bad for us. But like
others who share my linguistic background, i am aware always of the
presence of the past and the strangeness, the untypical edge on the way
i read history.’5 This ‘strangeness’ seems to stem from ireland’s dual
language tradition, and from the ways in which the experiences of the
past are shaped by the language through which they are understood
and discussed. later in the same essay, ní Chuilleanáin elaborates
on the specificity of linguistic experience by recording her dislike of
the ‘blurred’ boundaries that constitute ‘anglo-irish’ literature. her
wish that languages ‘keep their sharp edges, their strangeness to one
another’6 confirms the idea that language can function as an agent of
concealment, as well as one of expression.
her concern with the intersection of narrative history and folk
tradition has shaped her reflection on the relationship between
individual and shared versions of the past, which in turn has problematized the function of collective memory. it acknowledges in particular
the symbiotic relationship between memory and identity, as John
gillis has suggested: ‘The core meaning of any individual or group
identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained
by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by an assumed
identity.’7 The transition from memory into history is important in this
context. according to maurice halbwachs, history arises when the past
‘is no longer included within the sphere of thought of existing groups’.8
since group memory is focused on its own networks of meaning its
construction of the past is not ruptured but smooth.9 Thus it is in the
formation of history that certain perspectives are subsumed and lines
of memory broken. This is especially true of groups that are marginalized, either politically or socially, by the prevailing power structures,
and ní Chuilleanáin’s attention to the lives of women, and to those
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in religious life, shows her sensitivity to these discontinuities in the
narrative of history.
she came to this position early: in her introduction to Irish Women:
Image and Achievement, a book she edited for arlen house in 1985, she
suggested that ‘the study of the irish woman’s image through history
is also the study of the gap, most easily appreciated in the last couple
of centuries, between that image and what many irish women have
actually experienced’.10 This distinction calls attention to the dynamics
of memory and history, to the differences between experience and
representation and to its intellectual and ethical implications. history
may seem remote from the life of the individual, which is expressed
through personal recollection of experiences. yet the contingency of
memory is a key dimension to the understanding of the past, and to its
simultaneous presence and absence in literature. For ní Chuilleanáin
this has been an important motivation in her creative life:
it seemed to me that it was not language or image but subject that really
defined me as a poet; i wished to look at the feminine condition through
the equal glass of the common language, making it my subject on my own
terms. Was a female subject one which came merely from an assemblage of
concerns that have been brushed into a corner labeled ‘women’?11
she has disputed eavan Boland’s notion of women being ‘outside
history’, not least, it seems, because of its metaphorical formulation: ‘i
think, on the other hand, that women are very much there in history.
They are often there as the victims or the people being labelled or
enclosed, shut away in a way for us unimaginable.’12 The correlation
here between physical and linguistic concealment is an important
one in ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, which often represents architectural
structures – churches and convents as well as private homes – as places
of both containment and revelation. The extent to which these can be
the particular focus of imaginative states reveals their importance as
spaces not just of memory but of possibility.13 in an interview published
in Éire-Ireland ní Chuilleanáin speaks of the significance of ‘dreams
about houses which you have lived in, in which you find there’s an extra
room or something has changed, something remarkable has happened
to it […] i think the house and the body both come into that’.14 in
linking the house and the body here she strengthens the emphasis
on place as formative of identity: both house and body carry layers
of experience, representing time by material or sensory means. These
formations allow her poems to remain distinct yet also suggest spaces
of return, where past experience coexists with present knowledge. This
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act of return is an important dimension of ní Chuilleanáin’s creative
practice too, as images and phrases reappear to remind the reader
of the ineradicable nature of memory and of its power to shape the
development of thought.
Personal Effects: Towards The Magdalene Sermon
The individual’s relation to his or her own past, and to the shared past
of their family, is used by ní Chuilleanáin to extend and interrogate
the representation of history in her work. patricia Boyle haberstroh has
acknowledged the oblique form of this investigation, describing how
ní Chuilleanáin ‘revises well-known figures and narratives, sometimes
using the present, or her own personal experience, as an entrance
into the past’.15 in her poems domestic space and the private lives of
families create the tensions from which meaning can emerge. yet in
these settings memory and meaning can be at once closely connected
and strangely divergent – often it is the sense of what is unspoken or
unknown that governs action in the poem, reminding the reader of the
partial nature of all interpretation. For this reason, the circular shape of
Boland’s oeuvre and the emphasis she lays on repeated statement form
no part of ní Chuilleanáin’s aesthetic, in which key tropes are layered
and transformed in each new collection. For the speakers in Boland’s
work the need to articulate experience becomes a self-conscious one, as
guinn Batten suggests:
in the gap between Boland’s view that a woman writer finds her voice by
becoming her own subject and representing it faithfully, and ní Chuilleanáin’s
that the woman writer finds that voice through the objects of her poem …
we might locate an important and ongoing theoretical debate concerning
the possibility of a fully democratic community.16
here the contextualization of memory becomes an important issue,
drawing the reader outward from a stated poetic subjectivity. Batten sees
ní Chuilleanáin’s desire to represent, without claiming to speak for, the
experience of others as an important achievement in her work.
The textual environments that this poet creates are significant in
other ways too, especially for their attention to the power of the world
of physical objects to shape our understanding of present and past.
This relationship is a complex one, especially in its links between the
environment of the poem and its visual impact; the object therefore works
on two levels, as both image and context. This is an important dimension
of ní Chuilleanáin’s work given the overlapping worlds of renaissance
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scholarship and poetic craft that shape her writing. in negotiating the
past through objects, the poet can create a network of signification that
moves back and forth in time. The artefact, surviving from the past,
becomes part of present experience: ní Chuilleanáin shares with Boland
a sense of these objects as bearers of meaning, but in the former poet’s
work they are used to question the notion of fixed meanings rather than
to operate emblematically. ní Chuilleanáin’s treatment of memory is
therefore closely linked to the specificity of individual lives as a conduit
for the larger patterns of history.
This dimension is present from the poet’s earliest work. The Second
Voyage, published first in 1977, begins and ends with poems of private
space: texts that conjure imaginative and intellectual processes through
built structures. ‘The lady’s tower’ unites water and sky: while the grey
wall ‘slices downward and meets / a sliding flooded stream’, the thatch
‘Converses with spread sky, / heronries’ (SV 11), and it is from the
elevated bedroom that the imaginative transformation of the entire tower
is realized. The final poem, ‘a gentleman’s Bedroom’, returns to the
image of the ‘high windowpane’ as one that gives a vantage point over
the surrounding scene. yet this room is empty and its objects suggest the
detached character of its sometime occupant; the large bed is matched by
the masculine paraphernalia of scholarship – the ‘blue volumes shelved
at hand’, the fountain pen and cigar box (SV 68).
This exploration of male and female experiences through differentiated
spaces is intensified in The Magdalene Sermon (1989), a collection that
marked a transition towards greater integration of personal and historical
material. ‘The liturgy’, placed second in the collection, records the
division between the masculine performance of ritual and the as-yetunrealized actions of the waiting females. suggestive of the different
roles of men and women within the religious life, the poem is ambiguous
concerning the relationship between action and motivation. The man
seems attracted by a life of words, planning to study ‘the epigrams incised
/ on millennial plaques’, yet he is marked out by the ‘sacred metal’ he
carries and drawn into ceremonial acts. The obscurity of the ritual and
its context is heightened by the use of direct statements throughout the
poem: ‘he has been invited … / he stands … / They are waiting …’
(MS 10). The clutter of the boat and the energy of the natural scene
is set against the emptiness of the house in which the women remain,
enclosed yet not quite shut away: ‘They hear the hinges of the big door
closing, / They know the length of the ceremony, they know / They have
just forty minutes’ (MS 10). here the power of ‘habit memory’ – the
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memory enacted through ritual and observance – is challenged by the
intentions of the women, intentions that are still unknown to the reader
at the close of the poem.17
‘macmoransbridge’, from the same collection, is similarly suspended
between past and future. Beginning with the word ‘although’, it is a text
that hinges on apparent contradictions. The sisters who stay on in the
house after the death of their brother leave his will unopened, so that
‘his posthumous plan of slights and surprises’ – with all its alliterative
neatness – is never enacted (MS 19). Written texts have no agency here:
the dead man’s will remains in the drawer and his ‘diaries and letters
[are] posted abroad’ (MS 19). a later poem, ‘The secret’, will invoke
similar documentary evidence – the books, the ‘signatures on slips of
ravelled paper’ (BS 42) – to suggest a process of collective forgetting:
‘instead of burning the book or getting its value / They hid it and were
silent, even at home, / so that the history of that lost year / remained
for each one her own delusion’ (BS 42). here both written and spoken
words remain undisclosed, so that even within the confines of the
family the secret is preserved. yet the memory that kept these women
isolated must in the end be superseded by action; by the selling of their
land and even their bodily resources. likewise, in ‘macmoransbridge’,
the house resounds with the activities of the women: their constant
movement, the cooking, washing and reckoning of household accounts.
ironically, it is their preservation of the markers of their brother’s life
– his dropped dressing gown and extinguished fire – that thwart his
ability to wield power after death. The everyday objects he intended for
sale are still being used with pleasure by the women themselves, while
the adornments left to them remain hidden:
The tarnished silver teapot, to be sold
and the money given to a niece for her music-lessons,
is polished and used on sundays. The rings and pendants
devised by name to each dear sister are still
tucked between silk scarves in his wardrobe, where he found
and hid them again, the day they buried his grandmother.
(MS 19)
ní Chuilleanáin’s poems are filled with such objects – personal and
domestic items that act as interpretative clues, not only for the reader,
but also for the characters within these texts. as well as playing an
important role in the creation of historical and cultural context, the
materiality of these texts speaks of the transmission of memories through
objects themselves: ‘as physical materials, artefacts provide an authentic
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link to the past and as such can be reexperienced’.18 Their prominence
in these poems reminds us that texts themselves are artefacts to which
the reader can return to reiterate and renew meaning. Throughout the
work, written materials – letters, documents and books – are mixed
with other household and personal belongings in ways that emphasize
their continuous use and their significant presence in the poems. in
‘Consolation’, the wife of a dead man retrieves his personal effects, yet
these tell an ambiguous story of his life: the ‘codes, / lists, cards, his
multiplied signature’ are suggestive of subterfuge or even espionage, and
the cause of his death uncertain. The repetition of the transgressive verb
‘to rifle’ reinforces the apparent personal attack that the poem records
yet, in spite of this impression, ‘it seems little was taken’ (MS 30). The
ambiguity of this interpretation is increased by the ‘repeated story’ of
the man’s preparedness for death, a version that gains little imaginative
purchase within the poem itself. yet this serves only to emphasize the
untrustworthy nature even of shared narratives and the impossibility
of knowing anything with certainty. Just as the woman struggles to
understand the exact circumstances of her husband’s death, neither can
he himself recall in detail the incident he experienced. The shifts in
the poem between hospital basement and alleyway, as well as between
omniscient perspectives and direct speech, suggest the limitations of
memory: though its images are vivid (the man recalls seeing a ‘sliver
of an arch’ and ‘one trickling thread’), the act of remembrance is
incomplete. The severance that the poem explores is thus both spatial
and temporal and has a disturbing effect on the listening wife within
the poem, as well as on the reader.
Though past and present often coexist in ní Chuilleanáin’s texts, there
are many poems in which the relationship between these states becomes
the particular focus of scrutiny. ‘The informant’ again begins with an
object – it describes a photograph ‘of the old woman at her kitchen
table / With a window beyond (fuchsias, a henhouse, the sea)’ (MS 36).
The document of the past contains both these unspecific details and
the written record of ‘her name and age, her late husband’s occupation’;
in this it draws attention to the relationship between the general and
the particular, and the levels of meaning that can be drawn from these
details. a young man is listening to a recording of the woman recalling
folk beliefs, but attempts to fix the past prove fraught with difficulty: the
tape-recorder breaks down, ‘the machine, / gone haywire, a tearing, an
electric / tempest. Then a stitch of silence. / something has been lost’
(MS 36). our mediation of the past can be destructive, resulting not in
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increased understanding but in a loss of meaning. as Borbála Faragó
remarks, ‘“The informant” seems to resist interpretation which is wedded
to communicative action. We cannot expose or recover what “actually
happens” in this poem.’19 here a gap opens between the mysterious
accounts of the supernatural realm and the reasoned questions that
provoke and limit them, especially at the close of the poem where a
twist of humour at once makes the uncanny experience more normal
and more extraordinary for listener and reader alike:
You find this more strange than the yearly miracle
Of the loaf turning into a child?
Well, that’s natural, she says,
i often baked the bread for that myself.
(MS 37)
here the individual is the repository of meaning, which cannot be
transferred to any other medium with ease, so that attempts to bypass
the human agency are doomed to failure.
This realization of the complex relationship between the experience of
the woman and the way in which the interviewer can access and present
this information compels the reader to contemplate how the experience
of the single individual, the poet herself, enters and shapes the work.
Biographical readings of poetry by women can overdetermine meaning,
but the role of the poet’s individual perspective in selecting and synthesizing material remains important. in particular, ní Chuilleanáin’s own
comments on this poem problematize decontextualized readings:
in ‘The informant’ i was actually writing about – which i’ve never done, and
i don’t usually identify with – a particular death in the north, the deaths
of the soldiers who were dragged out of a car at a funeral and shot … it
seemed particularly awful … i was writing again about ways of speaking
about these things.20
This oblique perspective on an event noted for its horrific visibility is
significant. yet, like paula meehan, ní Chuilleanáin is concerned with
the difficulties of speaking about traumatic events, about the tenuous
relationship between language and memory. Just as the traumatized
subject does not directly remember the events, but exhibits the memory
as sensation, so the details of the killing are displaced for the poet into
an exploration of the difficulties of bearing witness to experience. This
displacement is characteristic of ní Chuilleanáin’s work. Though she
rarely deals explicitly with the narrative of modern irish history, its
events can be foundational to her texts; the apparently unbreakable
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chain of violence alluded to here reveals connections between past and
present that demand interrogation. her poetic practice draws attention
to this necessary transition and to the important role of the individual
perspective on ethical questions. ‘Can i be the only one alive / able to
remember those times?’ asks the speaker in the later poem ‘a Witness’
(BS 43), yet, in spite of the desire for silence, the hope that ‘others’ will
bear the burden of memory and speech, it is the individual experience
that will shape our understanding of the poetic world and make the
search for objective meaning ultimately futile.
The Book of Revelation:
Poem as Reliquary in The Brazen Serpent
While ‘The informant’ obliquely addresses the role of individual memory
in mediating traumatic group events, other poems by ní Chuilleanáin
explore the intersection of private experience and cultural memory in
more historically distant but no less resonant contexts. a poem such
as ‘saint margaret of Cortona’ plays with the links between the past
and language, here using the biography of the italian saint – and her
connection to ireland as the patroness of one of dublin’s lock hospitals
– as a means to explore the imaginative challenges presented by history.21
The poem begins with the creation of cultural memory; the priest
tells the early story of the sanctified woman, drawing attention to the
importance of the name as a signifier of identity: ‘She had become, the
preacher hollows his voice, / a name not to be spoken, the answer / to
the witty man’s loose riddle’ (BS 24). attention is drawn to the mouth
and its imagery: the hollowed voice, the jaws, her teeth. These last
physical signifiers, the slowest to decay, remain present to the congregation as a relic of the saint. Just as her life story is subject to omissions
and embellishments, so the fragments of her physical body are concealed
by ornamentation:
under the flourishing canopy
Where trios of angels mime the last trombone,
Behind the silver commas of the shrine,
in the mine of the altar her teeth listen and smile.
(BS 24).
By contrast, the words used to describe this woman are omnipresent,
transformed into living entities with agency of their own: ‘The names
flew and multiplied; she turned / her back but the names clustered
and hung’ (BS 24). two specific names appear clearly: that of the
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saint herself, which is the title of the poem, and the italicized word
‘whore’ – unspoken yet visible in the text of the poem. The trauma
of memory persists here, as past violence continues to haunt the saint:
‘the bloody scene: the wounds / in the body of her child’s father /
tumbled in a ditch’ (BS 24). This is one of two significant deaths in
the poem: and the other is that of the saint herself, which does not
mark the beginning of change and decay but instead a refutation of
it. language threatens to be the source of damnation, yet it is also at
the root of redemption – the names clustering at her shoulder bones
resemble angel’s wings. The poem ‘contains’ the history of the saint but
only partially reveals it. The tension this creates heightens the poet’s
exploration of how verbal and visual metaphors function to interpret
the past without fully disclosing it.
‘The real Thing’, also from The Brazen Serpent, again links ní
Chuilleanáin’s representation of the female with questions of revelation.
The material world once more plays an important role in the interpretative scheme but here – and in many of her poems of religious life
– it has acquired the specific power of metaphor, and with it a greater
weight of meaning. Within this poem the relic is a symbol of religious
significance – and thus a symbol of symbolism itself – as well as being
constitutive of new poetic meaning:
true stories wind and hang like this
shuddering loop wreathed on a lapis lazuli
Frame. she says, this is the real thing.
she veils it again and locks up.
(BS 16)
objects that express religious truths are enclosed to ensure their
integrity but this concealment keeps them at a distance from the
human subjects who would benefit from the revelation. likewise, poetic
meaning may be obscured by the materiality of the text and its particular
mode of transmission. in both cases, the significance passes to the object
itself rather than to its underlying meaning; it is the presence of this
object that ensures the continuity of religious or literary tradition. sister
Custos – her name means guardian – is an apparently unimportant
figure, yet she is the living channel between past and present meaning.
in the course of the poem she is transformed from a victim of circumstance, unable to liberate herself from the constraints of her existence, to
a speaking subject;22 as ní Chuilleanáin herself puts it, ‘this woman, her
life is not really all that great, and she is looking after a fragment, but it
is real’.23 The poem draws more lasting attention to what is hidden than
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to what is revealed, suggesting that the ‘real’ is in fact what is intangible,
what cannot be expressed in language. in this way, shared beliefs about
the past are more smoothly disseminated than the perspective of the
individual. The bones of the saints are venerated at the expense of the
body of the living nun, whose experience is unrecorded and whose story
remains untold:
her history is a blank sheet,
her vows a folded paper locked like a well.
The torn end of the serpent
tilts the lace edge of the veil.
The real thing, the one free foot kicking
under the white sheet of history.
(BS 16)
to suggest that ‘the real thing’ is in fact the nun herself, involves an
acknowledgement of the importance of this woman’s history, and a
movement away from a version of the past that venerates its significant
objects while leaving narratives of the marginal life untouched. yet
the seclusion of some of these lives makes the revelation sensitive – a
breaching of private life intentionally chosen. ní Chuilleanáin’s oblique
style indicates the delicate balance between the visible and the invisible
in the material of her poems, and reminds us of its ethical implications.
For ní Chuilleanáin, all forms of memory are relational, a characteristic highlighted by the spatial construction of temporal interactions
in her poetry. The past is often examined through a heightened
attention to place and, in particular, as irene gilsenan nordin has
pointed out, to the relationship between interior and exterior spaces.
This relationship provides an apt metaphor for the larger dynamics of
private and public that shape ní Chuilleanáin’s deployment of memory
in her work. her marked interest in the role of women in religious
life leads her to explore the relationship between the individual nun
and her community by means of spatial constructs. ‘The architectural
metaphor’ uses a religious building to highlight the arrangement of
meaning and, in particular, to draw attention to the ways in which
the worlds of the body and the spirit can overlap. eamon grennan
has commented on the importance of architectural references in ní
Chuilleanáin’s work and in this thematic context claims that ‘the
palpable force and solid presence of architecture itself, so reassuringly
there, can stand as some form of endorsement for this intersection
(and therefore continuum) between these separated worlds’.24 The title
of this poem draws attention to the deliberate play of meaning: the
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partly ruined convent is the place from which the layers of human
relationship unfold. its quiet enclosure is ruptured thus:
now light scatters, a door opens, laughter breaks in,
a young girl barefoot, a man pushing her
Backwards against the hatch –
it flies up suddenly –
There lies the foundress, pale
in her funeral sheets, her face turned west
searching for the rose-window. it shows her
What she never saw from any angle but this:
(BS 14)
The sudden intrusion with its sexual energy gives way with equal
suddenness to the body of the nun: movement turns to stasis, life
becomes death and a new angle of view – this time on the past.
revelation is powerful, but here it occurs when everyday life beyond
the convent walls is made manifest, rather than with the appearance
of a spiritual vision. This reversal brings a renewed acknowledgment
of the distance that religious life imposes on its adherents: ‘help is at
hand / Though out of reach’ (BS 15). ‘The architectural metaphor’ is
a poem full of thresholds of experience and understanding and these
occur at several levels: the speaker who is hearing the history of the
convent explained; the young barefoot girl in a moment of sexual
anticipation; the foundress seeing her past self; the reader absorbing all
of these moments. The use of tercets emphasizes the unexpected nature
of the poem’s semantic progression; its uneven line lengths, syntactical
digressions, shifting consonantal patterns all contribute to this effect.
These thresholds of meaning are imitated also in the imagery of the
poem – the changing border near which the convent was built; the
wall behind which the radio whispers; the opening door admitting the
young lovers; the hatch which flies up disclosing the foundress and the
rose window to which her head is turned. The sheer proliferation, and
permeability, of these divisions stands in marked contrast to the locked
reliquaries and bricked up windows of ‘The real Thing’. here past and
present cannot be definitively separated; memory becomes experience,
rather than the other way around.
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Spaces of Mourning in The Brazen Serpent
Though The Brazen Serpent, published in 1994, features many poems
in which history is the focus of attention, it is also a volume that
is illuminated by events in the poet’s own life, in particular by the
deaths of her mother and sister. as well as including some poems that
address these experiences directly, the collection as a whole considers the
difficulties inherent in representing grief; how what cannot be ‘spoken’
may yet be expressed in meaningful ways. here ní Chuilleanáin
traverses these difficult personal memories with particular care and
subtlety, with such subtlety in fact that without some explanatory
comments it would be difficult to determine the exact emotional focus
of some of these poems. here love is expressed in understated ways, as
though in support of Julia Kristeva’s assertion that the language of love
is an allusive one.25 Kristeva also suggests that feelings of love are akin
to those of fear: ‘fear of crossing and desire to cross the boundaries
of the self’.26 in this way, we begin to understand the constructed
boundaries depicted elsewhere in the book – its containment of human
actions and artefacts – as part of a larger investigation of emotional
restraint. ní Chuilleanáin’s explorations of subjectivity deepen at this
stage in her creative life, emphasizing the importance of private memory
as a shaping force on her poetics.
The structure of The Brazen Serpent is important in drawing attention
to this dynamic: it begins with the section ‘two poems’, dated 1994,
before continuing with ‘poems 1989–1993’, yet the opening works,
though presented separately, are in many ways integrated into the
prevailing concerns of the book as a whole. one of these concerns
is the keeping of secrets, which ní Chuilleanáin sees as a means to
self-expression. ‘passing over in silence’ accentuates this aspect – the
woman witnesses an event of violence and abjection yet does not disclose
it: ‘she never told what she saw in the wood’; ‘she kept the secret of
the woman lying in darkness’; ‘she held her peace about the man who
waited’ (BS 23). Though the poem is set within a natural landscape, it
is one of containment and obscurity and these qualities are expressive
of what cannot otherwise be stated in the poem. For this memory to
remain private affords it an oblique power. it is unclear whether it is
the trauma of the event that prevents the woman from articulating it
– to describe it would force her to relive it – or whether the scene has
more power for her because it remains unshared.27 The discovery that
the poem concerns the death of the poet’s sister from a brain tumour
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which is the ‘hooked foot’ here, at once clarifies some of its meaning and
complicates the act of representation, since the explanation undermines
the poem’s putative silence by speaking itself and giving us glimpses of
the unexplained horror. The second stanza enters a different, yet similarly
enigmatic space:
I went into the alehouse and called for a drink,
The girl behind the bar could not speak for tears,
The drops of beer flowed down the sides of the glass;
She wept to think of the pierced head,
The tears our Saviour shed.
(BS 23)28
The idea of atonement – that of Christ for our sins and of the man
for his crime – is matched by the poet’s desire that grief should atone
for the act of speaking the unspeakable here. yet the grief is displaced
from the woman, who is a witness to suffering, to another woman
inexplicably bearing the signs of distress. The girl’s grief is not only
for the bodily suffering of Christ, but for his consciousness of suffering
– for the emotional distress that accompanies the physical pain,
making his pierced head significant. in this way, empathy is addressed
conversely through emotional distance, and specifically through the
power of imaginative language both to express, and to reflect upon,
the relationship between feeling and sensation. The folktale mode
offers a form of emotional displacement, allowing the text to carry the
weight of personal feeling precisely because of its impersonality. These
textual shifts are important to ní Chuilleanáin in other ways too: the
text resembles a sonnet yet resists the kind of closure associated with
this form, both in structure (it is one line short) and in meaning (the
links between the first eight lines and the remaining five are difficult
to clarify without explanation). The idea that fixed form is a way of
containing poetic meaning – that is, of providing an apt vehicle for
meaning as well as a technique for limiting its interpretation – comes
under scrutiny here. it is by overturning expectations of how forms
may be used or how apparently disparate ideas may be linked that
ní Chuilleanáin both problematizes continuities in her own work and
questions the notion of fixed interpretative strategies.
at least three other poems in The Brazen Serpent are directly concerned
with processes of illness and grieving. ‘That summer’, ‘The pastoral life’
and ‘a hand, a Wood’ explore the lived and the remembered life as well
as the act of mourning – the shared, yet individual responses of family
members to the loss. ní Chuilleanáin comments:
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‘a hand, a Wood’ is factual, about the physical absence of máire from the
house in palmer’s green, the sense that every time one washed, one was
washing away something of her, and every time one used up something
from a jar she had labeled. The second half was written in italy after her
death and the scattering of her ashes in a little wood on our land beside our
italian house.29
‘a hand, a Wood’ is thus a poem in two parts: it explores first how
body and then place bear the imprints of the lost woman: ‘i am prising
you from under my nails’ and ‘the sparse / ashes are lodged under the
trees in the wood’ (BS 46). in this way, as mary o’malley has shown
so powerfully, both the human body and the natural landscape become
repositories of the past. everyday life is resumed reluctantly, but while
the living body continues its routines, objects express the power of
memory: the sister’s handwriting and diary entries remain, even in the
face of passing time. This disjunction is itself a painful one – it is the
continuing experience of living that heightens the pain: ‘i am wearing
your shape / like a light shirt of flame’ where the word ‘light’ both
lessens the violence of the sensation yet also threatens to make this pain
more visible. memory, then, can be both elided and intensified by the
immediacy of experience.
set alongside the loss of ní Chuilleanáin’s sister is that of her mother,
which occurred four years later. This further emphasizes the importance
of relationships among women and calls attention to the role of the
passage of time in determining the shape of the book. The first of
the two opening poems is ‘Fireman’s lift’, which is individually dated
‘parma 1963 – dublin 1994’, again an explicit acknowledgement of the
intersection of past and present that occurs in this volume. Written after
the death of her mother, the poem is set in parma cathedral and explores
the maternal not just through its representation in italian painting but
by depicting an experience shared between mother and daughter, the
experience of looking at, and responding to, a work of art. once again,
the built environment preserves and frames the meaningful object,
offering ways to establish perspectives on the created past. This kind of
layered meaning is at the core of ní Chuilleanáin’s work: the past is not
merely known or remembered, but re-experienced and re-contextualized
by the speaking voice in the poem as well as by its readers:
i was standing beside you looking up
Through the big tree of the cupola
Where the church splits wide open to admit
Celestial choirs, the fall-out of brightness.
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The virgin was spiralling to heaven,
hauled up in stages. past mist and shining,
teams of angelic arms were heaving,
supporting, crowding her, and we stepped
Back, as the painter longed to
While his arm swept in the large strokes.
We saw the work entire
(BS, 10)
one of the most significant aspects of The Brazen Serpent is highlighted
from the opening line of this poem: it is the emphasis on angle-of-view
that draws attention to the spaces of memory and makes all acts of
interpretation conditional. it is especially true in this case, as the poet
seeks to recapture the occasion when she and her mother visited the
duomo in parma and experienced first-hand Correggio’s Assumption
of the Virgin, which is among the most remarkable of italy’s artistic
achievements. The art object is an important presence in ní Chuilleanáin’s
work and a means by which she draws together visual influences from
a range of periods and cultures in her poetry. she uses these to explore
the act of looking itself and to examine the ways in which knowledge
is both communicated and disrupted by this framework. This emphasis
on the visual also demands that the reader should consider the spatial as
well as the sequential construction of meaning and memory, scrutinize
the poems for the pattern of interpretation rather than expect a logical
progression towards resolution. here her mother’s closeness is recalled,
but in the act of recollection the fact that her death has also made her
infinitely distant is finally inescapable. intimacy and remoteness are both
present in this poem and affect the act of reading in particular ways.
The observer here is the poet, but also crucially the reader, since we must
assume her position first, as part of the act of reading. The poet subtly
affirms this in the distinction she draws between the painter, struggling
to articulate his vision while able only to see a portion of that act of
creation, and she and her mother who ‘saw the work entire’ (BS 10).
The painting depicts a group of saints and angels that merge into a sea
of faces and limbs, lifting the virgin towards Christ in heaven. it is a
work of art that draws attention to the human body and its relationship
to artistic space. The painting is viewed somewhat humorously by
the poet, who later described her perspective as akin to looking up
the virgin’s skirts.30 Commenting on her writing of the poem, ní
Chuilleanáin says, ‘i could only concentrate on one aspect, the way it
shows bodily effort and the body’s weight.’31 here the merging of art and
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architecture is vital to the poet’s purpose, as the virgin’s body is part of
the church’s own structure – ‘The back making itself a roof / The legs a
bridge, the hands / a crane and a cradle’ – as well as an important part of
the institution’s doctrine. dillon Johnston comments that ‘the painting
could be said to reflect and celebrate the female body’ in elevating it at
the expense of a rather childlike Christ.32 in doing so, it also advances
the feminine side of Catholicism at the same time as it draws attention
to the complexity of the relationship between the virgin mother and her
son. as guinn Batten has noted, bodily experience plays an important
role in the function of personal memory for ní Chuilleanáin:
insofar as we may find, in her poems of grief for her mother, sister, and
father, the balm of sweet odours surviving the lettered slab, they also enact,
or engage, a bodily labour – the neck wrenched by the effort of following
the body, heaved by nurses out of the room, legs and wrists cramped by the
slow toil of carrying water for a dying mother from the end of the world.33
This particularity plays an important role in the merging of past
and present in the poet’s work, yet the sensory impact of memory does
more than reveal the body as an essential conduit to past experience. it
also bridges the imaginative gap between contemporary and historical
representation, allowing the poet to interweave her scholarly interests in
the renaissance world with the cultural landscape of modern ireland.
This nexus of materials emphasizes the interwoven nature of the processes
of remembrance and leads to a treatment of the past layered with discrete
interpretative acts. By imagining The Brazen Serpent as a space where she
actively constructs distinct and overlapping perspectives on the past, the
poet reveals her increasing use of the book not just as a gathering of work
but as a dynamic association of ideas and practices, offering new ways
of understanding the relationship between personal and shared histories.
Other Rooms:
Listening and Reading in The Girl Who Married a Reindeer
The interrelationship among texts has become increasingly important in
ní Chuilleanáin’s work and certain poems from The Girl Who Married
the Reindeer, though not constituting an explicit sequence, are connected
through image and reference. These subtle links, threaded throughout
the volume, emphasize the processes of creative return that pairings or
groups of poems initiate. The volume picks up the religious resonances of
The Brazen Serpent, with a particular emphasis on the celebration of feast
days and on the performative dimension of church practices. drawing on
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earlier poems, such as ‘a midwinter prayer’ (SV 45–7) and ‘The liturgy’
(MS 10), these works emphasize the power of spoken language and music
in spiritual and aesthetic communication. ‘The Chestnut Choir’ is one
poem that explores this form of expression in ways that highlight the
relationship between the individual listener and the collective purpose of
the performers. This relationship is first broached in the preceding poem,
‘sunday’, where the speaker’s intention to hear to the choir is expressed.
here a spiritual experience is privileged over social obligation, but the
journey to the mountain convent marks a return to an uncertain past
– though the speaker has made this journey before, she knows she will
not be remembered. The process of recollection is one-sided; it is only
of significance to the individual. The singular perspective remains strong
in ‘The Chestnut Choir’: the woman breaks her journey by stopping in
a bar where she encounters a small girl, ‘crouched / staring into the
wood stove’s flaming centre’ (GMR 14). Female attraction to spaces of
warmth and light, first the bar and within it the wood stove, again
indicates the importance of containment in the quest for revelation. The
woman’s entry into the chapel and into ‘the box pew at the back’ (GMR
14) indicates another kind of enclosure, in which the flames witnessed
earlier are realized again in musical form. The singing resonates through
the stone of the wall, entering the woman’s body as she leans against
it and uniting her experience of the sensory world with her search for
transcendence. in the silence the candle flames carry the motif of fire
that links secular and religious spaces, reminding the woman that she
is in transition between them. an ambiguous dynamic between singular
and collective emerges in this poem: ‘she knew / They were still there
while she, / The wanderer, was free to be away’ (GMR 14). at first this
seems to evoke the family group of the previous poem, but it applies
equally – and perhaps more powerfully – to the choristers themselves.
They, like so many of the figures in ní Chuilleanáin’s poems, are rooted
to place and community, marking the passage of time through their
repeated practices of faith. a similar force that first impelled the woman
to travel to hear the choir now prompts her to leave, though the terrain
outside is unpeopled and even threatening. This reinforcement of the
singular perspective suggests that meaning is created by the perceiving
self; by that particular encounter with an image or sound that is the
catalyst for remembrance and return.
The significance of religious experience that is located in space is
confirmed elsewhere in this collection. in ‘The Cloister of Bones’, entry
to the past is again effected through the built environment. The opening
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perspective is a view from above: instead of ascending the mountain to a
convent chapel, the speaker adopts the vantage point of a bell tower. This
perspective allows human and natural environments to be combined: the
tops of heads, cobbles, ledges and growing plants, all coincide below.
surveying this dynamic scene, the speaker searches for a cloistered space
where devotion and recreation may be pursued in peace:
i am searching for a shape, a den, watching
For the cloistering blank of a street wall,
a dark reticence of windows
Banked over an inner court,
especially rooves, arched and bouncing
naves; a corseted apse,
and always, even if the chapel sinks
deep inside, lit from a common well,
i search for hints of doors inside doors,
a built-in waiting about
of thresholds and washed floors,
an avid presence demanding flowers and hush.
(GMR 16)
This place can be detected by reading the shapes of the buildings, the
particular configurations of window and door. The space will be one
concealed from the street, set between or below buildings, inhabiting
another dimension – a meaning not readily available to the passer-by.
This other dimension is also a space of cultural memory, where now
vanished religious communities once flourished. The speaker’s search
for ‘doors within doors’ alerts us to the similarity of the places of
prayer and those of poetry, which too require practised engagement
and painstaking investigation. The sense of enclosure here is confirmed
in echoic effects and subtle mirroring of words: ‘blank’ becoming
‘banked’, ‘cloistering’ moving to ‘corseted’. modernization yields subtle
changes in form and language that take place within the arc of ní
Chuilleanáin’s own poetic development. The architectural details of wall
and court, nave and apse, return us to earlier texts yet also project the
future discovery of a place where the experience of prayerful reflection
as well as meaningful community can be attained. in the preceding
poem, the significance of the act of building itself has been invoked.
‘The angel in the stone’ gives voice to ‘the stone the builders passed
over’, which is now ‘trampled in the causeway’ where it registers the
extremes of the elements. This continuing attention to the materiality of
stone is an important part of the poet’s investigation of how structures
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are formed and made. all aspects of this material culture of family
and community are subject to her investigation and constitute an
enduring aspect of her art.
as these pairings of poems have shown, this collection marks a
preoccupation with the relationship between secular and religious, as
well as between domestic and institutional, settings. The volume also
contemplates the dynamics of family and community in new ways. The
poem ‘in her other ireland’ makes its location explicit in its title and in
addition gives a specifically female viewpoint from which to interpret the
material of the poem. yet even this level of certainty is problematized by
the notion of ‘otherness’, paired as this poem is with the preceding text –
‘in her other house’ – which is printed on the opposite page. Though
ní Chuilleanáin uses personal material obliquely in her latest poetry,
links between private and public concerns afford her opportunities to
explore important issues through the shaping of individual perspectives.
‘in her other house’ invokes a return to the past with which the
representation of the house often engages. rather than emphasizing the
passage of time, however, the poem suggests the imaginative simultaneity
of past and present. to return endlessly to the past is not to render it
explicable but to alert the reader to the inseparable nature of moments of
intense experience. as gaston Bachelard argues, ‘we are unable to relive
duration that has been destroyed […] memories are motionless, and the
more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are’.34 ‘in her
other house’ invokes this straight away; the place is ‘other’ from the
start. The ‘her’ of the title becomes ‘my’ and the focus of the poem shifts
to a dreamlike memory. The otherness in this poem seems to interrogate
the very notion of home but it may indicate the immediacy of the lived
and imagined past, where the vision is selective, even deliberately limited,
and ‘the table is spread and cleared by invisible hands’ (GMR 20). in
this home, books are the distinctive feature and supersede the domestic
detail, become the nurturing centre of the household together with the
fire and the meal. The imaginative power of the home is a textual one, so
that the role of language in reclaiming this space is crucial: it is a house
of texts, where past, present and future are there to be read as much as to
be experienced. to be at home, then, is to be among written words. The
poem’s final lines are especially significant in this regard: ‘in this house
there is no need to wait for the verdict of history / and each page lies
open to the version of every other’ (GMR 20). here chronological time
is disturbed by the presence of the dead. These books seem to refute the
logical progression of meaning in favour of freer interpretation, and in
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doing so suggest that acts of poetic interpretation need to remain alive
to the dynamic range of influences that shape the writing process.
Throughout The Girl Who Married a Reindeer, ní Chuilleanáin reflects
on the ways in which language gives form to the past. so it is significant
that the main body of poems in this collection ends with ‘gloss / Clós
/ glas’, a work that explores the unearthing of word-lore and the act
of translation itself, as though to prepare the way for the poems that
follow in the ‘Coda’. memory, at once powerful and unstable, often
finds expression through the speech act and many of ní Chuilleanáin’s
poems have a clear affinity with oral narrative: poems often begin by
telling stories (or at least alluding to them); they mention anecdotes and
events, both past and present. yet how these elements can be framed
has always been a matter for debate. paul Connerton’s work sheds light
on this problem:
oral histories seek to give voice to what would otherwise remain voiceless
even if not traceless, by reconstituting the life histories of individuals. But
to think the concept of a life history is already to come to the matter with a
mental set, and so it sometimes happens that the line of questioning adopted
by oral historians impedes the realization of their intentions.35
so it is, that in the midst of these speech acts, ní Chuilleanáin’s
poems often seem to escape to another realm, one beyond the narrative
context we first encountered. eamon grennan argues that she is ‘often
inclined to […] extend the narrative into a species of reflection, which
can compound what is already difficult. For it is not a question of the
narrative and the reflection existing in quite separate containers. The
borders between them are laid over one another, so no division is seen’.36
This complexity is an important dimension of ní Chuilleanáin’s interrogation of the transmission of history and, in particular, of her resistance
to the idea of fixed forms of identity. Both her treatment of voice and
of the environment in which forms of understanding emerge reveal the
capacity of the poem to destabilize the act of reclamation itself.
‘gloss / Clós / glas’ explores the relationship between the sound
and meaning of words so that the text itself seems conjured from the
scholar’s act of linguistic investigation. The first hint of this occurs when,
bearing his stack of books, he ‘walks across the room as stiff as a shelf’;
his own body becomes the books’ repository, a man-made object rather
than a living organism. The scholar is charged with finding two words
of opposite meaning yet almost identical; an idea suggestive of the way
different semantic pathways open in a poem. ‘Clós’, is suggestive of
both the english ‘close’ and the gaelic word for enclosure. already the
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networks of linguistic and cultural connection between ireland, england
and scotland are hinted at and these are extended in the idea of the
musical note translated from one instrument to another. There follows
a series of images associated with fiddle-playing – the wood; the finger
depressing a string; the bow drawn across the strings – images expressing
proximity but also close to one another in the texture of the poem. The
sheer mobility and contingent nature of language emerge clearly here,
through its zealous scholar and through its chosen imagery and the
flexibility of its lines and thought-pattern:
The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,
like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words
pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,
(GMR, 46)
Though described as ‘rags’ and ‘weeds’ – words that can themselves
be linked through the image of the garment – language reveals the
movement of powerful forces here. The print of dictionaries, sufficiently
small to require a magnifying glass, is also reflective of the world itself,
even the familiar image of the cat sliding through a gap in the fence.
‘pouring’ is a word tried twice, as though to test and confirm its precision
of expression before the poem turns to conclude on the double-meaning
of the last of its terms – ‘glas’ – which can be translated as both lock and
green: ‘Who is that he can hear panting on the other side? / The steam
of her breath is turning the locked lock green’ (GMR 46). The word for
‘his’ and for ‘hers’ is the same in the irish language, so that the barrier
of meaning is overcome by the exhalation, releasing the scholar from his
labours and the poem into near-silence. That the poem itself is formed
not from new language that may yield familiar interpretation but rather
from a point of linguistic convergence that offers extended meanings
expresses the subtlety of ní Chuilleanáin’s art.
Poems at the World’s Edge: Memory as Vertigo
The function of memory takes on new significance in the formation
of the poem sequence, where the temporality of reading becomes an
important dimension of interpretation. memory also has a special
purpose in cases where poems are reprinted in different locations,
creating new networks of meaning in each situation. two poems from
ní Chuilleanáin’s most recent volume, The Sun-Fish (2009) also appear
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as part of the sequence ‘vertigo’, published in Voices at the World’s Edge:
Irish Poets on Skellig Michael, a volume edited by paddy Bushe in 2010.37
The word ‘vertigo’ itself invokes movement – significantly, a sensation of
movement – and a unifying element across the sequence is the motion
of the tides, which is both endlessly repeated and constantly changing.
This tidal rhythm draws attention to the pattern of repetition and change
in ní Chuilleanáin’s work as a whole, in which related memories find
new forms and meanings. here the poems help to convey at once the
significance of particular observations and the duration of the experience
with its changing patterns and moods. The sequence oscillates between
moments when the human perspective of the journey is foremost, and
those in which nature alone features, reflecting the island’s isolation and
its history as a monastic settlement. Formally, too, each poem’s most
striking features are to be found in the relationship between its shifting
viewpoints and rhythmical structure. in the opening poem, ‘The litany’,
the most significant juxtaposition is between the visual and auditory
aspect of the environment. its quiet logic is shaped by the structure of
its first stanza:
as every new day waking finds its pitch
selecting a fresh angle, so the sun
hangs down its veils, so the ancient verbs
Change their invocation and their mood.
(VWE 111)
The ‘pitch’ of the opening line alerts us to the importance of sound;
spatially, too, the poem’s alternating stanza lengths reflect the ebb and
flow of the sequence’s tidal pattern. Though the historical significance
of the island is immediately invoked in the reference to ‘ancient verbs’,
we see that these are capable of changing with the passage of time: the
‘long gap in the story’ is suggestive of the narrative power of human
life and history, yet the monks’ habitation of the rock was brief in the
context of the island’s natural history. Thus the slow passage of time is
essential to seeing human activity in its true proportion, and though
this is an isolated place its relationship to elsewhere is considered. Just
as heaney’s ‘timeless waves’ of aran come from america, here the wave,
receding from skellig michael, is ‘called back to Brazil’.38
The wordless sounds of nature that form the ‘litany’ in this first poem
acquire a more specific ‘voice’ in the second, but it is one that calls the
subject position into question, since it is unclear whether the ‘old strong
voice’ speaks from the historical or the personal past. That the monks
should have chosen the most challenging environment for their life of
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prayer is expressed through the arrival of the storm in this second poem.
here the force of the waves is recorded in the poem’s insistent verbal
pattern – reaching and snatching; faltering and returning; slamming and
roaring. The doubling of these verbs again reinforces the ebb and flow
as well as the fear and compulsion that drove the monks onward, and
represents the larger dilemmas of the human state. yet the voice could
equally be that of nature itself, prompting, or uniting with, the spiritual
contemplation of the monastic life.
The third poem in the sequence retreats indoors, and its four-line
stanzas invoke the quietness and relative order of the shelter, compared
with the preceding storm. yet it is a reflective space in more ways than
one – its light and glassy surfaces draw attention to the visual, now
that the auditory bombardment has died away. in spite of this, the
environment proves not an easy one to read: the glass is iced up, making
objects indistinguishable. What is man-made takes on a natural aspect:
the boat mimics the anatomy of the fish, the lamp compensates for the
darkness of daylight hours, shedding a partial light over the timeless
interior. here the tidal rhythm is applied to language itself; speech
retreats into silence, creating a powerful impression of the interiority
of language. The mysterious wordless woman, appearing at the close,
seems to come from outside the world of the poem. she reminds us
of the unexplained figures and situations that appear frequently in ní
Chuilleanáin’s work, their stories forming beneath the familiar narratives
of history:
as in the five days she lay without a word,
Five glasses of milk huddled on a shelf,
Congealed, the sun of a winter afternoon
Breaking through curtains, piercing the shining whey.
(VWE 113)
The glasses of milk, at once opaque and translucent, are a fitting image
with which to contemplate the play of light and revelation. here they
also mark time – the five speechless days of the poem’s silent ending
This figure of woman – perhaps the sister whose early death has
preoccupied the poet – gives way in the next poem to an evocation of the
father, and the adjustment needed occurs for both speaker and reader.
The ways in which memory alters human relationships is rendered in
the father’s fragmented representation here: he becomes the many images
of his own experience. here the relationship between language and the
material world is interrogated, as it is in the next poem, ‘outdoors’,
which begins with a junction, and therefore a choice of direction. yet
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this station – which is both the literal train station and the station of
pilgrim experience – has lost its human markers: the name of the place
and the time of day are obscured by vegetation. The act of waiting
described here, and the uncertainty of progress, unites both the practical
and the existential dimensions of the sequence: the island is hard to
reach in bad weather, and visitors have to wait onshore for conditions
to improve. This poem then evokes the actual condition of waiting, as
well as the state of human uncertainty – ‘nobody thinks we’ll go on
our travels again’ (VWE 115). however, the final poem – which is also
the title poem of the sequence – introduces the pilgrim experience in a
vividly observed way. in the poet’s observation of the black-clad woman
and her daughters, the human engagement with this island space is fully
realized. The challenge of the harsh terrain is suggestive of the difficulty
of accommodating the world of objects to the world of process. The
woman struggles to take off her shoes and stockings, ‘which she adds to
the black bag, already encumbered / With rosary beads tangled in keys,
all the stuff / she’s dragged from home’ (VWE 116). as the world of
commodity becomes superfluous, the time frame of the poem begins to
slip, and the past merges with the present. it is fear, rather than desire,
that surrounds the idea of revelation at the close: the woman is terrified
of heights, ‘but she does look down, and at last sees what is there, / / The
dimensions, the naming. yes. / a broad slick widening, an anachronism,
/ ambiguous as a leaf floating where never / a leaf has blown’ (VWE
117). What is glimpsed is the void, where the religious imagery of death
and resurrection gives way to a strange, and estranging, ambiguity. What
is experienced is an emerging realization, a thing misplaced, appearing
where it should not be. yet this is both the physical edge of the island and
the edge of human consciousness, ‘where everything pours away’. in this
sequence, ní Chuilleanáin explores the potential of the island experience
to situate the past in a philosophically challenging way, deepening our
engagement with familiar images and drawing us simultaneously into
profound and alienating states.
ní Chuilleanáin’s body of work represents a varied and challenging
engagement with the past and one that confronts important questions
about how history is mediated, for both individuals and cultures.
her emphasis on the silences of the past – what history fails to
disclose – has both political and aesthetic significance: it signals the
concentrated yet resistant form of the poem as an important means
to explore the intellectual and emotional processes that the search for
meaning necessitates. in this way, ní Chuilleanáin’s work illuminates
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the subject of poetic memory, in the complexity of its figuration of
past and present and in its pivotal engagement with the materiality
of language and text.
Notes
1 nicholas allen notes ‘the collapsed distance between past and present [that] is part
of her writing’s enduring difficulty’, ‘“each page lies open to the version of every
other”: history in the poetry of eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, Irish University Review
37.1 (spring/summer 2007), pp. 22–35.
2 eamon grennan, ‘real Things: The Work of eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, Facing the
Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century (omaha, ne: Creighton university
press, 1999), p. 283.
3 oona Frawley discusses the ramifications of Bartlett’s work for the irish context in
‘towards a Theory of Cultural memory in an irish postcolonial Context’, in oona
Frawley (ed.), Memory Ireland, vol. 1, History and Modernity, p. 24. see also Frederic
Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge:
Cambridge university press, 1954 [1932]), p. 52.
4 her father, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (1903–1970), was professor of irish at university
College Cork. her mother, eilís dillon (1920–1994), was from a politically active
family during the War of independence; dillon later became an acclaimed writer
for children.
5 eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, ‘acts and monuments of an unelected nation: The
Cailleach Writes about the renaissance’, Southern Review 31.3 (1995), p. 571.
6 ibid., p. 573.
7 John r. gillis: ‘memory and identity: The history of a relationship’, in John
r. gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (princeton, nJ:
princeton university press, 1994), p. 3.
8 maurice halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. ditter and vida yazdi
ditter (new york: harper Colophon Books, 1980), p. 106.
9 see ibid., pp. 85–6.
10 eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, ‘introduction’, Irish Women: Image and Achievement
(dublin: arlen house, 1985), pp. 1–12.
11 eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, ‘nuns: a subject for a Woman Writer’, in patricia Boyle
haberstroh (ed.), My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art
(syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2001), p. 23.
12 patricia Boyle haberstroh, ‘interview with eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, Canadian
Journal of Irish Studies 20.2 (december 1994), p. 72.
13 elsewhere i have developed the relationship between the representation of the house
and the exploration of subjectivity. see lucy Collins, ‘architectural metaphors:
representation of the house in the poetry of eiléan ní Chuilleanáin and vona
groarke’, in scott Brewster and michael parker (eds), Irish Literature since 1900:
Diverse Voices (manchester: manchester university press, 2008), pp. 142–59.
14 Kevin ray, ‘interview with eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish
Studies 31.1–2 (spring/summer 1996), p. 67.
15 patricia Boyle haberstroh, The Female Figure in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry
(Cork: Cork university press, 2013), p. 39.
136
e i l é a n n í c h u i l l e a n á i n’s spac e s of m e mory
16 guinn Batten, ‘Boland, mcguckian, ní Chuilleanáin and the Body of the nation’,
in matthew Campbell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2003), p. 186.
17 paul Connerton emphasizes the importance of habit as a means of transmitting
collective memory – building in this respect on henri Bergson’s work. paul
Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge university press,
1989), loc. 527 [Kindle edition].
18 andrew Jones, Memory and Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge university
press), p. 3.
19 Borbála Faragó, ‘“The informant”, eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, Irish University Review
39.2 (autumn/Winter 2009), p. 301.
20 ray, ‘interview with eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, p. 64. The event that the poet refers
to took place in march 1988 when two plain-clothes British army corporals drove,
it seems accidentally, into the midst of an ira funeral. Three days earlier there
had been an attempt to kill ira members at the funeral of the ‘gibraltar Three’,
in milltown Cemetery. reportedly, members of the crowd mistook the British
army personnel for loyalist gunmen and, fearing a repetition of the earlier incident,
dragged them from their car. The initial violence was captured by television cameras
at the funeral. The two soldiers were later beaten and killed by republicans. see
Bew and gillespie, Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles.
21 saint margaret of Cortona (1247–1297) was an italian saint whose reckless early
life as the mistress of a wealthy man was altered by his violent death. leaving his
home she went to the Franciscan Friars in Cortona and was later admitted to the
order. lawrence hess, ‘st margaret of Cortona’, The Catholic Encyclopaedia, vol. 9
(new york: robert appleton Company, 1910).
22 irene gilsenan nordin, Reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: A Contemporary Irish Poet
(lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press, 2008), pp. 68–70. see also irene gilsenan
nordin, ‘“Betwixt and Between”: The Body as liminal Threshold in the poetry of
eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, in irene gilsenan nordin (ed.), The Body and Desire in
Contemporary Irish Poetry (dublin: irish academic press, 2006), pp. 226–43.
23 patricia Boyle haberstroh, ‘interview with eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, Irish University
Review 37.1 (spring/summer 2007), p. 46.
24 grennan, ‘real Things’, p. 285. see also dillon Johnston, ‘“hundred-pocketed
time”: ní Chuilleanáin’s Baroque spaces’ and patricia Boyle haberstroh, ‘The
architectural metaphor in the poetry of eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’, both in Irish
University Review 37.1 (spring/summer 2007), pp. 53–67; 84–97.
25 Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (new york:
Columbia university press, 1987), p. 1.
26 ibid., p. 6.
27 This uncertainty can be directly connected to the issue of traumatic memory and
its somatic effects, yet it also suggests that the power can be derived from a refusal
to disclose troubling events. see also ‘The secret’ (BS 42).
28 The poet has elucidated the second stanza of the poem as follows: in a folk tale a
man who commits a crime is told the forgiveness is impossible ‘unless he can find a
woman in a public house that is holier than a nun in a convent. he sees a woman
weeping as she pulls a pint of beer and she tells him it is because the drops of beer
running down the outside of the glass remind her of the blood of Christ running
down his face. so he is forgiven after all.’ eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, quoted in John
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Kerrigan, ‘hidden ireland: eiléan ní Chuilleanáin and munster poetry’, Critical
Quarterly 40.4 (Winter 1998), p. 93.
Quoted in haberstroh, The Female Figure in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry, p. 57.
introduction to a reading of the poem, trinity College dublin, april 1999.
ní Chuilleanáin, ‘acts and monuments of an unelected nation’, p. 578.
dillon Johnston, ‘“our Bodies’ eyes and Writing hands”: secrecy and sensuality
in ní Chuilleanáin’s Baroque art’, in anthony Bradley and maryann gialanella
valiulis (eds), Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (amherst, ma: university
of massachusetts press, 1997), p. 192.
guinn Batten, ‘The World not dead after all’: eiléan ní Chuilleanáin’s Work of
revival’, Irish University Review 37.1 (spring/summer 2007), p. 11.
gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon press, 1994), p. 9.
paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge university press,
1989), loc. 435 [Kindle edition].
grennan, ‘real Things’, p. 287.
skellig michael is a rocky island off the west coast of County Kerry. a Christian
monastery was founded there between the sixth and the eighth centuries and the
island remained in continuous habitation until the twelfth century. it is now a
unesCo World heritage site. in 2010, irish poet paddy Bushe commissioned
a dozen other poets to spend a night on skellig michael and write about the
experience.
seamus heaney, ‘lovers on aran’, Death of a Naturalist (london: Faber & Faber,
1966).
138
ch a p ter fi v e
medbh mcguckian’s
radical temporalities
medbh mcguckian’s radical temporalities
medbh mcguckian’s abstract and challenging work has fascinated and
puzzled readers in equal measure since she first began publishing in
the 1980s.1 her language describes, and dwells in, an inner world and
retains the freedom to explore a multiplicity of identities and to respond
to both real and imaginative worlds, past and present. The strangeness
of mcguckian’s language makes it memorable for the reader, and in this
way the processes of memory and estrangement are closely woven into
each poetic encounter. in keeping with these practices her engagement
with acts of remembrance is oblique but, as i will argue in this chapter,
both her recurring themes and compositional strategies are linked to a
desire to alter the linear relationship between past, present and future
in order that new ways of understanding experience can be achieved.
in this way her poetic process privileges the practices of memory over
those of the conventional historical narrative as her means of accessing
the past depends upon its imaginative presence to both poet and reader.
The world of mcguckian’s poetry is an intimate one in the relationship
it suggests between the reader and the sensory world of the poem. yet
these works do not represent the self directly, nor do they interrogate
ideas of selfhood except by abstract or associative means. This reflects
the poet’s convictions concerning the radical instability of language:
as well as the subjective processes of writing and reading, mcguckian
attributes these challenges to communication to ‘irish and english and
the language problem, and the way that the language was killed through
the fighting, that the language was lost by that awful trauma but very
recently, only one hundred and fifty years ago’.2
This concern for the changing dynamics of language in ireland is
reflected in her metaphorical uses here, in her references to language
being ‘killed’ and to the trauma of its loss.3 unlike mary o’malley,
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
who mourns the loss of the language but connects with it through place
and landscape, mcguckian initiates more fundamental challenges to the
contemporary lyric mode. shane murphy argues that the kind of decolonization in which mcguckian engages does not appropriate english
but ‘deterritorialises the english language, subjecting it to a radical
displacement’.4 The strategic nature of this approach creates further
receptive tensions: ‘The extraordinary logical and associative disjunctions
that typify her poetry offload sense-making almost entirely onto the
reader’, writes eric Falci, ‘while keeping an esoteric and exclusive mode
of authority – an authority effect – for the poet’.5 These ‘disjunctions’
have an estranging effect on all mcguckian’s readers, but the retention of
authority that Falci describes would seem to underpin the vexed critical
reception of her work. The practice of displacement is not the mark of
a devolved authority, then, but a contortion of linguistic temporality
that has implications for the relationship between creative and critical
discourses, since the latter can neither accurately express, nor claim
authority for, the patterns of meaning here.
one aspect of mcguckian’s handling of time that is immediately
evident is the sheer proliferation of her work. in the 35 years since she
began writing she has published more than eighteen volumes of original
work, suggesting not only a continuous creative process but also a degree
of compositional simultaneity. it is this dimension of her practice that
keeps mcguckian’s poems in a state of interpretative play, one with
another. her poems resonate with one another, circulating language as
well as creating it anew. Borbála Faragó has argued persuasively for the
importance of the creative process as an enduring theme for this poet
and her recent study demonstrates the cumulative nature of the poet’s
investigation of creativity.6 Though Faragó’s detailed close reading of the
poems reveals the networks of meaning that they progressively generate,
mcguckian herself has acknowledged the difficulties that her creative
abundance presents for a certain kind of critical order. some commentators, though, see this profusion as essential to the meaning of her work:
fellow poet nuala archer describes mcguckian’s poems as ‘resonating
prisms that amaze the mazes of partition and parturition’, revealing
the need for a critical vocabulary sufficiently flexible to express the
originality of mcguckian’s art and its arresting effects on the reader.7 The
prismatic quality, and the links between self-division and pro-creativity
suggested here, are especially illuminating of the intertextual dimensions
of mcguckian’s work, which have attracted significant critical attention
in recent years.8 she describes her practice thus:
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m e dbh mcguck i a n’s r a dic a l t e m por a l i t i e s
i never write just blindly, i never sit down without an apparatus, i always
have a collection of words – it’s like a bird building a nest – i gather materials
over the two weeks, or whatever […] i never sit down without those because
otherwise you would just go mad, trying to think of words.9
This accumulated material, often gleaned from the poet’s current
reading, is consciously assembled by her and reshaped to form a new
poem. The memory of the earlier text becomes a specific trace that
remains in the finished poem creating a multifaceted work that may
or may not reveal its past selves to the reader. mcguckian rarely offers
explicit signals to the texts she is drawing from, a fact that confirms the
delicate balance in her work between the desire to express and the desire
to communicate: ‘i don’t think you need to know it all to get something
out of it. in fact, maybe if you know it all you get less out of it’.10 For
mcguckian, the encounter with strangeness is not an alienating but
an invigorating experience and in this she has much in common with
avant-garde poets such as Catherine Walsh. The partial occlusion of an
interpretative history offers creative freedom to the reader. in this way,
the textual past may be as important to the mood of the poem as to its
detailed analysis, contributing to the textured quality of mcguckian’s
language without adding essential layers of meaning. shane murphy
argues that this intellectual/personal dynamic represents mcguckian’s
complex relationship with her precursors, permitting her
to retain vestiges of prior writings while including a critique or commentary
on them […] For the poet, such a layered composition initiates a personal
relationship to a literary precursor, a relationship wholly dissimilar to that
established by literary biographers whose work she reproduces.11
deryn rees-Jones further maintains that the intertextual references
are mcguckian’s attempt ‘to reconcile, rediscover, rewrite, to literally
incorporate the feminine body into the body of the text as texts, often
by canonical male authors, become intimately woven into the female
textual body, intersecting with her “own” writing, like warp to weft’.12
it is this drawing in of the world that makes the imaginative mobility
of mcguckian’s work so memorable to readers. nothing in these poems
is fixed; language and voices move freely from the poet’s reading to her
writing, reformed but never fully contained by this process.
in some respects, then, mcguckian’s work may be seen as antithetical
to ní Chuilleanáin’s in that it eliminates, rather than reflecting upon,
the boundaries between self and other, present and past, writing and
reading. For mcguckian, reading is an act of remembering, so that
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
each poem has a textual past as well as a textual present – a variable
pre-existence that allows her work to open imaginatively again and
again as different voices are heard within the poem’s compositional
structure. her poems therefore require an active form of remembering
but also the ability to forget in order that new interpretations may
emerge: as the poem ‘mazurka’ suggests: ‘a newly-understood poem
will melt / and be hard again’.13 This explicit acknowledgment of
the endless renewal of meaning possible in the single poem is again
suggestive of the simultaneity of mcguckian’s work: rather than one
act of reading following another, all are open to reinterpretation. here
forgetting is foregrounded as a necessary counterpart to the processes
of remembering. in order that some things are remembered, others
must be forgotten: ‘every act of remembrance, whether individual or
collective, necessarily involves selective, partial, or otherwise biased
forms of forgetting’.14 These energies make mcguckian’s poetry endlessly
receptive to the changing relationship between past, present and future, a
relationship that has figured both thematically and formally throughout
her career to date.
Creating Past Selves
in The Flower Master and Venus and the Rain
an appreciation of this dynamism of language is essential in approaching
mcguckian’s earliest work. not only is it a hallmark of her style, and an
element that set her apart from her peers, but it is an important dimension
of her first two collections – The Flower Master (1982) and Venus and
the Rain (1984) – both of which were republished by gallery press in
somewhat altered form in 1993 and 1994 respectively. The evolution of
these books clarifies aspects of mcguckian’s relationship with her own
creative past and therefore of the processes of self-remembering that
are so important in her work. The oxford Flower Master itself bore
the traces of earlier pamphlet publications: poems from Single Ladies
(interim press) and Portrait of Joanna (ulsterman publications) appear
there, charting the gradual evolution of mcguckian’s work towards a
full-length collection. The titles of both pamphlets draw attention to
female experience and their poems reveal the importance of gendered
perspectives in this poet’s earliest texts. The ambiguity of the later title
– The Flower Master – is in keeping with the interplay of opposites with
which mcguckian’s most fully realized work always engages. its cover
illustration of georgia o’Keefe’s ‘White trumpet Flower’ also brings
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m e dbh mcguck i a n’s r a dic a l t e m por a l i t i e s
the woman’s body back to the centre of reading. This combination of
the oblique and the immediate is exemplified by mcguckian’s frequent
use of the present tense: the states of being that are depicted here are
vivid, sensory yet temporally complex – suggesting the layers of meaning
that can be generated by intense experience. The speakers in her poems
wrap the past into present sensation: there is no consciousness here of
the act of remembering, instead it becomes part of bodily experience.
This technique draws attention to the endurance of the somatic as an
imaginative wellspring but this is not confined to the connection to
traumatic experience; for mcguckian, what is joyful and pleasurable
can also be recalled in this way. The poems of The Flower Master, in
particular, dwell on the relationship between child and woman, on the
changes of body and sensibility that mark this transition.
The opening poem of the oxford edition of The Flower Master is
a key text in this respect. its position in the original volume marks
it as a poem of transition, so that its concern with the passage from
childhood to adulthood is also a herald of the creative self. This process
of evolution highlights the importance of memory in recognizing
how the self can coexist in its past and present forms, much as paula
meehan uses the space of teenage rebellion to signal this dual subjectivity. mcguckian’s ‘That year’ signals the importance of retrospect
from the start; it recalls the new interests of the soon-to-be woman
in terms of material things – playing with rings, experimenting with
hair colouring and wearing a bra. immediately, subjectivity is split
into two: the other – the ‘you’ of the first line of the poem – is on
the threshold of adulthood, while the first person perspective of the
rest of the poem moves more slowly towards this position. Childhood
memories prefigure this process, combining joy and sorrow in the
images of the red kite lost in the sky, and the white ball disappearing
on the tide. The hints of menstruation in the red and white coloration
of this stanza seem distant possibilities, from which the girl distracts
herself by looking down, studying the linoleum at her feet and the
stitching on her dress, dominating the poem’s shifting perspective
now. The power of contrasting imagery to configure the overlapping
states of innocence and experience is demonstrated here. violence and
pleasure combine in the images of bee-sting (often used to describe the
sensation of female orgasm) and the bullet lodged within:
it was like a bee’s sting or a bullet
left in me, this mark, this sticking pins in dolls,
listening for the red and white
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
particles of time to trickle slow, like a wet nurse
Feeding nonchalantly someone else’s child.
(FM 1982 9)
When the text appeared in the revised edition from gallery press it
was no longer the opening poem but placed fifth in the collection under
the new title ‘eavesdropper’. its changed final line – from ‘The grass is
no bed after dark’ to ‘The grass is an eavesdropper’s bed’ – reinforces the
subtle shift of emphasis away from the processes of memory and towards
a more suggestive mode. as leontia Flynn has pointed out, the new
title makes the poem’s concerns ‘strangely both more and less elusive’.15
she goes on to indicate how the associations brought by these revisions
combine ideas of original sin (via eve’s ‘drop’ into the fallen world of
childbearing) with the phrase ‘falling off the roof’, which is slang for
menstruation.16 The proliferation of meaning that even such relatively
small alterations can cause is significant. For the same reason poems
such as ‘problem girl’ (with its persona of dreamy adolescence) and
‘The Chain sleeper’ (‘unshameable this leggy girl who sleeps and sleeps’)
(FM 1982 11; 12) are omitted from the gallery press volume, making
room instead for poems of multiple subjective states – ‘gateposts’ or
‘The truth room’ (FM 1993 35; 50). This is in keeping with a creative
strategy that moves away from subjective experience, preferring instead
to see changed states as coexisting in time, where both are imaginatively
available to the poet, and reader, at any stage.
The process of creative coexistence has an important effect on
mcguckian’s exploration of the twin states of childhood and motherhood.
in her work the adult woman ‘contains’ the child that is her past
self, at the same time as she carries the child to whom she will give
birth. Thus the potentiality of birth-giving is closely linked to the
processes of memory: the mature female body expresses past, present
and future, and her textual manifestation opens interpretation to new
temporal frameworks. moynagh sullivan defines the maternal aesthetic
in mcguckian’s work as one of experience rather than representation:
‘mcguckian’s aesthetic disrupts the modernist mechanism of confirming
identity at the expense of the object, by making the experience of being
inside her poetry one that displaces us as meaning-bestowing subjects’.17
in this way, the reader is brought into an intimate relationship with the
material of the poem, eliding the temporal distinctions that situate the
reader as coming after, rather than in the midst of, the act of making.
The maternal instinct recorded by the poet does not emphasize only the
childbearing capacity of the body but rather its entire creative nature.
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m e dbh mcguck i a n’s r a dic a l t e m por a l i t i e s
‘Confinement’ from mcguckian’s second full collection, Venus and the
Rain (1984), explores the coming together of fixed images of the human
subject and the contingent process of awaiting birth – that moment in
which the potential child becomes actualized in the world. The ‘sleepy,
glassed-in child’ is described as the speaker’s ‘fair copy’, suggesting the
presence of a more perfect version of the adult self, yet a version that
comes after the untidiness of lived experience. The idea of doubleness
is soon confirmed in the simultaneity of the poem’s image patterns:
‘While you were sailing your boat in the bay, / i saw you pass along
the terrace twice’ (VR 1984 42). The child occupies two imaginative
spaces at once, ‘sailing’ in the safety of the womb and moving freely
in a liminal space, neither inside nor outside. The autumnal air of the
poem, with its flying leaves and recovery from summer heat, suggests a
darker reading in which the child becomes a ghost – at once laid out at
the centre (the heart) of the house and haunting its marginal spaces. in
this way, the memory of the unborn child becomes a kind of memorialization, a momentary stilling of the imaginative dynamic. meanwhile,
the natural world, and its creative potential, also shifts and changes, the
‘river imagery’ of the speaker’s arms testifying to the endless flux of the
maternal imaginary.
The trope of movement that is so prominent in mcguckian’s early
works is a means to indicate key transitions between childhood and
adulthood, between single and married states, but also to speak of the
impossibility of containment. This trope brings with it a number of
themes and images that will recur in her poetry and that the reader can
trace through their various forms as indicators of difference rather than
sameness: the house, with constantly shifting perspectives; the garden,
together with more extensive natural imagery; motherhood and child
rearing; crafts of making. most significantly, the metaphors by which
these themes are introduced appear conjoined in inexplicable ways.
First, the juxtaposition of inner and outer spaces means that houses and
landscape are rendered simultaneously, making the boundaries between
them hard to read. as imaginative creations of place, they distort the
function of memory by permitting no fixed point of recall. Further, the
identification of material elements with complex emotional states means
that such shifts in spatial representation – or the evocation of a range of
disconnected objects – also trace the mutation of feeling and perception
in the poem. many of these early poems use the trope of moving house as
a means of addressing the dynamic ways in which the subject position is
realized in poetry. ‘The Flitting’, the poem that won the national poetry
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
competition in Britain and first drew critical attention to mcguckian’s
work, exemplifies the unfixed position of the speaking voice, a strategy
in keeping with one of the poem’s themes – the disorientating shifts
that new domestic arrangements must occasion. The first phrase of the
poem registers the connection between states of emotion and states of the
body, drawing explicit attention to a relationship already discernible in
earlier poems from this collection: ‘“you wouldn’t believe all this house
has cost me – / in body-language terms”’ (FM 1982 48). The inclusion
of direct speech here is comparatively rare in mcguckian and separates
these lines from those that follow, though they seem continuous in
their representation of the experience of domestic upheaval. The current
state is invoked first, before the process that helped to form this state
is addressed. in this way, present emotion is constituted from memory,
though no direct perspective on the past is offered. likewise, the sense
of human connection that this movement fosters is replaced by a more
anxious readjustment to new space and experience.
art provides the means to bridge this gap: the ‘living’ walls of
the house – likened to strawberries and tomatoes – are covered with
paintings of dutch interiors, their female protagonists testifying to
the new importance of the domestic realm as a world of metaphorical
meaning.18 The implicit treatment of vermeer’s ‘girl with a pearl
earring’ reveals the importance of visual memory here and draws on its
power to represent complex states simultaneously, rather than sequentially as language requires. it extends mcguckian’s reflection on states
of interiority: the girl’s ‘unconscious / solidarity with darkness’ explores
the relationship between the female subject and the dark background
of the painting, a field created by the painter and of which the girl can
have no knowledge. like Boland, in her textual treatment of Chardin’s
female subjects, mcguckian records the fact that much is concealed by
the act of representation itself since the narrative of women’s experience
extends far beyond the static image.19 yet there is also a suggestion
that the process of illustration itself creates significance: ‘her narrative
secretes its own values, as mine might / if i painted the half of me that
welcomes death’ (my italics). value, then, may be at once concealed and
generated by the shape of the girl’s life story; it may not be inherent in
the life, but rather be found in the afterlife of the work of art – a partial
though not a false representation. Just as the boundaries between art and
life are challenged by mcguckian here, so past and present merge as the
speaker takes on the garments of seventeenth-century holland, much as
she relished the ‘fraternity of clothes’ that shaped her twentieth-century
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transition from one house to another. neither can nature and technology
be held apart – the digital clock is ‘well-earthed’ and the train ‘plough[s]’
through ‘the cambered flesh of clover and wild carrot’ (FM 1982 48).
Creative futures merge with timeless landscapes that are both real and
literary: ‘i postpone my immortality for my children, / little rock-roses,
cushioned / in long-flowering sea-thrift and metrics’ (FM 1982 48). The
postponement of full artistic realization marks a recognition that while
the poem may be in the process of creation – and therefore present to
the poet – its materials are already past and move freely among visual
and linguistic traditions, to form new meanings and connections.
art in various forms has concerned mcguckian throughout her career.
sometimes she uses aspects of conventional representation as much to
question the nature and reception of the artistic act as to create a subtle
intertext with the life and work of the chosen artist. at other times, it
is the act of creation itself that offers an equivalence to her own poetic
formation and to the complex temporalities that attend the conversion
of nature into art. ‘The seed-picture’, from mcguckian’s first collection,
draws attention to this act of making by combining nature and artifice in
inextricable ways. it is also a text that exhibits the poet’s preoccupation
with the relationship between word and object. here they are conflated,
seeds becoming words and words seeds – the conglomerate picture is
made, bringing natural and poetic worlds into alignment. here the seed
as the originator of life is also its completed representation, suggesting a
cumulative form of signification that contains its point of origin within
its final state. each instance of creation carries within it a memory of
nature that is supported by the subtle shift that can be observed here
from the male, as the expected seed-bearer, to the female as the agent
of making. These seeds are on the surface of picture and poem, offering
themselves in a depictive pattern, yet they are also buried, hidden within
their fruits. The poem itself sprouts and grows from apparently inconsequential beginnings and the child within it forms through the textures
and colours of the natural world:
her hair
is made of hook-shaped marigold, gold
of pleasure for her lips, like raspberry grain.
The eyelids oatmeal, the irises
of dutch blue maw, black rape
For the pupils, millet
For the vicious beige circles underneath
(FM 1982 23)
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Just as in mcguckian’s numerous flower poems, closeness changes
perspective here. The detailed focus links human and natural patterns;
flowers becoming not merely flowers but powerfully sensual objects. This
process affirms the role of the reader in bringing such observations to
light and, in particular, in drawing inferences from the creative materials
chosen. The arresting visual elements in such poems highlight the
importance of form for both image and poem, while female sexuality,
which is so often the force behind both, finds a curiously blatant yet
delicate expression. Through these visual elements, mcguckian accesses
a range of disciplines, from physics to painting, from linguistics to
botany, and there are interesting after-images of all these fields to be
found in her work.
The significance of art emerges again in ‘The sitting’, from Venus and
the Rain, which is a form of self-portrait – ‘my half-sister comes to me to
be painted’ (VR 1984 15). it highlights one of mcguckian’s most familiar
strategies, the extension of a speaking poetic self into another persona.
This displacement allows strangeness and familiarity to be combined.
The ambiguity of her use of pronouns serves this purpose, leaving the
boundaries between selves fluid in order that emotional territory can be
most freely explored. The self that is presented in this poem is reclusive,
seeming to affirm the view of Clair Wills that there is a tension in
mcguckian’s work ‘between her wish to represent the self in order that
it be more perfectly understood, and her wariness of opening herself
up before the public’.20 sarah Broom sees a further consequence of this
mixed motivation: ‘mcguckian’s is a poetry which invites (though not
without anxiety) the intrusion of others, and welcomes as a source of
inspiration the “fragmentation” which results from full interaction with
others’.21 This interaction between self and other takes place both inside
and outside the poem and so affects mcguckian’s relationship with her
own readers, courting the blend of intimacy and estrangement noted from
her earliest work. even as she is acquiring considerable critical attention,
mcguckian can remark: ‘i began to write poetry so that nobody would
read it’, thus transforming her own readers into strangers.22 ‘The sitting’
continues: ‘she is posing furtively, like a letter being / pushed under a
door, making a tunnel with her / hands over her dull-rose dress’ (VR
1984 15). The disowning of the physical body is contrasted to the attentive
representation of it, as though art can reclaim what is lost in life and
offer intimacy in place of distance. again, the detail (‘painting it hair
by hair’) causes the reader to shift perspective and to see the value in
minutiae here. This close-up approach also goes some way to address
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mcguckian’s apparent reluctance at this time to deal with larger political
and historical issues, revealing a double existence that is focused on the
vivid representation of individual subjectivity, yet revealing of the larger
dynamics shaping social and political events. even the precise forms of
representation create ambivalent tones: the mixed feelings involved in
self-revelation become clear here in the held-back pose; the scepticism
concerning the accuracy of the rendering; the paradoxical desire to evade
artistic capture just at the moment when the representation is complete.
The explicit exploration of the role of the artist – and thus obliquely
of the writer – is an important development of this visual dimension.
mcguckian’s second major collection, Venus and the Rain, engages
more fully in this process. This is a more stable collection than the
first: though it appeared in two separate editions, its revisions are not
as radical as those that can be traced in the transition of The Flower
Master. its opening poem, ‘venus and the sun’, uses planetary configuration to consider the relationship between space and time, and thus
the relationship between the artist and her own creative identity. venus,
the first planet inside the earth’s orbit, is associated with the capacity to
apprehend wholeness while maintaining an intimate connection to the
experiences of earth. in this poem, it is the relationship between venus
and the sun – or between artist and inspiration – which is key. The sun
provides creative energy but the artist in turn shapes this inspiration to
realign the cosmos: the moon and stars are curved into new relation to
one another, an inclusive and binding form. Though describing herself as
‘the sun’s toy’, the speaker loves to test the boundaries of such authority.
it is a marker of mcguckian’s confidence that, at the threshold of her
second volume, she can announce her ambitions in this way, and suggest
the freedom that a break from temporal restrictions will bring:
if i travel far enough, and fast enough, i seem
to be at rest, i see my closed life expanding
Through the crimson shells of time
(FM 1984 9)
yet the universe that the poet creates at this point in her career is an
expanding one: the stars ‘fly apart / from each other to a more soulful
beginning’ – moving, that is, towards their origins, which are singular
rather than collective. in the final line, venus and mars, female and male
elements, are brought into alignment as the speaker speculates how she
might ‘double-back’ from her extraordinary creative trajectory to inhabit
a masculine space – the ‘dullest blue of mars’ (VR 1984 9).
The companion poem to this one, and the title poem of the collection
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Venus and the Rain, is situated halfway through the volume, as though
suggesting the symmetry of such doubling-back and embedding new
temporal freedoms into the physical space of the book. again, the poet
is concerned with the relationship of the parts to the whole, but here
the bright flames of the sun are replaced by the icy fissures of a distant
planet:
my gibbous voice
passes from leaf to leaf, retelling the story
of its own provocative fractures till
Their facing coasts might almost fill each other
and they ask me in reply if i’ve
decided to stop trying to make diamonds.
(VR 1984 31)
This fractured voice again tells of time’s reversal, here of the drawing
together of continents. The creation of diamonds from the compression
of rock might find a parallel in the diamond-like appearance of the
frozen raindrop – one a hard and lasting form, the other endlessly
changing in relation to its environment. as Catriona Clutterbuck has
argued, the making of diamonds is also an allusion to the creative
process and to the critical questioning that mcguckian’s challenging
style has inevitably provoked.23 instead of a fixed art, the speaker
privileges its alternative, offering forms of water which – as well as being
mutable – are unpredictable in their flow. Though she teases us with the
thought that the ‘cruising moonships’ of criticism might ‘find / Those
icy domes relaxing’ (VR, 1984 31), ultimately, the poet asserts the power
of the meltwaters of poetry and their energizing flow. again we enter
a strange and timeless realm; however, now mcguckian asserts this
not as a by-product of more personal themes but as a clear expression
of freedom from cause and effect and one that will go on to shape her
political poems of the nineties and beyond.
Intimate Remembrance:
Shelmalier and Had I a Thousand Lives
mcguckian’s relation to the specific cultural circumstances of her
writing has occasioned much debate. Though the work of all northern
irish poets is read against the backdrop of the violence in the province,
mcguckian has explicitly resisted the view that her work represents the
northern conflict: ‘the “troubles” affect my life and enter my poetry
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that way,’ she says, ‘but i avoid them as a subject as i avoid taking arms
against a sea’.24 Though she has acknowledged that the violence had little
direct impact on her family,25 yet she is aware of the shaping forces of
the environment on her creative process: ‘i was brought up in Belfast. i
wouldn’t have been a poet, i don’t think, if i had lived anywhere else.’26
The significance of place does not find expression in a direct representation of experience, whether of the individual or the community, but
rather in a synthesis of the less visible or tangible elements of the conflict
both for herself and for her readers. This process draws attention to the
importance of cultural memory in shaping opinion, past, present and
future: ‘cultural memory contains a number of cultural messages that
are addressed to posterity and intended for continuous repetition and
re-use’.27 The ‘cultural messages’ carried by poetry, however, are subtle
ones. here it is not the role of the poem to represent violent conflict
directly, but rather to achieve an understanding of its effects. mcguckian
has remarked on the sense of dislocation that the troubles have brought
and of the role of suffering in shaping writing, yet before the publication
of Captain Lavender in 1994 there was little to indicate that politics
were a direct influence on her work.28 That collection clearly marks
the transition towards a more politically motivated poetics, but one
that does not mark a stylistic break with her earlier collections. Flynn
argues that mcguckian’s ‘keen political intelligence’ is already evident
in her work, especially in her engagement with historical suffering in
other cultures.29 This lays the foundation of her later treatment of irish
political violence through the lens of history. The atemporality suggested
by republicanism, which understands armed resistance as both the result
of (and therefore coming after) lengthy political conflict and ideologically coexistent with ireland’s revolutionary past, allows mcguckian to
assimilate this material into her existing preoccupation with synchronicity. her choice of a quotation from picasso as an epigraph – ‘i have
not painted the war […] but i have no doubt that the war is in […] these
paintings i have done’ – is a testament to the subtlety of her approach.
mcguckian’s treatment of political material is not markedly different
from her engagement with personal relationships, yet the poems in the
second part of Captain Lavender present more uncertain emotional
territory for poet and reader. here the greater effect of sectarian violence
becomes more visible in her work: the mood becomes darker and a
whimsical sense of difference gives way to estrangement. poems like
‘The albert Chain’ expose the distortion that the province suffers under
terrorist violence – the shortened watch chain of the title indicating
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this constriction. vibrancy is set against stagnation and destruction in
the opening stanza where fruit hangs from a dead tree; the wild cat is
stripped of its skin; the squirrel stoned to death. There is something
deliberate about this state of affairs, however, as though the deathliness
is both cause and effect of the actions of nature: ‘like an accomplished
terrorist, the fruit hangs / from the end of a dead stem’ (CL 68).
The speaker returns to the situation of war and finds it to be a dark and
threatening place, much as heaney felt his return to northern ireland
after a year abroad was like ‘putting on an old dirty glove again’.30 in
this way she remains trapped between past and present, registering the
trauma of both and powerless to reach a place of peace and reflection.
This entrapment indicates the cyclical nature of the violence in northern
ireland, and the extent to which it draws its iconography from a long
history of divided political allegiances. The repetition of violence ties its
citizens to the past, so that though the poem may posit a single speaking
voice, the exploration of subjectivity is layered and volatile. This returns
us to Thomas docherty’s contention:
often it is difficult to locate any single position from which the poem can
be spoken. […] it reads as if the space afforded the ‘i’ is vacant: instead
of a stable ‘persona’, all we have is a potential, a voice that cannot yet be
identified.31
This issue, which is what makes mcguckian’s poetry so distinctive,
is also what offers the greatest challenge to readers and divides critics
most forcefully. shane murphy refutes docherty thus: ‘The voice may
be “unidentified”, but this does not void it of “identity”; and although
the “i” may be multiple in the poem, he is incorrect to consider this as
nullifying its actuality.’32 eric Falci has also argued that mcguckian’s use
of the ‘i’ reinforces rather than eliminates subjectivity: ‘the “i” of most
poems consistently asserts its own gravitational pull’.33 This debate is one
of no little significance for women writers, whose struggle to establish
a voice is inextricable from the reader’s willingness to engage seriously
with it, whether it be singular or multiple. mcguckian’s complex use of
the voice is what makes her work so important in any study of poetry
by women, because it enacts the shifting and often unfathomable aspects
of identity politics in immediate ways. she registers the familiarity as
that of being buried alive ‘like a dead man / attached to the soil which
covers him’; one that involves a dissipation of the self ‘in little pieces, like
specks of dust’ (CL 68). The figure of the prisoner, hands ‘bruised against
bars’, foreshadows the men that will later populate Shelmalier (1998) and
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Had I a Thousand Lives (2003). The personal trauma associated with the
death of her father becomes part of the larger cultural distress to which
she bears witness. Though her father’s death had no direct association
with the political conflict, mcguckian has linked it to the troubles: ‘i
felt i had to avenge his death, in a sense, myself, that my father was
my republican.’34 The extent to which she felt the lives of her parents’
generation had been limited by social circumstances and political violence
is clear from her remarks, as helen Blakeman concludes: ‘mcguckian
mourns the death of her father as a casualty of war, relating his “imprisonment” within a lifetime of conflict to the actual imprisonment of
political prisoners.’35 By thinking politically about these personal events,
mcguckian displaces feelings of grief and loss into ones of estrangement,
memorializing her father through a renewed sense of the injustices
inherent in the northern political situation.
This realization lays the foundation for two important volumes that
commemorate ireland’s revolutionary past. Shelmalier (1998) centres on
the united irishman rebellion of 1798 and links this landmark period
of irish history with the contemporary violence in northern ireland.
as Falci has pointed out, however, even these parallels are untimely:
‘considering that many of the poems […] were most likely written
between the ira cessation of military operations in august 1994 and the
good Friday agreement in april 1998, mcguckian’s conflation of 1798
and 1998 becomes aggressively anachronistic’.36 This observation confirms
the poet’s tendency to create her own temporal frameworks, which may
bear only passing resemblance to the chronologies of recorded history.
in calling the book ‘the dawn of my own enlightenment’, she is, Faragó
argues, ‘explaining her role as the reader of history, before her role as the
writer of poetry’.37 This dynamic adds a new layer to the temporal play
of mcguckian’s work, emphasizing the process by which she reads and
uses other texts, rather than the intertextual product that is the result
of this practice. here the shaping of the book around a central concept
allows the displacement of meaning to acquire a centrifugal force.
The book is divided into five sections, each of which combines different
moments of history and different perspectives on the interweaving of
national and personal material. each begins with an italicized poem that
resonates with the texts that follow, sounding a note that is taken up
in other voices and forms. Though the unified nature of the collection
might come as a surprise to mcguckian’s readers, the indeterminacy of
voice is already a familiar strategy, here made more politically significant
by the poet’s exploration of national history. The opening poem of the
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book, ‘Script for an Unchanging Voice’, speaks of forms within forms:
‘Here is a stone with a stone’s mouth inside, / a shell in which a lighter shell
has died’ (S 16). linking this image to the yeatsian ‘stone in the midst of
all’, eric Falci traces its departure from this solidity to express a form of
negation: the mouth ‘is made non-functional by being placed inside of
a stone, where, if nothing else, it will not work as a mouth. This figure
for utterance is canceled by the act of its figuration’.38 yet the image also
speaks of replication: of the present as a harder, more obdurate version of
the past, which it has subsumed. This accounts both for the ruthlessness
of terrorist violence and for the failure of coherent speech in the face of
oppression. The layered nature of past and present results in the close
connection between the speaker in these poems (usually female) and the
men of 1798. This is a collection animated by ghosts who are, as guinn
Batten has observed, paradoxically more alive than the speaker herself.39
yet in spite of the new and unified purpose of this volume, it retains
links with mcguckian’s past texts as well as with history, in this way
memorializing not only armed confrontation but also the kind of poetic
resistance that mcguckian has been practising since the beginning of
her writing career. one poem from the opening section explores the
subtle yet enduring nature of the past. ‘The sofa in the Window with
the trees outside’ reintroduces an image from one of mcguckian’s
earliest poems – the ‘serious sofa’ which there signified the creative
process itself – and thus records the creative changes that her work has
undergone. The title here draws attention to divisions of space even as
it dismantles them. as in the earlier poem, internal and external blend,
the gold forget-me-nots appear alongside the hedge thick with flowers;
‘storm and blue [sit] under the one light’ (S 20).40 The effort to keep
things separate seems doomed to failure. to accompany these spatial
shifts there are shifts in time:
The dead among the spices of words
brush their eyes over me, as if
all my limbs were separate.
They are pearls that have got
into my clothes
(S 20)
This deathly presence within the language of her poetry comes from
the earth. in ‘The Feastday of peace’ the dead who ‘steer’ the speaker’s
dreams are ‘deep in time’s turnings / and the overcrowded soil, / too
familiar to be seen’ (S 23). in ‘Cleaning out the Workhouse’, ‘your
eighteenth-century fingers spice the soil / with blood and bone’ (S 30).
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These overlapping words and images reinforce the unity of the collection
and emphasize the power of language, like the earth, to contain and
renew the materiality of the past. in this way, burial without commemoration is an unfinished process.41 This suggestion can be linked to the
claim made by luke gibbons that emmet’s speech indicates a deferral
of writing rather than a refusal to write: ‘The inability to achieve the full
inscription of the word within a subaltern or colonial culture points to
a lack of definition, a transitory, indeterminate condition at odds with
the homogeneity of the “imagined communities” of print culture’.42 in
words the speaker brings the dead to life: her ‘joyful / fighter’ comes
to the door, she can feel ‘his breath’s / smoothness’ but blocks out the
memory of his ravaged body, preserved at the dark centre of the poem,
itself a kind of grave (‘green Crucifix’, S 46). his missing backbone
is replaced by the ‘straight mast’ of the cross: it is not the fighter only
but also the witness who attains the identity of a Christ – a sacrificial
figure bound by fate to suffering. This unification of fighter and speaker
is an important dimension of these poems, and suggests not only the
linking of contemporary ireland with its revolutionary history but the
unification of female and male, of witness and participant in ways that
make the past present. ‘shoulder-length, Caged-parrot earrings’ (S 48)
is formed around such tensions. it begins by associating ‘female eyes’
with a ‘male hand’, and by depicting the open throat of the fighter as at
once expressive and deathly. The poem’s yeatsian echoes – ‘how lightly
then your rich body weighed’ (‘They weighed so lightly what they gave’)
– reinforces its unification of opposites, and its sense of the sacrificial
rebel as transcending earthly realities, and watching from a heightened
vantage point.43
The Face of the Earth (november 2002) and Had I a Thousand Lives
(July 2003), published barely eight months apart, reveal the different
strands clearly emerging in the poet’s work at this time, yet paradoxically assert the overlapping nature of the emotions they involve, for
both writer and reader. The former is a meditation on death and loss,
situating these in a philosophical rather than a political frame; the
latter commemorates the deaths of robert emmet and Thomas russell,
organizers of the 1803 rebellion, and considers the role of personal
sacrifice for a political cause. mcguckian’s work of this period confronts
the trauma to be found in private as well as public lives; its presence
in both these books confirms that it is distinct yet simultaneous – the
publication of Had I a Thousand Lives does not consign The Face of the
Earth to the past, but rather keeps it present to the reader. in spite of
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this process, the opening poem of the second book meditates on the
difficulty of ‘saying’ anything in a culture where past and present are
fraught with violence. The title ‘river of January’ implies a temporal
movement that belies the frozen language of rebel and poet: ‘i have
nothing to say which i can say’ (HTL 13). The security of ordinary
people who ‘walk about as if they own / where they are, and they
do’ is juxtaposed to the feelings of others who yearn for a unity that
is expressed here in primeval terms, through the image of the forest.
yet this place of symbolic richness cannot yield actual comfort – the
poem questions the attempt to create a ‘flower-rich shelter […] / […]
in a wood left untouched / by the prospering suggestion of orchards’
(HTL 13). The ‘old meanings’ of the forest persist, in spite of the
blasted landscape depicted here – the ‘treeless, herbless, overfished sea’,
a reversal of the elizabethan colonists appreciation for ireland’s rich
landscape and evidence of the ways which language can accommodate
oppositional meanings. The metaphor of belonging has become more
important than the reality of community.
The persistence of ideological commitment in the face of social change
is noteworthy here, and a partial representation of the past becomes
essential to this dynamic. memory and forgetting are keys to Had I a
Thousand Lives both because of its commemorative impulse and because
the individual creative act is linked to the process of memory itself.
‘my body cannot forget your body’ begins ‘The Chamomile lawn’ – a
poem concerned with the tenuous separation of life and death (HTL 78).
even the roses only ‘give the impression’ of existing in the present; it is
the scent of earlier roses that endures. The presence of death has both
individual and collective significance: ‘i hear my death speak, / making
silencing gestures while he speaks / through all the other deaths in the
room’ (HTL 78). This ‘speaking through’ is ambiguous, in that it uses
another’s experience as a channel for communication at the same time
as it obliterates the suffering of the other in order to assert that of the
self. here mcguckian articulates the anxieties around ideas of collective
memory that may invalidate the recollections of the individual subject.
elena esposito argues, however, that the seat of collective memory is
‘not in society, but indirectly in the consciousnesses (or in the minds)
of the individuals taking part in it’.44 This doubleness is reassuring
for the speaker in ‘The Chamomile lawn’ since, at the same time as
these anxieties emerge, the necessity of collective action seems to be
asserted in two different ways. First, the sacrifice of a leader must be
matched by that of countless anonymous rebels, whose commitment to
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the cause lends gravitas to the event. secondly, those who die fighting
for nationalist causes join a host of other who have died similarly over
the course of centuries. The relationship between action and emotion
is significant here: the movement beyond violence towards fear in this
poem marks a crucial confrontation with the self. This turbulent sense
of selfhood is closely linked to the nationalist struggle in the desire for
self-determination it indicates. it also ties the rebel leader to succeeding
generations who benefit from his sacrifice:
my head
and heart line up behind him, my legs’ darkness
fold around his waist. he pours his blood out
striving to free his I from the I,
and finds himself to be so non-masterfully
that indescribably delicate personality
of light by which he sees, this quartered
death is worth a whole life, my life, me.
(HTL 79)
The sexual connection between speaker and rebel here is integral to
mcguckian’s poetic technique: ‘my legs’ darkness / fold around his
waist’ mimicking her practice of folding disparate meanings into her
poems, of subsuming the past into the present. Bodily movement drives
the enjambment here but it is the darkness between the legs that can take
in and offer in return the blood the dying man pours out. in striving
for freedom, he is both actor and acted upon – the subject and object of
violence, verb and adverb in these lines. his fragmented body demands
a response from the living who, in their wholeness, must atone for his
past suffering even as they recognize its continuing presence.
The legacy of the insurgent is featured again in ‘petit Bleu’ and once
more the issue of self-expression emerges. The rebel’s prison existence
radiates meaning: ‘you burn like an extra- / special sunset / in the
warmth of your bed, / the very soul of the prison’ (HTL 20). more
importantly, the sprinkling of ‘small pieces of torn letters’ around the
prison yard, suggest the partial yet memorable communication of the
experience of incarceration and sacrifice. The poem itself is composed
of fragments, the first two of its three sections ending in ellipses. The
struggle to find language adequate to experiences of death and torture
has informed modern literature in significant ways; in problematizing
linguistic coherence, it demands a new approach to expression – ‘physical
pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing
about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the
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sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned’.45
mcguckian’s work further recognizes the struggle for any form of
expression given the choices and pressures inherent in language itself.
Though liberty may be ‘the eternal letter L’ that drives this poem, it is
marked by confinement and truncation, even the place of execution is
set apart ‘on the north side / where no one walks / except in new shoes
returning / from mass’ (HTL 20). yet this sense of being set apart will
fuel the memorialization of ‘the doomed in all but name’.
The inspirational nature of sacrifice is explored in this collection both
through mcguckian’s recognition of the legacies of history and, more
specifically, because she records the writerly aspects of this exploration
directly. ‘a religion of Writing’ chooses the motif of inscription to
examine the lasting nature of texts and the problematic relationship
between words and meaning (‘the remoteness / of name to meaning’).
The inscribed gravestone is at once a marker of identity and an indication
that identity has been lost through the death of the body. The writing
here is fragmented into letters, which themselves have no coherent
meaning: ‘such unsteady capitals, / / the backward S, the L / with its
foot slanting sharply / downwards’ like the mutilated figures of the
executed (HTL 22). For Conor Carville, this leaves us to infer the name
or epitaph on the tomb, suggesting ‘a degree of imaginative freedom, of
interpretation on the part of both the narrator and the reader’.46 This
drawing together of the processes of narration and reading increases
the sense of containment created in the poem. enclosure is emphasized
for both text and body: ‘letters of smaller / size placed inside others’
are paired at the close of the poem with ‘a death’s head carved / with
a human head inside it’, recalling the earlier ‘stone with a stone’s mouth
inside’ of Shelmalier (HTL 23; S 16). Within the representation exists the
life itself, so even as mcguckian creates oblique palimpsestic poems she
acknowledges the primacy of human feeling within them.
Transformations: The Book of the Angel
in mcguckian’s most recent collections, especially those published since
Had I a Thousand Lives in 2003, there is a pronounced emphasis on the
representation of the spiritual as a means of engaging, once more, with
the relationship between the revelatory power of language and subjective
experience. This development might be seen as the natural outcome
of her search for ways to unite past and present. By figuring the act
of commemoration as one of personal connection – an expression of
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intimate relation to the past – mcguckian seeks to construct meaning
through the breaching of physical and semantic boundaries. so the
intrusion of the divine into the human world, and the corresponding
challenge to rational systems that it presents, is suggestive of mcguckian’s
poetic project as a whole, and the important role the strange and the
inexplicable play within it. Throughout her work, codes of meaning are
exposed to sudden interpretative shifts; time frames extend and collapse
without warning. as a result, our normal strategies of reading must
change, because the progression of our interpretative acts demands it.
reading mcguckian’s latest poems requires us to remember our earlier
encounters with her work and to allow its continuities to illuminate her
recently written and yet-to-be-created texts. Through her representation
of the divine, in particular of the figure of the angel, mcguckian
explores the temporal implications of the creative process, extending her
experimental uses of language and deepening her engagement with the
body as the experiential nexus of knowledge.
The annunciation is an important trope for the poet: it is a moment
of the utmost significance for Christian civilization, yet it is also a
turning point in the life of the individual woman. its role in cultural
memory, and its endurance as a subject of textual and visual representation, can sometimes obscure the complex temporalities it invokes. as
a transformative event in the understanding of individual and world, it
demands a rethinking of time, projecting meaning from the moment
of revelation into the newly significant future. This dynamic suggests
an estrangement from the past and thus an implicit detachment from
earlier texts, causing us to rethink the implications of mcguckian’s
intertextual strategies. Thomas docherty has commented on what he
calls mcguckian’s ‘untimeliness’, which he further defines as ‘the gap
between what is said and the voice that says it’.47 in mcguckian’s
recent work the disjunction of voice and language is highlighted by
the presence of ‘voice’ within poems not as a speech act but as an
entity in itself. The voice is not therefore ‘heard’ as much as it is
understood conceptually through a kind of representation that moves
beyond the auditory.
i encounter now my only
language, an eye that opens
at a summit, something prior
to the sentences we speak,
as if, in the eloquent
survival of that voice,
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spirit said something
i wanted to say
(BA 54)
That the voice should exist prior to, yet also come after, wordless
expression is significant when exploring the concept of the annunciation
itself. Between the momentous articulations of John the Baptist and of
the angel gabriel lies the silence of private experience. This is the gap
between the foretelling of the event and the event itself; between the
significance of the Word and its implications for the listening subject.
The annunciation is of course the prelude to the Word made flesh:
the stage of pregnancy before it is manifest bodily, when its statements
occur in language only. For Julia Kristeva, this is an event that calls
attention, in turn, to the ‘gap’ in language between the analytical and
the poetic. her text ‘stabat mater’ combines a study of the cult of
the virgin mary with reflections on her own experience of maternity
that fragment – or merge with – the main text. This double discourse
confirms the presence of the subjective within the intellectual; it forms
part of our understanding of the argument throughout.
Words that are always too/distant, too abstract for this/underground
swarming of seconds, folding in unimaginable spaces. Writing/them down
is an ordeal of discourse, like love. What is/loving, for a woman, the same/
thing as writing.48
This struggle to fit words to the maternal experience is the result of the
kind of folding inward that Kristeva describes here; the same kind that
creates private spaces in mcguckian’s poems, making them resistant
to interpretation. This process is also one in which the strange and the
familiar meet: the intimacy that makes both love and creativity testing
experiences permits these processes to be reconfigured, so that the
subject is at once knowing and unknowing. again, the hollow body –
redolent of mcguckian’s concern with childbirth – is the empty space
through which a plurality of inferences may circulate. Culturally and
textually, this collection affirms that what is missing from the poems can
be at the centre of their meaning. The magnificat is the unspoken text in
The Book of the Angel (2004), for example: its absence at once constitutes
the system of belief that underpins the poem’s linguistic structure and
emphasizes its radical strangeness to the human mind.
The Book of the Angel meditates on representations of the angelic that
inflect medieval and renaissance art, linking these to contemplation of
poetic purpose and cultural conflict. here the intrusion of the divine
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into the secular world can seem both passive and active – an aesthetic
representation and a dynamic mystifying force. This unifying theme also
draws attention to the theatrical aspects of the poems and to the spiritual
nature of the poet’s creative quest, a quest that has involved the persistent
excavation of personal and cultural memory. The continuing significance
of religion in mcguckian’s work has been acknowledged by the poet
herself: ‘i realised i had some kind of message to hand on and that i
was in some degree a priest’.49 however, the topic of religion clearly bears
uneasy relation to the circumstances of her Belfast upbringing. Borbála
Faragó argues that its appearance in her poems ‘cannot … be interpreted
simply within the context of her politicised surroundings, but rather as
the symptom of the development of a highly personalised moral code’.50
in this collection, mcguckian uses the revelatory potential of the angel
to address the connections among religion, national identity and artistic
expression, as well as to effect the transcendence of historical time. The
angel as a transitional figure – one that belongs neither to heaven nor
to earth, and whose gender is ambiguous – could be seen as akin to the
poet in mediating between spiritual and material worlds, and between
different forms of experience, the kind of messenger that mcguckian
has already recognized in herself. aspects of the poet’s involved style
suggest that the angel might better be interpreted as of both heaven and
earth, however, since throughout mcguckian’s poetic career apparently
separate realms have been cast together in arresting ways. in this regard,
especially, the political dimension of the collection becomes clear: both
sides of the northern community are inextricably linked through the
experience and performance of suffering so that neither, in a sense, can
exist without the other.
such duality is in evidence throughout the volume. ‘angel in two
parts’ draws specific attention to the role of the poem in the act of
revelation: since the work itself contains two sections, the angel is not only
represented within it, but in some senses ‘becomes’ it. There is a familiar
blend here of containment and freedom, beginning with a question that
casts doubt on the position of the speaking subject: ‘how often, truly,
have we found ourselves in that square’ (BA 50). This opening line reveals
just how nuanced such an apparently straightforward question may
become. The inflected ‘truly’ does more than question shared memory,
it seems to reveal its inherent powers of collusion. By undermining
the shared understanding of ‘we’, mcguckian implicates not only the
figures within the poem but writer and reader too. in this way, she
opens the traumatic past to new forms of scrutiny, examining how the
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shared bonds of suffering can be transcended by singular reflection. The
holocaust may be evoked in the image of the train reaching the ‘end
of beaten track / end of final roofs’; man-made civilization yields to
nature, though even nature is damaged and distorted. This apocalyptic
vision is attended by an angel: ‘The last angel / sings the words, at
first so dazzlingly severe’ (BA 50). here, as elsewhere in mcguckian’s
work, language bears witness to its own intensity: when Wittgenstein
dwells on the language of meaning (as opposed to the mere rehearsal or
repetition of words) he invites people to sing their sentences, since this
is how the sign can be made ‘alive’.51 in this poem the angel achieves
both intensity and a transcendent lightness in a context that suggests
cultural trauma. The first part of the poem renders the continuous
present and the single instant of experience. By questioning the truth
of specific memory, mcguckian dismisses the possibility of a logically
formed sequence of meanings in favour of impressionistic, repeatable
moments of being: ‘it was here, more than anywhere, / that we met,
the sky unfeathered and burned, / as if a valley were pounded into it’
(BA 50). The second half of the poem dwells on time itself: calendar
time is telescoped so that it can be experienced in multiple ways: ‘even
though it has time, still, / / the mountain above the door is weatherless,
/ supplying time for time’ (BA 51). The last phrase suggests that time
itself is what facilitates the temporal in being absorbed or understood,
seeming to support the symbiotic relationship between past and present
that the process of memory itself may suggest.52 This is an idea that raises
particularly interesting questions concerning the relationship between
the act of reading and the passage of time, since mcguckian’s work
renders the temporal both outside the realm of her consideration (she
refuses to adhere to its rules) and at the centre of an endless process of
interpretation within which no closure can be reached. ‘supplying time
for time’ also suggests a sleight of hand, by which one appreciation
of time is replaced by another, without our frame of understanding
(‘the door’) being disturbed. There are ambiguities of punctuation in
this final stanza too: the hyphenation of the ‘angel- / boatman’ turned
‘angel- / doorkeeper’ stresses the angelic as a qualifying characteristic,
yet elsewhere it seems an essential of identity, especially since the word
‘angel’ concludes two consecutive lines. Charon and st peter merge,
allowing the final threshold to be both structured (the door) and
unstructured (the river).
if the metaphor of the annunciation is about the power of language to
create the real, to intervene between what is known and what is believed,
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then it has significance for the relationship between memory and
imagination. in mcguckian’s hands the metaphor probes the relationship
between the visual tradition and the meanings it accumulates. The Book
of the Angel has five parts,53 which may hint at the Joyful mysteries,
since the annunciation unifies some early poems in the book with
painterly detail: ‘it is impossible to tell / from the brocade and feathers /
of the robes, wings and hair of gabriel / […] / / whether he has already
spoken’ (‘a Chrisom Child’, BA 30). in this sense, mcguckian seems to
take account of ‘what great art leaves out’, choosing to move beyond the
generic expectations of each art form to ask awkward questions about
its purpose and meaning. Certainly, the overlapping of verbal and visual
expression disturbs our codes of reading, as in ‘studies for a running
angel’, which opens part 2 of this collection:
she prolongs with words the growing fields
and, to make draperies, skies and clouds
on the larger arched surface,
or knots of gold cord on the ceiling
(BA 28)
here realistic representation and decorative elements fill a structured
space, much as the poems themselves combine moments of emotional
directness within a richly imaginative terrain. increasingly, the importance
of painting introduces a stillness at the core of many of these works,
an instant of perfect repose around which the dynamic of the poem
moves. The idea of the annunciation itself demonstrates that death is
an important driving force from the beginning – the seeds of Christ’s
suffering lying within the announcement of his imminent birth.
one does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain: the child represents
it and henceforth it settles in, it is continuous […] a mother is always branded
by pain, she yields to it. ‘and a sword will pierce your own soul too …’54
mcguckian herself has admitted: ‘death is always a crux around
which i write […] death is what poets are supposed to define, not deal
with death or even understand or to cope with it, and not give answers
but just meditate …’.55 There is an interesting paradox here between
the apparent fixedness of death itself and the flexibility of mcguckian’s
writing, the endless renewal that attends her poetic process. hers is
not a monumental art but one that is continually transformed as new
versions of familiar tropes and images are inscribed in the texts. in
this way her work is both familiar and strange, her recognizable style
always challenging interpretation. Within a poetic scheme that seems to
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resist fixity, there exists an imaginative endurance that has a significant
impact on mcguckian’s development. towards the end of The Book of
the Angel we find poems that stand firm against dissolution, enacting
an alternative kind of memorialization. ‘Charcoal angel’ begins with
a momentous quality, a time set apart from others, ‘a moonlit night a
hundred years ago […] / / sky as hard as a wall. / sea drowned in the
sand’ (BA 82). here the most changeable of forms become fixed; water
and earth exchange properties. The ‘[t]wo knowledges’ that come into
conflict may be indicative of the increasing divide between West and
east – two cultures and two sets of belief. yet the phrase ‘one face upon
another’ seems at once to suggest the combativeness of coming ‘head-tohead’ as well as the idea of two identities so similar that they can’t be told
apart. This possible binary resolves itself into a seemingly singular ‘he’:
absence of pupils, but he has eyes
in his voice, that scarred voice
that seemed so near, it’s by his voice,
it’s in his voice that he dies.
(BA 82)
The synaesthesia so often evident in mcguckian’s work emerges here:
the idea that speaking is an act of observation not only alters the sensory
process on the part of the experiencing subject but also for the onlooker
too, who may be forced to consider whether the act of reading itself has
now changed. if it is through language that we bear witness to the past,
then the speech act lays vital claim to that process, yet there is an implicit
suggestion here that our acts of remembrance engage all the senses. This
emerging poseidon is first and foremost a voice – it is at once the means
of his continuance and the instrument by which he loses his identity.
here speech sustains feeling and understanding even as the elements
blow the markers of death away. mcguckian’s imagery is tricky though:
further consideration reminds us that the angel is made of charcoal – a
porous, organic substance, not the enduring marble that is most familiar.
The inscription is in ivory, again emphasizing a material once living, so
that this collection ends with these contradictions held in balance.
The underlying resistance that this poem explores suggests that strength
is not to be found in stasis but in constant change, in the mutability of
existence itself. in this sense the artistic process overlays the foundation
of Christian imagery that mcguckian explores. she represents an altered
attitude to authority in her use of intertextuality and her rejection of the
idea of closure. every poem gives into another, collections are shaped
around repeating images and textual patterns, and themes are picked
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up from one volume to the next. her radical attitude towards memory
is expressed through the changing relationship between diffusion and
concentration in her work. multiple subjectivities may be temporarily
accommodated in a kind of visual representation that itself expresses
variety in unity. The persistent importance of art in mcguckian’s work
suggests that for her it represents an act of remembering as well as one
of creation. similarly, her tropes of intimacy, both maternal and sexual,
are at once reinforced and transcended by the spiritual character of her
later poems. in this her own career exemplifies the capacity to retain
the concepts of past, present and future at the same time as she allows
the distinction between them to disappear. These radical temporalities
shape our reading and interpretation of her work in fundamental ways.
Notes
1 her work has also divided critics: she has been variously described as ‘fluid’
and ‘mannered’, as ‘forward-looking’ and ‘non-visionary’, as ‘humorous’ and
‘whimsical’. in a review of Venus and the Rain, James simmons described her work
as a ‘hoax’ (‘a literary legpull?’, p. 27) while patrick Williams castigated her for
‘insistent womanliness – or as i find it, pseudo-womanliness’ (‘spare that tree!’,
p. 52).
2 maría Jesús lorenzo-modia and Cristina Fernández-méndez, ‘“longer and longer
sentences prove me Wholly Female”: medbh mcguckian and Feminism(s)’,
in manuela palacios and laura lojo (eds), Writing Bonds: Irish and Galician
Contemporary Women Poets (Berne: peter lang, 2009), p. 40.
3 Brian Friel approaches the same issue from a different perspective, emphasizing
the capacity for language to prompt shared engagement: ‘i think that the political
problem of this island is going to be solved by language, not only the language
of negotiation across the table, but the recognition of what language means for
us on this island’. For further discussion of Friel and the Field day project, see
elmer Kennedy-andrews, ‘The language of memory: translation, transgression,
transcendence’, in Frawley, Memory Ireland, vol. 3, pp. 247–71.
4 shane murphy, ‘sonnets, Centos and long lines: muldoon, paulin, mcguckian and
Carson’, in matthew Campbell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary
Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2003), p. 200.
5 eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge
university press, 2012), p. 91.
6 Faragó’s study explores the role of creativity and performativity throughout
mcguckian’s poetic career. she does this by dividing the work into four broad
chronological groups, emphasizing both continuity and evolution in the poet’s
career. see Borbála Faragó, Medbh McGuckian (lewisburg, pa: Bucknell university
press; Cork: Cork university press, 2014).
7 nuala archer, ‘nuala archer on Blue Farm’, Two Women, Two Shores: Poems by
Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Archer (Baltimore, md: new poets series; galway:
salmon press, 1989).
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8 shane murphy is the foremost critic to examine medbh mcguckian’s intertextual
strategies. see, in particular, shane murphy, ‘intertextual relations in the poetry
of medbh mcguckian’, in patricia a. lynch, Joachim Fischer and Brian Coates
(eds), Back to the Present, Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History Since 1798,
vol. 2 (amsterdam: rodopi, 2006), pp. 271–85; shane murphy, ‘roaming root of
multiple meanings: intertextual relations in medbh mcguckian’s poetry’, Metre
4 (Winter 1998), pp. 99–109; also shannon hipp, ‘“Things of the same Kind are
separated only by time”: reading the notebooks of medbh mcguckian’, Irish
University Review 39.1 (spring/summer 2009), pp. 130–48.
9 shane murphy, ‘obliquity in the poetry of paul muldoon and medbh mcguckian’,
Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 31.3–4 (Fall/Winter 1996), p. 85.
10 Quoted in shane murphy, ‘“you took away my Biography”: The poetry of medbh
mcguckian’, Irish University Review 28:1 (spring/summer 1998), p. 121.
11 murphy, ‘obliquity in the poetry of paul muldoon and medbh mcguckian’,
p. 86.
12 deryn rees-Jones, ‘motherlands and mothertongues: Writing the poetry of
nation’, Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets (newcastle upon
tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), p. 177.
13 medbh mcguckian, ‘mazurka’, On Ballycastle Beach (oxford: oxford university
press, 1988), p. 22.
14 assmann and shortt, Memory and Political Change, p. 5.
15 leontia Flynn, Reading Medbh McGuckian (dublin: irish academic press, 2014),
p. 21.
16 ibid., 30.
17 moynagh sullivan, ‘dreamin’ my dreams With you: medbh mcguckian and the
Theatre of dreams’, Metre 17 (spring 2005), p. 106.
18 dutch interiors flourished during the seventeenth century when there was a
transition from aristocratic and religious patronage towards the middle-class or
merchant buyer. The demand for domestic themes in art not only meant the
introduction of more accessible images but the transformation of real-world scenes
into richly metaphorical texts. see mariët Westermann, A Worldly Art: The Dutch
Republic 1585–1718 (new haven, Ct: yale university press, 2007).
19 Works by Jean-Baptiste-simeon Chardin (1699–1779) feature in a number of poems
by Boland, including, ‘From the painting Back from Market by Chardin’ and
‘self-portrait on a summer evening’ (NCP 17; J 12–13).
20 Clair Wills, ‘voices from the nursery: medbh mcguckian’s plantation’, in michael
Kenneally (ed.), Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature (gerrards Cross: Colin
smythe, 1995), p. 382.
21 sarah Broom, ‘mcguckian’s Conversations with rilke in Marconi’s Cottage’, Irish
University Review 28.1 (spring/summer 1998), p. 44.
22 laura o’Connor, ‘Comhrá: Conversation between medbh mcguckian and nuala
ní dhomhnaill, Southern Review 28.1 (1995), p. 590.
23 Catriona Clutterbuck, ‘a gibbous voice: The poetics of subjectivity in the early
poetry of medbh mcguckian’, in shane alcobia-murphy and richard Kirkland
(eds), The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian: The Interior of Words (Cork: Cork university
press, 2010), pp. 41–67.
24 Kathleen mcCracken, ‘an attitude of Compassion: Q & a with medbh
mcguckian’, Irish Literary Supplement 9.2 (Fall 1990), p. 21.
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25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
lorenzo-modia and Fernández-méndez, ‘“longer and longer sentences”’, p. 37.
mcguckian, in sommerville-arjat and Wilson, Sleeping with Monsters, p. 2.
erll and nünning, Cultural Memory Studies, p. 99.
mcguckian, in sommerville-arjat and Wilson, Sleeping with Monsters, p. 2.
Flynn, Reading Medbh McGuckian, p. 146. Flynn notes mcguckian’s engagement
with russian writers as evidence of her prior political engagement. renate
lachmann also examines stylistic elements of russian writing that are relevant to
mcguckian’s practice: ‘one can … note a metonymic tendency in authors such
as pushkin, akhmatova, and mandelstam, primarily in their use of anagrams,
syllepses, quotations, hidden allusions, rejoinders, and repetitions, and in their
surpassing of other texts as well as their attempt to identify or to merge the time of
their pre-texts with the time of their own texts’. lachmann, in erll and nünning,
Cultural Memory Studies, p. 306.
seamus heaney, ‘The poet Who Came Back’, Belfast Telegraph, november 23, 1971.
Thomas docherty, ‘initiations, tempers, seductions: postmodern mcguckian’,
in neil Corcoran (ed.), The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of
Northern Ireland (Brigend: seren, 1992), p. 192.
murphy, ‘“you took away my Biography”’, p. 112.
Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, pp. 90–1. With reference to ‘harem
trousers’ from On Ballycastle Beach, Falci specifically refutes elmer andrews’
contention that mcguckian seeks ‘to eliminate the “i” altogether, to escape from
a rational, unified self (‘some sweet disorder’, p. 140).
lorenzo-modia and Fernández-méndez, ‘“longer and longer sentences”’, p. 39.
helen Blakeman, ‘“i am listening in black and white to what speaks to me in
blue”: medbh mcguckian, interviewed by helen Blakeman’, Irish Studies Review
11.1 (2003), p. 61.
Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, p. 100.
Faragó, Medbh McGuckian, p. 81.
Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, p. 103.
Batten, ‘Boland, mcguckian, ní Chuilleanáin and the Body of the nation’, p. 182.
in referencing louis macneice’s ‘snow’ the poem reminds us that it too is
‘soundlessly collateral and incompatible’. louis macneice, Collected Poems (london:
Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 30.
The relationship between burial and inscription would become more vexed in the
case of robert emmet, executed following the later rebellion of 1803. his famous
– and contentious – speech from the dock sees the executed rebel as a figure
impossible to consign to the past: ‘let them and me repose in obscurity and peace,
and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice
to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth,
then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.’ see marianne elliott, Robert
Emmet: The Making of a Legend (london: profile Books, 2003).
luke gibbons, ‘“Where Wolfe tone’s statue Was not”: Joyce, monuments and
memory’, in ian mcBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge:
Cambridge university press, 2001), p. 147.
W. B. yeats, ‘september 1913’, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems
(london: simon & schuster, 2010), p. 108.
elena esposito, ‘social Forgetting: a systems-Theory approach’ in erll and
nünning, Cultural Memory Studies, pp. 181–90.
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45 elaine scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (new
york and oxford: oxford university press, 1987), p. 4.
46 Conor Carville, ‘Warding off an epitaph’: Had I a Thousand Lives, in alcobiamurphy and Kirkland, The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian, p. 118.
47 docherty, ‘initiations, tempers, seductions’, p. 192.
48 Julia Kristeva, ‘stabat mater’, in toril moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (london:
Blackwell, 1986), p. 162.
49 laura o’Connor, ‘Comhrá’, p. 596.
50 Borbála Faragó, ‘medbh mcguckian: The angel in two parts’, European English
Messenger 13.2 (autumn 2004), p. 47
51 Joachim schulte, ‘“The life of the sign”: Wittgenstein on reading a poem’, in John
gibson and Wolfgang huemer (eds), The Literary Wittgenstein (london: routledge,
2004), p. 152.
52 Jeffrey K. olick explores the suggestion that what is remembered is determined
by present need. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical
Responsibility (london: routledge, 2007).
53 it also mirrors the structure of Shelmalier, inviting parallels between political and
religious beliefs.
54 Kristeva, ‘stabat mater’, p. 167.
55 Blakeman, ‘“i am listening in black and white”’, p. 63.
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ch a p ter si x
Catherine Walsh
a poetics of Flux
catherine walsh: a poetics of flux
Throughout Catherine Walsh’s work, innovations of form challenge the
stability of temporal perspectives and subjective positions. Though this
is a familiar dynamic in contemporary avant-garde poetry, the stylistic
experimentation that Walsh practises grows directly from her particular
enquiry into the nature of being, and the limits of human understanding.
What michael Begnal has described as the ‘scientific’ character of
Walsh’s work, is borne out by the absence of a clearly located self in the
work, a strategy which, together with constant shifts in vocabulary and
tone, problematizes the role of the singular speaker in this environment
and further indicates the impossibility of such stability in any context.1
This radical reconfiguration of subjectivity has implications for how the
past may be understood and represented in poetry. By altering the formal
and linguistic structures of the poem, Walsh challenges the linearity
of thought, redefining how past and present operate in the reading
mind. yet this strategy does not merely reprise larger assumptions
concerning forms of postmodern identity, instead the tension between
lived experience and existential questioning pulls the normal registers
of language apart, giving rise to particular complexities of rhythm and
tone. These innovations of form and technique fundamentally alter the
relationship between past and present in the work, eliding the boundaries
between them in more radical ways than other texts. For Walsh, this
adjusted temporality has an impact too on how space is conceived, so
that cultural as well as poetic spaces must be seen from new perspectives.
This has important implications for the ways in which cultural memory
is shaped by political and linguistic environments:
personal memories are purely virtual until they are couched in words or
images in order to be communicated. Collective memories are produced
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through mediated representations of the past that involve selecting,
rearranging, re-describing and simplifying, as well as the deliberate, but
also perhaps unintentional, inclusion and exclusion of information.2
The dismantling of subjectivity, and the formal and linguistic impact
of this, is an important preoccupation of contemporary poetry, as
the exploration of medbh mcguckian’s work has demonstrated. The
problems of unitary subjectivity are not always expressed in formally
innovative ways, however; widely read poets, such as eavan Boland
and paula meehan, use a range of strategies to challenge assumptions
of coherent identity and to problematize the relationship between
public and private selves in the poetry. indeed, Clair Wills has argued
persuasively against the distinction between so-called ‘mainstream’ and
‘experimental’ poetries:
it is not that ‘expressive’ poetry naively falls back on a stable individuality,
and experimental work explores the radical absence of subjectivity. Both are
responses to the reconfiguring of the relationship between public and private
spheres which makes the ‘private’ lyric impossible, and in effect opens it out
towards rhetoric.3
others, most notably marjorie perloff, have attributed the impossibility of the private lyric to the pre-eminence of electronic media in
contemporary life,4 and this complex refashioning of the creative self as a
mediated entity has ramifications on both linguistic and ethical levels. in
particular, it challenges the relationship between the singular subject and
creative and critical processes. immanuel Kant’s notion that the ground
of the subject is the ground of thought itself is relevant in this regard,
since any process of thought, including the questioning of subjectivity,
may be interpreted as emerging from the single consciousness. henri
lefebvre expresses the idea in these terms:
Kantian space, albeit relative, albeit a tool of knowledge, a means of
classifying phenomena, was yet quite clearly separated (along with time)
from the empirical sphere: it belonged to the a priori realm of consciousness
(i.e. of the subject), and partook of that realm’s internal, ideal – and hence
transcendental and essentially ungraspable – structure.5
if subjectivity is called into being by that which is outside the subject,
however, then the relational elements come to the fore, and the links
between singular and collective identity demand further investigation.6
This issue has a particular resonance for women poets, for whom
the dynamics of private and public identity are always in play. many
politically engaged readers and practitioners are concerned about the
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implications of innovative poetry’s elision of clear subject positions,
fearing the abandonment of gender and class debates. Caroline Bergvall,
herself an experimental poet, argues that feminist literary criticism
distrusts innovative writing, and continues to privilege issues of representation over questions of radical technique: ‘Can female poets in fact
afford to dispense with identity-seeking when positive female identification is still culturally and politically so vulnerable?’7 in spite of these
suspicions, however, textual experimentation continues to produce new
spaces in which radical political engagement can take place – spaces
with both a creative and a critical function.8 For Catherine Walsh, the
dispersed perspectives that fragmented form make available are vital to
the interrogation of singular and the collective states. They allow the
poet to problematize personal experience and to unsettle the notion of
linear thought processes as the necessary pathway to knowledge. eric
Falci argues, however, that although Walsh rejects ‘lyric’s varieties of
formal closure and coherence’, she adopts instead a page-based lyric
practice.9 The challenges mounted to formal categorization by both
poetic and critical modes problematize the relationship between memory
and knowing, not by breaking the rules of temporal order as much as by
positing different interpretations of what those rules might be.
in this respect, the mode of publication is a significant dimension
of the work, shaping not only the dissemination of the poetry but
determining how specific strategies of reading are developed. doreen
massey’s work on spatial representation explores the links between it
and temporal frameworks:
representation is seen to take on aspects of spatialisation in the latter’s
action of setting things down side by side; of laying them out as a discrete
simultaneity. But representation is also in this argument understood as fixing
things, taking the time out of them. The equation of spatialisation with the
production of ‘space’ thus lends to space not only the character of a discrete
multiplicity but also the characteristic of stasis.10
yet for some irish poets the space of textual experimentation does not
dispense with time as an influential dimension of the reading practice.
maurice scully’s extraordinary 25-year project, Things That Happen
(1981–2006), suggests new temporal and spatial possibilities for the poet,
ones that Catherine Walsh has also tested, though in less extensive ways.
These approaches not only indicate the continuous nature of the poetic
process, and its potential for non-linear articulation, but suggest the
importance of simultaneity too – the idea that meaning is in a single
instant here and elsewhere, each manifestation informing the other in
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unique ways. The scope of scully’s work, in terms of both intellectual
ambition and material reproduction, is remarkable. it challenges the
concentration of the reader at the level of the volume and of the single
page, where fragmentary syntax and the absence of formal boundaries,
together with the appearance of symbols or sketched images force us into
new territories of reading.
The rejection of linear thought in poetry is not a recent phenomenon,
but for many contemporary poets working with print media the
deployment of visual strategies to signify states of rupture and fragmentation has become a means of testing the possibilities of language.
For some, formal disturbance may be scarcely visible on the surface
of the poem; for others, such as susan howe or paula Claire, radical
typographical strategies make the poem a site of immediate intellectual
challenge.11 This differentiation at the level of production and design
has tended to separate experimental work from the mainstream, making
comparative modes difficult to achieve, and creating critical challenges
in describing and quoting from the material. The size of the page and
the type of printing become important considerations in the act of
reading, and they may create an unnatural boundary to the formation of
meaning. at times it is difficult to determine whether there is continuity
between one page or opening and the next – for Catherine Walsh, the
single page often appears to be the unit of meaning. eric Falci has
identified two sorts of pages that Walsh produces: dense ones and sparse
ones. The dense ones he characterizes as including ‘partial or fractured
narratives and […] longer continuous (if not always coherent) blocks of
text’. The sparse pages ‘feature more white space, and they often consist
of much smaller syntactical units; words and phrases hang apart on the
page, as though they repulse each other’s pull’.12 These differences enrich
the reading experience and increase the complexity of the process. The
nature of this challenge is registered on many different levels, from a
first encounter (where do we begin the act of reading?) to an attempt
at sustained criticism (is it possible to capture and embed aspects of
this text in any recognizable form of critical discourse?). in this way,
innovative poetry not only tests the boundaries of poetic language, but
of the language of personal self-reflection and of academic criticism
too. it presents an experience of radical estrangement to the reader,
one that reflects the impact of existential questioning on the textual
encounter. in doing so, it also disturbs cumulative notions of reading,
according to which we expect a puzzling impression to come before,
but never after, our close engagement with the text of the poem. yet
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experimental poetries encourage the coexistence of these states – of the
past and present of reading – so that the contingent nature of meaning,
and the text’s capacity to surprise, can be preserved. These provisional
acts of engagement inflect both the representation and the experience of
subjectivity for poet and for reader
‘Making Tents’: A Dislike of Beginnings and Endings
‘making tents’, a gathering of four poems first published in 1987,
deploys some of the features that Walsh will later develop in her
extended manipulation of poetic time and space.13 John goodby offers
as its contexts ‘those of migrancy and the necessary provisionality of
the attempt to make the self at home in the world and in language’.14
its short opening poem, ‘nearly nowhere’, plays with the slang phrase
‘half-past hangin’ time, time to go rob’ in ways that draw attention to the
unnatural transition between speech and writing. using the solidus, or
forward slash, typical of the line-break mark, Walsh deliberately interferes
with the transparency of the voice on the page, emphasizing the visual
denotation of rhythm and disrupting the flow of the street-speak that
emerges in her longer poems. The lines that follow – ‘encapsulate it / and
escape it’ – demonstrate the role of language in the push-pull of poetic
engagement here. The creative power to render a scene can constitute a
barrier to it, a form of separation that alters the temporal relationship
between the poet and their material. The word ‘timeless’ constitutes at
once the shortest and the most eye-catching line of the poem, reminding
us that the paring back of language can also be a way of releasing it
from too rooted a temporal context. The two longer poems in ‘making
tents’ are more evocative of their particular environments, and in turn
invoke remembered scenes and experiences more fully. ‘snow for the
morning’ opens with the notion of renewal and repetition: ‘same place
/ time / dream’ (IEMT 61), the river that first ‘flows’ and then ‘meanders’
among fields and houses. Though language renders landscape clearly – if
not conventionally – here, the ten lines on the next page are bracketed,
suggesting new permutations of continuous reading. These lines alternate
between single words – ‘Centred’, ‘Weightless’, ‘happening’ – and
short phrases. The changing environment that is suggested here in the
conjunction of ‘new place / / happening’ is first hinted at in ‘a vacancy
/ fulfilled’, with its play of meaning between needs met and a sense of
emptiness reinforced. This insertion of an extra syllable into one word
of a phrase in order to alter its meaning in subtle ways will be familiar
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to readers of Walsh’s work. as well as permitting the coexistence
of different meanings, it draws attention to the preconceptions that
language generates in the mind of the reader.
already, then, the relationship between past and present is uncertain
and made more so by intense patterns of repetition within certain
sections of this poem: ‘i needn’t think / of needing not to think / not
thinking i need you / needing […]’ (IEMT 63). The interdependent
relationship between thinking and needing is foregrounded here, and
the extent to which emotional states are mediated by thought remains
a subject of recurring interest in Walsh’s work. it is the first of two
points of human connection in the poem, the second being a recalled
encounter, the meaning of which remains ambiguous:
it
was her touch, almost
no
more
a way
greeting
fondness
it seemed to me
(IEMT 65)
here the fragmentation of language works to destabilize the speaker’s
own conviction concerning the events represented. she admits
‘presumption’, however, suggesting an interpretation had been arrived at,
but was later reconsidered. attention turns back to the landscape, before
swerving again to the human predicament – an acknowledged ‘dislike
of beginnings / and endings’ and a preference for ‘song / a continuum /
we carry’ (IEMT 67). The mingling of sensory environment and human
experience in this poem, and the deliberate obfuscation of ideas of
sequence, or of cause and effect, will become an important dimension of
Walsh’s developing art, making the concept and operation of memory in
these poems endlessly complex. The extent to which language remakes
the past emerges strongly at the end of the poem:
repeat the changes change the
repeats the change repeats the
repeat changes change it repeat
change it
(IEMT 71)
Wrapped into these lines is the ambiguity of repeating change – at
once impossible, since change is a point of differentiation with what
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came before, and (in derridean terms) appropriate, since repetition in
difference could be seen as a function of language
‘return ticket’, the other long poem from ‘making tents’, begins
the oscillation between different cultural spaces that will be a central
trope of Idir Eatortha. The opening phrase – ‘Where do you want
to go?’ – suggests the potential of this mobility, though the title has
hinted at the inevitability, or perhaps the necessary pretence, of return.
The list of places – ‘dan’s yard / The mill field / The bog …’ – confirms
secure identity, ‘everything / still / in the same place’ (IEMT 76),
but the poem moves towards strangeness. The environment changes:
extremes of sun and shade give way to text from a language teaching
manual and then to drifts of conversation ‘snatched and strange’
coming up the ventilation shaft. differentiation in language increases
as the poem progresses, as it remakes virginia Woolf ’s ‘take two coos,
taffy’ to render its variant possibilities, first with logic (considering
first cows and then wood pigeons), then in sound: ‘ka cu coo / khaki
kacu’ (80).15 yet in spite of the increased intertextuality of the work,
it projects a listening subject, though this may be the speaker herself.
it speculates ‘how much / more uncomfortable / you must have
been’ (79), permitting the later ‘imagine me appreciating the metro’
to function both as interjection and creative invitation. The strange
consonance of commodity and tradition reflects the power of the mind
to move across texts and experiences, reworking both in language: the
speaker, lying in the bath, listens to sounds of human speech and of
nature; recalling literary texts and reading cosmetic ones (‘you scrub
your face with it / it removes 1, perhaps 2 layers / of skin’); thinking
of the process of churning butter. some reflection on this multitude
of impressions is finally offered:
noting many things frequently what
i hear is not anachronistic but
diplomatically sound
(IEMT 82)
Returning Memories in ‘Idir Eatortha’
‘idir eatortha’, appearing before ‘making tents’ in the combined volume,
but in fact written after it, intensifies Walsh’s treatment of the spaces
between – spain and ireland, rural and urban, past and present. as
Falci puts it: ‘These lyric pages attempt to capture the singularities of
experience, as well as the different modalities of flux that emerge when
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this manner of poetic capture is inevitably also one of mutation.’16 its
opening words echo those of ‘snow’ – ‘the same / / sky / / close your
eyes’. The moment between sleep and waking, or between the act of
visualizing one’s environment and being in one’s own mind, is an
important one for Walsh, as a moment when observed reality merges
with recollected experiences and with the play of language. This poem
begins with a feeling of motion, as befits the title of the sequence and
its use of irish. The rhythm of ‘riding home / riding back’ is intensified
in the image of ‘rotating feet / on pedals around / tracks’, its tightening
sense of circular movement seeming to entrap. here space and time
are implicitly connected; to go back is to move through space but also
to revisit past experiences, reinforcing existing memories rather than
creating new ones. yet the mood of this section is an expansive one; the
speaker observes the moon’s corona in ‘the v of bottlenecked blackened
treetops’ while further away lies the ‘fumed blue / city line’ (IEMT 7).
These two different forms of light, yellow and blue, converge as the
longest line on this page slips to the shortest, creating an awareness of
space and distance here. The night environment is also redolent with
drunkenness, the drifting lines and closing eyes creating a sense of
half-conscious observation and disorientation. read in another way, the
‘yellow’ moon, ‘cold tap’, ‘corona’ and ‘bottlenecked’ are suggestive of a
beer popular in the 1990s – an overlap between landscape and material
culture which invites us to think about the dynamics of the permanent
and the disposable, and the different attitudes towards time these invoke.
The vividness of Walsh’s language draws the reader into the midst of
the experience, but the final line of the page positions this as a memory,
and of questionable accuracy at that: ‘but / wasn’t that somewhere else?’
(IEMT 7). a journey is recalled, apparently in two voices, showing
divergent versions of experience: the weather, the bumps and the fact
there are ‘no coffee houses along this cateyed road’ (IEMT 7). yet
again, it is difficult to discern whether the experiencing subject here is
singular or multiple. The environment represented changes constantly,
and with it the texture and presentation of the language. The poem
‘that was the day’ attempts to locate the memory in time, but a gale
blows words about and the speaker struggles to keep her ‘momentum’
(IEMT 8). This disturbance can be seen as part of a larger pattern of
movement across the globe, so that the puzzling phrase ‘nothing / the
same / nothing / changed’ demands that we broaden our perspective: if
we are in turmoil, someone else is in stillness. alongside these reflections
are also questions, implicit and explicit, for which there are responses,
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of a sort, in the continuous present: ‘knowing’ and ‘writing’. But these
purposeful processes become less sure with the repetition of ‘missing’
and the prospect of ‘sailing / an upside down canoe’ (IEMT 11). There
is a tension for the speaker – and perhaps for Walsh herself – between
the explicable action and the crazy plan, so that the creation of poetry
itself can seem a reckless voyage on an upturned boat, one that occupies
past and present, and presumably future, for the poet herself. Qualified
description becomes important here as adverbs float to the right of the
phrases they qualify – a technique that will proliferate in Walsh’s later
work as she riffs on particular parts of speech. darkness and light,
indicative of confusion and inspiration as well as of the passage of time,
have coexisted from the beginning of this sequence, and here they
begin to alternate, creating fluctuating emotions as they do so. These
fluctuations are best expressed here in a multidirectional text created to
facilitate different permutations of reading and to reflect on the interrelationship between varying emotional states:
hope
satisfaction
of
satisfaction
hope
(IEMT 12)
The temporal play inherent in the projection into the future of a state
that relies for its meaning on past need is significant here. all of
Walsh’s work oscillates between the possibilities created by language
and the emotions that result from these possibilities and the actions or
experiences that ensue.
The discrepancy between the potential and the actual becomes greater
at this point in the poem as the act of screaming and a ‘percussive no!’
finds the centre of the page. The square brackets and added forward
slash marks suggest a stagnation and self-division also expressed in
language: ‘[one step on 2 / back / what i’ve been saying for / / so / /
long’ (IEMT 13). The image of the snail with which this page ends is
a negative one – ‘trailing stickily […] home on back’ (IEMT 13) but
gives way to a freer movement of text on the following page, where the
distant rhymes of ‘[singing] … ringing / all over sky / blue’ offers a
welcome moment of release before the crowded space that follows where
‘anonymity teems / […] / variety / screams / exert ion’ (IEMT 15). once
again human and non-human worlds overlap; the flattened furrow and
(as yet) unproductive seed suggestive of creative opportunity lying fallow.
The ‘supposéd silence’ soon introduced draws greater attention to the
spaces in the text, and to the gaps between past and present in Walsh’s
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creative practice. repeated silence, dwelt on here, could be a condition
of reflection or a kind of creative death, and the facing blank page
starkly demonstrates the anxiety of continuance and thus, implicitly,
the importance of memory in supporting thought and language. yet
continue the poem does, moving into territory more immediate – the
‘partially vetoed’ motorway, mediated images, the ‘sadness’ and ‘disgust’
that grow from lack of consensus and a failure of democratic process. in
a betrayal of implicit hope and effort, apparent possibilities offer nothing:
the optimistic ‘there you are you see you can reach the top from here’ is
grimly reconfigured within a mere quarter of a page as
there you are there’s not much you can do from here bar
visit the sights
windowless
not given to demonstrations of well anything
another in the long lore of
traffic
triteness
(IEMT 19)
The previous ‘you see you can’ is reprised in the windowless sightseeing
that proves to be the only activity on offer. ‘demonstrations’, whether
instructive or revolutionary, are unlikely, and the subject is at once too
old and too young to make use or sense of this dynamic. a generational
split is accentuated by rapid social change. Those in the middle ground,
who can neither avoid nor make the most of the transformation, are
in a position of difficult witness. ‘[d]o they only reach out to kill each
other?’ (IEMT 20) is a dystopian view of an atomized and endlessly
competitive society in which the innocent granting of wishes has no
part. yet understanding must still be sought, and the sea – its waves
both buoyant and deathly – may offer it. But, in the nets of meaning,
joy jumps ‘back out the holes’, implying that the emotion is integral to
the sea’s organic ever-changing nature and cannot be captured or limited
by structure. This passage sheds implicit light on Walsh’s poetic practice,
revealing as it does the necessity for linguistic flux and all-encompassing,
variable forms so that both intellectual and emotional challenges can be
addressed. as in medbh mcguckian’s work, the past is enfolded in the
present here, but for Walsh this is more than a sense of inclusive subjectivity: it is an essential breaking of temporal and subjective boundaries
that can only be achieved through destabilizing syntactic clarity using
fragmentation, repetition and unheralded shifts in style and register. at
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this stage in the text, Walsh directly challenges the reader’s expectations
of art: ‘wonder’ is linked to the ‘endless strata of/conceptual errors’
(IEMT 22). From the sea, we are thrown skyward and forced to consider
the origins of matter, the relationship between ‘intense light’ and ‘dark
matter’, the creation of energy. temporality suddenly becomes a much
more problematic category – a human construction designed to make
sense of the void. This realization affirms the meaning-making capacity
of memory at the same time as it suggests its relative insignificance. in
both explicit and implicit ways, Walsh’s work invites us to consider the
construction of human meaning in this larger context.
nature, its patterns and processes, offers ways of engaging with these
questions that permit issues of human perception careful consideration.
Just as the poem began with the light of the moon behind trees,
dominating the distant city horizon, so the idea of repose in nature
(and of the drawing together of the natural and the man-made) remains
a possibility at this stage in the poetic process. moss offers a mental
‘resting place’: birds return and leaves block the sink overflow. But
there are alternative resting places: ‘clear / nights across car / park lights
waiting / for joy / / riders’ (IEMT 25). ‘Joy’ acquires new meaning here
with the postponed addition of ‘riders’ and the poem veers back to the
bleak urban setting of ‘[smoggy haze / [roads circling the city’ (IEMT
26), square brackets suggesting at once their presence within, and their
separation from, the reader’s imaginative range. The words ‘foreclosure’
and ‘improvident’ suggest the financial strain of ireland’s now growing
economy:
all
have!
is
becoming
going
(IEMT 28)
This creates a progressive disjunction between ownership as self-defining
(‘have! is becoming’) and as fleeting (‘have! is going’). What is more
interesting to Walsh, though, are the liminal states – ‘each nebulous
atom inbetween’ – that permit vivid yet various forms of perception from
nature to the Barcelona streetscape, which is rendered in a condensed
section beginning with ‘pigeons the ledge opposite scritching round the
roof’, moving into a description of pavement and grassy areas, the smell
of markets, ‘every zippy tripper / mooch by through barrios advancing
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streets return in / on themselves alien i all gaudi centres been bought
into / at specified times […]’ (IEMT 31). The crowdedness of the scene
lends a sensory immediacy and is one of several passages in the last third
of the poem that present a continuous scene to the reader. The most
arresting is an extended treatment of illness (the occluded subjectivity
here makes it hard to determine whether it is the ill woman or her carer
who is the experiencing self in the poem, though again the complex
variety of language suggests that experience is mediated). memory
plays an important role in several ways; first, because of the visceral
recollection of feelings of nausea; secondly, because of the woman’s
memory of a dairy in meath: ‘or that smell emerging remembrance /
game hanging in the dairy / unwittingly walking into stench’ (IEMT 34).
The irish context continues on the next page in the reference to ‘Back
lane’, its proximity to guinness’s brewery confirmed by ‘malt high on
the air’ (IEMT 35). This carries echoes of Thomas Kinsella, whose poem
‘Back lane’ specifically addresses the failure of civic responsibility in
dublin, and whose work set in the area around Thomas street and Wood
Quay renders the immediacy of experience in the context of dublin’s
social and economic history. Kinsella’s representation of the margins of
city life and its relation to the wider environs may be naturally triggered
by the urban woman’s memory of the farm in meath, as well as by
the representation of the suffering body: another recurring theme in
Kinsella’s work. The ‘currents of unease’ that Walsh catches here hint at
the deprivation in the area: the instability of the environment recalling
the instability of memory itself.
The next riff relates to the act of translation, toying with the exact
choice of adjective and preposition, but, surprisingly, though the context
has moved between ireland and iberia, here the language shift is implicitly
between irish and english. The first ambiguity is between ‘grey’ and
‘green’ – both ‘glas’ in irish, and a linguistic overlap that recall’s eiléan
ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘gloss / Clós / glas’; then Walsh plays with ‘of’ and
‘off’ and the possibilities of ‘off of’. The attempts to identify particular
grammatical functions – whether ‘if i had’ signals the conditional or a
dependent clause hints again at language teaching, but now the action
is of manual labour: ‘[scraping of shovel on concrete] … [clattering of
spade, brush on wooden cart]’ (IEMT 37). here the environment contemplated in the text (the grey grainy pavement) becomes manifest in the
auditory effects of the poem, and its rough texture fits the scene of tough
physical work. immediately, language and sound begin to synchronize,
so that the rhythm of brushing determines the words: ‘“grainy, grainy
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green, greyey green, just green”’ (IEMT 37). From rhythmic language,
meaning begins to emerge as sentences are formed and a tone set. These
pages affirm the extent to which significance develops from the play of
language, rather than language being manipulated to express meaning.
here a response to the failure of language – the act of throwing the
spade and brush onto the wooden cart and trundling it off – is what in
fact creates new linguistic possibilities and deeper questions.
a human interaction offers more layers to the accumulation of
meaning here. Casual racism intrudes as the passers-by, presumably
english, pass judgement on the labourer: ‘“I don’t know george, drunk”
/ “this time of the morning, dear? don’t know” / “well, irish, scottish
perhaps”’ (IEMT 39). The dismissive response diverts into a meditation
on space, with its ‘“ah well, and up yours to with a, stop there. stop right
there. / / here. here, there, any place. space. stop right there’ (IEMT 39).
as this considers how our efforts to contend with space lead us to ‘box
it, label it, extend / language fencing’ there is a screeching of brakes and
exclamations from an irate driver. We are reminded that even the most
involved and abstract thinking here takes place in the world and must
fight for space among the everyday activities of others, their criticism
and anger. The power of language in the creation of an experiential
environment is clear though. The question, ‘have you ever seen snow’
(IEMT 42) triggers a memory of sliding ‘on teatrays’, of a ‘barrage of
snowballs’, of digging out paths and assembling basic provisions. other
memories contend for expression: next seashore and shingle occupy two
separate columns of words suggesting both multiple and interwoven
experiences. The evocation of a child’s drawing brings us back into the
moment: ‘tonight windy that / summer way’ (IEMT 45) – or else it was
the present weather that first prompted thoughts of playing in the snow
and on the beach, as well as the piece of art: ‘heart trees sun / trees
people trees’ (IEMT 45). The movement towards abstraction may be
the inevitable outcome of these memories as the speaker must find for
them a larger framework. The desire ‘to notice some quality of / all ways
interminable / almost / redemption’ (IEMT 46) could be the driving
force of the poem itself – a need not to create but rather to discover
meaning through the play of words. since ‘the word i tried to remember
to say to you / was saraband’ (IEMT 47–8), even this potential for
singular meaning is lost: ‘saraband’ can describe several different kinds
of dance as well as the music that accompanies them. The reference does
return us to spain though, and more specifically to Catalonia, it seems:
‘i would fan / you if you were / / 700 years and 6 / not a separatist /
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people’ (IEMT 48). Whether the difference that exists between the region
and the country is ‘manufactured’ or inherent is a subject for debate
here, as the speaking voice deploys the language of cultural politics:
‘problematic’, ‘divisive’, ‘role defining’, ‘part of a whole socio-linguistic
pattern’ (IEMT 48). The poem seems to escalate towards a collision with
‘shards of / glass / hairline cracks / bicycling stops’ (IEMT 49), but what
is smashed is language itself. The final word of the poem is ‘acceptation’,
printed alone on a large white page – the speaker is determined ‘to quit’
the established sense of words for something more daring and more free.
yet this is hardly a form of closure but closer to the impulse that has
governed the poem’s composition from the start. The desire to challenge
linear thinking must be consciously renewed, it seems, so that the fullest
potential of language can be grasped
Temporal Geometries: City West
The flux that characterizes existence is realized throughout Walsh’s
recent poetry by means of an intensified process of philosophical
questioning and formal innovation. While linguistic experimentation
remains the raison d’être of Walsh’s work, here it interrogates more
closely the atomization of existence on the margins of urban life at
the turn of the twenty-first century. in this way, form and purpose
become further unified, the texture of the work exemplifying the crisis
of identity and representation that gave rise to it. Thus the disrupted
relationship between past and present in Walsh’s City West complicates
the construction of both individual and collective identities, and does
so in the context of debates on irish poetic tradition. Though the work
of irish experimental poets may indicate the influence of modernism
and of the work of the language poets of the usa, these links do
not necessarily indicate a rejection of national identity. poets such
as maurice scully and Walsh herself use irish material repeatedly in
their work. Walsh not only includes specific references to place and
to contemporary events in ireland, but also embeds passages in the
irish language within her poems. The term ‘citywest’ itself denotes
(among other things) a digital park on the outskirts of dublin, and
a conflation of urban and rural life – one that became common for
irish commuters during the boom years.17 This speaks of diminished
humanity, now reduced to its capacity to consume, and the apparently
random arrangement of words in parts of this poem suggests a telling
absence of order and reflection. yet, in spite of these links between
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experimental form and cultural context, irish innovative poets remain
more likely to be compared to their British counterparts than to their
mainstream irish peers, and innovative poetry as a category still tends
to be viewed as elitist, in spite of its encounters with varieties of social
experience. harriet tarlo, editor of the recent anthology of innovative
poetry of the natural world, The Ground Aslant, has argued that radical
experiment can in fact be radically democratic: since no one has the
tools to interpret the work, everyone must depend on their instincts
as readers, rather than on established theories.18
City West is neither a collection nor a sequence of poems, but rather
a single poem that exhibits abrupt, dramatic shifts in style and register,
moving between minute attention to the observed world and more
abstract meditations on human understanding, and on the function
of language itself. The poem is divided into three unequal parts:
‘City’, ‘tangency’ and ‘plane’. The latter two terms are suggestive
of geometrical construction – in particular of relational situations of
increasing complexity – and imply a movement from two-dimensional to
three-dimensional space; from the dynamics of line and curve to those
of plane and globe.
The most immediate syntactical quality that strikes us about City
West is its absence of personal pronouns; not only of the lyric ‘i’, but
of any clearly delineated human perspectives. Though her earliest work
manifests some of the characteristics of the personal lyric, the work after
‘making tents’ (1987) becomes radically indeterminate and, in the words
of alex davis, ‘shatters practical language in its rejection of a transparent
or normative discourse’.19 From this point onward, Walsh’s poetry clearly
demonstrates the use of innovative techniques, cutting itself adrift from
both the sentence and the stanza as units of meaning, and using syntax
and layout to challenge our assumptions regarding the poetic line. in
this respect, Walsh now exemplifies Barrett Watten’s idea of poetry as
a continuous reflexive encounter with language.20 a significant feature
of City West is its strong emphasis – especially in the first section of the
poem – on verbs, in particular on verbs in the continuous present tense.
This strategy emphasizes the (sub)urban flux and sets some of the terms
by which individual and collective human experience is figured in this
work: subjectivity is multiple and simultaneous, and the writing subject
is just a part of this field of meaning. There is a strong sense that, as
eavan Boland affirms, ‘poetry makes nothing happen … [it shows] that
something else happened at the same time’21 – in other words, it draws
attention to what exceeds normal human perception and record.
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Walsh’s poem begins with a four-line section, rare for this work in its
condensed and expressive attributes:
– the physical quality of life, that’s
living and not the analysis
afterwards or the moments of
discord or premonition –
(CW 9)
it could be read as a warning to critics that what is valuable is the
immediacy of language and not the results of analytical scrutiny. it is
an impossible proposition though, since everything, once perceived, is
already in the past. unusual, too, in that innovative poetic strategies
usually run counter to a conviction that there is a ‘real’ world, instead
emphasizing the self-reflexive nature of language. From the dynamics of
past and future in this short section grows the inexplicable ‘discord’, and
with it the assumption that all living things tend towards dissonance.
temporality, it seems, will be a key to the sequence, even though this
may mean the elimination of the normal co-ordinates of time. We are
sensitized here to the processes of reading: we must live ‘in’ the language,
rather than expecting the questions it generates to be resolved. instead
of reading progressively, and accumulating meaning, we must encounter
each word or phrase as though it were the first. Fittingly, then, processes
of linear reading are troubled from the outset of this poem: the second
page presents words in two parallel streams. almost exactly the same
words occur in each case: it is the arrangement of them, and the spaces
between them, that determine how we read: ‘there is a clearer light / /
stark boles / bark lifting / / layer of defence the curved / circumference
of v’s’ (CW 10). The second rendition immediately reprises these phrases
with some changes – the appearance of the word ‘experience’ and the
removal of prepositions. We are alerted to the use of the verb: ‘curved’
becomes ‘curving’ to change an impression of completion to a state
of continuous movement. This alteration is important in emphasizing
process and simultaneity: actions are both in the present and in the past,
and the ‘physical quality’ of language is further affirmed. We become
aware too, that each one of the sections of this book could be similarly
reprised, with new slants on meaning becoming visible with the change.
it is in this way that the dynamics of tangency may be seen to shape the
sequence as a whole, and in this respect the absence of prepositions here,
and elsewhere in the poem, is noteworthy. it interferes with our sense
of how the parts of the poem relate to one another – at the level both
of individual words and of longer sections. implicitly, this removal fits
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our sense of Walsh’s work as occurring on the margins of the urban, not
in a place of historical and cultural density but in a transitional space,
a newly created commercial environment where meaning is necessarily
provisional.
The intersection of domestic and natural worlds can be detected early
in this poem, and images of vegetation and growth will form some kind
of pattern in the pages that follow. These images bear comparison to
paula meehan’s representations of nature in inner city dublin, though
they have a less direct relationship to the human energies of the poem.
They call attention to the cycles of life, to the natural processes that
mark the passage of time. Their recurrence encloses a memory of earlier
iterations and confirms the presence of the past throughout this work.
The spreading bloom is linked to the creaturely vitality of the natural
world, to hunger and thirst, and later to the act of breathing (CW 14–15).
This association of nature with the act of breathing offers a faint echo
of Thomas Kinsella,22 while textually it calls attention to the role of
the breath in establishing the pace and thus the meaning of the poetic
line, the ‘long / tight’ breath suggesting control, a measured – or partly
withheld – exhalation. another feature of this work is initiated here, that
is, the dynamic linking of opposing verbs (‘push’ and ‘pull’) affecting
the rhythmic patterns built in the poem and creating a sense of tension
and release on the part of the reader. at this point, the human energies
that might be linked to the specific voice, or to the operation of the
speaker in the world, are displaced into the spaces of nature and the
larger dynamics of the living earth. Thus we may be inclined to interpret
nature itself as acquiring a distinct subjectivity here: ‘a little today! / yes.
for me. overdue. she says’ (CW 15).
By contrast with these more meditative early sections, human existence
seems fraught with the dispersal of energies in multisyllabic words and
awkward rhythms: ‘people / conglomerating / material / items foisting
on categories’ (CW 16–17). even the emotions are implicated in a frenetic
activity heightened by internal rhyme and cumulative meanings:
heart
where?
readying steadying giving taking
loving making breaking coming in going out
spending whiling listening playing
tuning tiptoeing crossing
shh sleeping
(CW 17)
The movement here is layered with idiomatic resonances: where we
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
might expect ‘going’ (ready-steady-go), we have ‘giving’ (give and take);
lovemaking (with the appropriate contraction) and the idea of ‘make or
break’. These suggestions are more than just amusing additional layers
to the text: they fundamentally question the forward momentum of
our reading. There are other – more typographically daring – ways of
interrupting this typical movement, but Walsh’s strategies are particularly
subtle, offering us almost conventional lines but forcing our reading to
oscillate by inviting us to double back over words for new meaning. This
act of doubling back has played an important role in how memory is
constructed and understood by all the poets explored in this book. For
an experimental poet, such as Walsh, it becomes essential to all processes
of reading and a way of releasing meaning from the myriad observations
and encounters of everyday experience.
We are immediately brought back to the neighbourhood world,
though, and to the overheard voices that form such an important part of
Walsh’s acoustic landscape. punctuation intervenes to create distancing
effects; here, as elsewhere, square and round brackets are used singly,
to open but not to close embedded phrases. it is not clear whether the
overheard speech is that of a living being or the disembodied voice
of a radio, but it invokes a domestic world of prams and shops that
increasingly comes to infiltrate the more meditative natural spaces, and
to trace the impact of commodity culture on the processes of thought
and action: white plastic appears amid the rosebushes, and overhanging
branches ‘doom’ footballs (CW 18). The importance of choosing a
peripheral urban space as the environment for the poem begins to
become clear: it is the point of encounter between multiple human
subjectivities and the clear space that both precedes them (in temporal
terms) and lies beyond them (in spatial terms). The idea of the past
as an empty space radically alters our understanding of personal and
cultural memory as crowded with impressions that help to shape the
individual subject and the larger community. in the present, though,
these impressions continue to play a significant role. The teeming
emotional and intellectual energies to which these subjectivities give
rise are the focus of representation here, rather than the particularized
subjects themselves. in this way, we sense the force of human life
without the perspective of individual motivation, and are thus remote
from the affecting dynamics of the personal.
The encounter between natural and human world is figured spatially
here, but is reprised with a temporal slant. a subject position briefly
emerges: one capable of contrasting proximity to nature (‘run thumb
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c at h e r i n e wa l sh: a poe t ic s of f lu x
/ along smaller / spines detaching / minute leaves’) (CW 20) and an
aggressive populated environment:
having been used to sitting a room when
mine yellow blind up reading the window filled in
canal cider parties teenaged couplings dogs nicked
cars smashing bollards chain junkies
(CW 20)
some level of the self-referential can be inferred here, though the
condensed language suggests that these features are all implicated in
one another’s existence. likewise, an observing consciousness becomes
clear for a moment, looking out at the scene, and another (or the
same?) walking and cycling through the landscape, named for the first
time as islandbridge and sandymount, suburbs of dublin that straddle
the city in almost equidistant measure – islandbridge to the west
near the phoenix park, sandymount to the south east on the coast.23
This grounded approach gives way to a more philosophical mood, in
keeping with the larger rhythmic patterns of the sequence: ‘is it time?
(what time? / (what’s time?)’ (CW 22–3). There is a mathematical
rendering of syntax here, as though the final phrase is arrived at
through the addition of the earlier two: so existential questioning is
fundamentally linked to the language of everyday life. We can trace
an echo of t. s. eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a model relevant to
Walsh for a number of reasons, not least because of the many voices
that can be heard throughout that text. The figure of prufrock also
shadows the hesitation before action in evidence in City West, surely
displacing the stated desire for the ‘physical quality’ of life, in favour
of the need for reflection.24 But ‘do i mean?’ has the role of both
clarifying precise meaning and questioning whether meaning can be
attached to the singular subjectivity at all. Walsh suggests that it can
only be constructed through the play of language over multiple forms
of existence and through the shifts and changes, the fragmentation
and obscurity, that arises. This is not the first of her works that can
be read in this way. of Pitch (1994), ian davidson writes: ‘it is a
fabrication, which may be made up of occasions or events, but it is not
a report on those “instants”’.25 The episodic nature of the work, then,
does not detract from the importance of the organic whole. language
is self-consciously addressed in this passage of City West, most clearly
in the ‘dashing gerund’ phrase, and it is not the substance of debate
itself – ‘should? ought one be seen to?’ – but the formulaic nature of
its expression in words that becomes so affected and tedious (or ‘boring’
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in the words of the speaker) (CW 22). There is a realization here of
the deflationary possibilities of language and the fact that the struggle
towards representation may reduce, rather than increase, the importance
of ideas. ‘[B]eing in doing’ returns to the initial importance of the
physical life, ‘and in / doing while / duration’ emphasizes temporality
again (CW 22). ‘Being in span’ encapsulates both the simultaneity of
multiple subjects and the endurance of this vigorous and varied life.
into this abstract meditation bursts the vibrant actual, and the
‘atomistic method’ yields for a time to ‘naming linking / describing’
(CW 24). Both strategies contribute to the act of composition itself –
interruption generates both fear and anticipation, as the loss of creative
momentum is balanced by the intrusion of a new energy that will
in turn impel language forward. This tension between the static and
the dynamic shapes the text of City West and reflects the complex
relationship between the process of reflection and the world of urban
modernity, which overwhelms the human subject with vivid sensory
impressions and events. The constant oscillation between these two states
expresses their coexistence, so, at the same time as the quiet garden is
observed (‘son’s / buttercup garden’s coming on’) (CW 28), technological
devices are competing to transmit the voices and experiences clamouring
to be heard:
slow repetitious advice crystal
radio sets hams cavity bricks foreign
insects ’phones off hook faulty digital
clocks cheap transistors relative quantities
of silicon
(CW 29)
For Walsh, as for so many innovative poets, it is the act of transmission
itself that preoccupies, and this extends to non-verbal communication
too: ‘no / more / than / breathing / 2 / us / reality / running still’
(CW 32). here the breath intervenes to steady the awareness of human
experience, and the form of the poem is drawn into a vertical wavering
line as though through a process of inhalation. This results in a
minimizing of form and a refinement of perception – if not to a unique
subjectivity then at least to a singular human process.
The title of the second section of City West, ‘tangency’, implies
divergence of meaning, yet divergence within a set of unifying
mathematical principles – a correspondence suggestive of the shape of
the book as a whole. at first the emphasis here is on processes, on
verbs of making that invoke the sprawling urban infrastructure which
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the poem both expresses and critiques: ‘wide sweeps housing on roads
leading round / housing cul de sacs closing encircling roads / one or
two towards motorway main / roads roads bearing incessant / weight’
(CW 38). The continuous present is an apt mode in which to capture
the dynamic yet directionless energies of modern engineered dwelling.
verbs double as nouns (sweeps, housing) to imply at once materiality
and flux. suddenly, the reader encounters an almost empty page, an
impression of silence and space that the environment itself lacks, and
an opportunity for reflection and questioning. in spite of this pause,
the rhythmic connection between the stimulus of the world and the
quiet contemplation of the mind continues, now incorporating the
dynamics of continuance and cessation with new textual significance.
later, this pattern will be played out in a passage that combines the
lexical emphasis of the telegram with the visual rhythm of changing
traffic lights: ‘flossy past light stop by hind retreating wreaking /
daylight every point stop hugely now light stop so / fine regarding
seeking daylight very pointed / stop justly soon light stop on time
depending’ (CW 47). First, though, a distinction is made between
stopping and finishing – ‘should one place be better to stop / than
another / / always / definitively / / or stop as pause ? / / at all?’ (CW
40). These are, of course, important considerations for the creative artist,
and in particular for the writer of the long poem, for whom sustained
engagement with the problem of writing itself is key concern. rachel
Blau duplessis reflects on this issue:
Writing a long poem has an interwoven private and public temporality.
Because of the number of variables set in play, one has (as a producer) deeply
to desire that kind of activity in time. it’s a kind of erotic charge as well as
an ambition – both expressing excess and desire – a longing and a sense of
vow. … it isn’t so much making a big Thing, but entering into a continuing
situation of responsiveness, a compact with that desire.26
That combination of excess and desire can be traced in the texture
of Walsh’s writing, in particular here in her verbs, as the interleaving,
folding and weaving reveal how language itself is changed by the process
of making. it is a process that accords with comments made by martin
gubbins on temporal dynamics in the long poem: ‘the duration of the
poem is not only a time of waiting but also a time of transformation
… The poem starts to dissolve. its letters/molecules start to move, heat
and melt’.27 The emphasis on the processual aspects of poetic creation
suggests that the extension of the imagination required for a poem of
this duration must inevitably be matched by periods of contraction and
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
concentration, a cosmic rhythm that also finds its way into Walsh’s
reflections on science and nature. Thus the poem facilitates the shifting
attention of the observing mind, the awareness of a world scarcely visible
or audible:
how
many
shapes
shifting
miniscule
patterning so
light, dark textures
minute
particles
affecting
making
shapes
living
matter
material
(CW 46)
The challenges involved in the pursuit of human-centred meaning
are considerable here, and the prominence of prepositions at various
stages of this sequence suggests a continuing need to see the world in
relational terms. This aspect of the poem is problematized, of course,
by the absence of a singular speaking subject, and also by the ways in
which human meaning is submerged into the dynamics of urban life.
The flux of the city is extended through Walsh’s distinctive punctuation,
which plays an important role in establishing the lexical energies of the
poem. The use of square brackets facing outward emphasizes at once
the isolation of words and the ways in which they remain embedded in
collective human understanding:
imagine [
] change [
] imagine
] change[
i i more
ing
(CW 50)
amidst these complex rhythms of isolation and connection, of
reckless exteriority and quiet thought, one image becomes suggestive of
both the expansive nature of Walsh’s creative process and the kind of
poetic quest she is enacting here. The swinging beam of the lighthouse
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c at h e r i n e wa l sh: a poe t ic s of f lu x
indicates how space itself can be understood through a continual
process of revelation and concealment. This could be seen as a metaphor
for Walsh’s writing: knowledge of the whole is apprehended yet its
detailed manifestation never fully retained. Just after the powerful
image of the moving beam makes its first appearance, the text extends
again, once more making available a number of simultaneous readings.
a sequence such as ‘unheard / harmonic / intervals / unabstracted /
scale / mathematical proportions’ is the result of reading downward
through the right-hand side of the text (CW 53), rather than according
to normal lineation. at this stage the poem’s unfolding form seems to
validate such a vertical alignment; indeed, throughout the work, reading
strategies may best be formulated by reading forward to get one’s
bearings before breaking off to try a section afresh. in this pattern, to
stop is not to conclude, but rather to facilitate a renewed engagement
with the text. it is a strategy to which Walsh has drawn attention on
several occasions, and it accords too with the panning motion that
returns at the end of this section in the image of the usher’s beam
that might bring us into a darkened theatre, mixing too the Joycean
usher’s island reference. at the close of ‘tangency’ we are aware of
the power of this moving shaft of light, scanning the darkened space,
offering glimpsed routes to meaning.
‘plane’, the final section of the volume, begins with another whirl of
repetition, though the arc of movement has tightened with the endlessly
revolving wheels of the buggy: ‘watching some one walking a / way
down the road buggy pushing / along walking some one a / way down
the road buggy pushing / along some one walking a way’ (CW 59).
This mundane image is followed by an apparently significant admission:
‘with these problems in mind / this book was initiated’ (CW 59). The
irony of this statement is hard to gauge; it seems a weighty claim, yet
this is a book shaped by the problems of existence, its own and those
of humanity at large. The coexistence of centre and margin – ‘white
bay foam still face over lights / coming downhill threaded city into /
once again grey walls water sounding’ (CW 60) – are reflected in the
proximity of commercial transactions to the great historic events that
shape the narrative of ireland.28 yet, even as we are immersed in the
experiences of city and suburb, we are reminded of the act of reading
so crucial to the textuality of this project: ‘Jezus – who writes these
books’ (CW 65). Both city and text are volatile spaces: sudden eruptions
of sound and movement break through again, reinforcing the pulsating
movement between interior reflection of reading and the dynamism
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
of action on the street. The exploratory nature of the poetic moment
is reinforced here:
there we go
tracing
lines
little excursive ploys
the curved plane
(CW 70)
darkness and light continue to contend with one another in this
text; knowledge, always provisional, giving way to uncertainty. This is a
cosmic issue too, as the immediate concerns and exchanges of the human
subjects here fade into the larger existential questions. a little before the
close of the poem – its final words are ‘(time to go)’ – there is a short
section in irish that touches on the relationship between ancient and
modern ways of seeing the world: ‘a story that unfolds in the past, in /
the present and in the future / where will it all end?’ (CW 79). essentially
it is ideas of the continuous present that shape Walsh’s poetic enquiry
and her mode of writing, and this continuous present is one that allows
the subjectivity of the poem to move ever outwards, encompassing
a greater range of observations and insights, an inclusive response to
philosophical and aesthetic concerns and a means of exceeding narrow
definitions of the poetic that are limiting to creativity and intellect alike.
it is this realization that Catherine Walsh’s work returns to again
and again. innovation in form does not constitute a breakdown in the
structures of representation, but an extension of their possibilities across
both time and space. This means a simultaneous acknowledgment of the
presence of the past in language yet also its absence in the consciousness
of the moment. The space of the past, therefore, can fill and empty with
shifts in thought and language, meaning that the experimental poetic
text can renegotiate its handling of memory as it unfolds. This applies
not only to the individual subjectivity but also to shared experience.
Within the multiple, the singular survives, and it is with the tenuous
relationship between the two that this poetry is concerned.
Notes
1 michael Begnal, review of Catherine Walsh’s City West, B’Fhiú an Braon Fola
(June 2006), www.mikebegnalblogspot.ie.
2 assmann and shortt, Memory and Political Change, p. 3.
3 Clair Wills, ‘Contemporary Women’s poetry: experimentalism and the expressive
voice’, Critical Quarterly 36.3 (september 1994), p. 39.
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4 in perloff’s case, the idea that personal experience has become radically shaped by
its technological mediation – first in the form of television and video, but more
recently through information technology, in particular through social media –
results in the notion of the authentic private subject becoming itself a commodity.
see marjorie perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago:
Chicago university press, 1991), p. 12.
5 henri lefebvre, The Production of Space (oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 2.
6 lefebvre’s own construction of three types of space – physical space, mental space
and social space – draws attention to the dynamics between singular and collective.
henri lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays, ed. neil Brenner and stuart
elden, trans. gerald moore, neil Brenner and stuart elden (minneapolis, mn:
university of minnesota press, 2009), pp. 186–7.
7 Caroline Bergvall, ‘no margins to this page: Female experimental poets and
the legacy of modernism’, Fragmente 5 (1993), p. 33. in the introduction to an
interview with Caroline Bergvall, linda a. Kinnahan emphasizes the importance
of this dimension of Bergvall’s work: ‘Bergvall’s point is to argue for a broader
understanding of feminist poetics and greater attention to women poets whose
work unsettles the standard lyric while refusing to evacuate the self (as advocated
by certain discourses of postmodernism); indeed, in language-based poetic work,
Bergvall and others have argued, the ideologically gendered construction of the self
and systems of identity can be explored and transformed.’ see linda Kinnahan, ‘an
interview with Caroline Bergvall’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 5:3 (november
2011), http://www.carolinebergvall.com/content/text/Kinnahan%20interview.pdf.
8 This combination of creative and critical modes can be seen in the relationship
between poetic and discursive contributions to journals such as Intercapillary Space
(www.intercapillaryspace.org) and PORES: A Journal of Poetics Research (www.
pores.bbk.ac.uk). it is deepened by the important role that practising poets play in
the critical discourses that surround experimental or alternative poetics.
9 Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, p. 192.
10 doreen massey, For Space (london: sage, 2005), p. 23.
11 susan howe’s work is preoccupied by history; she weaves text and image from
primary documents into her poems and in doing so often disrupts standard
typography. see susan howe at the poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.
org/bio/susan-howe#about. For paula Claire, ‘the sound of words and their
relationship to music [is] paramount’. her experimentation with sound finds a
parallel in the typographical innovation of her work, much of which was produced
with Bob Cobbing. see ‘The paula Claire archive of sound and visual poetry’,
www.paulaclaire.com.
12 Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, pp. 192–3.
13 Making Tents appeared first as a pamphlet in 1987 from hardpressed poetry. The
combined edition, Idir Eatortha and Making Tents was published by invisible Books
in 1996 in a4 format with abstract charcoal or pencil sketches on cover, frontispiece
and between the two works in the book.
14 John goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (manchester:
manchester university press, 2000), p. 308.
15 The phrase ‘take two coos, taffy’ occurs repeatedly in virginia Woolf’s The Years:
‘take two coos, taffy. take two coos …’ virginia Woolf, The Years (london:
vintage, 2004), p. 64.
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
16 Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, p. 193.
17 in the ten years between 1998 and 2008 ireland experienced unprecedented
economic growth. during this time its infrastructure changed considerably and
large-scale building projects not only reshaped the major urban centres but also
altered the rural landscape in lasting ways. many of the apartment complexes
and houses built on farmland were never occupied; these so-called ghost estates
are a visible reminder of the effects of recession. Catherine Walsh’s City West was
published in the early stages of the Celtic tiger phenomenon, so significantly
reflects this period of growth.
18 harriet tarlo,‘provisional pleasures: The Challenge of Contemporary experimental
Women poets’, Feminist Review 62 (summer 1999), p. 96.
19 alex davis, ‘deferred action: irish neo-avant-garde poetry’, Angelaki 5.1 (2000),
p. 88.
20 Barrett Watten, ‘The turn to language and the 1960s’, Critical Inquiry 29.1
(autumn 2000), pp. 139–83.
21 deborah mcWilliams Consalvo, ‘an interview with eavan Boland’, Studies: An
Irish Quarterly Review 81.321 (spring 1992), p. 96.
22 in Kinsella’s ‘another september’, nature’s resistance to the conscious creative
subject is figured through the representation of the breath: ‘hears through an open
window the garden draw / long pitch black breaths […] / exhale rough sweetness
against the starry slates’ (Another September (1962), p. 41).
23 Both areas of the city that have a Joycean resonance: the phoenix park features in
Finnegans Wake (1939) and sandymount in both the proteus and nausicaa episodes
of Ulysses (1922).
24 ‘do i dare / disturb the universe? / in a minute there is time / For decisions and
revisions which a minute will reverse’. t. s. eliot, ‘The love song of J. alfred
prufrock’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (london: Faber & Faber, 1963), pp. 13–17
(p. 14).
25 ian davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (london: palgrave macmillan,
2007), p. 104.
26 rachel Blau duplessis, ‘Considering the long poem: genre problems’, Readings:
Response and Reactions to Poetries, 4 (2008), www.bbk.ac.uk/readings/issues/issue4/
duplessis_on_Consideringthelongpoemgenreproblems.
27 martin gubbins, ‘time and visual poetry’, PORES 3, www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/3/
gubbins.html.
28 here Walsh’s work can again be linked to that of Thomas Kinsella, both in the
poet’s apparent intervention in the text with comments on creative aims and
in the rendering of geographical spaces closely associated with the dublin of
Kinsella’s oeuvre, especially those appearing in Poems from Centre City (dublin:
peppercanister, 1990).
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ch a p ter sev en
vona groarke
memory and materiality
vona groarke: memory and materiality
since her earliest poems, vona groarke’s exploration of what it is to
create meaning in the world has highlighted the importance of the
place of her speaking subject and its relationship to the cultural moment
out of which she writes. her philosophical enquiries are always aware
of that subject’s location in time and space – their moment in history,
their place of birth and belonging. These are not elements that contain
or limit groarke’s poetics, but rather provide the creative moment from
which complex investigations unfold. Though many of her poems have
an identifiably irish setting and material, groarke does not see herself
as an ‘irish poet’ and resists a single cultural location as a central
enquiry of the poetry. america, in landscape and language, is glimpsed
fleetingly in poems from the period, first in Juniper Street (2006) and
then in Spindrift (2009); northern england emerges in Spindrift and X
(2013). Though these collections see groarke extending her versatility of
form, it is her treatment of time that is especially noteworthy. as well as
mediating between present and past, these poems also offer important
insights into groarke’s negotiation of the moment of experience and its
assimilation in the finished poem.
The relationship between experience and aesthetics is a complex and
interesting one in groarke’s work as a whole. since her third collection,
Flight (2002), there has been an intensification of her engagement with
existential concerns, yet this process has occurred without loss of the
vividly specific world for which her work has been justly praised. in
Juniper Street, experience remains an important formative element, yet,
though the specifics of groarke’s life in america shape her art, these
are never straightforwardly personal lyrics. While the immediacy of
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
experience is rendered directly in language, it is also transformed by
it, so that a significant temporal gap opens between experience and
representation. time itself becomes a key concern: so that a transnational
reading of her poems must take into account not only the visual and
linguistic inflections of american and British cultures that emerge in
her work but rather her extended preoccupation with ideas of the secure
and the transitory – a concern that has been intensified in X, her most
recent volume.
her early work is especially attentive to the concept of home, most
notably the poems of her second collection, Other People’s Houses.
This does not suggest, however, that the process of re-engagement
with such material is an endless reaffirmation of belonging, but rather
offers evidence of the many ways in which this concept requires to
be reimagined and extended in language. For groarke, home is an
important site of personal and cultural memory.1 in the title poem
of Other People’s Houses, the space of relationship is deconstructed by
the passage of time so that the shape of the house – and of the poem
itself – is radically altered: ‘There’s been a fire and the roof’s caved in’;
‘The ceiling of the sitting room is upended / on the floor’ (OPH 52).
The revival of the house as an emblem of cultural survival reveals its
potential as a repository of emotional meaning, especially in connection
with forms of self-determination in language. in the private context, the
house also provides an essential creative space within which to think
and write. This metaphor offers an enduring structure for groarke in
her exploration of the relationship between memory and language and
her investigation of the limits of knowledge.
North American Time: Juniper Street
The title poem of Juniper Street gives groarke’s journey to america a
domestic shape, but the poem is principally concerned with the passage
of time as an important determinant of the transnational experience.
implicit in the newness of this situation, and the impact of its sensory
detail, is the memory of a previous existence; the unspoken other in
this text. seasonal change – the transition from a harsh us winter – is
the central trope. The increasing use of run-on lines creates a surge of
movement in the poem from the bare landscape of floodlights, gutters
and flagpoles to the optimism of ‘the gilt-edge of our neighbour’s
forsythia’ and ‘our own trim laurel shrub’ (JS 52). From the start, natural
and man-made processes overlay one another:
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We go to sleep by artificial moonlight.
The floodlit stadium times itself out at midnight
and a thicker weave of darkness plies the room.
We sleep under the eaves, where nights of late
have eddied in the wind’s plump, elevated arch.
We wake to only the dawn’s blindsided glaze.
(JS 52)
The complex interweaving of conscious and unconscious states is
indicated here – sleep combining with a sensory awareness of the
weather outside. structure is prominent at the opening of the poem,
as stadium and eaves create different spaces of engagement. as the
movement from night to morning suggests, the passage of time is
central to this poem’s purpose, and the narrative continues with the
children’s hasty disappearance to school. meanwhile, seasonal shifts
see the snows recede and animal and birdlife become newly visible:
the strangeness of this observed world is key to its power to arrest
the observing speaker. not only the actual but also the metaphorical
is determined by the new american experience – its squirrels, orioles
and hawks. here the framing of seasonal change within the shape
of the single day helps to contract the larger patterns into an experiential mode. yet in spite of the seeming importance of the temporal
progression here, the poem finally doubles back on itself to remember
a moment when the spring was framed as an imaginative projection
from the winter months:
or tell you now
that even in January, with our snow-boots lined up
in the hall, i slipped your leather glove onto my hand
and felt the heat of you as something on the turn
that would carry us over the tip of all that darkness
and land us on the stoop of this whole new world.
(JS 52)
This ‘whole new world’ conflates the idea of america with the transformation of spring itself, but in doing so it suggests that it is not just the
environment that is susceptible to endless change but that the language
that describes it is also in flux. as Catriona Clutterbuck has observed,
‘Juniper street, unlike groarke’s preceding work, proposes that loss of
sustainable coherent meaning can both be acknowledged and recuperated,
this by integrating the available remnants of that meaning with lived life
as play’.2 as we saw in sinéad morrissey’s collection Between Here and
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There, a temporal shift indicates the poet’s ability to hold different states
of being in imaginative connection: here in ‘Juniper street’, just as the
warmth of march does not eliminate the experience of snowy January,
so the transnational movement suggests not one culture overshadowing
another but the simultaneity of different imaginative influences.
as well as exploring aspects of american experience in detail, the
work in Juniper Street considers issues of belonging and estrangement
in broader ways, and in doing so returns to the personal past to probe
the passage of time from that vantage point. ‘The return’ evokes a
house in which the speaker once lived and wrote, using a single stanza
of seventeen lines to create the bridge between present and past. in
choosing this compact framework for reflection, groarke not only
intensifies her return to the space of personal memory but engages too
with her earlier work – especially the poems of Other People’s Houses
(1999) – in which the representation of the home, and its emotional
and aesthetic significance, is a central aspect of the poetic enquiry. The
poem begins by halting the reader at the bricked-up door of the house,
impeding our access to the interiority of the domestic space. instead,
language leaves us outside, drawing attention to its own power in
constituting the structure we witness – even the attempts at renovation
read like a punchline to an old and tired joke. yet the creative impulse
that has shaped groarke’s choice of material here is also seen as in the
past – ‘i know this house: i wrote our summer here / into words that
closed over years ago’ (JS 26). here language is like a wound, sealing as
the experience that inspired it grows more distant in time. The speaker’s
return does not just explore the experience of early domesticity but the
complex relationship between the past and its layers of representation.
placed at the centre of the poem, the line ‘even your hand stops as i
unhook the gate’ could belong to either past or present, invoking the
freezing of time in the stopped hands of the clock:
even your hand stops as i unhook the gate
and there it is, our young day, like the blue of your eyes,
a noticed, simple thing that leaves me dumbfounded
in a half-hearted ruin
(JS 26)
This movement qualifies the earlier assertion ‘i know this house’; the past
is in fact a shared one, and the speaker’s lover is cast here as both observer
and the thing observed. ‘our young day’ is not quite ‘like the blue of
your eyes’ as the shared past must be witnessed and understood by both
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of them. Though the joy of the past leaves the speaker dumbfounded,
the half-hearted ruin hints that this is a singular feeling, encompassing
– though not necessarily complicit in – the emotions of the lover. his
apparent act of holding back (‘even your hand stops’) is balanced by her
movement forward (‘my hand on the door’), and by her willingness to
open the past to scrutiny. in her mind the layers of the past cannot be
uncoupled (a word suggestive of a return to a singular state) any more
that the narrative of their love can be remade.
The light that memory sheds on the growth to understanding is a
recurring preoccupation for groarke and in Juniper Street is inflected by
investigations of history and its narrative retelling. again, the nuances
of language and vocabulary shape subjective perspectives in key ways,
highlighting the important intersection between history, memory and
language in understanding the self in a specific national and cultural
context. ‘to smithereens’ begins by signalling the challenges of this
journey back in time: ‘you’ll need a tiller’s hand to steer this through /
the backward drift that brings you to, as always, / one fine day’ ( JS 16).
The patterns of memory can be traced back to the clichéd childhood
summer holiday, the ‘marvellous haul of foam’ and ‘buckets of gold’
exaggerating the simple pleasures of the beach life for children. already
this seems impossibly idyllic, however, and though the ‘scarlet dye’ hints
at the graphic flow of violence through the poem, it gives way to a more
knowing and complex perspective on the event. By the third stanza, as
the radio brings news of the bomb that killed lord mountbatten further
up the western coast,3 language begins to approximate the explosion: ‘the
news that falls in slanted beats / / like metal shavings sprayed from a
single / incandescent point to dispel themselves / as the future tense of
what they fall upon’ (JS 16).
suddenly the scene shifts, reminding us of the need for careful steering
indicated in the first line of the poem. now the speaker is in the cinema
– at the ritz in athlone, ‘a modernist / western wall away from the
shannon’ (JS 16).4 The film is Gandhi and its world begins to merge with
the scene outside the cinema, ganges and shannon presenting a ‘slipknot
of darkness’.5 The ‘she’ accompanying the speaker is undisclosed, but
presumably one of the ‘mams / and aunts’ that feature earlier on the
beach. here the Foxford rugs are replaced by the crimson plush of the
cinema seat, but the sleeping woman is not drawn into the imaginative
world of the film but rather to ‘where all the journeys terminate / with
the slump and flutter of an outboard engine’ (JS 16). Though the ‘heat
and dust’ of the locked projection room evokes another classic film of
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indian independence, it is the postcolonial condition that links ireland
and india.6 Woken ‘by words that spill over the confluence of the ganges
/ / and the shannon at our backs’ (JS 16), the woman interprets what
she hears – the word ‘smithereens’ – as indian, ‘it means / to open
(like an albertine); to flower’ (JS 16). This flowering, which links the
petal-strewn waters of the ganges with the albertine rose, named after
the husband of Queen victoria, empress of india, shows the anomaly
of these colonial connections. more ironic still is the misinterpretation
at the heart of this conclusion – ‘smithereens’ is an irish word, meaning
shattered fragments, an explosive version of the opening out envisaged
in the poem. yet the muddling of beauty and violence, of potential
and destruction is an important part of the post-independent state. it
echoes W. B. yeats’s awareness of these dichotomous responses and alerts
us to the manipulation of language in the staging of both private and
public histories.
in this collection groarke is often concerned with the importance
of the auditory in the construction of meaning; this encompasses not
only the sounds of words but also the accent of the speaking voice. in
exploring her new life in america, and the ways in which it shapes her
poetry, vocabulary and tone prove as important as identified location:
‘The local accent’ is a poem that draws voice and topography into
particularly close alignment. This is not the first time that groarke
has juxtaposed the fluidity of water with solid ground, but here the
relationship between these states, and the extent to which they define
one another, is marked.
This river is pronounced by granite drag.
it is a matter of inflection, of knowing what
to emphasize, and what to let drift away,
just as a slipping aspen leaf makes barely a flicker,
one gaffe in the conversation between the current
and the flow; a stifled yawn, a darkness reimbursed;
while, underneath, the thing that falls through shadow
is full of its own occasion. Weighty and dull,
it longs for water, the lacquer and slip of it,
the way it won’t allow for brightness on its back,
but flips around to where its fall is a wet-wool,
sodden thing about to break at any moment, and undo.
something is coming loose like aspen leaves, or froth.
or maunder, letting itself down like rain into a river
immersed in getting on with what it separates:
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the sulk of damp soil; the stiff articulation of the shore,
the giddy vowels sprayed over the drag and ebb
of voices leaking through the rain over the town.
(JS 18)
The word ‘pronounce’ draws early attention to the sound of language
as shaping of its meaning. The granite drag that determines the pace
of the water’s flow here is suggestive of the cultural bedrock shaping
the deployment of language, the material circumstances of words. if
‘knowing what to emphasize and what to let drift away’ defines pronunciation – the intonation required to make language meaningful – then
it also mirrors processes of understanding: what requires attention, what
can be relinquished. here groarke toys with the practice by which what
is other to language becomes absorbed within it. Just as the aspen leaf
slips downriver virtually unseen, the ‘gaffe in the conversation’ may be
unnoticed by others but meaningful in itself, ‘full of its own occasion’
(JS 18). Water is a space of undoing for groarke, where objects may lose
their sense of coherent identity, yet can be understood to be in transition
between states.
it seems, then, that the speaking voice within this poem records
this point of transition as a linguistic one. The transnational subject
is therefore in a productive state of undoing, where the established
expectations of language and form loosen to allow new modes to emerge.
This loosening of form is also an enquiry into what is coherent and
identifiable in linguistic terms: what comes loose here is ‘aspen leaves or
froth’ – the first a thing ‘other’ to the water, the second an organic part
of it. The merging and separation of similar forms (the froth that comes
adrift from the body of water, and the rain that enters it) mimics the
natural ways in which forms of expression are absorbed within the body
of language, while others are lost. The context suddenly enters the poem,
reminding the reader of the particularity of experience from which
these ideas emerge. The word ‘local’ suggests a version of irishness is at
stake, but given the american inflection of Juniper Street as a whole, its
implications for the understanding of the relationship between place and
spoken language, and in turn between spoken language and meaning,
have a much greater significance. For the first time in groarke’s work
language is linked directly to materiality, and with this connection
comes an increasing sensitivity to the temporal dimension of language
–its powers both of endurance and of adaptability. in this way, the poem
text exemplifies the continuity of tradition and the breaking of this
lineage to create new ways of reading the past in the present.
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Losing the Past: Spindrift
groarke’s fifth collection, Spindrift (2009), retains much of the particularity of Juniper Street but goes further in its dispersal of the continuities
of form that offer sustained and sustaining meaning so that the gap
between the intense reality of the observed world and the contingency of
the observing self becomes ever wider. This dispersal is captured in the
energy of the volume and in its rich interleaving of past and present. The
recognition of this contingency emerges through the formal strategies
of these poems. Spindrift’s transitions of perspective, therefore, speak
not only of loss and change but also of the imprint that these leave on
language.
groarke has long exhibited a sensibility attuned to loss and to the
significance of absence in exerting a shaping force on present meaning.
The figure of the absent father is important in her early work, helping
us to read the voice of the speaker as a singular one; even enduring
relationships are shadowed by the demands of self-knowledge. if Spindrift
marks a transition, it is surely to the realization of radical discontinuities
in the construction of meaning itself – of language’s shortcomings in
helping us to understand the full significance of the past. paradoxically,
though, this realization helps groarke to push language and form
towards an apt expression of this contingent position. as richard rorty
argues, a poet ‘is typically unable to make clear exactly what it is he
wants to do before developing the language in which he succeeds in
doing it’.7 Thus, we may see the dislocations of language in Spindrift as
the cause, as much as the result, of a loss of faith in the continuities of
experience.
in common with the poet’s second collection, Other People’s Houses
(1999), Spindrift has a unifying image, but instead of the grounded
representation of the house, this collection engages with the unceasing
movement of water and singularity of past, present and future that
this suggests. spindrift itself is defined at the opening of the book
as ‘spray blown from the crests of waves by the wind’ and this is a
collection shaped not only by the motion of water but by its dispersal
and evaporation. Thus it becomes an apt motif for the fear of lost
selfhood in that it replaces the safety of domestic happiness but
also challenges the possibility of poetic containment in conditions
of personal and cultural uncertainty. The title sequence, significantly
placed last in the book, dwells on the return of the past through the
materiality of the present
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1
What is to be done
with a past tense
that, once recalled,
presents itself again?
you might as well
throw a stone in the sea
and be taken aback
when the same thing
is keeping you from sleep
(SD 62)
as well as crossing the boundaries between present and past, the
poem signals the merging of literal and imaginative worlds and the
paradox of what is cast away remaining with us. as in so many of
groarke’s earlier poems the house holds past lives – ‘all manner of old
news’ – and we are especially alert to forms and structures here and
their impact on both present mood and memories of the past: the sea,
the house, fields, stones. The landscape is revealed gradually through the
poem’s numbered parts, through its expansion and contraction of lines.
These parts emphasize ideas of progress and chronology at the same
time as they privilege ebb and flow, so that time may be conceptualized
in linear fashion, even as it carries the past with it. The reopening of
the house marks a telescoping of time as the immediacy of domestic
tasks provoke memories that confirm all that has changed since these
tasks were last performed. Thus it is fitting that this sequence is the
final one of the book, drawing together both the speaker’s memories
of place and the reader’s of reading. The impressions of sea and land
become more intense and subjective as the speaker opens to these
new–old experiences and tests the power of language to evoke them
truly: ‘The colour of the sea today / is nothing like the name / of
any colour / i can think of ‘ (SD 63). The poem then opens out to
combine botanical observations with brief narratives of the children’s
experiences, bringing a different energy to the sequence. memories
of past summers are balanced by projected futures: the planning
application that might pave the way for bungalow and landscaped
garden gives a larger cultural context to the changing landscape. as
the materiality of the past is lost to a new, commodified ireland, the
role of personal memory changes. For now, though, wave and sky
predominate, revealing a different order of change – the endless shifts
of the coastal landscape and the mutability of memory and mood.
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observation and reflection are keys to this poem, so that when night
falls light floods the scene: lit windows, a lighthouse beam, headlights
of cars – all are suggestive of the patterns of human life, intersecting
with the speaker’s own daily routines but also exposing them to the
gaze. This sense of being at once on the margins and moving within
a web of life is important: all this variety is ‘a kind of love song’, yet
not one written by the speaker but heard by her. This profound sense
of witness with which the book ends at once unifies and clarifies the
poems of contemplation and doubt that precede this in the book.
Spindrift’s opening poem, ‘some Weather’, heralds an emotional
turbulence that shapes the present of these poems, but that also
indicates the fragility of the apparently stable past: ‘among the things
/ (though these are not things) / i did to pre-empt the storm were: /
upturn, stow, disconnect, / shut down, shutter, shut’ (SD 11). The poem
immediately draws attention to the inadequacy of the well-worn phrase
in favour of a more purposeful relationship between nouns and verbs –
the word for things and the word for actions. it is the first evidence of
the unobtrusive search for newness that is present here and still more
pronounced in X, groarke’s subsequent collection. This relationship
draws attention to the dynamic between an existing material reality
and the contingent nature of human intervention in this reality. The
actions listed in the poem invite various interpretations: they are the
precautionary measures taken in a boat entering storm conditions, but,
in a larger sense, they indicate human modes of self-protection in time
of crisis. The line ‘shut down, shutter, shut’ improvises meaning from
a single word but is also suggestive of declension – a verb moving
through different tenses, and as it does so linguistically mimicking its
own meaning, that of defensive reduction. The contest between the
human figure and the elements here is an investigation of the tension
between stasis and movement, between withdrawal and expressiveness
that is also the dialectic of human relationships and of the creative
process. These are reminders too of the distancing effect that so many
of these poems enact: the noted significance of what happens elsewhere
and can be only imagined by the speaker.
From its opening poem, then, water imagery flows through Spindrift,
not only emphasizing the uncertain processes of writing itself but
allowing the distinctions between surface and depth to inform our
reading of the work. The second poem in the collection, ‘The Jetty’,
considers reflection (in both senses of the word) as creative of new frames
of meaning, even if these perspectives exist only ‘for a moment’.
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summer-bleached and swaddling the paddle-boat
and tin canoe, the jetty shoulders, for a moment,
clean right angles, lichen seams heavy as voices
tacking now across water, calling ‘don’t’ or ‘Boat’ –
it hardly matters to me. The way i scribble
is like the way a squirrel or a cardinal
is fumbling in the thicket to my left:
at least he knows what he’s looking for.
(SD 12)
groarke’s imaginative attention rests on the jetty – that man-made
construction that protrudes into the existential mystery of the lake, here
‘swaddling’ the paraphernalia of american literary fiction.8 The voices
overheard here are discernible only by their vowel sounds, not by what
their words connote, and are in any case of little interest to the poet
intent on her own creative labours. This is ironic, of course, because these
voices form part of the poem’s final meaning, again showing that what
is at a distance constantly impinges on the poet’s mind. in addition to
this covert attentiveness to her immediate surroundings, groarke’s poem
is alive with the memories of earlier texts and as the poem progresses
these may be seen to hint at a range of literary contexts, from twain’s
american adventures to Wordsworth’s Prelude. There are resonances
here too of poems by both Thomas Kinsella and Bernard o’donoghue,
who have found analogues for their writing process in the avian world.9
in ‘The Jetty’, the creative breakthrough occurs at a point of ambiguity
in the natural world: ‘i think i’ve found it when the opposite hill /
throws down another version of itself / on the lake’s gloss’ (SD 12). as
well as seeing the landscape inverted in the water’s surface, the speaker
also records how the acts of reading and writing add layers from the
imagined and observed worlds to the text-in-process. The doubling
of representation in this poem is potentially disturbing, though, as it
exposes the process of repetition even in the singular space of the newly
created poem.
This reaches to the heart of the tension in this collection, between, in
rorty’s terms, ‘the attempt to represent or express something that was
already there and the attempt to make something that never had been
dreamed of before’.10 This tension exemplifies the working of memory
as both a reclamation of the past and an imaginative creation that may
help us better to understand what we have experienced, either personally
or collectively. groarke sometimes uses the breaking of surfaces as a way
of investigating the coexistence of a shared material memory and an
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original perception. The poem ‘trapdoor’ records water’s relationship to
its environment, and how its appearance shifts and changes according
to circumstance:
it fools no one.
not the dragonflies or midges,
not the pine trees or the moon,
not the swimmer, me, breaststroking out
to immerse myself at its dark heart,
to witness how nothing, not even silence
or my own dim company, can disturb
that practised and accomplished suffering.
(SD 35)
in keeping with a reading of water that privileges it as a metaphor for
subconscious states, the ‘dark heart’ of this lake is the repository of
suffering and of concealed life. here groarke envisages a lake not as a
continuous space of water, though, but rather one divided into different
states of experience: in this way the distinction between past and present
can be made clear, even as their capacity for remaining undifferentiated
is also expressed. The underwater descent, so much a part of the investigation of self and psyche, is linked here to observed detail (the pike), to
tragic memory (the two young deaths) and to the surreal (the dock that
‘unhinges itself’) (SD 35).
The concept of doubleness acquires new significance too: right through
this collection groarke dwells on the past, not only the lost past of
personal experience but the pastness of her earlier texts. many of these
poems reprise ideas and images from previously published work with
new or intensified meaning. The metaphorical structure of ‘trapdoor’
marks a return to groarke’s first collection Shale, which is prefaced by
a quotation from elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The riverman’: ‘i waded into the
river / and suddenly a door / in the water opened inward’. some of
Bishop’s ambiguous treatment of the movement between water and land,
between different states of being, informs this early book, especially a
poem such as ‘sunday’s Well’ that explores the relationship between
individual identity and domestic space in ways that also disturb the
existence of clear boundaries. groarke’s return to this scheme of images
some 15 years later indicates a need to explore the development of her
creative perception and to disturb any sense of easy progression towards
new forms of understanding. instead, this strategy of doubling back
affirms the disjointed ways in which meaning is made.
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The water imagery that emphasizes processes of movement and
readjustment in Juniper Street here becomes an apt motif for the fear
of lost selfhood, not only replacing the safety of domestic happiness
but also challenging the possibility of poetic containment in conditions
of personal, and cultural, uncertainty. in Strangers to Ourselves, Julia
Kristeva suggests that for many exiles the homeland may be represented
by a time rather than a place, ‘a lost mirage of the past which he will
never be able to recover’.11 ‘away’ (the second of two poems with that
title in Spindrift) presents the transnational experience in a manner that
dramatizes the geographical separation of the speaker from her children.
her ability not only to speak to her children but also to glimpse their
lives by technological means opens up new possibilities in the realms of
virtual experience. The performative dimension of groarke’s treatment of
technology is again to the fore but temporality is the most crucial factor
in determining the fragility of the connection across space:
i am three thousand miles ago,
five hours in the red.
What would it take –
one crossed cyber wire,
a virtual hair’s breadth awry –
for these synapsed hours
to bloat to centuries,
for my background
to be rescinded
to a Botticelli blue,
my webcam image
ruffled and pearled,
speaking vintage words
into spindrift?
(SD 26)
The order that time represents is easily disturbed, groarke suggests,
and with it the codes of connection are meaningless. These codes relate
both to the past – in the shape of a family unity now lost – and to
the uncertain future. The simultaneity suggested by the use of skype
is refuted when the speaker contemplates viewing her children’s lives
on google earth – a visualization that is at once intimate and frozen
in time. in this scheme, the distinction between past and present
is problematized. it suggests that groarke’s poetic progression is an
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assimilative one, always turning back on itself to produce new meanings
and perspectives. although her work is acutely attentive to the individual
moment of experience, it often gives the impression that the speaker has
already absorbed this experience; that it has been reflected upon not
only deeply but also in an enduring way. Thus, groarke’s openness to
american culture, here and in Juniper Street, is not a dynamic of change
and development, but rather one of return, as the core concerns of her
poetry find new materials of expression. it is in illuminating the complex
temporal modes of groarke’s writing that her transnational experience
is most valuable.
The sense of isolation, even of fear, that shadows the subject position
in this collection is also reflected in its changed domestic representation.
For groarke, the interior or domestic space has always been a site of
investigation, one in which the relationship between self and world
can be explored. even where the domestic space has been signalled as
apparently secure, the relationship between the singular viewer and this
space is often one of disturbed vision. a striking example of this is the
poem ‘orange’ from Flight (2002), which sees a fissure open through
the centre of the poem as the speaker surveys the brightly lit family
home from outside in the wintery dark. The separateness that enables
the speaker to look at her family from a distance, yet closely, also creates
apparently contradictory feelings of belonging and being excluded. it
is a strategy that groarke employs in increasingly complex ways in
Spindrift, where feelings of estrangement are ironically accompanied
by some of the closest scrutiny of the material world we have yet seen
in this poet’s work. Capturing a moment of perfect attention is by
now a hallmark of groarke’s poetry and in Spindrift it finds particular
significance when set against the wilfulness of natural processes that
storms and tides invoke. Within these states of uncertainty and flux are
to be found the most resonant of features – a tear in the satin lining of
a handbag, the sound of scissors cutting, a car headlamp reflected on
a gatepost – details that are not just evocative of an instant of human
experience, but confirm that our relationship to the world is often cast
in just this fleeting way. it is as though the awareness of mutability
brings the impulse to record in detail, to lay down memories for the
future. now the space of the house is no longer a place of security
but instead one that is breached or darkening. a poem such as ‘The
stairwell’ uses wordplay to generate the imagined well at the centre
of the house, the deliberate rise and fall of the machinery marking a
strange state somewhere between sleeping and waking. The absence of
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the speaking subject from this mechanistic process, and her abdication
of future responsibility, is a significant indication of the future loss of
meaningful involvement in shared domestic processes. The instability of
the boundaries of the home is evident in the shape of the collection as
a whole; in the way the poems resonate with one another, just as ‘the
open plan of this last house / pulses and contracts’. This poem, entitled
‘The Box’, concludes in fear that shared experience and understanding
may be irretrievably lost: ‘that all the years we lived here drain away’ (SD
31). This is ultimately the fear that discontinuity and meaninglessness lie
at the core of human existence. Both the fear of loss and its acceptance
mark Spindrift, yet it does not simply represent emotional responses to
lived experience, instead it engages fundamentally with the making and
the loss of meaning.
The rich possibilities of the material world are also present in the
poem ‘Beyond me’, where again what is beyond the bounds of human
subjectivity and understanding is the subject of scrutiny. The interwoven
nature of time and space is immediately apparent: ‘The hours stack up
like saucers’ (SD 43). The poem, like several others here, progresses by
means of association – the image of saucers is followed by that of knives
‘resting on their polished sides’; the ‘stream’ of light leads us to ‘rain
falls in reams’ (SD 43) (my italics). The ability of language to guide our
thought-processes by sound and association lends particular significance
to the act of writing and to its role in making, rather than describing,
meaning.
rain falls in reams: whatever else there is allays
a loneliness plump with your absence, that balances,
tightrope and fall, to either side of me.
What do i ask? to make something of these lines
extend to you; to have you turn in my direction;
the long-life bulb by my front door illuminate your hand.
even a single hair on your pillow knows all there is of you:
even more than i, though i have thought of you,
made much of your fern eyes and speckled wrist
(SD 43)
The absence at the core of this poem is expressed in the image of
the tightrope and the corresponding fear of falling, yet the finest line
between meaning and emptiness is of course the poetic line. The word
‘line’ itself offers multiple meanings and the speaker here makes clear
that her poem is a means to reach the absent figure and to draw him
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back into the very world the poem inscribes. in this way the ideal reader
is the absent ‘you’ of the poem, and our awareness of this missing figure
prompts us to consider the distance that has opened up between speaker
and reader throughout the collection, suggesting that uncreated meanings
shadow every poem. The limitations of knowledge have become integral
to the poet’s awareness of the process of writing itself – that it can be
no more than one version of lived experience. The dna to be found
in a single hair reveals more of the individual than the creative act. to
press a version of the person ‘between unyielding sheets’ is to preserve
in the manner of the pressed flower and to render as a text – unyielding
because printed, ineradicable. The absent figure both opens up and
closes down creative response: the speaker must ‘rest’ from the labour
of representation and attend to the material of her own poem. at this
point, ‘Beyond me’ begins to turn back on itself: the speaker becomes
the poet tinkering with the first images. The earlier question – ‘What
do i ask?’ – is answered: ‘i have nothing to ask’ (SD 43). The line of the
poem extended to the absent figure is cut in two in the truncated final
line: ‘it is not over. i will not again’ (SD 43). These syllabically balanced
yet strangely incomplete sentences test the relationship between present
and future, being simultaneous expressions of continuance and finality,
hope and despair.
X: No Curve or Arc to Double Back?
many of the preoccupations of Spindrift can be traced again in X,
published in 2014. its elusive title – the definitions of which are more
numerous than for Spindrift – alerts us to the further fragmentation
of meaning in this volume. The title poem signals the juxtapositions
that the book as a whole creates: ‘straight lines only / no curve or arc
/ to double back’ (X 14). This sense of forward motion is belied by the
extent to which this collection is in dialogue with groarke’s last volume,
especially in its depiction of the crucial intersection between space and
time. John mcauliffe sees it as marking an important transition for
groarke: it ‘inhabits the empty space it describes in a way that feels new
in irish writing: the poems tell a story of reclaimed and recovered spaces,
albeit haunted by memory’.12
X becomes a puzzle not easily revealing how its parts fit together,
and in this way it alerts us to the significant relationship between the
individual poem and the volume as a whole, as well as between the
human being as a singular and relational entity. in the absence of the
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‘o’ that would confirm this letter to be a kiss, we are given – but given
to question – the sensual image of the slipping shoulder strap of the
dress. This seems to be a glimpse of the past, the tangled nature of
which takes years to unpick. But the parts are also indicative of the
relationship between lovers, intersecting at the point of intensity then
moving in opposite directions:
as if here and now
were equal lines
fused the way lovers are fused
for as long as it takes
to pass through the eye of love
to recover, to egress.
(X 14)
The intersection of time and place is important here, as it will be in
the volume as a whole. They are seen as ‘equal lines’, briefly conjoined
yet divergent in meaning; their identical shape before and after this
moment of unity suggests both a purposeful movement and an ‘egress’.
here the nuclear family represents the state of completeness, making the
four-sided shape ‘full of itself’ before being ‘cornered, quartered, hinged’
– a depleted condition reinforced by the dwindling stanza that follows.
The uneven shape of the poem as a whole belies the exact symmetry of
its central image; later in the text the prevalence of single lines marks the
opening up of blank space and the slowing, then the cessation, of shared
time. This process has some affinities with changes that sites of collective
memory undergo: when these memories fade, Jay Winter suggests, ‘the
sites of memory decompose, or simply fade into the landscape’.13 in
groarke’s poem, though the speaker contemplates the interdependence of
presence and absence: ‘as crosshairs train on a blank page / / as arrows
turn in on themselves / / as the blades of a bedroom ceiling fan / come
to / / a perfectly obvious stop’ (X 15). The loss of momentum seems,
after a certain point, inevitable. it brings our focus back to the present
moment much as the speaker in ‘Fate’ rejects the conflation of past and
future that a fairy story represents, in favour of the chance to ‘walk in
the room / of my own breath’ (X 23), a containment that paradoxically
expresses the potential for personal liberation.
other poems in this volume continue the engagement with domestic
materiality that is a defining feature of Spindrift. These texts produce
light – they are full of reflective surfaces, from ‘a pocket mirror’, with
which the book opens, to the glass bowls of ‘Where she imagines
the Want of Being alone’, ‘3’ and ‘midsummer’ (X 17; 18; 36), to the
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antique silver box and ‘unscheduled silver’ of the photograph (X 31; 75).
White – all colour and no colour – predominates in the first half of the
book, speaking of the urge to embrace the world yet also expressing a
profound sense of emptiness. as sherry turkle has argued, the meaning
of objects shifts according to time and place: ‘objects speak in a way that
destroys any simple stories we might tell about our relations to nature,
history and the inanimate; they destroy any simple sense we have about
progress and our passage through time’.14 This places the volume, as its
title poem suggests, at a pivotal point between past and future, where the
radical break with an earlier existence has not yet yielded a transformed
existence. The signs of renewal can be glimpsed in the second half of the
book; at first, though, this potential is tentatively expressed. The opening
poem begins with the image of a snowdrop, which finds its analogue in
the white poppy from the garden sequence; interiors have ‘white door
handles’ and ‘off-white walls’ (X 17; 18). ‘The White year’ is explicitly
concerned with the dynamics of remembering and forgetting:
i am told that memory can’t afford
to care less about what it brings to light
just as i’m told the table does not
occupy itself with cleanliness
nor the made bed with desire,
but it is difficult to believe.
(X 12)
here memory is linked to the material world – it resembles an object
more than a process, suggesting that it is prompted by the sensory
stimulus that everyday life provides. The speaker resists this apparent
arbitrariness, but the touch of irony does not negate the imaginative
significance of material objects for the poet, or the creative necessity of
reading these objects as an important part of the individual’s negotiation
with the world. in this poem, the light / dark binary indicates the shifting
mood that grief for lost love induces: what memory ‘brings to light’
prompts a ‘contingent darkness’; trees ‘toy with shadows of themselves’
(X 12). ultimately, the speaker judges, neither memory nor forgetting is
randomly linked to the materiality of the present tense. instead, time
moves gradually onward, confirming the sequential character of making
meaning: ‘night after night, city after city, / word after functional word’
(X 13). The past self is not subsumed into the present, but neither does
their coexistence rule out the demand of the ‘whole body […] to be in
possession of itself’ (X 13) and capable of unfettered action in the world.
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This contemplation of multiple selves finds later expression in two
poems invoking ghostly presences. ‘The ghost on the road’ conjures a
figure from shadow and rain, a presence moving towards the house from
which the speaker watches. his relationship to the past is ambiguous,
though; he is created by, and from, an act of observation. he looks up at
the speaker’s window just once: ‘but i know that look / and everything
that will come of it / given ink and time’ (X 62). This contemplation of
self and other emphasizes not intimacy, as is more commonly the case
in groarke’s work, but an enigmatic distance and an awareness of the
power of writing to create from almost nothing: ‘the ghost on the road /
is a ghost on the road / / for all i make of him’ (X 62). yet if this ghost
is conjured by language, he manages to acquire an identity independent
of it, suggesting once more the coexistence of multiple versions of the
past, each one created by a separate attempt at understanding. in the
poem that follows this one, simply called ‘ghost poem’, the revenants
are not singular but multiple, and they have the same effect of slowing
time ‘so one minute is cavernous / / compared to the next’ (X 64).
unlike the ghost on the road, these invoke bodily memories – ‘your
wrist / on my breast’, ‘your veins in silverpoint mapped / on my skin’
(X 64) – yet this shared life is ‘made up’, conjured by words. This has
important connotations for the relationship between language and
memory, suggesting that both the original emotions and the memory of
them exist primarily in language.
Centrally placed in X is the ‘garden sequence’, comprising thirteen
poems in varying forms. Though in renaissance times the garden was
construed as evidence of fitting authority, its modern representation is
suggestive of physical and mental renewal. For groarke, it combines the
energies of growth with questions of structure and form and marks a
significant transition from her earlier representations of nature. Though
landscapes have played a prominent part in her work, she describes
herself in a recent interview as ‘more given to investigating how nature
might mirror human psychological experience and states, than to the act
of description’.15 earlier, indoor and outdoor spaces were often presented
in oppositional ways, signalling divergent perspectives on both present
and past. here her invocation of the imagery of the garden doesn’t
assume unity of perspective but reflects more deeply on the passage of
time and on the complex and contingent character of human perception.
although the representation of gardens offers groarke an opportunity
to engage with the non-human habitat, in these poems she is concerned
with forms of understanding that encompass contextualized human
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relationships too. Breath is a recurring trope in these poems, obliquely
considering the different relationships between human and plant life. it
appears first in the opening text: ‘only a roofline tin whistle / practising
“The parting glass” / construes the gap / between lupin and rose / as
possible held breath’ (X 41). here the interaction between human sound
and plant life sets the tone for the oblique and fleeting contact that
the sequence will explore. The shape of the stanza – which is without
punctuation – is itself that of the held breath, and the subject of the
barely heard song is of closure.16 This draws attention to the poet’s choice
of the sequence mode,17 as well as to the ways in which they revisit earlier
themes and images in her work.
From this opening poem, groarke acknowledges the pivotal role of
the poetic imagination in interpreting these plants, but in noting its
deliberate character she also confirms the power of symbolic meaning
and its significance for how we read the world. The poem she places
second in the sequence, ‘The garden in hindsight’, carries this idea
over to a direct exploration of past and present. imagining a garden that
belonged to her years before, the speaker frames this memory in a particularized present. The poem recalls an earlier theme of groarke’s – that of
a visit to a previous home – encountered in such poems as ‘other people’s
houses’ (OPH 52–3) and ‘The return’ (JS 26). in contrast to those
poems, however, ‘The garden in hindsight’ is not a poem of intimacy.
rather, it invokes a refusal to connect with the world; the black tulips
are remembered as ‘close in themselves’, they ‘turn embittered / hearts
against all possible sky’ (X 42). yet these are balanced by more recently
planted bulbs that ‘yield / as to remembered light’, suggesting an inherent
desire to bloom (X 42). The tension here between a dark inwardness and
a disposition open to growth and change shadows a number of poems in
this sequence. This capacity to look in two directions – towards the past
and the future – is a distinctive feature of this collection, helping both to
connect it to her previous work and to suggest new aesthetic departures.
The metaphorical power of garden imagery reinforces the concept
of unity in this group of poems. in ‘The garden as event’ we pick
up echoes of W. B. yeats’s root, blossom and bole in the relationship
groarke traces between skyline and sky, between branch and cherry
tree.18 The dynamics of part and whole are important both in the
sequence and in individual poems, and have spatial and temporal
resonance too: as all these poems indicate, time can be both fleeting and
expansive. in the unchanging kitchen scene of ‘The garden as event’,
with its barely moving square of light, we see reflections of poems from
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Spindrift (2009) – ‘The hours stack up like saucers. The knives / are
resting on their polished sides. a widening stream / from the back-door
light is the last thing sure of itself’ (‘Beyond me’, SD 43). now the act
of making becomes even more deliberate than in earlier poems, so that
just as the ‘fruit in the fruitbowl glosses / a composed version of itself’
(X 46), elsewhere too there is a concern for the realistic detail that
alludes to artful creation. groarke has acknowledged the challenge of
negotiating ‘between the life one lives and the life one writes’, and in
the garden poems the subtleties of this relationship are probed in images
that emerge from earlier texts: the cowslips in ‘their borrowed pot’ grow
from the convergence of life and art in Spindrift’s ‘Cowslips’, and take
up the strands of its discussion (S 61).
‘The garden, over time’ reflects on the transitory nature of belonging,
balancing the contingencies of human existence against the unhurried
pace of nature. time is not marked conventionally by the passage of
the seasons here, but rather by the erratic involvement of the human in
nature’s rhythms, suggesting that we are both part of and other to this
non-human world. The tree that would not thrive finds its analogue in
the false starts of independent life before a new pattern of existence can
be established; trial and error is the process foremost here. This sense of
learning anew is also a way of refiguring the past to create meaningful
connections to the present – even if these connections may conversely
mark a decisive break in understanding. This disruption is expressive too:
the barren winter halted language – the ‘bones of winter […] ring hollow
as words / / i would just as soon / shroud in darkness / as bring to / open
light’ (X 58). yet though the speaker seems to treat the future casually
(the early arrival of summer is ‘fine by me’), she is not careless of the
fragility of hope; reflecting on the speed of time’s passing she concludes:
left
to my own devices,
i would spend it, surely,
cradling the only
fact of winter
coming in early,
yes, this year.
(X 59)
Three-beat lines expand slightly to accommodate the disyllabic opening
words ‘cradling’ and ‘coming’, creating the sensation of a shallow breath
– a delicate pulse of life for which the poet is grateful.
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The evolution of groarke’s response to the materiality of the past – and
what it means for the future – has been considerable. Closely observed
detail remains important in this work, but temporal continuities have
given way to an acceptance of change. since Spindrift, the uncertainties
of history have been actualized in the domestic life of the poems and it
is in this space that the growth of understanding must, and does, take
place. The thematic unities of groarke’s work yield to an understanding
of the past made complex both through suffering and through aesthetic
refinement. so it is that the evolving precision of the poet’s language
leads to greater insight into our relationship with the past.
Notes
1 The relationship between public and private readings of groarke’s work is a
contested one. John redmond argues that it is almost possible to supply a publicly
oriented reading for the poems in Other People’s Houses: ‘The way in which groarke
allows her poems to brush against seemingly relevant public narratives gives them
a necessary, extra charge.’ Poetry and Privacy: Questioning Public Interpretations of
Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Bridgend: seren, 2013), p. 166. see also selina
guinness, ‘“The annotated house”: Feminism and Form’, in Justin Quinn (ed.),
Irish Poetry After Feminism (gerrards Cross: Colin smythe, 2008), pp. 69–79.
2 Catriona Clutterbuck, ‘new irish Women poets: The evolution of (in)determinacy
in vona groarke’, in Fran Brearton and alan gillis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of
Modern Irish Poetry (oxford: oxford university press, 2012), p. 661.
3 lord louis mountbatten was a British naval officer, the second cousin of Queen
elizabeth ii. he was supreme allied Commander in south-east asia during the
second World War and the last viceroy of india. in 1979, he was killed by an ira
bomb at mullaghmore, County sligo. see Bew and gillespie, Northern Ireland: A
Chronology of the Troubles.
4 The ritz Cinema in athlone was built in 1939 and was designed by Bill o’dwyer
from the office of michael scott, the renowned irish architect. extensive
glazing and white plasterwork, together with portholes and flat roofs suggested
a maritime theme. after years of disuse, the building was finally demolished
in the 1990s. ‘1938 – ritz Cinema, athlone, Co. Westmeath’, http://archiseek.
com/2009/1938-ritz-cinema-athlone/.
5 Gandhi is a biographical film directed by richard attenborough. it dramatizes
the life of mohandas gandhi, the leader of india’s non-violent independence
movement. it was released in ireland on april 22, 1983, www.imdb.com/title/
tt0083987/.
6 Heat and Dust, a novel by ruth prawer Jhabvala, was published in 1975 and won
the Booker prize in the same year. in 1983, it was made into a film from merchant
ivory productions (www.imdb.com/title/tt0084058/).
7 richard rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge university
press, 1989), p. 41.
8 ‘paddle-boat / and tin canoe’ evoke the culture of mark twain’s Adventures of
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von a groa r k e: m e mory a n d m at e r i a l i t y
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Huckleberry Finn (london: penguin, 2012), the quintessential text of american
coming of age.
poetic precursors include Wordsworth, terrified by cliffs in his stolen canoe (The
Prelude, Book 1). in the irish context, further resonances can be noted: Thomas
Kinsella’s ‘Wyncote, pennsylvania: a gloss’ was first published in New Poems (1973),
shortly after he had moved to america. it includes a sensitive description of a
mocking-bird in this new environment. Bernard o’donoghue’s ‘The nuthatch’
draws parallels between bird and observing poet, noting that the bird ‘didn’t / lift
his head as he pored over his wood-text’. see Bernard o’donoghue, Selected Poems
(london: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 17.
rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. 47.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. leon s. roudiez (new york: Columbia
university press, 1991), p. 10.
John mcauliffe, ‘X marks a new place for vona groarke, and for irish writing’.
review of X by vona groarke, Irish Times, march 15, 2014, p. 13.
Jay Winter, ‘sites of memory and the shadow of War’, in erll and nünning,
Cultural Memory Studies, p. 72.
turkle discusses the work of Bruno latour in sherry turkle (ed.), Evocative Objects:
Things We Think With (Cambridge, ma: mit press, 2007), loc. 2449 [kindle
edition].
hedwig schwall, ‘how do you make a teapot Be intellectually interesting? an
interview with vona groarke’, Irish University Review 43.2 (autumn/Winter 2013),
pp. 288–306.
‘oh all the money that e’er i had, i spent it in good company / and all the harm
that e’er i’ve done, alas, it was to none but me / and all i’ve done for want of wit
to memory now i can’t recall / so fill to me the parting glass, good night and joy
be with you all’ (‘The parting glass’). see Colm Ó lochlainn, Irish Street Ballads
(london: pan, 1978).
Four of these poems were printed in Irish University Review 43.2 (autumn/Winter
2013), in the following order: ‘The garden from above’, ‘The garden in hindsight’,
‘The garden as event’ and ‘The garden as an island approached by a tidal
Causeway’.
‘o chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, / are you the leaf, the blossom or the
bole? / o body swayed to music, o brightening glance, / how can we know the
dancer from the dance?’. W. B. yeats, ‘among school Children’, The Collected
Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems (london: simon & schuster, 2010), p. 219.
groarke herself has commented on the importance of yeats to her as a practising
poet: ‘he’s a great technician, he has great mastery of metre and music within a
line … he also has real intellectual ballast in the poems’. schwall, ‘how do you
make a teapot?’, p. 290.
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Conclusion
memories of the Future
conclusion
The many ways in which contemporary irish women poets respond to
the past is evidence of the significance of this negotiation for generations
of writers, and its vital intersection with a range of themes and practices.
all the poets featured in this study engage with different dimensions of
memory, from explorations of key historical events to the recollection
of the turbulent personal past; from shared networks of tradition to
textual resonances from their own earlier work. some of these poets
first became established in the 1960s and 1970s, when feminist debates
inflected how their work was read and received. The development of their
poetry, politically and aesthetically, has not only helped to keep poetry
written by women to the forefront of the irish poetry scene but has also
highlighted the significance of reflecting on this process of evolution
within creative practice itself.
all acts of reading and criticism take place in time and they too
must reflect upon the trajectories of such commentary. in this sense,
we remember past reading experiences – poetic and critical – and bring
these memories to our analysis of the texts we encounter. eavan Boland’s
ongoing interrogation of silenced voices in narrative history has created
an awareness of the partial nature of the official past; yet it has also
highlighted the strategic character of some memory practices. in the
presence of this repeated engagement, other women have traced oblique
routes through personal and political histories, using the dynamics of
place and belonging as a counterpoint. For poets such as paula meehan,
mary o’malley and eva Bourke, responses to the past – and the formal
mechanisms deployed to explore them – are shaped by the landscapes
and streetscapes of experience. The enduring links between temporal
and spatial imagination for these poets has not limited their aesthetic
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development, instead it has emphasized their creative process as one of
constant renewal.
The rich variety of work produced by women during this period
emphasizes the interconnected nature of these voices. as some of these
poets write out of a specifically irish present, others move abroad to
articulate an irish experience that may be in the past, yet remains an
important dimension of their identity. mairéad Byrne and Catherine
Walsh have demonstrated that unfixed perspectives can be productive
of formally innovative poems that extend the boundaries of form and
tradition. Though these texts create very different reading experiences,
they contribute to a larger network of meaning and representation that
encompasses stylistically various texts. This has the important effect of
making these texts ‘present’ to one another, existing in the same critical
space and therefore demonstrating an awareness that the poetic practice
of others is a vital part of each woman’s own writing process.
The generational differences encompassed by this study reflect the
overlapping nature of present and past in important ways. The women
represented here are born between 1942 and 1983 and represent three
generations of creative life. By bringing these poets together, this book
draws attention to their evolving styles and preoccupations, yet also
shows how key concerns with personal, social and political histories
remain strong. Though the younger poets represented here do not
identify with feminism, their mediation of the past shows an awareness
that such an inheritance spans ideological and personal realms.
Within these patterns of connection, personal relationships remain an
important determinant of identity and a means of exploring one’s place
in the world. a number of poets from the younger generation explore
their relationship to time through inter-generational reflection – by
reflecting upon their bonds to parents and grandparents, and with their
own young children. sinéad morrissey’s Parallax is a volume that brings
past and future into alignment in this way. ‘The house of osiris in the
Field of reeds’ records the inexorable process of leaving youth behind:
all through last winter, each day
made to bear the pressure of impending loss.
Soon it will no longer be like this. The lean girls
picnicking in the park, their haul of charity-shop
dresses at their feet
(PX 57)
The collection as a whole contemplates how the past can be recorded; its
particular histories are read through photography and text. Birth-giving
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c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
offers a counterpoint to these explorations, combining memory and
futurity in the single unit of the poem.
‘a matter of life and death’ is particularly significant in this respect.
it subtly binds together the process of childbirth with the death of a
grandmother, balancing the optimism regarding new life with the loss
of the old: ‘making room as she herself predicted’ (PX 41). This poem of
long lines and tercets negotiates the escalating pain of labour through
its intensification and release, both mind and body concentrating on the
event to come. to pass the time, the speaker watches ‘a matter of life
and death’, a powell and pressburger film made in 1946. The film, a
fantasy featuring david niven as a second World War pilot, plays with
the relationship between this world and the next. our first glimpse of
the action interweaves niven’s decision to bale out of a burning plane
with a heightening of labour pain from which no escape is possible. at
this point in the poem (much as in the film) present and future become
confused: references to pethidine and epidurals are followed by a vision
of the speaker walking ‘the sunny verges / / of our cul-de-sac like a
wind-up, fat-man toy’ (PX 41). soon the film reveals the monochrome
of the afterlife,1 where the vision of death is one of orderly exchange –
a balancing of the books between life and death. This image presages
the equilibrium of the poem itself, balanced between the death of the
grandmother and the expectation of new life. The film plays a dual role
in furthering this theme: it not only suggests the coexistence of worlds
but also evokes a period when the speaker’s grandmother was young and
herself giving birth. This female lineage is an important one, creating
a vital link between generations of women that is deeply embedded in
the contexts of writing.
The disruption of time is an important way in which the poem
unites theme and form, destabilizing our sense of clear progression.
morrissey’s focus shifts between present physicality, personal memory
and imaginative creation, affirming the mind’s tendency to move
swiftly across time, to gather and connect disparate elements at first
unconsciously and then with more deliberation. at the close of the
poem, the grandmother enters the film world – ‘young, glamorous,
childless, free, in her 1940s’ shoes and sticky lipstick’ (PX 43) – to
become twice imagined: first by the speaker’s remembrance, then by the
cinematic construct. morrissey’s layering of memory and imagination
here shows how the poetic text can realize discursive tensions in its
own formal techniques.
morrissey’s ‘home Birth’ and leanne o’sullivan’s ‘you Were Born
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at mealtime’ both explore how the moment of birth changes the
space of the family, displacing existing positions to make room for
new relationships. morrissey’s use of the sonnet overturns the expected
dynamics of arrival: here it is the sick older sibling who goes to hospital,
the newborn who emerges at home – ‘you came back days later, pale
and feverish, / and visited us in the bedroom in your father’s arms. /
you turned your head to take her in: this black-haired, / tiny yellow
person who’d happened while you slept’ (PX 18). o’sullivan’s poem
is more oblique, imagining birth within a space of memory: ‘The
empty kitchen hummed when i came home / like a swollen river
with the swelling gone’ (MR 14). The delicate balance here of recall
and expectation is reflected in the whole volume: The Mining Road
is preoccupied with the process of recollection, from the ‘old homes
and a half remembered word of mouth’ in the opening poem (MR
13) to the repeated entreaty to the beloved in ‘valentine’ – ‘remember
/ / how at night you bring your face to mine’ (MR 52). The volume
resonates with the landscape of West Cork, revealing the ways in which
the past is embedded in place and community.
sara Berkeley’s landscapes are distinct from this: her last two
collections, Strawberry Thief (2005) and The View from Here (2010) are
largely set on the west coast of america, where Berkeley now lives. The
earliest of these poems celebrate birth: the title poem from Strawberry
Thief speaks to anne sexton’s poem to her daughter ‘little girl, my
string Bean, my lovely Woman’ in its use of plant imagery: ‘Bean
seedling, starting with that soft, divided green, / already you are wild
thyme, climbing rose, strawberry thief’ (ST 15).2 These poems embrace
the present moment in celebrating the newness of the child’s life but are
also aware of the fleeting nature of this intense experience – ‘i touch
her tiny shoulder blades as a gentle reminder – / she’ll be my flown
one’ (‘The Call’, ST 13). Within these meditations on happiness and
completion, more troubled memories are to be found, reminding the
reader of the experiences that have led to this moment, and those that
may follow in time. Fittingly, The View from Here records the need to
look to both the past and the future: ‘and though the past / is a dress
i’ll always wear / i am putting on a new one’ (‘Carrying’, VH 15). many
of these poems are preoccupied with loss: ‘meal for Friends’ addresses
this process unflinchingly. a four-stanza poem, it begins by juxtaposing
birth and death: the ‘white curtain blowing in the breeze’ set against
the house with blinds drawn. yet the poem is a meditation on memory
and forgetting:
221
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
everything i needed to remember
has been remembered; everything i yearned to forget
is lost. Who knows what future, who cares what past,
the night sky is no longer far away
(VH 54)
again the poem holds us in the present, but this time not to celebrate the
joy of young life but to take stock of the moment that has been reached
through years of both suffering and delight. here the relationship
between past and present is vital, even as it is discarded, the poem’s
stanzas marking the cardinal points by which we must get our bearings
– the intimacy of friendships, the broad and ever-changing sweep of our
thoughts and feelings.
leontia Flynn’s collection Drives also negotiates between the experiences
of generations, and in a book of journeys the poems remain grounded in
the lives of writers, among them Charles Baudelaire, elizabeth Bishop,
sylvia plath. The act of driving is one that at once invokes the past and
seeks to leave it behind, as the poem ‘dungeness’ reveals:
here were the cottage and lighthouse. you wanted to cut ties
so came to this coast
away from ‘You know …’ now i look behind me
and there is our youth among the shingled waste
that recedes before my eyes like the angel of history3
(DR 57)
The decision to move away from the past prompts reflection on this
relationship; the hidden knowledge of the elliptical explanation suggests
an apocalyptic landscape, yet one, it seems, that can be escaped.
one of the most resonant poems in this collection reads the
landscape as a means to explore the difficult relationship between
remembering and forgetting. ‘drive’ situates the speaker’s mother and
father in a landscape that remains meaningful to one, but not to the
other. For her father, suffering from alzheimer’s disease, road signs
become words more useful for their musical resonance than for the
directions they offer:
They drive along the old road and the new road –
my father, in beside her, reads the signs
as they escape him – for now they are empty signs,
now one name means as little as another;
the roads they drive along are fading roads.
222
c onclusion
– ‘dromore’, ‘Banbridge’ (my father’s going to drive
my mother to distraction). ‘in Banbridge town …’, he sings.
(DR 50)
retracing their shared life through the form of an imperfect sestina,
Flynn suggests the change within sameness; the process of recurrence
that may bring new meaning or no meaning at all. The difference in
perspective between husband and wife is delicately handled – inverted
commas appearing around the place names her father reads. The
landscape the mother traverses suggests her adventurous younger self,
but behind this ‘indefatigable drive’ is the clock that ticks – heard first
in the sound of the cricket, then reappearing in the clock the mother
turns back to recapture her early married life when her grown children
were still young. This reminds us that memory will deteriorate, and
that shared time, when familial care will still be possible, is short.
Flynn’s choice of the sestina in which to interweave past and present,
connection and detachment, movingly expresses the need for structure
to bind us to one another and to the places that are meaningful
to us.
in this book of memory and forgetting, Flynn summons key
dilemmas for the younger irish poet: the inescapable facts of geography
and history that can be altered at will, or through a twist of fate;
painful experience can be shaped by wit. The radical instability
of memory, glimpsed in the work of the older generation, is more
profoundly expressed by the women growing to adulthood in the
1990s. The personal independence that was the hallmark of this
generation profoundly altered their relationship to forms of authority,
yet the question of subjectivity remains an enduring preoccupation in
their work. in this coming together of private and public, of difficult
circumstances and control in their expression, the dynamics of memory
and estrangement are aptly expressed. it is this rich and challenging
juncture that remains as critically compelling as ever for readers of
poetry in ireland today.
Notes
1 The film was shot in technicolor, but for the afterlife scenes the colour was not fully
developed, giving a pearly monochrome to the scenes. see www.powell-pressburger.
org.
2 sexton’s poem, addressed to her elder daughter when aged 11, was first published
in Live or Die (new york: houghton mifflin, 1966).
3 ‘This is how one pictures the angel of history. his face is turned toward the past.
223
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’. Walter Benjamin,
‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, Illuminations, ed. hannah arendt, trans.
harry Zohn (london: Fontana, 1992), p. 249.
224
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index
index
ahmed, sara 83
allen, nicholas 136n1
archer, nuala 140
assmann, aleida 64
Bachelard, gaston 50, 130
Bainbridge, Charles 105n13
Bal, mieke 3
Barcelona 80, 179–80
Barnett, Clive 32, 46n16
Bartlett, Frederic 112
Baronian, marie-aude 52
Barthes, roland 26
Batten, guinn 8, 105n20, 114, 127,
154
Baudelaire, Charles 222
Beckett, samuel 49, 68
Begnal, michael 169
Beiner, guy 8, 12, 17n4
Belfast 4, 61–5, 99, 151, 161
Benjamin, Walter 68, 223n3
Bergvall, Caroline 171, 193n7
Berkeley, sara 105n7, 221–2
‘Call, The’ 221
‘Carrying’ 221
‘meal for Friends’ 221
‘strawberry Thief’ 221
Strawberry Thief 221
View from Here, The 221–2
Berlin 70, 73
Berryman, John 15
Besser, stephan 75n17
bilingualism 75n23, 95, 131–2, 139
Bishop, elizabeth 15, 206, 222
Blakeman, helen 153
Blau duplessis, rachel 189
Boland, eavan 3–4, 5, 8–9, 10–12,
14, 15, 17n13, 23–48, 68, 94,
105n20, 106n37, 113, 114–15, 146,
166n19, 170, 183, 218
‘art of empire’ 45
‘Briar rose, The’ 31–2
‘City of shadows 43
‘Colonists, The’ 43
‘daughters of Colony’ 43
‘Fond memory’ 38
‘game, The’ 34–5
‘habitable grief, a’ 41–2
‘harbour, The’ 42
In a Time of Violence 12, 33–4
‘in Which the ancient history i
learn is not my own’ 33–4
‘i remember’ 29–30
‘irish Childhood: 1951, an’ 36–7
Journey, The 29–32, 36–8, 48n43
‘lava Cameo’ 12
Lost Land, The 39–43
‘mise eire’ 48n43
Object Lessons 17n13, 27–8, 36, 39,
40, 43, 47n21, 47n28
Outside History 34–5
‘scar, The’ 43
‘sea Change’ 44
‘source, The’ 30–1
241
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
‘unheroic’ 43
‘Watching old movies as if They
Were new’ 40
‘Witness’ 42
‘Woman Without a Country, a’
(sequence) 44–5
Woman Without a Country, A
44–5
Bort, eberhard 7
Bourke, eva 6, 68–74, 74n1, 82, 218
‘amber’ 71
‘Berlin notebook’ (sequence) 68–71
‘Bunkers’ 69–70
‘Fatherland’ 69
‘graves’ 69
‘Kreuzberg nuptials’ 70
‘nightingale’ 70–1
‘nightsinger, The’ 71
‘notes from henry street’ 73–4
Piano 71–4
Travels with Gandolpho 68–71
‘view of Berlin, a’ 71–2
Brearton, Fran 76n32
British army 7, 137n20
Broom, sarah 148
Bryce, Colette 7, 9, 79–107 passim
‘derry’ 99
‘epilogue’ 82
Full Indian Rope Trick, The 82
Heel of Bernadette, The 82
‘little girl i knew when she was my
mother, a’ 88–9
‘re-entering the egg’ 85–6
‘riddle’ 82
‘self-portrait in the dark (with
Cigarette)’ 92
Self-Portrait in the Dark 80
‘twelve’ 80–1
Whole and Rain-Domed Universe,
The 88–9, 99–100
Buddhism 66, 103
Bushe, paddy 133, 138n37
Byrne, mairéad 5, 50, 51, 53–60,
75n20, 76n28, 219
‘after valentine’s day’ 60
Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven,
The 59
‘Commercial street’ 58
‘Cycling to marino’ 53–4
‘hive of home, a’ 59–60
‘irish discover america, The’
56–7
Nelson and the Huruburu Bird
53–8, 60
‘pillar, The’ 54–5
‘reflex’ 57–8
Talk Poetry 59–60
Caruth, Cathy 12, 64
Carville, Conor 158
Catholicism 9, 64, 77n39, 102,
106n35, 119–22, 125–7, 128–9,
132–5, 161
Celtic tiger 194n17
childhood 5, 7, 11, 13, 17n4, 22–45,
48n42, 53–4, 61, 86–90, 93, 96–7,
99–103, 118, 120, 127, 136n4,
143–7, 160, 163, 181, 197, 199–200,
203, 207, 219–21, 223
city spaces 24–33 passim, 43–4, 46n5,
47n28, 54–8, 61–4, 68, 69–74,
79, 92, 97–9, 176, 179, 180, 181,
182–92, 194n17, 194n23, 212
Claire, paula 172, 193n11
clerical abuse 17n4
Clutterbuck, Catriona 36, 86, 150,
197
Colman, anne ulry 15
Conboy, Katie 39
Conlon, James 25
Connerton, paul 15, 131, 137n17
Consalvo, deborah mcWilliams 183
Cork 112, 136n4, 221
Correggio, antonio da 126
creative process 16, 35–6, 38–9, 40,
48n34, 50, 59, 62, 81, 113–14,
139–41, 150–1, 154, 156, 159–61,
165n6, 177–8, 190–1, 204–5, 219
242
i n de x
Critchley, simon 46n15
Cubitt, geoffrey 3
davidson, ian 187
davis, alex 183
dawe, gerald 61
deane, seamus 8
de angelis, irene 76n34
de Fréine, Celia 6, 51
derrida, Jacques 11, 16n2, 26, 32, 36,
46n16, 80
derry 79, 99–100
docherty, Thomas 152, 159
dorcey, mary 13
dublin 4, 5, 24, 29–31, 37, 42–3, 53,
54–5, 75n22, 79, 97–9, 119, 125,
180, 182–92, 194
easter rising 1916 8
edkins, Jenny 99, 105n3
eliot, t. s. 187
ellmann, maud 13
emmet, robert 167n41
erll, astrid 63, 77n37, 78
esposito, elena 156
experimental poetry 170–3
Falci, eric 140, 152, 153–4, 167n33,
171, 172, 175
Faragó, Borbála 74n1, 118, 140, 153,
161, 165n6
Fernández-méndez, Cristina 139, 151,
153
Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,
The 5, 17n10
Finch, annie 81
Flynn, leontia 144, 151, 167n29,
222–3
Drives 222–3
‘drive’ 223
‘dungeness’ 222
Fogarty, anne 36
folklore 6, 11–12, 18n34, 82, 100, 112,
117, 124, 137n28
Frawley, oona 2, 17n4, 136n3
Freud, sigmund 28, 83
Friel, Brian 165n3
galway 4, 73
george, rosemary marangoly 74n6
germany 6, 68–73, 82
gibbons, luke 155
gillis, John r. 112
gilroy, paul 52
gonzález-arias, luz mar 97
good Friday agreement 77n38
goodby, John 173
granard, County longford 102–3
great Famine 18n33–4, 103
grennan, eamon 121
groake, vona 5, 6, 50, 105n7,
195–217
‘3’ 211
‘away’ 207–8
‘Beyond me’ 209–10
‘Box, The’ 209
‘Fate’ 211
Flight 195
‘garden as event’ 214–15
‘garden in hindsight’ 214
‘garden over time’ 215
‘garden sequence’ 213–15
‘ghost on the road, The’ 213
‘ghost poem’ 213
‘Jetty, The’ 204
‘Juniper street’ 196–7
Juniper Street 196–201
‘local accent, The’ 200–1
‘midsummer’ 211
‘orange’ 208
Other People’s Houses 196, 198
‘pocket mirror, a’ 211
‘return, The’ 198–9
‘some Weather’ 204
‘spindrift’ 202–4
Spindrift 202–10
‘stairwell, The’ 208–9
‘sunday’s Well’ 206
243
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
‘to smithereens’ 199–200
‘trapdoor, The’ 205–6
‘Where she imagines the Want of
Being alone’ 211
‘White year, The’ 212
‘x’ 211
X 211–15
grubgeld, elizabeth 17n9
gubbins, martin 189
guinness, selina 216n1
guinness’s Brewery 180
Japan 6, 61–2, 65–8, 76n34
Johnson, Kent 76n25
Johnston, dillon 127, 137n24
Joyce, James 49, 85n22, 191, 194n23,
194n73
Jones, andrew 137n18
haberstroh, patricia Boyle 114,
136n15, 137n24
halbwachs, maurice 4, 10, 33, 78, 83,
104n1
hardie, Kerry 14
hartnett, michael 48n44
heaney, seamus 133
heidegger, martin 50
hipp, shannon 165n8
hirsch, marianne 23
history 2, 3, 6–9, 13, 16, 23, 27, 29,
33–4, 36, 38–45 passim, 47n27, 54,
57, 62–4, 68–73, 77n37, 112–13,
79, 88, 97, 100, 104, 105n3, 111,
112–14, 116, 118–20, 123, 131,
133–5, 151–4, 155, 158, 180, 193n11,
195, 199, 212, 216, 218, 223
hobsbawm, eric 8
hoffmann, e. t. a. 69, 77n43
home 6, 24–9 passim, 34–6, 44,
49–52, 58–60, 63, 66–7, 74n2,
74n6, 75n8, 75n9, 79–82, 87, 90,
97, 100, 113, 130, 176, 177, 196–216
passim, 220–1
hood, Thomas 47n21
howe, susan 172, 193n11
humour 56
illness 14, 94–5, 124–5, 180, 222–3
irish memory studies network 2
ira 55, 77n38, 106n35
italy 5, 125, 126
Kansteiner, Wulf 10
Kant, immanuel 16n2, 26
Kavanagh, patrick 76n28
Kearney, richard 16n2, 80
Kelleher, margaret 18n33
Kelly, Frances 47n20
Kennedy-andrews, elmer 17n4,
165n3, 167n33
Kilcoyne, Catherine 23, 46n9, 47n22
Kinnahan, linda 193n7
Kinsella, Thomas 15, 50, 180, 194n22,
194n28, 217n9
Kirkpatrick, Kathryn 103
Krell, david Farrell 12
Kristeva, Julia 2, 16n2, 28, 82–3, 123,
160, 207
laCapra, dominick 12, 84
lachmann, renate 16
landscape 37–8, 44, 67–8, 82, 84,
85, 96–7, 99, 100, 102, 123, 125,
140, 145, 147, 156, 173–4, 176, 187,
194n17, 195–6, 203, 205, 211, 213,
218, 221–2, 223
larkin, philip 47n21
lefebvre, henri 170, 193n6
levinas, immanuel 16n2, 26, 27, 32,
80
literary precursors 1, 13, 15, 94–5, 141,
217n9
lloyd, david 17n4, 18n33
london 5, 24–38, 46n5, 48n42,
77n38, 80, 106n35
lorenzo-modia, maría Jesús 165n2
lovett, ann 102–3, 106n39
lyric poetry 56, 169–70
lysaght, patricia 11
244
i n de x
mcauliffe, John 210
mcBride, ian 8
mcCracken, Kathleen 166n24
mcguckian, medbh 7
‘angel in two parts’ 161–2
‘albert Chain, The’ 151–2
Book of the Angel, The 159–64
Captain Lavender 151–2
‘Chamomile lawn, The’ 156
‘Charcoal angel’ 164
‘Chrisom Child, a’ 163
‘Cleaning out the Workhouse’
154–5
‘Confinement’ 145
‘eavesdropper’ 144
‘Feastday of peace, The’ 154
‘Flitting, The’ 145–7
Flower Master, The 142–4, 145–9
‘green Crucifix’ 155
Had I a Thousand Lives 156–8
‘mazurka’ 142
‘petit Bleu’ 157–8
‘religion of Writing, a’ 158
‘river of January’ 156
‘Script for an Unchanging Voice’
154
‘seed-picture, The’ 147–8
Shelmalier 153–5
‘shoulder-length, Caged-parrot
earrings’ 155
‘sitting, The’ 148–9
‘sofa in the Window with trees
outside, The’ 154
‘studies for a running angel’ 163
‘That year’ 143–4
Venus and the Rain 142, 145,
148–50
‘venus and the rain’ 150
‘venus and the sun’ 149
mclennan, rob 51
macneice, louis 15, 99
magdalene laundries 17n16
mahler, gustav 90
maier, Charles 3
maloy, Kelli 105n4
massey, doreen 171
meaney, gerardine 9
meehan, paula 13, 78–107 passim,
185, 218
Child’s map of dublin, a 97–8
‘dharmakaya’ 103
Dharmakaya 86, 93, 96, 103
‘Full moon’ 98–9
‘hearth’ 98
‘man sleeping’ 98
Man Who Was Marked By Winter,
The 86–88, 102–3
‘night Walk’ 98
‘“not alone the rue in my herb
garden…”’ 91–2
Painting Rain 79–80, 84–5, 91–2,
96–9
‘pattern, The’ 87–8
‘remembrance of my grandfather,
Wattie, Who taught me to read
and Write, a’ 96–7
‘return and no Blame’ 86–7
‘statue of the virgin at granard
speaks, The’ 102–3
‘swallows and Willows’ 96
‘This is not a Confessional poem’
84–5
media 76n26
memory
collective memory 10, 33, 104n1
commemoration 8, 18n19, 24, 145,
150–8 passim, 164
cultural memory 10–12
definitions of memory 3
private memory 4, 5–6, 16, 23,
78–107 passim, 169–70
traumatic memory 12–14, 90–5
migration 24–38 passim, 49–77, 79,
80, 82, 103, 196–9
miller, Cristanne 19n46
misztal, Barbara a. 2, 17n4
modernization 9, 37, 129
mohanty, Chandra talpade 52
245
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
montale, eugenio 73–4
moore, Thomas 38
morash, Christopher 76n26
morrissey, sinéad 5, 6, 7, 61–8,
219–20
Between Here and There 61–8
‘house of osiris in the Field of
reeds, The’ 219
‘goldfish’ 65–7
‘home Birth’ 221
‘in Belfast’ 62–3
‘matter of life and death, a’ 220
‘night drive in Four metaphors’
67–8
Parallax 61, 219–21
There Was Fire in Vancouver 61
‘tourism’ 63–5
mothers / motherhood 87–90
mountbatten, lord 216n3
mulhall, anne 105n5
murphy, shane 140, 141, 152, 165n8,
music 58, 66, 69, 72–3, 77n43, 100,
128, 131–2, 181, 193n11, 217n18, 222
nelson, horatio 54–5
new york 5, 24, 51
ní Chuilleanáin, eiléan 5, 9, 10,
111–38, 141, 180
‘angel in the stone, The’ 129–30
‘architectural metaphor, The’ 121
Brazen Serpent, The 119–26
‘Chestnut Choir, The’ 128
‘Cloister of Bones, The’ 128–9
‘Consolation’ 117
‘Fireman’s lift’ 125–6
‘gentleman’s Bedroom, a’ 115
Girl Who Married a Reindeer, The
128–32
‘gloss / Clós / glas’ 131–2
‘hand, a Wood, a’ 124–5
‘in her other house’ 130–1
‘in her other ireland’ 130
‘indoors’ 133–4
‘informant, The’ 117–18
‘lady’s tower, The’ 115
‘litany, The’ 133
‘liturgy, The’ 115–16
‘macmoransbridge’ 116
Magdalene Sermon, The 115–18
‘outdoors’ 134–5
‘passing over in silence’ 123–4
‘pastoral life, The’ 124
‘real Thing, The’ 120–1
‘saint margaret of Cortona’
119–20
Second Voyage, The 115
‘secret, The’ 116, 137n27
‘storm, The’ 133–4
Sun Fish, The 132–3
‘sunday’ 128
‘That summer’ 124
‘vertigo’ 135
‘Witness, a’ 119
ní dhomhnaill, nuala 6, 11
nora, pierre 4, 6, 33
nordin, irene gilsenan 121
northern ireland 7, 61–5, 79,
99–100, 106n35, 150–3
troubles 7, 61–5, 79, 99–100,
106n35, 137n20, 150–7 passim,
199–200
nünning, ansgar 63, 77n37
Ó Bruadair, dáibhi 48n44
Ó Ciosáin, niall 18n34
o’donoghue, Bernard 205, 217n9
Ó gráda, Cormac 12
o’halloran, eileen 105n4
olick, Jeffrey K. 1, 168n52
Ó lochlainn, Colm 217n16
o’malley, mary 11, 13, 51, 78–107
passim, 125, 218
‘abandoned Child, The’ 101
‘Boning hall, The’ 103–4
Boning Hall, The 89–91, 101, 103–4
‘Journey, The’ 81
‘ice age, The’ 90–1
Knife on the Wave, The 94–5
246
i n de x
‘maighdean mhara, The’ 11, 100
‘miss panacea regrets’ 94–5
‘otter Woman, The’ 100
‘poem for my Birthday’ 89–90
‘Question of travel, a’ 81
‘resident at sea’ 81
‘seascape, errislanaan’ 101
‘song of the Wise Woman’ 11
Valparaiso 81
o’sullivan, leanne 9, 220–2
Mining Road, The 221–2
‘townland’ 221
‘valentine’ 221
‘you Were Born at mealtime’
221–2
pain 13–14, 41, 83, 87, 90, 93–5,
106n27, 124, 125, 157, 163, 220,
223
painting 29, 125–7, 146–9, 151, 163,
166n18, 166n19
perloff, marjorie 170, 193n4
pine, emilie 2, 17n4
plath, sylvia 15, 96, 222
pratt, minnie Bruce 66
Poetry Ireland Review 39
post-colonialism 27
Queyras, sina 56, 59
Quinn, Justin 5
ralph, david 75n9
randolph, Jody allen 45n1, 46n5,
48n44, 48n45
ranger, terence 8
ray, Kevin 136n14
redmond, John 219n1
rees-Jones, deryn 141
renan, ernest 8
rich, adrienne 104
rigney, ann 17n6
rorty, richard 202
rushdie, salman 52
russia 167n29
saint Brendan 56–7, 76n27
scarry, elaine 19n43
schulte, Joachim 168n51
schwab, gabriele 106n23
schwall, hedwig 217n15
scully, maurice 171, 182
seascape 11, 42–4 passim, 62, 76n27,
81, 100–1, 104, 117, 133–4, 151, 156,
178–9, 181, 199, 203
seiferle, rebecca 56
sered, danielle 105n8
setti, nadia 74n2
sexton, anne 221
shils, edward 10
shaw, george Bernard 18n19
simmons, James 165n1
skellig michael 133, 138n37
smith, valerie 23
somerville-arjat, gillean 18n23,
19n45, 167n26, 167n28
sontag, susan 19n44
spain 181–2
steinbeck, John 51
strong, eithne 13
sullivan, moynagh 144
tarlo, harriet 183
technology 59
terdiman, richard 46n8, 75n19
translation 48n44, 131, 165n3, 180
truth and reconciliation
Commission 7
turkle, sherry 212
twain, mark 217n8
united irishmen 153
united states of america 5, 50, 51,
53, 56–60, 104, 182
van alphen, ernst 84, 86
violence 7, 14, 61, 63–5, 79, 80, 93–4,
99, 100, 102, 118–19, 120, 123,
125, 137n20, 143, 150–7 passim,
199–200
247
c on t e m por a ry i r ish wom e n p oe ts
Wall, eamonn 100
Walsh, Catherine 5, 6, 10, 141,
169–94, 219
City West 182–92
‘idir eatortha’ 175–82
‘making tents’ 173–5
Pitch 187
Walsh, paul 63
War 30, 64, 69, 74n2, 77n37, 101,
151–3
Cold War 2, 46n4, 72–3
First World War 69, 99
second World War 24, 38, 46n4,
71–3, 216n3, 220
War of independence 17n4 136n4
Watten, Barrett 183
Whelan, yvonne 75n22
White, paul 74n3
Whitehead, anne 18n19, 18n29
Williams, patrick 165n1
Wills, Clair 16, 39, 148
Wilson, rebecca e. 18n23, 19n45,
167n26, 167n28
Wineburg, sam 47n27
Winter, Jay 211
Woolf, virginia 175
Wordsworth, William 217n9
yeats, W. B. 15, 53–4, 154–5, 214,
217n18
248