Ailbhe McDaid - The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry
Ailbhe McDaid - The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry
Ailbhe McDaid
New Directions in Irish
and Irish American Literature
Series Editor
Claire A. Culleton
Department of English
Kent State University
Kent, OH, USA
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh
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and works that investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes m
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discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and
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America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical
spaces between.
The Poetics
of Migration
in Contemporary
Irish Poetry
Ailbhe McDaid
The Institute of Irish Studies
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, UK
Cover illustration: Martina Galvin, Hidden Spaces No. 2, 1993, oil on canvas, 123 × 135 cm.
Image courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
This book is the result of the support of many people over the years
since its inception as a doctoral project. I am very grateful to the team at
Palgrave Macmillan for their advice in bringing this book to publication,
especially to Tomas René and Vicky Bates. I also wish to express my grat-
itude to Martina Galvin for permission to reproduce her painting Hidden
Spaces no.2 for the cover image and to Anne Boddaert at the Crawford
Art Gallery, Cork for her assistance.
The research underpinning this book was conducted at the Centre for
Scottish and Irish Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand. I received
generous and thoughtful mentorship from Professor Peter Kuch and
Professor Liam McIlvanney at the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies
and I wish to sincerely thank them both for their guidance and encour-
agement throughout. I am grateful to the University of Otago for fund-
ing the research, and to the Department of English and Linguistics, the
Division of Humanities and the American Otago Alumni Association for
financial support.
This book was completed during a Moore Institute Visiting Research
Fellowship at National University of Ireland, Galway and I wish to thank
Professor Dan Carey and Dr. Louis de Paor for the opportunity. The
Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and O’Connell House
Dublin, University of Notre Dame also supported this project in various
ways, not least for the intellectual stimulation and companionship of the
Irish Seminar 2013 on Contemporary Irish Poetry. I am especially grateful
to Professor Brian Ó Conchubhair and to Nathaniel Myers, Ailbhe Darcy,
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Kelly Sullivan, Lisa McGonigle and many others for the multiple ways
their insightful friendships assisted me in writing this book. I received
invaluable encouragement from the History and English Departments at
Liverpool John Moores University, especially from Professor Nick White
and Dr. Nadine Muller. I also wish to thank my colleagues at the Institute
of Irish Studies at University of Liverpool for their warm and wise support.
I am extremely grateful to my family who have supported me over the
years in many different places and in many different ways: the Morrisseys,
Caoimhe, Colin, Iseult, Róisín, Liam, Bríd and Niamh, and my parents
Fergus and Bridie. Finally, my overwhelming debt of gratitude is to
John, to whom this book is dedicated.
Contents
1 American Highways 1
‘the busy work of forgetting’: Memory and Community
in Eamonn Wall’s America 3
‘Half and halfed’: Greg Delanty’s Modes of Belonging 19
‘merely a brown trout / with wanderlust’: Migrant Identity
in Paul Muldoon’s Poetry 33
2 Alternative Cartographies 55
‘I mean it as no ordinary return’: Vona Groarke in America 57
‘laying holy miles between myself and home’: Sara
Berkeley’s Ecopoetics 71
3 Memory Spaces 89
‘Neither here nor there, and therefore home’: Memory
and Myth in Bernard O’Donoghue’s Poetry 91
‘Listen to that for twisting’: Martina Evans and
Manipulations of the Past 107
‘Imagine a tilt and the consequence’: Colette Bryce’s
Strategies of Escape 122
ix
x Contents
Conclusion 237
Bibliography 241
Index 261
Introduction
xi
xii Introduction
seen to take place during the resurgence of diaspora studies in the 1980s,
a period of ‘resuscitated debate about “Irishness”’, according to Michael
Boss and Irene Gilsenan Nordin.25 Dianne Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm
expertly delineate the historiography of migration studies in their article
‘Diaspora, Gender and the Irish’, linking usage of the term diaspora as
an analytic and theoretical signifier to the popularisation of Irish migra-
tion discourse.26 Wider international developments in diaspora theory saw
a flourish of important publications in the nineties—amongst them Stuart
Hall’s ‘Identity and Diaspora’, Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture, Arjun
Appadurai’s Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation,
Caren Kaplan’s Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement,
James Clifford Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century and Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora. These studies posited
new formulations of diasporic and migratory experience, asking key ques-
tions around concepts of nationhood and ideologies of home, and interro-
gating identity, affiliation and aspiration in conditions of exile, emigration,
transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and/or globalisation.
Within the waves of historical immigration to the United States, female
voices from any country are rarely heard or else superficially represented.27
The figure of the Irish domestic servant, ‘Biddy’, has been explored
by Maureen Murphy,28 and Margaret Lynch-Brennan expands upon
Murphy’s work in her 2009 book;29 both these works build on Diner’s
comprehensive study of 19th century female immigration from Ireland.30
Literary self-representation by women emigrants, aside from letters, has not
survived.31 The silence of female narratives is troubling, but it has offered
a certain freedom to contemporary women (e)migrant poets. The fluid-
ity and flexibility of migrant poetry reflects the contemporary reality that,
for female poets, the ‘relationship to place and community, both past and
present, is a complex and contingent one’, continually evolving both in
Ireland and beyond.32 The poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,
Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has been analysed in terms
of their individual engagements with irrelevant, limiting, or proscriptionist
constructions of nationalist feminine ideals.33 Boland describes the synthe-
sis of woman and nation as ‘a corrupt transaction between nationalism and
literature which feminized the national and nationalized the feminine …
their place in the poem was prescribed; it was both silent and passive.’34 As
highlighted in this analysis, migration can offer an alternative avenue for
female poets whose work demonstrates the possibilities of an identity that is
not inhibited by national or diasporic narratives.
Introduction xvii
Clifton with Wake Forest University Press and The Gallery Press, or
Conor O’Callaghan’s initial publication of ‘The Pearl Works’ as a chap-
book from New Fire Tree Press and its later inclusion as part of The Sun
King from The Gallery Press) and by publishing practices involving sin-
gle poems in journals and newspapers (Greg Delanty occasionally pub-
lishes stand-alone poems in the Irish Times but has no collection from an
Irish publisher). Issues of imagined and actual audiences are addressed
in the following analysis, bound up with cultural memory practices.
The range and diversity of contemporary migration poetry and the con-
straints of this project mean that this analysis must necessarily leave cer-
tain avenues unexplored. The restrictions imposed here are the necessary
product of exigency rather than deliberate acts of omission, made with
due respect to the depth and breadth of the field of migration poetry.
Through its focus on carefully chosen poets, this study explores how
recent poetry diverges from established paradigms of emigration litera-
ture, arguing against ‘myths of totality’ in favour of advocating an alter-
native interpretative model for the poetics of migration in contemporary
Irish poetry.65
Notes
1. President Mary Robinson placed a candle in the window of her resi-
dence at Christmastime every year during her presidency, 1990–1997.
See Fergus Finlay, Mary Robinson: A President with a Purpose (Dublin:
O’Brien Press, 1990).
2. Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2003):
p. 157.
3. Jerzy Jarniewicz and John MacDonagh, ‘Scattered and Diverse: Irish
Poetry Since 1990,’ in Brewster, Scott & Parker, Michael (eds.), Irish
Literature Since 1990, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009):
p. 139.
4. Sebastian Barry (ed.), The Inherited Boundaries: Younger Poets of the
Republic of Ireland, (Mountrath: Dolmen Press, 1986). See also Dermot
Bolger (ed.), Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad, (Dublin: New Island
Books, 1993).
5. Terence Brown describes the ‘consolations’ of ‘a poetry of place custom-
arily involve[d] in Irish cultural tradition, with its suggestions of belong-
ing, of familial and tribal continuities’ in ‘Mahon and Longley: Place
and Placelessness,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish
Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
xxiv Introduction
12. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America: pp. 3–4.
13. Ibid.: p. 244.
14. Timothy Guinnane, ‘The Vanishing Irish: Ireland’s population from the
Great Famine to the Great War,’ History Ireland 5 (2) 1997.
15. David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish
Migration to Australia (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994).
16. Joseph J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social
and Cultural History 1922–2002 (London: Harper Perennial, 2004);
Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London:
Profile Books, 2004).
17. Enda Delaney, ‘State, politics and demography: The Case of Irish
Emigration, 1921–1971,’ Irish Political Studies 13, no. 1 (1998).
18. Irial Glynn, ‘Irish Emigration History,’ UCC, http://www.ucc.ie/en/
emigre/history; See also Bronwen Walter et al., ‘A study of the existing
sources of information and analysis about Irish emigrants and Irish com-
munities abroad,’ (Department of Foreign Affairs, 2002).
19. Qtd. in Piaras Mac Éinrí, ‘Emigration: we still can’t all live on a small
island,’ Politico, 21 January 2011.
20. Ailbhe McDaid, ‘“Sure we export all our best stuff”: changing representa-
tions of emigration in Irish television advertising,’ Journal of Nordic
Irish Studies, Special Issue on Cultural Memory and the Remediation of
Narratives of Irishness (Volume 13), 2014.
21. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Some of our emigrants are happy to go,’ The Irish
Times, 14 September 1989; Linda Dowling Almeida, ‘“And They Still
Haven’t Found What They’re Looking For”: A Survey of the New
Irish in New York City,’ in The Irish World Wide ed. Patrick O’Sullivan
(Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1992); Russell King and Ian
Shuttleworth, ‘The Emigration and Employment of Irish Graduates
: The Export of High-Quality Labour From the Periphery of Europe,’
European Urban and Regional Studies 2, no. 21 (1995).
22. O’Toole, ‘Some of our emigrants are happy to go.’
23. Jim Mac Laughlin, ed. Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish
Society: Emigration and Irish Identities (Cork: Cork University Press,
1997): p. 136.
24. Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2003):
p. 30.
25. Michael Boss and Irene Gilsenan Nordin, ‘Introduction: Remapping
Exile,’ in Re-mapping Exile: Realities and Metaphors in Irish Literature
and History, ed. Michael Boss, Irene Gilsenan Nordin, and Britta Olinder
(Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2006): p. 7.
xxvi Introduction
26. O’Toole, ‘Some of our emigrants are happy to go.’; Hall and Malcolm,
‘Diaspora, Gender and the Irish.’
27. Patrick O’Sullivan, ed. Irish Women and Irish Migration (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1995); Dorothea Schneider, ‘The Literature
on Women Immigrants to the United States,’ Actes de l’histoire de
l’immigration 3 (2003). The phenomenon of the silenced female is
a common issue in classic histories of American immigration, which
Schneider (2003) argues are ‘incomplete accounts because throughout
women are almost entirely absent from the story.’
28. Maureen Murphy, ‘Bridget and Biddy: Images of the Irish Servant Girl
in Puck Cartoons, 1880–1890,’ in New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora,
ed. Charles Fanning (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2000).
29. Margaret Lynch-Brennan, Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in
America 1840–1930, (New York: Syracuse, 2009).
30. Hasla Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the
Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1986).
31. It is important to mention here the prolific output of Mary-Anne Sadlier,
who emigrated from Cavan in 1844, and published some sixty vol-
umes of novels, translations, short stories and plays. Although her work
is often dismissed as sentimental, Sadlier’s fictional representations of
the Irishwoman in America remain both pioneering and enlightening.
See the Mary-Anne Sadlier Archive online at University of Virginia for
an in-depth account of her life and critical reputation American Studies
at the University of Virginia, ‘The Mary-Anne Sadlier Archive,’ http://
xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/SADLIER/Sadlier.htm; also Kevin Molloy,
‘Literature for Irish Colonials: The Example of Nineteenth-Century New
Zealand,’ LISA E-Journal III, no. 1 (2005) for more on Sadlier’s trans-
mission to a global diaspora.
32. Lucy Collins, ‘Northeast of Nowhere: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey
and Post-Feminist Spaces,’ in Irish Poetry After Feminism, ed. Justin
Quinn (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 2008).
33. There have been innumerable critical studies on these poets, particularly
with regard to gender, myth and national identity. Prominent intersec-
tional works include (but are by no means limited to): Guinn Batten,
‘Boland, McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin and the Body of the Nation,’ in
The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew
Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Michaela
Schrage-Fruh, Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and Gender in the
Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian
(Trier: WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004); Irene Gilsenan
Nordin, ‘Beyond the Borders of Home: The Subject-in-Exile in the Work
Introduction xxvii
53. Ibid.
54. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, ‘Where Literature and Memory Meet,’
in Literature, Literary History, and Cultural Memory, ed. Herbert Grabes
(Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2005): p. 273.
55. Renate Lachmann, ‘Mnemonic and Intertextual aspects of Literature,’
in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary
Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyster, 2008): p. 15.
56. Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representations of Memory,’ in Cultural
Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and
Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): p. 334.
57. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964); Michel
Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,’ Architecture /
Mouvement/ Continuité October (1984): pp. 46–49; Brian Massumi, Parables
for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2002).
58. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004): p. 426.
59. Oona Frawley, ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Memory in an Irish
Postcolonial Context,’ in Memory Ireland Volume 1: History and
Modernity, ed. Oona Frawley (New York: Syracuse University Press,
2011): p. 4.
60. Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive,’ in A Companion to Cultural
Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2010): p. 99.
61. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of
Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995): p. 2.
62. I have chosen to include poets from both Northern Ireland and the
Republic of Ireland in this study.
63. Rosita Boland, ‘What Daffodils Were to Wordsworth, Drains and
Backstreet Pubs Are to Me.’ The Irish Times, 12 March 2011.
64. Eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó (eds.) Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in
Ireland. (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2010); Borbála Faragó, ‘“I am the Place
in Which Things Happen”: Invisible Immigrant Women Poets of Ireland,’
in Tina O’Toole and Patricia Coughlan, eds., Irish Literatures: Feminist
Perspectives. (Dublin, Carysfort Press: 2008): pp. 145–167; Villar-Argáiz,
Pilar, editor. Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in
Contemporary Irish Literature. (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2015).
65. Ihab Hassan, The Right Promethean Fire, qtd in Linda Hutcheon, A
Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge,
1995): p. 20.
CHAPTER 1
American Highways
Irish poets must be able to partly unlearn what they have picked up in
Ireland, and produce newer hybrid forms which are part-Irish and part-
American. For the new Irish who have sought their artistic voices in the
United States, their facility at being able to absorb American influences
and styles has been crucial to their success [….] That such themes as
exile and loss are being recorded using new forms represents an impor-
tant development in Irish writing.’5 The uncertain distinction between
‘newer hybrid forms’ and ‘new forms’ indicates Wall’s awareness of pre-
existing codes of poetic conduct to which his generation of poets must
respond. How then do migrant poets adapt to the changed parameters
of belonging? How do they relate to their new environments and how
does that influence their relationship to Ireland? To what extent do they
engage vocabularies of migration? How do memories of the past inter-
fere with and inform interpretations of the present? The poetry of Wall,
Delanty and Muldoon, when considered in conjunction with each other
and through the lens of migration to the United States, highlights the
consequences for poetry of locating oneself within, or indeed beyond, an
established emigration narrative.6
The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the
plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of
the sculpture result from the viewer’s movement. Step by step the percep-
tion not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.14
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 7
Part of the initial ‘novelty’ of the United States for Wall is surely, and
perhaps paradoxically, its familiarity. The cultural exchange between
Ireland and the United States is not restricted solely to emigration jour-
neys. Indeed, for a particular generation, the ‘memory’ of ‘America’
is as formative as any Irish cultural memory. Inherited and transferred
through cultural media of music, film, literature and television, the coun-
try is, in some senses, already known for Wall: ‘Before coming to live in
the United States, I lived in that vast country through books, music, and
the rich visual images presented in the movies I watched in Dublin cin-
emas’, the poet recollects.17
‘America’ is a construct, a mythic place evoked and generated through
literary and cultural memory. Having set out to expect ‘America’,
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 9
My own childhood
unimaginable without the Slaney humming
‘Son, you breathe’ as I read the clock
each morning about Louis Kerr’s shop.
Impossible that there was another life.
Iron Mountain Road, 26.
Mr. Pedro and Louis Kerr provide the link between location and gen-
eration, and Wall is responsible for ensuring intergenerational memories
10 A. McDAID
for his children similar to those his own childhood allowed. Reflecting
on this second migration, Wall says of his children: ‘I felt I’d pulled
them out of childhood violently, and I feared, or even knew, that they
would never have that strong sense of place I so deeply profess, that
they had begun this impossible process of forgetting much sooner that I
had’.19 The final lines of ‘The Westward Journey’ function as a gesture
of defiance, futile as it may be, against the inevitable acts of forgetting;
his role as father and as poet clarified against the maelstrom of migra-
tion: ‘but someone must remember, / there must be someone to write
this down.’
This ethic of responsibility weaves through Wall’s work, bring-
ing him to address political, social, and cultural issues in Ireland and
America throughout his many volumes. In Iron Mountain Road his
journey westward pushes the old frontier, entering into the prairie lands
of the American dream. Once again, his original myth of this part of
America—‘[a]s a child growing up in Ireland, I understood it to be sim-
pler than Ireland’—is confronted and challenged by his actual immersion
in these landscapes. Moving through the Black Hills of South Dakota,
Iron Mountain Road comes to realise that the ‘undiscovered’ lands of
the American frontier are repositories of human and natural history.
Moreover, like the struggle of competing memory narratives conducted
through Serra’s Tilted Arc, the prairies have their own contested and
occluded stories to tell. Wall takes a cultural geographical approach that
has its roots in the dinnseanchas tradition and is inspired by the ‘gen-
erative’ quality of land and of locations.20 Indeed, Wall’s approach
to the prairie landscapes might be seen as ideologically related to Tim
Robinson’s ‘new type of cartography’, about which Wall has written
extensively.21 Of Robinson’s work, Wall notes that it ‘includes not just
intersecting lines and discrete shadings we are so familiar with from
school and road volumes, but [also] includes or at least makes gestures
toward, all of lived/living experience—from the most ancient past to
the present’.22 In his prairie poetry, Wall recognises and tries to excavate
some of those ‘past processes whose traces are not always evident on the
landscape’, in Henri Lefebvre’s phrase.23
The politics of space and the troubled and multiple histories laid
down in the dusty earth of the American West are rich material for the
migrant poet. Wall is drawn to this repository of history for the ways
it refracts imaginings of the Irish landscape that permit him to remain
ethically responsible to America’s past. Heaney’s longing for the bog
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 11
when faced with the prairie in ‘Bogland’ voids the American plains by
insinuation—the bog is constructed in contrast to the wide open spaces.
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening—
Everywhere the eye concedes to
encroaching horizon
…
For Wall, the journey through the plains is ‘a slow mid-morning pil-
grimage’ through ‘the holy ground of the Lakota nation’, the religious
vocabulary signalling a reverence for the spaces dismissed in Heaney’s
poem. He finds ‘ancient spirits within these hills’ (‘Reverie: The
Dublin—Rosslare Train’) and realises that ‘to lie on high plains, / prairie
grasses, and Black Hills is to be blown into their stories’ (‘Four Stern
Faces / South Dakota’).
The haunted landscapes of the American West are peopled by the
ghosts of the land’s layered history: displaced natives, plucky pioneers and
aimless wanderers all linger here, and Wall perceives a version of the self in
each of these figures. He identifies an uneasy ancestry in the pioneers who
pushed west across the plains, a discomfort signalled by the repeated use
of the word ‘trespass’ to describe his own forays. ‘Iron Mountain Road’
depicts ‘tyres crushing bones’ as the poet addresses individual and collec-
tive responsibility in the shameful destruction of the sacred lands belong-
ing to Native Americans. The role of the immigrant Irish in building the
railways and their contribution to the expulsion of Native Americans for
their lands and onto the Trail of Tears is acknowledged:
The journey takes a westerly direction once again, the pioneer travers-
ing unfamiliar ground led by his wife, with the synchronicity between
land and local intimately inscribed as the curves of the female body. This
poem engages in conversation with ‘Courtown Strand’ from Dyckman-
200th Street; the earlier poem being an expression of the frustration of
cultural confusion that ensues from a life divided across countries. In that
poem he had taken his wife back to Ireland but, once there, finds himself
muted and debilitated.
Following the maps laid out for him by his family, Wall conducts a
conversation of his own with the landscape of the American West that
is eased by his new willingness to bilocate within his poetry. ‘Driving to
Kearney, Nebraska’ depicts the collision of two worlds in the interrup-
tion of the experienced event by the recollected reference, in this case
placenames that sprawl typographically across the lines of the poem.
The location of the poem is characteristically definite from the outset,
yet the imaginative terrain returns the poet to Ireland, where ‘the past is
as / bright as wounds opened by Hank / / Williams’ songs’. ‘Kearney,
Nebraska’ recalls ‘Rostrevor, Co. / / Down’ and ‘Athenry, / County
Galway’ in an impressionistic, fractured fashion, while ‘Reverie: The
Dublin–Rosslare Train’ also employs a similar technique of intertwin-
ing past with present, memory with impression, and the actual with the
induced.
And I
remember last year driving from Omaha, Nebraska, to
Custer, South Dakota,
thinking as I saw the Nebraska Sandhills for the first time
that I was once
again in Ireland. Low hills, tufts of grass and if
I keep on
driving I’ll hit the sea somewhere between Courtown and
Cahore.
Iron Mountain Road, 14.
‘Friends, Landscapes, & Life Stories’ sets the poet in his local Nebraska
supermarket while locating his imagination ‘on the top of Ardamine cliff’
back in Courtown, contemplating the sea whose literal absence is per-
petually evoked in these prairie poems. The preoccupation with the sea
and the construction of the prairie as oceanic is a long tradition in prairie
poetry—Henry Kreisel details ‘the prairie as sea [as] one of the control-
ling patterns shaping the imagination of the observer’, demonstrating the
extent to which Wall’s poetic consciousness is influenced by American as
well as Irish literary traditions.30 The sea is a symbol of home for Wall,
and the distance of the prairie from the sea, both literally and philo-
sophically, is psychically challenging. Finding the ocean in the wide-open
plains is a liberation, another mode of connection to this strange place
where ‘when you drive west the prairie sky / becomes the sea’.
16 A. McDAID
The final lines of ‘Yellow Band’ seek to assert that, by his very pres-
ence, he is validated in America, and that his familial, personal, and artis-
tic investment in his acquired homeland should neutralise his anxieties
around belonging. Engaged as he is by this environment, a subversive
voice remains, as in ‘A Prairie Poet!’ which addresses the poet’s insecu-
rity surrounding his literary pedigree. Adrift from an Irish poetic tradi-
tion, a strongly-accented Muse heckles the writer: ‘An’ ya go home to /
Wexford whenever / ya get the chance’, forcing the poet’s confession: ‘I
don’t feel comfortable: / I just blew in from the East / four years ago’.
Vernacular language becomes a means of affirming affinity, although the
remove at which Wall stages the accent again implies his uncertainty and
the mimicry here is a form of satire that excoriates both the original and
the aspirational selves. The Muse casts doubt over his aspirations to be ‘a
prairie poet’, but significantly, the speaker’s unease is associated with his
recent internal migration from New York rather than his original immi-
gration from Ireland.
A later poem, ‘Election Day’, from the volume The Crosses, demon-
strates the enduring nature of immigrant insecurity in a meditation
about his role in the United States. The claim ‘I don’t feel cynical about
America / today’ is perhaps a little disingenuous, but the poem simulta-
neously acknowledges the possibilities an immigrant life offers: ‘a better
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 17
house on a / better street in a better world / under the sun.’ Yet, when
American citizens head for the polls, he and, by extension, the wider
migrant community, are excluded:
It’s
election day and if I could enter
the polling place, I’d vote for
Democrats, Republicans,
Independents[.]
The Crosses, 21.
Those ‘smaller units’ include his family, the prairie landscape, and indeed
his birthplace, Enniscorthy Co. Wexford, where the local detail maintains
its hold over his imagination. As previously noted, Wall’s poems increas-
ingly bi-locate between his native and adopted homes, a symptom of the
fluidity of memory-practices that dart and shift between places as well as
between pasts and presents. These fluctuating allegiances and anxieties
of immigrant life demand to be constantly (re)negotiated. The result is
that Wall’s poetry can be read as a dialogue of the mutability of iden-
tity which affects how the poet gauges the past as well as the present.
‘Finding a Way Home’ demonstrates the impermanence of the ongoing
quest for certainty—the title conceding the impossibility of any definite
route in its choice of ‘a’ rather than ‘the’. The poem dissolves the bor-
ders between his Irish and American consciousness:
18 A. McDAID
Paraphrasing Mexican writer Paz, the poem allows the devastating con-
sequences of exile but it also suggests that stasis destroys. The useless-
ness of the ‘great mythology’ is borne out of its inability to translate into
the walker’s life ‘in another world’—rather than an enabling structure, it
becomes mute, a shell emptied of meaning. Instead, the poet reaches out
to his family, just as he reaches out to the prairie, to create a new frame
of belonging within which to compose new codes of memory that can
contain his changed and changing relationship to Ireland and America.
‘[M]y children call me to the swings restoring the roots of life. / Now.
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 19
Now. Now. Now ….’ The reiteration of the child’s call is also a gesture
of deference to the immediacy of constructs of identity and how they
persistently demand to be readdressed. Realising the unyielding nature of
inherited narratives, Wall creates a personalised vocabulary that can more
fully accommodate his migration experience, echoing the route of the
migratory bird in ‘The Night Heron’:
eschews
migration path and famine road
to record
a route peripherique
…
in lines traversing
ancient streams
and ponds of prayer of plenty.
A Tour of Your Country, 30.
In their crucial work on the modes of memory, Jan and Aleida Assmann
identify three distinct levels on which memory operates.33 The first level
is individual, denoting personal recollections of the past. The second
level, communicative, is defined as social memory that passes between
families and intimate communities, and also functions on an intergenera-
tional level within near-living memory. The third and final level is cul-
tural memory, an institutional mnemonic mode of remembering that
is embedded in literature, monuments, and in official gestures and dis-
course. These differential modes are discrete, yet they are continually
interwoven in acts of memory, particularly in literary texts, which present
themselves as simultaneously operating on and through each of the three
levels. Literature can be understood as both a medium of memory and a
repository of memory and Greg Delanty’s poetry engages wider modes
of collective and cultural memory as a means of anchoring his individual
migration experience. Delanty’s highly self-conscious memory practices
across these various modes work to varying successes in his migration
poetry but whether to differentiate, legitimise or participate, memory
functions integrally in his writing.
20 A. McDAID
The returned Yank is a familiar trope in Irish literature and film, featur-
ing in canonical works from as early as George Moore’s ‘Homesickness’
(1903) and Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). Numerous mid-century plays,
including Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) and Tom
Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), maintain the fig-
ure in popular drama. Latterly Jim Sheridan’s 1990 film version of J.B.
Keane’s The Field (1965) recasts the land rival as from America rather
than England, while Julia O’Faolain revisits the figure of the returned
Yank in her novel No Country for Young Men (1986). Ann Schofield sug-
gests that the figure of the returned Yank in popular culture functions
as a lieu de mémoire (site of memory), as per Pierre Nora’s definition as
‘any significant entity, material or non-material in nature, which by dint
of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the
memory of any community’.35 The symbolic significance of the returned
Yank figure, particularly the hostile, if hidden, reception received in
Ireland, carries the weight of cultural allusion that Nora’s observation
suggests. Delanty’s poem invokes the figure as a personal memory and
as an explicitly collective memory shared by ‘us wiseguy kids’, the phrase
‘wiseguy’ itself an Americanism. Less directly, the poem draws on the
cultural store of memory that appeals to a shared understanding of the
returned Yank trope. Indeed, the memory staged in the poem’s recount-
ing bears close resemblance to answers in the Folklore Commission’s
survey during the 1950s: ‘Returned Americans who wore any ‘loud’
clothes and had a pronounced accent were not favourably regarded and
were made fun of behind their backs’.36
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 21
from historical modes of emigration, Delanty derives the cues for his
poetry from within the traditional discourse. David Lloyd points out the
invocative power of terms such as emigration and diaspora, and argues
that ‘rather than assuming a descriptive and categorical relation’, the lan-
guage has the ‘effect of disavowing or activating the memory of pain-
ful displacements’.41 For Delanty, employing the rhetoric of emigration
involves a self-conscious effort to stabilise his poetry within a recognis-
able framework. By signaling the codes of his literary allusions, Delanty
ensures his poetry is inserted into that context even while he avows his
reservations about its validity. Renate Lachmann’s theory on memory in
literature situates text and context as inextricably interwoven; by stating
a work in terms of a larger cultural utterance, those dynamics become
its key referentials. In Lachmann’s words, ‘[i]nvolvement with the extant
texts of a culture, which every new text reflects, (whether as convergence
or divergence, assimilation or repulsion), stands in a reciprocal relation to
the conception of memory that this culture implies’.42
As such, when Delanty adopts traditional emigration imagery, his poetry
becomes part of that narrative. ‘The Emigrant’s Apology’, addressed ‘to
my mother’, offers an image of Mother Ireland bereft in her son’s absence:
‘wearing a black scarf alone in a front pew.’ While the poem resonates with
Synge’s Maurya from Riders to the Sea, inevitably son-less, another poem
from the same volume, ‘Economic Pressure,’ restages a similar scene from
Seán Keating’s painting.43 Like ‘The Yank’, ‘Economic Pressure’ pre-
sents two selves within the poem’s narrative—the remembered child and
the personal narrator. The poem presents the schoolchild as he ‘traipsed
beneath pictures’, impervious to the weight of cultural memory which he
will shortly assume: ‘I never bothered much / with that emigration can-
vas. / I may even have ignored it’. The spatio-temporal disruption enacted
here—‘[b]ut today at the departure / gate of the airport / it caught up
with me’—alludes to the continuing instability of identity; the contem-
poraneous self is vulnerable to insidious personal and cultural memories.
‘Economic Pressure’ segues from the airport to an exercise in ekphrasis, as
Delanty merges both timeframes in the singular observed embrace:
I’m buffaloed
by this landscape
without voice
or memory.
Collected Poems, 47.
The phrasing here leaves just enough ambiguity around the voiceless,
memory-less subject to imply the poet’s own dissatisfaction, and the
theme of voicelessness is taken to extreme lengths in the final poem of
American Wake, the sequence poem, ‘The Splinters’. Encapsulating pre-
cisely Delanty’s hesitancy around his sense of poetic self, ‘The Splinters’
ventriloquises key voices of the poet’s literary heritage and Ireland’s liter-
ary history. ‘I’m flummoxed when you ask what poetry is’, the opening
first-person narrative declares, and the ensuing vignettes from ‘Amergin’,
‘The Old Woman of Beare’, ‘Edmund Spenser’, ‘Aodhagán Ó Rathaille’,
‘Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’, ‘Patrick Kavanagh’ and ‘Louis MacNeice,
Dylan Thomas and other voices’ testify that while the poet might in fact
‘know what poetry is’, he is less confident about how to write it in his
own voice.
American Wake is distinguished by its insistence in asserting (and
inserting) itself as part of the cultural performance of the Irish-American
emigration narrative, but the restrictions of this self-imposed code of
engagement are evident from the poems themselves. The poet teases
out the limitations of the lexicon but admits in ‘Film Directions for the
Underworld’ that ‘[t]o go on with this malarkey’s too easy’ and his next
collection, The Hellbox (1998) marks a major departure, both stylistically
and thematically, from American Wake. In ‘The Fifth Province’, the poet
jokes about being ‘half and half-ed’ but, by the time The Hellbox is pub-
lished, he recognises he is truly ‘cross-fertilising’ his Irish and American
existence. The increasing length of his poems signals a deliberate effort
at American inflation, the poet’s self-awareness undermining any pos-
sibility of organic engagement: ‘Look, / even me own poems are get-
ting blasted bigger’. The conversational intimacy emerging here is less
strained, however, and implies a poet increasingly settling into an identity
of sorts. In a number of poems, Delanty still utilises familiar tropes of
emigration, but there is a definite, identifiable and confident ‘I’ within
these poems, unlike the wavering narrative style of the earlier works.
‘We Will Not Play the Harp Backward Now, No’ demonstrates the
poet’s evolving relationship with symbols of cultural memory. The title
26 A. McDAID
Delanty’s later collections The Blind Stitch (2001) and The Ship of Birth
(2003) focus precisely on what ‘The Hellbox’ announced: ‘birth and
death and everything / sandwiched between’. The use of dialect persists
in a number of poems—‘Cork Prothalamium’, ‘Lepers’ Walk’, and ‘The
Malayalam Box’ particularly—but the language is more considered and
less unwieldy here than in the long poems of The Hellbox. More note-
worthy again is the way Delanty develops another lexicon, this time
using needlework as a mode of stabilising his connection with his mater-
nal relatives and female in-laws, just as the printing vocabulary offered a
secure binding to his deceased father. Delanty self-effacingly dismisses his
poetry’s ‘fustian transmutations of your domestic art’, but the metaphor
of ‘the memory quilt’ is graceful in its evocation of ‘grief patched to / …
absence with that blind stitch’. In the meticulous act of threading a sew-
ing needle for his aging mother, Delanty perceives symmetry with writ-
ing poetry:
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 31
of choice.
The Prince of the Quotidian, 36.
The individual volition made clear here in the phrase ‘his emerald isle of
choice’ and elsewhere in Muldoon’s use of terms such as ‘wanderlust’,
‘successive flits’ and even the active gesture of ‘rowing towards’ indicates
the poet’s appetite for elsewhere. The geographical, temporal, historical
and imaginative opportunities of migration, both literal and figurative,
are central to Muldoon’s poetry and he sees this aesthetic as distinct from
traditional poetry of exile, as written by Brodsky and Padilla. Whether
willed or obliged, however, the cultural disorientations that define his
poetry are related to his migratory experience, and surface in the many
cross-cultural exchanges, alternative possibilities and linguistic confusions
that recur in his work. These are restaged in different ways through his
densely allusive poetry, at times pushing the reader away through the
diverse and unexpected directions in which his poems, particularly his
long poems, progress. The inability of the reader to anticipate the poem’s
trajectory is itself an act of cultural disorientation—Muldoon denies the
security of literary or generic memory by undermining those ‘remem-
bered’ conventions. He is deliberate in this objective: acknowledging the
impenetrability of his poetry, Muldoon says that his poetry is ‘meant to
be equal to the difficulties that surround us’, in this ‘era of extraordi-
nary complexity’.62 His defamilarisation of the sonnet, whereby he abides
by the 14 line structure but radically refuses all its other conventions, is
designed to push the reader further into unfamiliar territory. Instead of
meeting an established sonnet, where rhyme and form should provide
structural familiarity, the reader is confronted with a poetic reconstruc-
tion of the kinds of cultural and personal dissonance experienced in 21st
century existence, at which migration and disorientation is the heart.
Difficult disorientations can be alleviated by recitation, and in ‘The
Outlier’ from Horse Latitudes, Muldoon uses recitation as a means of
36 A. McDAID
In Armagh or Tyrone
I fell between two stones.
In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
I fell between two stones.
In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
in 1951
I fell between two stones.
In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
in 1951
I fell between two stones
That raised me as their own.
Horse Latitudes, 47–48.
Although its title clearly indicates the poem’s subject, and the pho-
tographs focus on the woman, the figure of the mother is barely pre-
sent in the poem itself—within the 14 lines, the mother is never named
and is evoked through the feminine pronoun just twice and only in the
opening stanza.67 The duality of the photograph imposes a kind of ‘hal-
lucination’, in Barthes’ words, ‘false on the level of perception, true on
the level of time’.68 Muldoon revels in the possibilities of temporal dis-
ruptions, pursued fully in ‘Madoc: A Mystery’ and ‘Why Brownlee Left’.
In ‘Ma’, the physical stability of the photograph allows the poet the dis-
tance from his mother, evoked through narrative detachment as well as
the framing device of the photograph. This very distance then allows the
poet to scrutinise and speculate on the photograph’s subject all the more
intensely. Barthes uses the terms studium and punctum to describe the
‘co-presences of two discontinuous elements’ of the photograph69; the
studium are the immediate, obvious meanings of the photo—in ‘Ma’,
the mother figure pictured reading beneath the tree. Muldoon revels
in the punctum, the details that fill the void inevitably engendered by
the limitations of the photograph. By focusing on the book, the rest of
the photograph is imaginatively filled out: the book’s projected author is
WWI poet Rupert Brooke while the mother is occupied by the genteel
pastime of reading aloud against the backdrop of a croquet lawn on a
summer’s day. These suggestions of the mother’s personality, her hobbies
and her history are encoded in the private contingent meanings of the
punctum which are the poet’s alone.
For Barthes, punctum is a wound, a prick in the airtight container of
emotions that is the photograph. Through the small detail, the wider
sense of loss is evoked. This has been noted in Muldoon’s poetry as the
‘exiguous’ object, a remnant of something larger, and it is implied here
through the unnamed book and through the ‘polished brass buttons’
of the unnamed male in the second stanza.70 The ‘sharp shock’ of the
punctum creates a ‘blind field’, ‘a whole life external to [the] portrait’
and it turns the poem’s memory in a new direction of grief and mourn-
ing.71 The sestet is comforting and confronting at once; the communal
consolations of ‘neighbours gathering’ and ‘storytelling’ are jarred by the
solitary image of the canary ‘going into the ground’. The ‘soft flame’
that might offer solace is damaged by the troubling final pararhyme
of ‘canary’ with ‘cannery’, a denial of the anticipated closure. In clas-
sic Muldoon fashion, this is an elegy that refuses all its obligations—to
remember, to console and to preserve.
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 39
The proposed directions in which the poem might progress are telling:
‘Marina’ as a synecdoche for Irish emigration history; ‘identity parade’ as a
link back to the Troubles; ‘the etymology of tuxedo’ connecting with the
disposed Native American peoples. These disregarded possibilities indicate
Muldoon’s awareness of the Irish migration narrative and its incumbent
obligations, while his preference for the linguistic possibilities is a deliber-
ate ethical choice. It is in the embedded possibilities of words themselves
that Muldoon wants to locate his poetry, thus when he savours ‘booth’
(enclosure) and ‘bathy–’ (depth), or ‘quits’ (being discharged of liability)
and ‘mesquite’ (an indigenous shrub), the implications for migration, and
therefore his poetry, become more varied and open.
In characteristic contradictory fashion, language is simultaneously a
pressure cooker and a release valve for Muldoon’s poetry. It offers the
poet alternative avenues—through the linkage of ‘mesquite’ with ‘mis-
quote’, in this instance—to his preferred articulation, yet it somehow
winds up uncomfortably close to the very destination the detour sought
to avoid. Familial heritage, rural scenes, migration and etymology are
precisely the subjects of the (mis)quoted lines: ‘When he clicked at a
donkey carting dung / your grandfather had an African tongue. / You
seem content to ventriloquize the surf.’ In returning to what Muldoon
has Foley describe as ‘that same old patch of turf’, ‘The Key’ con-
cludes with a rueful confession of inevitability in the poetic endeavour.
The existent cultural memory of migration and the literary memory of
Northern Irish poetry linger in Muldoon’s lines here, which gracefully
capture the difficulties in finding poetic language adequate to represent
the continual exchanges undertaken during migration: ‘These past six
months I’ve sometimes / run a little ahead of myself, but mostly I lag
behind, my footfalls / already pre-empted by their echoes.’
This question of responsibility or, as the poet himself puts it in his
1998 Bateson lecture, ‘[t]he question of that cattle truck and its inev-
itable freight is one that all Irish writers have to deal with’.73 One
option for Muldoon is to discard his past to embrace his migrant pre-
sent, and at times he claims that route: ‘So it was I gave up the Oona
for the Susquehanna / the Shannon for the Shenandoah.’74 This idea
of swapping one reality for another is a concept of alternate possibilities
that recurs for migrant subjects, for whom dual lives track along parallel
paths. Muldoon revels in these possibilities, which he teases out through
linguistic tricks as well as through narratives punctuated by geographi-
cal and temporal disruption. In ‘Errata’, the litany of alternates might be
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 41
typographical (or even psychological) errors but they are also ‘invitations
to introduce as well as to remove mistakes, which consequently become
alternatives’.75 By invoking the classic migrant state of being both and
being between, the experience of being in flux and subject to change
depending on interpretation, presentation and even pronunciation, is
made implicit on the level of language rather than of theme.
The different reverberation of language when transported across cul-
tures is a recurring theme for Muldoon, especially in the poems that deal
with migration. Collective, familial and individual memory practices are
rehearsed through language, and are thus threatened when that language is
no longer understood. If there is anxiety around the difficulty in transport-
ing a lexicon out of the domestic, there is also a pleasure in the intimacy of
that private language; the poem ‘Quoof’ revels in its hidden meanings. The
innocence and ownership of ‘our family word / for the hot water bottle’ is
undermined by the unspoken rhymes for ‘half-brick’ and ‘sock’ implied by
the phallic imagery of ‘head’ and ‘sword’. It is a poem as much about sexu-
ality as language, and these confusions merge in ‘[a] hotel room in New
York City / with a girl who spoke hardly any English’. The violent intimacy
of using the private family word is itself a weapon, or perhaps more accu-
rately, a defence—if Muldoon brings his own lexicon, then he can actively
exclude rather than find himself excluded. But on one level, the speaker and
the girl are equal—neither speak conventional English, both are uninitiated
and outsiders, like the ‘shy beast / that has yet to enter the language’.
‘Quoof’ can also be read literally, as a ‘migrant object’, the term given
to items carried carefully by migrants to their new destinations and pre-
served in their new homes as a physical link to the homeland. The migrant
object is a symbol of identity, and Muldoon’s ‘quoof’ asserts his idiosyn-
cratic origins, his particular family heritage and his cultural background as
‘other’. In ‘The Soap-Pig’, a poem that anticipates Muldoon’s permanent
migration to the United States through original migrations from the fam-
ily home, from female partners and from various residences, the migrant
object (a bar of soap) is an immensely vulnerable item, destined to dis-
solve. The journey of the migrant object is also a metaphysical one, carry-
ing meaning and memory to unfamiliar places. ‘The Soap-Pig’ is an elegy
for a named lost friend, Michael Heffernan, as well as for the past and the
memories it consumes, following Appadurai’s suggestion that ‘memory,
for migrants, is almost always a memory of loss’.76 Muldoon’s choice of
migrant object merges memory and migration as an inevitable experience
of loss, the dual erosions steadily realised through the soap pig.
42 A. McDAID
lin) Lane
until, at last, in Landseer Street
Mary unpeeled its cellophane
and it landed on its feet
among porcelain, glass and heliotrope
pigs from all parts of the globe
Selected Poems, 74.
‘It Is What It Is’ was first published in Muldoon’s 2006 collection Horse
Latitudes and that maritime context offers an appropriate cartographical
reference point as Muldoon increasingly embeds the breadth and depth
44 A. McDAID
of the migration experience into his poems. The ‘horse latitudes’, located
thirty degrees north and south of the equator are subtropical regions
of high pressure, where ships en route from Europe to the New World
became stranded due to lack of winds. In seeking to survive their pro-
longed journey by sparing drinking water, sailors often threw their live
cargo, mainly horses, overboard, hence the name. This suspension of
the journey is thus echoed in the speaker’s endless effort to reach the
shoreline, to understand the rules, to fit the pieces together that will
allow him to berth at last. In migrant literature, interstitial spaces can be
troubling but they can also be productive: Harry Clifton enjoys being
‘[s]afe, a bord, /Between two worlds, suspended in mid-flight’ in ‘Icy
Pandemonium’ while Justin Quinn finds ‘matchless civic freedoms / of
miles and miles of open sky’ in ‘The Onegin Sequence’. In ‘It Is What
It Is’, Muldoon’s speaker struggles to recognise the productivity of the
interstitial space, wanting only to reach the new world and discard his
migrant identity. He is willing to play the parts with the props—the ‘pan-
tomime’, the ‘inlaid cigarette box’, the ‘shamrock-painted jug’—but yet
he does not fully comprehend the ‘rules of this imperspicuous game’.
Once again, objects are troubling presences in Muldoon’s migrant
poetry, not least for the ways in which they demarcate spaces of belong-
ing and not-belonging. If the migrant object is designed to provide com-
fort in unfamiliar surroundings, in ‘It Is What It Is’, the found object
deliberately unsettles.
The migrant object is also a kind of baggage, literally as well as sym-
bolically, in multiple poems in Madoc: A Mystery. In the eponymous long
poem, a ‘valise’, ‘pearwood box’ and ‘teeny-weeny key’ recur at bizarre
moments almost as memory fragments, innately unpredictable, unre-
liable and yet irrepressible: ‘Inside the pearwood box—hold on a min-
ute— / is an exact replica / / of the valise.’78 In this instance, memory,
migration and composition are merged together, a preoccupation pur-
sued in Madoc: A Mystery, as in the way complexities of assimilation and
intertextual memory are embedded in ‘The Briefcase’, the first poem
written after Muldoon’s permanent migration to the United States.79
Like ‘The Panther’, it pursues a circular construct that brings the final
line (‘for the sea. By which I mean the ‘open’ sea.’) right back to the
poem’s opening sentence (‘I held the briefcase at arm’s length from
me’). The poem can be read as a commentary on the anxieties involved
in poetic expression, the purposeful narratological distancing at outset
and conclusion of ‘The Briefcase’ complicated by the formal circularity
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 45
[The poem] has to have efficacy at some level. But just in ways as
simple as the fact that ideally one should never be able to look at
a briefcase again after reading that poem, certainly not an eelskin
briefcase—never be able to look at it again in exactly the same light.
46 A. McDAID
Notes
1. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, ‘Frank McCourt: From Colonized Imagination
to Diaspora,’ in Rethinking Diasporas: Hidden Narratives and Imagined
Borders, ed. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, Kevin Howard & David Getty
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007): p. 6.
2. Ní Éigeartaigh, ‘Frank McCourt: From Colonized Imagination to
Diaspora,’: p. 7.
3. David Lloyd, “What’s in a Name: The Dialectics of Diaspora and Irish
Emigration,” Breac: A Journal of Irish Studies Migration and Diaspora
(2013), https://breac.nd.edu/articles/36705-whats-in-a-name-the-dia-
lectics-of-diaspora-and-irish-emigration.
4. Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988): p. 5.
5. Eamonn Wall, From the Sin-è Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New
Irish (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999): p. 9.
6. An earlier version of the research in this chapter was published in Journal
of Franco-Irish Studies: Ailbhe McDaid, ‘“Breakfast-time back home”?:
‘New Irish’ Poets Greg Delanty and Eamonn Wall,’ Journal of Franco-
Irish Studies, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013.
7. Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural identity and difference,’ in Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathon Rutherford, (London: Lawrence
& Wishart, 1990): p. 235.
48 A. McDAID
8. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America: pp. 102–130.
9. Wall, From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish: p. 8.
10. Eamonn Wall, Dyckman-200th Street (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon
Poetry, 1994); Iron Mountain Road (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon
Poetry, 1997); The Crosses (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon Poetry,
2000); Refuge at De Soto Bend (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon
Poetry, 2001); A Tour of Your Country (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare:
Salmon Poetry, 2008); Sailing Lake Mareotis (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare:
Salmon Poetry, 2011); Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990-2015
(Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2015).
11. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 8.
12. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 7.
13. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 70.
14. Richard Serra, ‘Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc,’ PBS, http://www.pbs.org/
wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/tiltedarc_a.html.
15. Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Berryman and
the Makeup of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Virginia: Virginia University Press,
1999): p. 254.
16. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: pp. 70–71.
17. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 30. See also Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Ex-Isle
of Erin: Emigration and Irish Culture,’ in Location and Dislocation in
Contemporary Irish Society: Emigration and Irish Identities ed. Jim Mac
Laughlin (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997) and Tom Inglis, ‘The
Global is Personal,’ in Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland
ed. Eamon Maher (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009).
18. Robert Kroetsch, ‘The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues,’
Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory Fifth Series, no.
4, Spring (1983).
19. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 29.
20. Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson, Introduction to
Land & Identity: Theory, Memory and Practice eds. Christine Berberich,
Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012): p. 19.
21. Eamonn Wall, ‘Walking: Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran,’ New Hibernia
Review 12, no. 3, Fomhar/Autumn (2008): pp. 66–79; ‘Digging into
the West: Tim Robinson’s Deep Landscapes,’ in Reflective Landscapes
of the Anglophone Countries, ed. Pascale Guibert (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2011): pp. 133–145.
22. Eamonn Wall, ‘Deep Maps: Reading Tim Robinson’s Maps of Aran,’
Terrain Spring/Summer, no. 29 (2012).
23. Henri Lefebvre and Michael J. Enders, ‘Reflections on the Politics of
Space,’ Antipode 8, no. 2 (1976): p. 31.
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 49
65. ‘Paul Muldoon: The Art of Poetry’, Paris Review 45.169 (2004), p. 83.
(pp. 50–91)
66. Matthew Campbell, ‘Muldoon’s Remains’ in Tim Kendall and Peter
McDonald eds., Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool; Liverpool
University Press, 2004), p. 171.
67. For more on the distinction between elegy and elegiac poems in
Muldoon, with specific reference to the significance of migration in ‘Ma’,
see Nathaniel Myers, ‘End Rhymes and End-Rhymes: Paul Muldoon’s
Echoic Elegies’ in Post Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry
(North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 2017): pp. 221–244.
68. Barthes, p. 115.
69. Barthes, p. 25.
70. Neil Corcoran, Clair Wills, Tim Kendall and Matthew Campbell have
identified this feature of Muldoon’s work. See Matthew Campbell,
“Muldoon’s Remains,” in Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, Tim Kendall
and Peter McDonald eds., (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004);
pp. 170–188.
71. Barthes, p. 57.
72. Allen, p. 69.
73. Paul Muldoon, “Getting Around: Notes Towards An Ars Poetica”, Essays
in Criticism, VOL. XLVIII No. 2, April 1998 107–128; p. 125.
74. Muldoon, ‘BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: The River’, from Poems 1968–1998,
(London: Faber & Faber, 2001): p. 414; see also Kendall, Paul Muldoon,
p. 153.
75. John Kerrigan, ‘Muddling through after Madoc,’ in Paul Muldoon:
Critical Essays, Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald eds., (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2004); p. 138.
76. Arjun Appadurai, (2016) ‘Aspirational maps: On migrant narratives and
imagined future citizenship’, Eurozine, 19 February. Available at: www.
eurozine.com.
77. Guinn Batten, ‘Muldoon: Critical Judgement, Crisis and the Ethics of
Voice’, in Crisis and Contemporary Poetry edited by Anne Karhio, Seán
Crosson and Charles I. Armstrong (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
pp. 201–214. (p. 205)
78. Paul Muldoon, Madoc: A Mystery (London: Faber & Faber, 1990): p.
188.
79. Earl G Ingersoll and Stan Sanvel Rubin, ‘The Invention of the I: A
Conversation with Paul Muldoon,’ Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume
XXXVII, Issue 1, Winter 1998: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.
act2080.0037.106.
80. Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 144.
81. Kendall, Paul Muldoon, p. 153.
1 AMERICAN HIGHWAYS 53
Alternative Cartographies
The hesitancy of the diction signals the poet’s impulse to reinvent and
the concomitant uncertainty of a language that shirks from committing
fully to an alternate diction. The qualifiers—‘not exactly’, ‘something
like’, ‘I don’t think so’—reject inheritance but fall short of complete
reinvention. Coupled with Groarke’s mediated and interrupted imagery,
these semantic qualifications suggest a fractured memory that, in using
reinvention to forget, also struggles to remember. The uneasy tone that
continues throughout the volume is borne out by the fact that nothing
is what it seems; moments are shadows of older experiences that have
been lost or left behind, involuntary memories that surface in sensory
snapshots.
one,
two metallic notes with the cadence of a name;
silverfish throwing your reflection off a beat.
Or a peony petal blown off your path.
Juniper Street, 11.
in the land in which the family, as ‘new adventurers, wary’, settles. The
space is simultaneously modern (its ‘gardens abloom with / styrofoam
and ply’) and primitive (for ‘the road’s not tarred / and the dust gets
everywhere’), again alluding to the dualities that coexist in Groarke’s aes-
thetic. By drawing on the American settler tradition and calling up its
defining feature, the prairie, the poet nods to the historical heritage of
her migrations and also calls up the narrative of dispossession in which
the reinvented self participates. Outside is vaguely unsettling, and so the
family ‘keep to the house, /have time on [their] hands.’ The isolation of
elsewhere is suggested in this innocuous phrase, and again, more directly,
later, as the poet confesses:
Groarke’s careful form offers heightened detail observed with the inten-
sity of an outsider’s eye. The short lines and brief verses are arbitrated
by assiduous punctuation: in the above stanzas, minimal punctuation
opens out the statement into a musing that enacts a structural echo of
the ‘time’ the poet has on her hands. In contrast, the opening stanza is
terse and conjunctive, the caution of initial impressions captured by the
conditional atmosphere engendered by the comma, the colon, and the
semi-colon.
‘bright yellow buses of the future’ that spirit the life away for the dura-
tion of the school day.10 Eamon Grennan meditates on that time in his
poem ‘Pause’, describing it as:
The specificity of the matched colour binds the speaker’s present setting
to the place of treasured memory, and the particularity of the remem-
bered detail. Like Wall’s ‘Election Day’ and Bernard O’Donoghue’s ‘Any
Last Requests’, the act of suburban DIY in ‘Away’(1) is a self-soothing
gesture that consoles while it asserts exclusion. Difference is lodged in
the most fundamental of daily actions:
I am too old for this. I feel like some hoary, washed-up hoojah
on the edge of that funfair, waiting for the carousel
to jolt into life like a wound-up hummingbird or jay[.]
Spindrift, 16.
The river Shannon running through the heart of the midlands dictates
the cadence of the poem and the town. Athlone, ‘wracked on a river’, is
defined by its relationship to the water that must be ‘taken in hand’ and
‘kept in check’. Yet the river’s influence seeps into the light that’s ‘lured
away’, becoming liquid as it ‘tinkles down through Northgate Street’.
If Groarke’s early writing is preoccupied with places, houses and his-
tories, then it can be argued that her migrant collections engage with
the subject and vocabulary of water. This trend amongst female migrant
poets of engaging water as a deliberate alternate aesthetic is teased out in
more detail in relation to Sara Berkeley’s work, but Groarke’s work simi-
larly moves towards a poetics of water, demonstrating a reinvention of
her early delineated, grounded metaphors towards increasingly ephem-
eral reflections. In her careful observations of transitions—cultural,
68 A. McDAID
I babysit by Skype
breakfast to their lunch,
lunch to their dinner.
Spindrift, 26.
70 A. McDAID
calling up the vessels that transported her emigrant ancestors across the
vast Atlantic for weeks and months at a time.
Finding herself strung between two places, Groarke’s American poetry
depicts a self stranded at ‘the spot in the ocean / that’s just as far from
one home as the other’. In self-consciously describing herself as a ‘rem-
nant envoy / to a province of depleted relevance, outlying home’, the
poet acknowledges the obsolescence of such representations. The lim-
ited use of these traditional tropes flags the poet’s reluctance to actively
participate in reworking emigration narratives, her ethical responsibility
discharging itself in the poetic act. Yet by admitting the shared truths at
the heart of all migration, Groarke’s poetry, and the poetry of her con-
temporaries, is important for the ways it contributes to narrating the evo-
lution of emigration. Poetic journeys take place across many levels, and
geographical peregrinations form part of the profoundly layered story
of poetry and migration. Through her journeys of ‘no ordinary return’,
Vona Groarke’s poetry forms its own seam in the complex stratigraphy of
contemporary Irish poetry.
I never thought
eight would be so fragile,
so delicate, so robust, such a synthesis,
a symphony, a gallery full
of astonishing art. For my part,
now and then,
I see where I held the brush.
The View from Here, 23.
[…] among their own’. Here in ‘The Business of Rain’, the daughter
becomes elemental in her own way, embracing the rainstorm as ‘she
opens the windows, / she opens all the doors, / […] / and she bursts
upon the great outdoors’. As for Eamonn Wall and his daughter, the
synchronicity between the child and nature reconfigures the poetic rela-
tionship with physical and emotional landscapes. In Berkeley’s poetry,
it engenders reflections on the substance of nature in terms of universal
human experience. The element of water dictates the lexicon of poems
such as ‘Dark Summer Days’ and ‘Approaching Eight’ that transfigure
the difficulties of growing up into metaphors of voyage and expedi-
tion. The daughter’s books and toys become ‘the bowed and weathered
instruments of her navigation’, her strength ‘driving up like a mast
through the sea foam’. The precariousness of life’s journeys, even at this
early stage, is pronounced.
The lure of the water, despite its dangers, is perceptible to both poet
and daughter, who knows ‘how scary, / that moment when the oar /
rode up, what a relief / to make it back to shore, / how tomorrow you
want more’. The solo journey on the water is a kind of rite of passage, an
Odyssean trip across the ocean with dangers lurking beneath the surface.
The ocean’s charm seduces the poet in ‘Heart’s Desire’, tempting her to
relinquish her worldly worries through immersion.
The narrator’s confidence in the lines of her hands, and the easy syn-
chronicity between water and body, contrasts sharply with the ensuing
stanza’s difficulty in articulating the inner life.
The formal stutter brought about by the caesurae echoes the emo-
tional content of the difficult lines, lines that reach for an other language
to express themselves. The ‘strangeness of the ghost’ draws on ideas of
the unheimlich and the foreigner, which refract Berkeley’s personal expe-
rience as an emigrant. The multiple selves of the exilic subject can’t help
but engender psychic crises of identity, suggested here in linguistic inad-
equacy and expressive limitations. Personal and cultural alienations are
tightly woven, and the paradoxical urge for familiarity as well as distance
is expressed towards the end of the poem: ‘I ride the same train every
afternoon / laying holy miles between myself and home.’
The sense of the uncanny infusing the poet’s observations defines
her relationship to these foreign places. Peculiarities in nature are eerie
and foreboding, at times threatening to disrupt the natural order as she
understands it. ‘There are bees at the flowers in December. It is not right
/ to live like this down here in the half-light.’ These disturbances are
distressing to her instincts, an affront to her understanding of how the
world works. Berkeley’s expectations are challenged by this foreign cli-
mate, and she perceives a catastrophic aspect to these natural digressions,
anticipating the deluge. ‘[I]t’s never rained like this before / at Easter.
Where the colours should be pale yellow, pale blue, they are an unre-
mitting slate’. This tarnished land is an alien place, full of suffering and
distress. The strangeness she perceives is, on one level, borne out of her
outsider status but the poet is equally concerned with the profound dam-
age to ‘the robbed earth’ that translates across cultures and countries.
Berkeley’s ecopoetic approach equates the environmental and seasonal
disruption with insidious ecological and social devastation. ‘Absolution’
develops those connections between personal and public crises, indicting
both herself and society.
Wes Davis proposes that Berkeley’s ‘poems of memory and loss link her
to a longer poetic tradition than first glance might suggest’, and this
can also be perceived in the bereft quality to her writing.33 An aware-
ness of the past and its extinct possibilities enthrals Berkeley, as she ven-
tures back to junctions to lament what might have been lost. ‘I wish I
2 ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES 79
had built more fences / taken down more fences’ she keens in ‘Meals for
Friends’, a poem that laments and rejoices life in equal measure. Like the
Cailleach Beara, the speaker rues the onset of old age while acknowledg-
ing the joys of her life. ‘Everything I needed to remember / has been
remembered; everything I yearned to forget / is lost.’ Trust in the natu-
ral order trumps human expectation, hopes revealed as foolish when ‘the
ocean gives its undivided attention’. Yet for all the nonchalance, the final
line suggests the vulnerability of the human condition and offers little
consolation as the last reflections of an aged narrator in asking ‘what
matter now / when the heart has proved such a porous vessel for love?’
The presentation of fragmented and devastated individual lives high-
lights the ecopoetic impetus behind Berkeley’s poetry. Along with a
heightened sense of the uncanny, this disorder permeates Berkeley’s per-
ception of the natural world, an awareness intensified by her migrant sta-
tus as well as by her eco-consciousness. At the core of Berkeley’s poetry
is a post-pastoral aesthetic that sees human culpability in the devastation
of the earth’s natural resources. Through this lens, the significance of
water in her writing is more than a poetic device of self-liberation from
migration and national narratives; the post-pastoral speaks out of an
ethic of responsibility to larger environmental and ecological concerns.
While the traditional pastoral mode, especially in the Irish tradition, uses
nature as a means of redeeming history or violence, or as a unifying tribal
motif, Berkeley’s poetry refuses distinctions between nature and culture,
treating both as a sinlge integrated system. Historically the pastoral is
concerned with landscape, countryside (in opposition to city) and ide-
alisation; the specifics of post-pastoral ethics differ in kind. Arguments
have been made for (and against) the consideration of prominent Irish
poets, including Heaney, Longley and Murphy, as writing in an ecopo-
etic or/and post-pastoral mode.34 It is worth noting also the emergence
of ecofeminist criticism that considers post-pastoral traits in a gendered
context, especially in Adrienne Rich’s poetry; this approach is particu-
larly illuminating with regard to the work of Moya Cannon, Medbh
McGuckian and Mary O’Malley, as analysed by Donna L. Potts and
James McElroy.35 Ecofeminism provides another interpretative dimension
to Berkeley’s work although this analysis is less concerned with gender
than with post-pastoral elements in her writing. A post-pastoral approach
allows contemporary migratory poetry to move beyond ‘a preoccupation
with place as an unseverable aspect of self’ to address universal environ-
mental issues which Berkeley views with ethical and poetical urgency.36
80 A. McDAID
the landscape of her new surrounds than the imprint of a past place; her
ethic of reinvention obliges her to persist with and rework the inherited
trope of nature imagery. Her sense of awe at the ‘radiant storm of light
and sound’ finds its language in religious wonder, realising ‘every day is
holy, full of miracles’. In conceiving of life as ‘a ceremony, simple among
the redwoods, / each of us in our own shaft of celestial light’, Berkeley
is inspired and humbled by the magnitude of nature and, by extension,
human experience within the natural world. ‘I bow down before her, I
give her all praise and blame’ she announces in ‘This I Take With Me’.
Awe-inspiring as nature is, Berkeley is also acutely aware of its crea-
tive/destructive qualities: the balance of power between affirmation and
devastation forms the central imagery in numerous poems. In document-
ing the cyclical thrust of nature, Berkeley recognises her own minor role
within that system: ‘I am part of the pattern / that time makes lovely
and destroys.’ In her writing, the potential for growth leads inevitably
to the prospect of demise and the poetry accepts the symbiosis between
life and death. In every act of nature, both possibilities exist, as when
‘the heavy drops beat the tulips down / into their final embrace with
life’. Rain is simultaneously life-giving and damaging, the flowers both
dependent on and subject to the vagaries of rain. The uncontrolla-
ble, double-edged aspect of nature and its ‘moons and moods’ features
throughout Berkeley’s poetry, creating an atmosphere of apprehension
and unease at times in her work. The sense of a looming power hangs
over the poems, like ‘trees in the river’s mirror, / … almost there’, cast-
ing shadows across even the positive narratives.
Reflections of other kinds also feature, as internal personal experi-
ence is externalised in nature. The dialogic exchange between human
and natural expression positions itself with ease, as the poet flits between
physical and emotional modes of articulation. Seasonal shifts are given
individual characteristics: ‘Fall, obediently grey with rain, hugs the car’
in ‘Smoke from Oregon Fires’, while in Feet First ‘the days ached to be
longer / and the dawns fired up blue in our veins’. The poet conceives of
herself as constituent of the earth, longing to be rejuvenated and thereby
redeemed by natural cycles. She declares, ‘Come spring, after the long
months / of slumbering I want my life / to unfurl again, transcend-
ent green’. Furthermore she longs to be released into the environment
at death, acknowledging the cyclical structure of life that sees the body
return to the earth and the spirit survive in nature.
82 A. McDAID
The cyclical pattern of the pastoral mode centres around retreat and
return. This depends on a separation of urban and rural, and on a dis-
tinction between home and away. It requires the concept of arcadia that
is missing in post-pastoral literature, since post-pastoral dismisses those
necessary divisions. Nevertheless, the discourse of retreat figures in
Berkeley’s poetry at an ideological level; The View From Here uses retreat
as a post-pastoral poetic device, in that the volume itself is presented as
a perspective from elsewhere. The poet is careful to establish her out-
sider-status, and this position is used to explore alternative realities and
possibilities.
On a personal level, Berkeley’s relocation to rural southern California
signals a retreat from her urban Dublin roots, while thematically, the way
her poetry moves away from material and cultural early concerns towards
the ecocentricism laid out above is, in itself, an act of withdrawal. Her
act of retreat also chimes with her urge to disassociate from Irish canoni-
cal poetic concerns, and with the way she priorities water over land as an
integral motif. Berkeley’s poetry can be read as escapist and renunciatory,
without the pejorative implications of these terms. As Gifford suggests,
‘[a]gainst necessary notions of roots, neighbourhood and community,
there is another necessary impulse towards retreat, renewal and return.
This is the circle of post-modern mobility.’38 This ongoing dialectic is
consciously espoused by Berkeley, particularly in the way she counter-
points roots with renewal, as in ‘Park Bench, Queens: ‘some distance
from the fork in the road / I turn and look the way I have come, /
step by step away from my last home.’ Even ‘home’ is temporary and
renewable, the insinuation of ‘last’ as ‘most recent’ rather than ‘final’
suggesting that there will, in time, be a next home. Memory reinvents
and rejuvenates itself as it anticipates the future as well as preserving (or
84 A. McDAID
Notes
1. Anne Fogarty, ‘“The Influence of Absences”: Eavan Boland and the
Silenced History of Irish Women’s Poetry,’ Colby Quarterly 35, no. 4,
December (1999).
2. Patrick O’Sullivan, ed. Irish Women and Irish Migration (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1995); Dorothea Schneider, ‘The Literature
on Women Immigrants to the United States,’ Actes de l’histoire de
l’immigration 3 (2003). The phenomenon of the silenced female is
a common issue in classic histories of American immigration, which
Schneider (2003) argues are ‘incomplete accounts because throughout
women are almost entirely absent from the story’.
3. Erica Mena, ‘The Geography of Poetry: Mahmoud Darwish and
Postnational Identity,’ Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self
Knowledge VII (2009): p. 112.
4. Catríona Clutterbuck, ‘New Irish Women Poets: The Evolution of (In)
Determinacy in Vona Groarke,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish
Poetry, eds. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012): p. 654.
5. Ailbhe Smyth, ‘Dodging Around the Grand Piano: Sex, Politics and
Contemporary Women’s Poetry,’ in Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth-
century Women Poets, ed. Vicki Bertram (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1997): p. 76.
6. A version of this chapter was published as an article entitled ‘“I mean it
as no ordinary return”: Poetic Migrancy in the poetry of Vona Groarke
and Sara Berkeley,’ Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 13 (2013): pp.
45–63.
7. Vona Groarke (in interview with Jillian King), ‘A Brief Interview with
Vona Groarke,’ http://wfupress.wfu.edu/An%20interview%20with%20
Vona%20Groarke.html.
2 ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES 85
8. Vona Groarke, X (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2014). Other recent
publications include Selected Poems (Co Meath: The Gallery Press, 2016)
and a personal essay entitled Four Sides Full (Co Meath: The Gallery
Press, 2016).
9. Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
10. ‘The Debt-Collectors’ in Eamonn Wall, The Crosses (Cliffs of Moher, Co.
Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2000).
11. ‘Pause’ in Eamon Grennan, Relations: New and Selected Poems
(Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1998).
12. Spindrift contains two poems entitled ‘Away’. For the purposes of clarity,
I have appended (1) to the poem appearing on p. 14 of Spindrift and (2)
to the poem appearing on pp. 26–27.
13. Colette Bryce, The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (London: Picador,
2014).
14. Fran Brearton, ‘“The Nothing-Could-Be-Simpler Line”: Form in
Contemporary Irish Poetry,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish
Poetry, eds. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012): p. 360.
15. Justin Quinn, ‘The Irish Efflorescence,’ Poetry Review 91, no. 3 (2001):
p. 46; David Wheatley, ‘Irish poetry into the twenty-first century,’ in
The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew
Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): pp. 250–251.
16. Vona Groarke, Other People’s Houses (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
1999).
17. Shane Alcobia-Murphy, ‘Safe House: Authenticity, Nostalgia and the Irish
House,’ in Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern
Culture, eds. Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006): pp.
107–108.
18. As early as 2006, David McWilliams coined the term ‘ghost estates’
for the proliferation of unfinished housing developments in under-
serviced and peripheral regions in Ireland with little to no demand
for increased residential units. With remarkable prescience, in a blog
posted on September 30th 2006 he warns that ‘these ghost villages,
like our famine villages, may stand testament to a great tragedy which,
although predicted by concerned observers, was never fully appreciated
until the morning the crops failed.’ See http://www.davidmcwilliams.
ie/2006/10/01/a-warning-from-deserted-ghost-estates. For literary
reflections on the post-Celtic Tiger landscape see Colm Barrett, Young
Skins (Dublin: Stinging Fly Press, 2013); Tana French, Broken Harbour
(London: Hodder & Staughton, 2012); Donal Ryan, The Spinning
Heart (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012); William Wall, Ghost Estates (Cliffs
of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2011).
86 A. McDAID
Memory Spaces
experience (his own and others’) with his private need to retrieve the
past. His deliberate use of mythology as a frame of memory is a tech-
nique that transforms the rupture of migration into emotionally and
poetically manageable material. In deploying myth as a narratological
device, O’Donoghue frames his migration in a way that allows him to
reappear at crucial moments in a remembered past and his reconstruc-
tion of his native place is an act of myth-making essential to his migrant
sensibilities.
Martina Evans’s poetry pushes at the limits of memory (in Facing
the Public) and of poetic form (in Petrol), but the location of her poetry
is seldom disrupted. In situating her poems in the rural hinterlands of
County Cork, Evans reconstructs a childhood through the self-conscious
fictions of personal and collective memory. Present-day realities are
entirely dissolved in her reconstructions of private and public narratives.
She interrogates cultural and literary memory through an ethic of rein-
vention that serves to distort as well as to clarify the past. Evans’s sub-
versive approach to memory, both private and collective, is realised in the
mimetic fragmentation and disruption on multiple levels in her poetry.
Colette Bryce’s migration from Derry to England is less clear-cut in
terms of the geopolitics of the archipelago, but the psychic significance
of the event is unquestionable. This section concludes with an analysis
of Bryce’s poetic preoccupation with space and transgression, and argues
that her thematic and imagistic emphasis on appearing and disappear-
ing reflects the conditions of her childhood during the Troubles as well
as her sexuality. This section examines how the ethics of memory and
reinvention in queer migration challenge heteronormative constructions,
while recognising the legacy of growing up in a society in conflict. In
returning home, whether in practice or in memory, this chapter recog-
nises how acts of reinvention can be subversive as well as healing.
The individual poetries of Bryce, Evans and O’Donoghue are each
compelled by the multiple acts of appearing and disappearing that define
migration. All three are drawn to the home space, both domestic and
geographical, varying from rural to urban, in ways that bind their work
to the moment and space of their migrations. By continually reinvent-
ing their home spaces, these poets’ works demonstrate how the migra-
tion imagination can be captivated by origins in ways that go beyond
traditional tropes of nostalgia and sentimentality. Indeed, whether in
O’Donoghue’s bitterness, the unheimlich domestic in Evans’s poetry
or in the ongoing tensions of escape and return for Bryce, there is little
3 MEMORY SPACES 91
‘Nechtan’ retells the Old Irish saga of ‘The Voyage of Bran’ from the
perspective of the poem’s eponymous voyager.7 Personalising the myth,
O’Donoghue narrates Nechtan’s nostalgia as crucially damaging; he con-
fesses: ‘I spoilt it / For them—and for me—by being homesick / For
Ireland’. The original manuscript has Nechtan turn to ash upon touch-
ing Irish soil for the first time after his wanderings. In Meyer’s transla-
tion: ‘As soon as he touched the earth of Ireland, forthwith he was a
heap of ashes, as though he had been in the earth for many hundred
years’.8 O’Donoghue casts it slightly differently in his poem:
We never discovered
exactly what gift it was that brought in its train
our father clutching his chest before he fell
and our particular wanderings across the sea.
Farmers Cross, 7.
Those ‘wanderings across the sea’ conflate the mythic with the his-
torical, reworking Odysseus’ journey in terms of the poet’s personal
3 MEMORY SPACES 95
The questions of agency raised in these lines reiterate yet again the
complexities of volition versus fate. There is a psychological liberty
in rescinding responsibility, and this is realised through the framework
of myth. By considering individual experience as age-old and univer-
sal, traumatic personal memory is dispersed. O’Donoghue’s choices of
myths prioritise tales of exile and return, pointing to the poet’s ambigu-
ous relationship to Ireland. In an interview in 2001, he acknowledges a
central displacement in his work that is temporal and existential, rather
than geographical, asserting that ‘I don’t feel especially displaced myself
except … by loss’.14 He asks rhetorically ‘doesn’t everyone like the rather
luxurious feeling that they have something in reserve?’, alluding to the
aesthetic of alterity that contributes to the detachment in his work.
Nevertheless, Ireland constitutes the dominant site of his poetic imagina-
tion, ‘rooted in one dear perpetual place’ as Yeats says in ‘A Prayer for
my Daughter’ and quoted by O’Donoghue in his 2001 interview.15
The varieties of Ireland presented in his poetry are recovered spaces
of memory; as he confesses in ‘Aisling’, ‘My dreams now increasingly
move along / the unmetalled roads of childhood’. His honesty towards
the detail of the past is complicated by his urge towards reinvention—to
remake personal memory as seen in his use of myth. As such, by delib-
erately setting out his poems as recollections rather than observations,
O’Donoghue permits a fallibility of memory that enables his poetic. The
vaguely fictitious nature of his memorial portraits is signalled repeatedly,
as in ‘Bona-Fide Travellers’ which presents an awareness of the layered
reality in which the poet resides:
Your book
has slipped to the floor, the John Hinde postcard
has fallen out, and now you’ve lost your place.
Farmers Cross, 3.
3 MEMORY SPACES 97
home.’ The note of obligation chimed by the use of ‘have to’ sours the
perfect intimacy between landscape and narrator, introducing a dissonant
tone that is sustained in the poem’s conclusion.
The relief to find the cow ‘standing up, eating hay’ brings about his par-
ents’ reaction, which resurfaces in his memory on wet sleepless nights in
Bristol. That emotional response to the cow’s survival sparks the narra-
tor’s withering outburst:
The expression of repulsion looms over the line, tainting the parents’
embrace and linking their action with ‘poverties and embarrassments’.
Behind the phrase ‘too humbling to retell’ lie stories of greater indig-
nity which the narrator is unwilling to call to mind. Though memory is
managed and manipulated here, it seems to evade the narrator’s author-
ity by its rapid descent into traumatic recollection. In the same way that
the lock possesses agency in the earlier image of the turning key, ‘the
country’ looms over the narrator, demanding absolution despite his
refusals.
The callousness of this rejection continues in the final section of ‘The
Mule Duignan’, as the narrator describes the final breaking of ties. The
punctuation of the first line seems misplaced, but the harshness is delib-
erate. ‘When my father died at last, the place / was empty.’ In depicting
his father’s death as long-anticipated, the implication of difficult pater-
nal relations compounds the already-flagged antipathy to his birthplace.
The unexpected placing of the comma before rather than after ‘at last’
intensifies the hostility of the sentence. The run-on final line of the poem
reduces his father’s burial, his final visit to the house, and the handing
over of the keys to a series of minimally significant events. The narrator’s
return is functional, disregarding any emotional weight by levelling, on
the page, the death with a trip to the estate-agent. The poem finishes
with that long sentence, the final phrase an expression of the narrator’s
contempt for Ireland and his childhood.
Oh but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.23
Mahon’s poem deploys the image of the deserted garage, of which there
are many in rural Ireland, as an ‘emblem of post-war Irish emigration’.29
Where Mahon presents the discarded shell of family (and community)
life, Evans recalls it still as a ‘roadside oasis’, populating the scene with
the ‘somebody’ of both Mahon’s and Bishop’s poems. Memory has a
palliative purpose for Evans here in that it enables her poetry to ‘forget’
the contemporary reality of the garage as deserted and defunct, and to
restore its lived-in energy. Returning directly to the past, Petrol recreates
the details and dramas of life beyond the shop counter without entertain-
ing the inevitable demise of those who think ‘of this as home’.
The role of memory in migration as a tool of reinvention without
recrimination is clear—‘memory’ as opposed to ‘remembering’ grants
access to a past without the necessity of reintegrating that past with the
present. ‘Remembering’ is an active dialogue between the foregrounded
present self and the removed past self; ‘memory’ on the other hand
privileges the past as unmediated by the present. In Evans’s poetics
3 MEMORY SPACES 109
The local flavour of Evans’s Petrol is brought about by the poem’s spe-
cific location in space and time—rural Ireland during the 1970s—while
the range of formal and thematic elements at work are varied and ambi-
tious. The dark humour and intimate voice are offset by the high-literary
allusion to Lear through the trope of the father with his three daughters.
Evans has mentioned the tale of Bluebeard as a template for Justin as a
serial widower, while the presence of the step-mother figure has many
mythic and folktale precedents, not least The Children of Lir. 35
At the level of form, Petrol is liminally located while within the poem
itself, the lines between public and private space are similarly uncer-
tain. The setting of the poem—‘McConnell’s bar, shop and petrol
110 A. McDAID
Sometimes
the singing voices from the bar were very near,
they sang A Nation Once Again which was
companionable. Or I’m nobody’s child
112 A. McDAID
Rather than offering a nurturing environment for the three sisters, the
house is a space of incarceration, dominated by their father Justin, whose
controlling presence is constant: ‘Justin was everywhere, worse than
God.’ (P, 38)
Society is also implicated in the subjugation of the women both
within and peripheral to the text. The prospective third wife, Clodagh,
will soon leave her job as a teacher, a reference to the Civil Service mar-
riage ban, while the death of Imelda’s mother appears to be by suicide
after repeated miscarriages.
He might as well
have put the gun to her head, twenty-nine miscarriages, sure
who in the name of god would put up with that? The
3 MEMORY SPACES 113
In this version of the female gothic, women are trapped in their homes,
by society, and even by their bodies, over which they have no control.
Imelda’s recollection of her mother’s breakdown shows a tiny, futile act
of rebellion against overwhelming oppression: ‘Last time Mammy Agnes
and / me down the fields, she took all her clothes out of a / big suit-
case and threw them into the river and started / bawling crying.’ (P, 9)
The suitcase, with its symbolism of escape, carries her only as far as the
river, while the renunciation of her femininity, her (in)fertility, and her
responsibility through the gesture of discarding her clothes is a stunted
act of desperation, an act that will be shortly repeated by her suicide: ‘I /
wished hard that she’d die like Bertha’s Mammy and / three weeks later
she had.’ (P, 9)
The confessional tone of Petrol lends itself to the construction of the
prose poem as a version of a journal, with multiple entries. While there
is narrative momentum of sorts, the prose poem is comprised of a series
of memories contained, almost exclusively, within the house. The dark
humour and unflinching rendering of rural life balances the poignancy of
this coming-of-age narrative of bereavement and grief. Imelda is poised
between childhood and maturity, a dialectic symbolised by the alternat-
ing roles of alcohol and sweets in Petrol. In addition to the cast of ‘Main
Characters’ preceding the text (a strategy designed to further confound
attempts to categorise the genre of the book), various types of choco-
late bars, sweets, ice-creams, and lollies feature so regularly as to war-
rant character listings of their own. In Petrol, and in her earlier work,
sweets function metaphorically as symbols of innocence or, occasionally,
of transgression. ‘Song of Sweets’ from Can Dentists Be Trusted traces
the path from childhood through to adolescence via confectionary road
signs: from the unselfconscious ‘slabs of concrete’ chewy bars to the rela-
tive sophistication of ‘Catch bars and Yorkies’ for ‘later forays out of /
boarding school’.
In Petrol, eating sweets offers a refuge in childhood that appears con-
stantly under threat by the encroaching adult world, denominated by the
public spaces in which Imelda is obliged to function. The opening scene
has the child ‘under the table with the sugar bowl the day of the funeral’,
114 A. McDAID
The cruelty of the IRA men is lent little attention in these memories,
but the perception of the Black and Tans as sadistic is crucially detailed:
‘fingernails pulled off and a slow death by the barracks fire—they were
very fond of the red hot poker, the Essex were.’ In ‘Reprisal’, the Tans
are depicted as even more extreme, building on popular perception that
many of the Auxiliary force were mentally unstable ex-soldiers brutal-
ised by their experiences in World War I.54 Evans relays this collective
belief in the fear running through the young mother’s mind as she goes
to retrieve her small child, who has been ‘picked up by another Crossley
Tender’:
and tightened over time most often in line with cognitive needs’.57 ‘50th
Anniversary of the Easter Rising’ embeds this process into the poetics of
the poem. The poem is comprised of two verses that, upon reading, are
revealed as a single verse laid out forward once and then, line-by-line,
in reverse. The length of the poem initially disguises the device and by
the time the reader realises the cyclical structure, s/he is entrapped in
the reductive, self-defeating recitation. The poem controls the reader just
as narrative dominates memory in this orchestration. Told from a child’s
perspective, the poem is pitched precisely at the point between official
commemoration and individual recollection.
Years later I saw shaky old men who could hardly hold their rifles
the old IRA closing one eye to fire shots over the monument
3 MEMORY SPACES 119
Aside from slight syntactical alterations, the poem is exactly the same for-
ward and backwards except for a single word change. ‘[L]ift their rifles’ in
the initial verse becomes ‘hold their rifles’, insinuating the damage of time
on these elderly men. The way the poem reels forward and backwards
through time demonstrates the structures of memory and history in which
all narratives take place. The poem’s narrative purpose is reinvented as a
commentary on personal and ritual memory, whereby the poem is a vehi-
cle for a re-enactment of the process rather than the substance of memory.
Evans’s evident fascination with these narratives of the past resurfaces
in the final poems of Facing the Public. The Tans poems, which open the
volume Facing the Public, privilege oral memory in terms of tone, con-
tent, and narrative construct. ‘50th Anniversary of the Easter Rising’ and
later Petrol, can be seen to emphasise the poetics of personal memory.
The closing set of poems of Facing the Public approaches cultural mem-
ory through the memoirs of IRA commander Ernie O’Malley. Excerpts
from his memoir On Another Man’s Wound (1936) preface ‘Mallow
Burns, 28th September 1920’ and ‘Wooden Horse’, while the poems
themselves directly re-state O’Malley’s exact words from his memoir.59
It is a curious act of appropriation, not least because O’Malley’s own ver-
sion of personal and collective history was itself also a deeply literary ges-
ture.60 As lieux de memoire, O’Malley’s memoirs now stand as part of
the cultural memory of the War of the Independence, yet the memoirs
themselves are carefully constructed literary works, reinventions of per-
sonal and political memory. Evans’s appropriation of O’Malley’s carefully
constructed version of the past has the effect of distancing history by fur-
ther blurring the boundary between narrative and fact. The fluidity and
unreliability of memory, as mediated through narrative, is at the heart of
Evans’s evocation of O’Malley’s memoirs.
Evans’s poems here are problematic pieces of writing, as again she
engages her technique of genre manipulation, a stylistic imperative that imi-
tates the commingling of sources and modes within the O’Malley poems
themselves. At the level of form, the poems engage a prose poem narrative
similar to Petrol, straddling the boundaries of the genre just as O’Malley’s
books reside somewhere between history, memory and literature. Unlike
120 A. McDAID
The column was drawn up. They smiled joyfully when they were told
we were going to seize the barracks. At two in the morning, behind out
scouts, we moved into the town. The advance guard was told to make pris-
oners of anyone they met and blindfold them. There were no lights in the
houses, no people on the streets. […] Our approach up to higher ground
brought us through back yards, barbed wire and across high walls. We
used ladders on the high walls. When I looked down on the house, I saw a
toy town, blurred and misty with half light [.]61
O’Malley’s original is evidently lyrical in its own right, but Evans’s use
of the original material surely invokes questions of authorship, of the past
as well of the words. Importing O’Malley’s writings into her own poetry,
Evans deliberately espouses the liminality provided by iterative poet-
ics, allowing her both to inhabit and expose the material she absorbs.
O’Malley’s memoirs form part of the abiding cultural memory of the
War of Independence and ‘Wooden Horse’ initially represents, without
interpretation, O’Malley’s version of the past. In doing so, the poem
seems designed to highlight, by virtue of authorial anonymity, questions
of ownership, representation and memory.
When the final lines of the poem diverge absolutely from O’Malley’s
narrative, this question becomes even more acute:
but
Mallow wasn’t made of wood, it was flesh and blood, like
Achilles’ horses, Bailius and Xanthus, who dragged their
shining manes along the ground when they wept for the
death of Patroclus.
Facing the Public, 58.
forms part of the fabric of cultural memory around that period in history.
‘Wooden Horse’ however serves to complicate the ways cultural memory
is transferred by problematising ideologies of remembering encoded in
the appropriated narrative.
The centrality of memory in Evans’s poetry, in spite of its fragility,
seems to speak to a fundamental misgiving about permanence. In the
constant rewriting and undermining of codes of legitimacy, history and
belonging, Evans exposes the vulnerability of identity constructs; yet
her poetry clings tightly to a remembered, recreated or invented past.
Her migrant status barely registers in her poetry at an explicit level, but
it is implicit in every act of cultural, collective, and personal memory
undertaken in her writing and keeps her poetic imagination bound, very
tightly, to her roots. Her poetry attempts to reinvent a past that is both
impenetrable and yet constantly in the process of reconsideration. The
fluctuations of memory and myth demand persistent renegotiation, par-
ticularly for Martina Evans whose relationship to her hometown, despite
the distance in years, remains integral to her poetics of reinvention.
In pursuit of Line, the poem follows its movement through the city,
an action restaged in the poetic structure itself that stretches the line
from beyond the poem’s boundaries by starting at the title and ending
in that ‘criss-crossed’ heart of the city. The personalised ‘Line’ dissolves
into the multiple ‘lines’ of the poem’s conclusion, thereby gesturing with
a nod to the various traditions of the city.
While the Irish literary tradition is familiar with poets and playwrights
incanting a litany of placenames to invoke their native locations, Bryce’s
subversive recitation is of darker substance. The paraphernalia of a car
bomb is reeled off with the ease and familiarity of a prayer, but these
utterances, while bland on their own, compile a sinister mass. The pre-
cision of the recitation reflects the process of assembling the device:
‘wired, / coiled and crafted together, care / taken over positives and
negatives.’ A suggestion of responsibility and consequence is brought
up by the reference to ‘positives and negatives’ but these remain, finally,
issues of electrical rather than moral imperative.
The representation of the device as a gift over which its creator has
toiled implies the extent to which this society is monstrously misshapen.
In this place, the act of destruction becomes a gesture of creativity, and
devastation bequeaths immortality. The gentleness of the closing stanza
enshrines the disjoint between the depicted act and its inevitable effect.
There is no hint of violence here; only the word flare suggests an explo-
sion, while the reference to ‘under a car in a street’ is subtly represented
3 MEMORY SPACES 129
scratching out his/her final words. The prison wall also calls up the so-
called ‘dirty protests’ that preceded the hunger strikes, reinforcing the
unstated external framework of ‘Form’. Within the poem, form reso-
nates. It becomes the binding goal of the hunger artist’s act as she rev-
els in the steady revelation of smooth lines and perfect contours on the
body.
There is a gentle lilt to the rhyming of ‘by’, ‘sky’, ‘away’ and ‘goodbye’
that allows the act to take place with ease within the poem, and that
rhyme continues into the next stanza: ‘Goodbye, goodbye. / Thin air.
First try. / A crowd hushed, squinting eyes’. The speaker’s marginality is
encoded in her performance that is, essentially, an attempt to refute the
dominant parameters of social behaviour.
In Bryce’s version of her one-off trick’, there is, however, no possibil-
ity of return, no miraculous reappearance. The act of disappearing is irre-
versible, a ‘one-off trick / unique, unequalled since’. There is ‘no proof,
no footage of it’ nor, implicitly, of the woman herself—erasure is the
realisation of the trick’s ambition. Having disappeared, the difficulties of
reappearance are immediately made clear in the final lines of the poem.
Striving if not to undo the performance, then to at least reassert the self,
the speaker reaches from her place above the rope to try to reconnect
with the public she left below. She asks ‘[a]nd what would I tell them
3 MEMORY SPACES 133
our thirties, / [in] this strange pass, / a car wash in Belfast’. The ‘strange
pass’ of the petrol station becomes a kind of portal through which Bryce
realises an alternate space in which her reappearance and her sexuality
are accommodated. The sub-space of the car in the carwash exists both
within and beyond the visible public sphere where all acts are scrutinised
and, once the machine begins, the car itself becomes a private, enclosed
space, a heterotopia, which cannot be observed or invaded.
The heterotopic space, realised here within the car going through the
carwash is, according Foucault’s construction, a ‘counter-site’.75 Highly
localised, it is a space of marginality and alterity that is simultaneously
improvised and actual. The counter-site occupies a physical presence
as well as a space of imaginative disruption; it is ‘a kind of effectively
enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be
found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and
inverted.’76 Society’s norms are reinforced by the association of ‘driving’
with ‘fathers’, but in this heterotopia, that expectation is challenged and
overturned by the female drivers. Requirements are observed (they ‘have
minded / the instructions to wind up / our windows and sit / tight’)
but in obeying the rules, the heterotopia is fully realised rather than
inhibited, granting ‘a wholly unexpected privacy’.
The erotic tincture of the ‘soap suds pouring, no, / cascading in
velvety waves’ brings the poem to its inevitable climax, a private act
snatched in a normally public space. The sentence begins as a plea
to the reader but soon turns its question into a statement. The initial
appeal to a shared sense of human connection is retracted as the narrator
remembers her own outsiderness, even within this temporarily safe zone.
Bryce’s deft phrasing carries the weight of the image’s allusions lightly:
what can we do
but engage in a kiss
3 MEMORY SPACES 135
in a world where to do so
can still stop the traffic.
Self-Portrait in the Dark, 7.
I could drop
here and sleep in my own shape, happily,
as the hare fits
to its form.
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe, 1.
Once again, Bryce delineates her space, in this case into ‘grids’, as the
city is viewed from above in its flawed beauty. The vista gained by dis-
tance is quickly compromised, however, and the passengers’ hopes are
dashed: ‘[a]nd just when you might expect to see / the globe in brilliant
clarity, / cloud fills the tiny screen’. The expectation of insight, or at
least perspective, from afar is not realised, with the result that the poem
acknowledges the cyclical predictability all of life’s endeavours, ‘[W]e …
wait, seatbelts on, / for the world to turn and return to us / as it always
does, sooner or later’. That the plane, and the poem, returns to where
it started, ‘a point marked with the shadow of a plane / … growing /
larger under Irish rain’ suggests that Bryce’s umbilical connection to
Northern Ireland is stronger than she might openly declare. This effort,
indeed every effort, to leave is bound by inevitable return; a trajectory
that is borne out by the development of her poetry.
Bryce’s first three collections are mostly coy on political matters, and
the sectarianism and violence of her youth are almost exclusively averted
to through imagistic and formal references. Her fourth collection, by
contrast, is an explicit engagement with her personal experiences of the
Troubles. The Whole & Rain-domed Universe demonstrates a sense of
responsibility towards the past that Bryce’s poetry carries in personal
lyrics. While Bryce shies away from assuming representative status, her
reconstructions of the past represent personal and familial experiences
on one side of the sectarian divide. The provocative titles of poems in
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe include the colloquial ‘Don’t speak
to the Brits, just pretend they don’t exist’, ‘The Republicans’, and the
ekphrastic ‘Positions Prior to the Arrival of the Military’. One particu-
lar poem with disappearance at its heart is ‘The Search’, subtitled ‘i.m.
Jean McConville’, which conjures a crowd of children searching the sand
for the lost wedding ring of a family member. It is only in the dedica-
tion that the poem’s underlying subject is articulated, but the language
of erasure and irretrievability as well as the familiar imagery of failed digs
definitively locates ‘The Search’.
The fabric of memory, like the material of the couch, is stained by events
absorbed through cultural and collective memories as well as through
individual observation. The interjection—‘Am I making this up? Its
animalness.’—doubts the memory but the repetition of bestial imagery
that characterises Bryce’s depiction of victims of the Trouble asserts its
validity, if not necessarily its truth, through its association.
In returning her poetry to Derry, Bryce configures memory as flawed
and subjective; similar to the map in ‘North to the South’, it is ‘like a
kite, a barely / controllable thing / to be wrestled’. In ‘Re-entering
the Egg’, memory takes on spatial configurations in a grotesque version
of a Fabergé egg that, once opened, reveals overwhelming detail. The
poem’s final lines recoil from the intensities of memory, and demand
that ‘the egg’ of the past be set aside: ‘Close it up. That’s enough for
now.’ Approaching the past through frames that contain and can be set
aside, Bryce engages precautionary modes such as the Fabergé egg or
the snow globe of ‘The theatrical death of my maternal grandmother as
revealed in a 1960s glitter globe’ of The Whole and Rain-domed Universe
and through distancing devices including the hunger artistry of ‘Form’
and the sleight of hand in the eponymous poem of The Full Indian Rope
Trick. She places memory in carefully configured spaces over which the
poet and narrator maintains strict control and there is a furtive, cautious
3 MEMORY SPACES 141
Notes
1. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991
(New York: Penguin Books): p. 12.
2. Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,’ in Arts of the
Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York: Norton, 1972 (2001): p. 13.
3. Bernard O’Donoghue’s collections include The Weakness (London: Faber
& Faber, 1991); Gunpowder (London: Faber & Faber, 1995); Here
Nor There (London: Faber & Faber, 1999); Outliving (London: Faber
& Faber, 2003); Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2008); and
Farmers Cross (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).
4. Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today,’ in Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang,
1972): p. 109.
5. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2008):
p. 81.
6. Iain Twiddy, ‘Visions of reconciliation: Longley, Heaney and the Greeks,’
Irish Studies Review 21, no. 4 (2013); Gerardine Meaney, ‘History Gasps:
Myth in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry,’ in Poetry in Contemporary
Irish Literature ed. Michael Kenneally (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe,
1995).
7. Kuno Meyer, ed. The Voyage of Bran, son of Febal, to the land of the living:
an old Irish saga (1895).
8. Ibid.: p. 32.
9. Angela Bourke explores the sociocultural as well as the etymological sig-
nificance of the word piseog in The Burning of Bridget Cleary, defining it
as ‘malevolent sympathetic magic, when something organic is hidden and
left to rot on another’s land. The belief was widely held, and still prevails
in places, that that person’s well-being would decay as a result’. Angela
Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (London: Penguin, 2001): p. 92.
10. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation: p. 6.
11. Barthes, ‘Myth Today.’
12. George W. DaSent, ‘The Story of Burnt Njal,’ in Icelandic Saga Database
(1861); John Coles, ‘The Story of Hrafnkell, Frey’s Priest,’ ibid. (1882).
13. Andrew McCullough, ‘‘Freyfaxi’: An Introduction,’ Times Literary
Supplement.
142 A. McDAID
74. Ed Madden, ‘Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig
Rooney,’ Éire-Ireland 47, no. 1&2, Earrach/Samhradh /Spring/
Summer (2012): p. 177.
75. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,’
Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité October (1984): pp. 46–49.
76. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’.
77. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose (New York: Library of
America, 1997); Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979.
CHAPTER 4
Wandering Songs
The prospect of reinvention through contact with the ‘living dust’ coun-
ters any construction of migration as disabling—the possibilities of the
city, a shifting repository of memories, motivate the poet. Drawing on a
counter-memory to Delanty and Wall’s emigration inheritance, Clifton
empowers his poetry with the invocative powers of the fourteenth arron-
dissement, ‘[a]ll softness of acacia trees, and plane-trees’ and its role-call
of former residents. Mentioning Beckett, Dali, Giacometti and Althusser,
‘The Fourteenth District’ celebrates the city ‘[w]here the lost-in-space
drop in, the émigrés getting by’.
This ‘remembered’ version of the city is a kind of construct, imagi-
natively reinvented through the city’s reputation as a literary and social
hub between the wars. The community of outsiders complements and
contradicts Clifton’s professed marginality, which his poetry admits is
152 A. McDAID
the product of a certain privilege: ‘True, it takes some luck and a little
money / to set yourself up around here, but it can be done.’ Like other
migrant poets, Clifton is acutely aware of the parallel lives that migra-
tion engenders, and the sliding doors of fortune and fate that determine
one’s path. From amongst his imagined community of writers and art-
ists in the historical fourteenth district, he recognises a moral imperative
to acknowledge other migration experiences. ‘How it might have been,
/ How it might be yet, in the other nineteen districts / Anyone may
guess’. Like Wall’s and Muldoon’s recognition of diverse migrant lives,
Clifton similarly reflects on the diversity of the city and its inhabitants. In
‘Epiphany Cakes’ the speaker ventures into the urban maelstrom:
The familiar Paris of the Latin Quarter is occluded by the exotic and sen-
sual intoxications of the immigrant districts. ‘Billowing steam’ enacts a
sense of gleeful disorientation in the bustling ‘Middle Eastern crowds’
thronging Faubourg Saint-Denis. ‘Epiphany Cakes’ merges the city’s
spheres of existence through the image of the baked treats, which shift
the poem’s focus from its present-day immigration back to its west-
ern lineage. Reaching through cultural memory to a Christian herit-
age, the speaker tries to define for himself some meaning, ‘to see what
it is made of’; however the epiphany cake crumbles, and instead the
speaker reaches to ‘pick up an objet trouvé’. Moving easily between tra-
ditions, the speaker is comfortable in his essential outsiderness, both of
the Christian ritual and the Middle Eastern routine. The poem concludes
with Clifton’s sense of his own purpose as a poet:
communities, that truly transfix his work. The larger context of revo-
lutionary Russia and the Holocaust are alluded to in his poetry, but
Clifton never lays claim to the waves of global and historical crises. This
reluctance to represent surely relates to Gubar’s recognition of anxie-
ties of testimony and witness, while also adverting to Clifton’s deliberate
decision to shun domestic Irish literary expectations in his consciously
European aesthetic.
The question of audience for the migrant poet is complicated,
whether migration is through contrived detachment or unavoidable
circumstance. The persona of Polish novelist Witold Gobrowicz who,
through a series of unfortunate circumstances, found himself effectively
stranded in Argentina upon the outbreak of World War II, agonises over
the question ‘Who am I writing to? in ‘Letter from Buenos Aires’ from
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.10 The latent anxieties of the novelist,
semantically present in the poem’s trailing ellipses, centre on his fear of
being ‘abandoned by history’ in ‘a city of exile …’. Given Clifton’s own
return to Ireland after almost three decades living elsewhere, the poem’s
final lines are pithy:
the dream, but never the realisation, of return. Like a diaspora, for which
the Wandering Jew is an historic symbol, the Wandering Jew’s very exist-
ence is predicated on the impossibility of repatriation. If the Wandering
Jew (or the diaspora) were to simply return, the myth would lose its
potency. The Wandering Jew is always peripheral, on the outskirts of his-
tory and society, even if he manages an approximation of return. In The
Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, the experience of return to Ireland con-
fronts the poet with the actuality and the associations of Ireland that his
ethic of marginalisation deliberately strives to avoid. Through an affective
conflation of the personal and the archetypal, Clifton’s poetic negotia-
tion of return demands a further reinvention of the self and, indeed, of
Ireland as a construct as well as a material, historical and topographical
location. Carrying forward the humanist, universal and European per-
spective of Secular Eden, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass conveys the
protagonist as one of the many ghosts of Secular Eden; belated, periph-
eral, and detached.
The epilogue to The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass sets out in a hazy
scene of ‘Dublin under sea-fog, dreeping weather, / [s]alt air blown
inland …’ that signals its debt to Joyce in the word choice of ‘dreep’.18
‘Dreeping’ features in the Penelope episode—‘he did look like a big
fool dreeping in the rain’—and the journey in Clifton’s poem takes us
deep into the heart of Joyce’s Dublin: ‘The cab turns west / [a]t Brady’s
pharmacy, into the nightlit drizzle / [o]f Harrington Street.’ ‘Dreeping’
evokes the dreary depression of the city streets, its pervasiveness con-
veyed by the present participle form and the elongated doubled vowel.
The streets are vaguely threating, with a Circean quality that intensifies
the unheimlich nature of this nostos: ‘Alive to the danger, in this mon-
key-puzzle / [o]f ancestry’. The figure’s return is enacted under the
city’s watchful eyes, its own ghosts populating the poem’s background.
Molly, Bloom, Stephen and Joyce all lurk in these lines, questioning the
protagonist:
When Clifton declares, just two poems later in Secular Eden, ‘I want to
go back, / [j]ust once, behind all that is Ireland’, he finally articulates
the problematical cultural encoding of ‘Ireland’. Like Sinéad Morrissey’s
attempts to unravel the accumulated associations of the kanji in her
Japanese poems, Clifton is eager to find a mode of addressing Ireland
without finding his words recruited by rhetoric. ‘The Country of Still
Waters’ is an exercise in pushing the language of ‘Ireland’ without invok-
ing Ireland itself, as the poet probes at the borders of shared memory.
Clifton’s resistance to essentialism results in a creative tension between
his poetic impulse to represent and his inclination towards marginality;
by using the technique of belatedness, the poet distils that creative ten-
sion into poetry that prioritises peripherality through existential distance.
Literary, cultural, and anecdotal memory conflate in ‘The Winter
Sleep of Captain Lemass’, which takes the historical figure of Captain
Noel Lemass, who was kidnapped and murdered in July 1923, just two
months after the end of the Civil War during which he had fought on
the Anti-Treaty side. History remembers his younger brother Seán,
who became Taoiseach in 1959, but the passages of time and politics
have mostly forgotten Noel Lemass. His death is memorialised chiefly
through a lonely monument in the Featherbed Mountains where his
body was found, encountered by Beckett’s protaganists in Mercier and
Camier (1988). The erosions of memory over time have already worn
away the facts for Mercier and Camier; trying to find its location, neither
can fully recall: ‘I once knew, said Mercier, but no longer. I once knew
said Camier, I’m almost sure.’25 Lemass’s reputation and even his name
also suffer the trial of time in Beckett’s novel:
His name was Mass, perhaps Massey. No great store was set by him now,
in patriotic circles. It was true he had done little for the cause. But he still
had this monument. All that, and no doubt much more, Mercier and per-
haps Camier had once know, and all forgotten.26
162 A. McDAID
The ‘new front’ expands into space on the page as the stanza breaks
and then recommences with ‘[o]pened’, the possibility of the ‘new’
briefly held in the poem’s pause before it is closed down by the tightly
bound two-syllabled words of the ensuing sentence. The murky events of
post-Civil War Ireland and its hypocrisy burn into the poem in a death-
bed flash of recognition:
4 WANDERING SONGS 163
Your eyes,
Blindfolded, beheld the ideal State
As the real one steadied itself
To annihilate you.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 69.
narrates some of the challenges of return migration for a poet who has
definitively sought to slip the nets of inherited ideologies and stock themes.
The allusive figure of Noel Lemass is used to reach through cultural, col-
lective and literary memory while also positing an apt counterpoint for
Clifton’s own sense of marginalisation and his personal journey of return:
Aspens whispered,
Miles of wheat. Eared silences
Ripened, imperceptibly,
Towards I knew not what.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 41.
whom Goodby refers, Clifton has written of his own sense of detach-
ment from the Troubles, and his recollections stir a measure of resent-
ment at the dominance of the Troubles as poetic subject during that
period.
Always pulling
Alone, to some station
In the middle of nowhere,
Giving it a name,
Exactitudes. A glass
To be rubbed clean.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 134.
The collections under discussion here are the products of Morrissey’s ini-
tial experiences as a migrant from Belfast, firstly to Dublin and Europe as
a student, and later to Japan and New Zealand. The physical and emo-
tional displacements from the material and psychological space of ‘home’
dominate There Was Fire in Vancouver, while Between Here and There is
preoccupied with the experience of otherness. Both volumes are domi-
nated by versions of belonging, and Morrissey’s ethic of marginality is
borne out by her inability to belong, either in her native or adopted cities.
As for many migrant poets, the native space features prominently, if
intermittently, in Morrissey’s poetry, although for Morrissey, home is
continually counterpointed by elsewhere. In addition to the social and
political crises of the Troubles that also frame Colette Bryce’s childhood
in Derry, Morrissey’s unusual upbringing and her familial breakdown
generate an original condition of outsiderness that migration serves to
enhance. Where Harry Clifton finds a community of literary and his-
torical émigrés with whom he ideologically identifies, Morrissey’s poetry
emphasises collective and ritual memory as processes that exclude as well
as cohere. Memory is a balm in Clifton’s poetics of marginality, reassur-
ing the outsider of antecedents, but for Morrissey it is a more volatile
device. The cost of forgetting in a city contingent on its tribal memories
172 A. McDAID
Four days to go until the twelfth and the bonfire is fourteen feet
high.
I want the driver to drive ten times around the diamond.
4 WANDERING SONGS 173
The unexpected splendour of the image collides with the ugly real-
ity of splintered glass raining down on the child’s head, which foresees,
with eerie accuracy, the Holy Cross disputes watched by the world on
television more than five years later.50 The conjunction of private and
political memory, and the way it conflates, is a feature of Northern
Ireland poetry, seen also in Colette Bryce’s poetry of Derry. Both
Morrissey and Bryce perceive a twisted beauty in the debris of vio-
lence that punctuates their recollections of their home-cities. Bryce’s
‘Last Night’s Fires’, with its ‘windscreen / shattered on the ground
like jewels, / diamonds, amethysts, on the school / walk’, picks up the
imagery of Morrissey’s lines. These transmutations of traumatic mem-
ory into something salvageable, even beautiful, are ethical efforts of
reinvention that, although not always successful, nevertheless strive to
elevate beauty over tragedy.
4 WANDERING SONGS 175
Irreverence wanes to sobriety as the poem proceeds, and the final line
implicitly questions the cause by which the hotel is repeatedly targeted.
Morrissey is engrossed by the intractable nature of the situation and in
the associated impossibility of narrating or symbolising such a contested
history. The public face of the North, post-Troubles, is duplicitous, and
when she finds herself acting as a representative, she is similarly unsettled
by her role.
The ironically-titled ‘English Lesson’ addresses the issue of how the past
is manipulated and marketed as a unique selling-point. Performing the
past, she is intoxicated by the spell she can weave with history. Morrissey
is aware she is using suffering for her own ends—as a teaching tool in her
classroom to entertain the students. She is also commenting on the allure
of violence as the subject of poetry, particularly pertinent for a poet from
the North with its tradition of poetry about the Troubles. In ‘English
Lesson’, language begins to break down when it comes to addressing
the detail of violence. Instead of maintaining articulacy, the vocabulary
resorts to comic-book style sound effects and exaggeration. By caus-
ing language to degrade, Morrissey admits her ethical reservations.
176 A. McDAID
The single remnant from the debris of the poet’s childhood is a photo-
graph of her mother in her ‘GDR-worker phase, salient, rehabilitated’.
The photograph operates as a testimony from the past, proof of another
life that existed before the devastation when ‘[o]ur lived-in space /
Became a house of cards’. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
(1981), itself a gesture of grief for a lost mother, Barthes recognises the
inevitable inauthenticity of the photograph: ‘not only is the Photograph
never, in essence, a memory, […] but it actually blocks memory, quickly
becomes a counter-memory’.55 The photograph is an emblem of loss,
because the scene it conveys can never be fully recovered, and it manipu-
lates memory towards inauthentic recollection.
In ‘Hazel Goodwin Morrissey Brown’, the artificiality of the photo-
graph is conveyed through the manner in which it is displayed—like an
artefact, it is exhibited alongside a missive from the most recent episode
in her mother’s life: ‘I’ve hung your smile beside your latest business card:
Nuskin Products. / / Contact address: Titirangi, New Zealand’. These
two versions of reality, the photograph and the business card, suggest fab-
ricated pasts and futures; the company name ‘Nuskin’ homophonically
conjures new skin, suggesting the mother’s desire for reinvention and her
urge to discard the past. The daughter is left behind, scrabbling for secu-
rity as the lines of genealogy are distorted through circles of time. The
parent/child role is inverted as the narrator ‘remembers’ an earlier rein-
carnation: ‘in a previous life / I’d been your mother / / You were my
albino son.’ This past life during the French Revolution is represented as
just as plausible, and as unreachable, as the time spent in their shared and
vanished home. This instance of parallel possibilities is a recurrent trope
in migration poetry, the product of the temporal and ontological disrup-
tions that characterise migration experiences. Similar to the ways Conor
178 A. McDAID
memory and the contents of the drawer are interchangeable. The space of
the drawer bears within itself ‘a kind of aesthetics of hidden things’ but, in
hiding away, the drawer might also be seen to incarcerate as its contents
accumulate.57 By shrinking a life to the precious contents of the drawer,
memory becomes like a priceless ‘Chinese vase … beautiful and brittle as
bone’, too fragile to risk handling.
An entirely contrary approach to living is espoused in ‘Nomad’, the
second poem in the ‘Mercury’ sequence, which juxtaposes the search for
stability with the irretrievability of childhood. Continuing the impetus of
the sequence as a study in memory and dislocation, ‘Nomad’ uses the
metaphor of eternal wandering to reflect upon the poet’s personal expe-
riences of repeated relocation:
*
Sometimes, I picture its lonely sojourn
along the coast of Honshu, facing the Chinese frontier.
And then I’ll picture its return –
Depicting the writer’s block that ensued after her two-year stint living
in Japan and lasted until she eventually returned to Belfast, the epilogue
sets out the image of the voice as independent and self-determining.
Furthermore, the poem proposes a symbiosis between the act of migra-
tion and the loss of her poetic voice that runs contrary to the accepted
notion of travel and exoticism as fuel for the creative process.
‘My voice slipped overboard …’ is located in a typical tourist scenario,
a fishing trip on the Sea of Japan and it juxtaposes the received imagery of
traditional Japan—a boat, the sea, the puffer fish—with the more threat-
ening contemporary presence of ‘a nuclear reactor’. This disjunction
between aesthetic expectations and actual reality, with particular reference
to environmental degradation, becomes a pattern as Morrissey mediates
her experience as both tourist and resident. The exploitative aspect of the
visitor is suggested by the speaker’s activity of fishing: the visitor seeks to
capture a part of Japan for herself and is so consumed by immersing her-
self in her task that she fails to notice her own depletion. Intoxicated by
exoticism, with a ‘flexible throat full of a foreign language / and my atten-
tion on the poison of the puffer fish’, the loss of voice and, implicitly, self
goes unremarked. The poems of the Japanese sequence struggle to rein-
vent the self within a profoundly unfamiliar place, replete with codes and
customs of which the speaker is unaware. Striving to maintain a sense of
identity and a distinctive voice, the speaker of the poems ultimately sub-
mits to the criteria of being elsewhere with its incumbent baggage.
Every act of migration is also an act of attrition and in Between Here
and There the erosion of Morrissey’s poetic voice is a traumatic conse-
quence of her migration. Morrissey has spoken in interview about the
writer’s block she suffered in Japan that continued for a further two years
while living in New Zealand. Upon returning to Belfast, it would be
another twelve months before she finally began to write again—albeit in
a different voice than before.
[Before writer’s block] it would be a matter of listening and then the poem
would just flow onto the page … [T]he voice would be very, very clear.
Since the writer’s block I’ve never had that clear voice … It’s much more
like chiselling away, of something emerging, rather than having a clear direc-
tion at the beginning. There’s much more labour, more craft involved.59
The distinction between the style of the Japan sequence and the other
poems is evident in the collection, which is strategically arranged in
182 A. McDAID
They push beer cans into my hands with red and yellow leaves.
I’m so drunk by the fourth lap round the street
that my students who stand to either side have the faces of leaves[.]
Between Here and There, 48.
The stylised solemnity of the women’s bodily practice ‘refer back inexo-
rably to a pattern of social memories’ to which Morrissey has no access,
and once again, as in Belfast, she is on the periphery of rituals that
denote belonging.68
Given that access to communal memory through ritual is impossible,
Between Here and There turns to alternate ways of reinventing belong-
ing, namely through language. The Japanese written system of kanji,
or characters, is courted by the poet as a potential mode of asserting
herself in the Japanese culture, but like the festival codes, the kanji are
impenetrable. The pictograms encode cultural meaning in their carefully-
drawn line. Memory is encrypted in the way the characters are formed.
The visuality of kanji appeals to the poet’s eye; in ‘Night Drive in Four
Metaphors’ she deconstructs ‘the kanji for centre’ as ‘[t]he eye of an
4 WANDERING SONGS 185
I’ve been inside these letters it seems for years, I’ve drawn them
on paper, palms, steamed mirrors and the side of my face
in my sleep, I’ve waded in sliced lines and crossed boxes.
Between Here and There, 53.
war’ when the route Bashō walked, the Tōkaidō, passed through the
poet’s temporary hometown. Felice Beato’s famous photographs of the
ancient route, taken in the 1860s, provide Morrissey with the imagina-
tive springboard to envisage life before commercialisation, and she takes
solace in this comfortable cultural memory.69
The unsullied power of the looming mountain in the picture belies its
future, while the repetition of an earlier reference to Bashō indicates that
art, as well as nature, is under consideration here. Derek Mahon’s ‘The
Snow Party’ takes its cue from the disconnect between poetry and real-
ity, questioning the role of poetry in the wider context.70 The ‘silence’ of
the snow party in Mahon’s poem drowns out the violence and suffering
of ‘elsewhere’, questioning the privileging of aestheticism over responsi-
bility. The ‘tinkling of china / and tea into china’ overpowers the ‘burn-
ing of witches and heretics’, thereby documenting one version of official
memory while other, more urgent, narratives are left unspoken.
The intertextual memory in Morrissey’s ‘February’ affirms
Lachmann’s assertion that ‘[l]iterature inscribes itself in a memory space
made out of texts, and it sketches out a memory space into which ear-
lier texts are gradually absorbed and transformed’.71 ‘February’ absorbs
Beato’s photographic works while echoing both Bashō’s haiku in
Nagoya— ‘Goodbye now / I go snow viewing / til tumbling over’—and
Mahon’s rendering of Bashō’s visit. The anxiety in ‘February’ is borne
out of the multiple responsibilities of memory; it centres around the
poet’s duty to aestheticism and her sense of accountability to her envi-
ronment. How can the poet prioritise forms of memory, and what is the
impact of this eco-poetical memorialisation on traditional mnemonic
literary memory? Sara Berkeley’s poetry realises and tries to resolve this
conflict between ecopoetic ethos and aesthetic aspiration that results in a
curious (and effective) voiding of memory in her poetry. Morrissey bares
4 WANDERING SONGS 187
The dry clarity of the desert-scape is yang to the yin of her Northern
Irish heritage comprised of ‘bog cotton, coal fires, wild garlic, river dirt’.
Intertwined smells, unique to every household, create ‘slipped givea-
ways of origin’, yet another identifying marker in the complex codes
of belonging that Morrissey’s Belfast upbringing instilled in her con-
sciousness. Unable to remember a community for herself in her native
place, and in the aftermath of the disintegration of her nuclear family,
Morrissey seeks and finds a new way to define herself through the unas-
sailable marker of smell that she and her husband create together.
188 A. McDAID
The low-looming sky and brimming river compress the streets, and
the lines, into a compact, functional space, encouraging an atmosphere
of encroachment and even claustrophobia through the panic-attack phra-
seology of ‘inhaling shop-fronts’ that ‘exhale’, pause,/ inhale again’.
Veering into the personal in the second section, Morrissey addresses
her own relationship with the city; anxieties around authenticity surface
immediately, as the returned emigrant struggles to come to terms with
the aftermath of her wanderings.
Notes
1. Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never
Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
2. Benjamin Keatinge, ‘Responses to the Holocaust in Modern Irish Poetry,’
Estudios Irlandeses 6 (2011).
3. Keatinge, ‘Responses to the Holocaust’: p. 32.
4. Harry Clifton, The Walls of Carthage (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
1977); Office of the Salt Merchant (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1979);
The Liberal Cage (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1988); The Desert
Route: Selected Poems 1973–1988 (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1992);
Night Train Through the Brenner (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1994).
5. Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): p. 190.
6. Sebastian Barry, ‘Introduction,’ in The Inherited Boundaries: Younger Poets
of the Republic of Ireland, ed. Sebastian Barry (Dublin: Dolmen Press,
1986); Harry Clifton, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994–2004 (North
Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 2007).
7. Alberto Manguel, ‘The Exile‘s Library,’ The Guardian, 21 February 2009.
8. Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representations of Memory,’ in Cultural
MemoryStudies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds. Astrid Erll and
Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): p. 334.
4 WANDERING SONGS 193
52. The volume’s title draws attention to the Great Vancouver Fire of 1886
that decimated the Canadian city.
53. Michael Cox, Adrien Guelke and Fiona Stephen, eds., A Farewell to
Arms?: Beyond the Good Friday Agreement, Second Edition (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2006).
54. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern
Ireland 1968–2008 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008): p. 259.
55. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard (Reading: Vintage, 2000 [1981]): p. 91.
56. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964): p. 78.
57. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: p. xxxvii.
58. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism.and
Schizophrenia II, trans. B Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988):
p. 21.
59. Declan Meade, ‘Interview with Sinéad Morrissey,’ The Stinging Fly Winter
2002/3, no. 14 (2002/3).
60. Gillespie, qtd in Irene De Angelis, The Japanese Effect in Contemporary
Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): p. 148.
61. The seventeenth century writer, famous for his poem-punctuated trave-
logue, has repeatedly figured as inspiration and influence in contempo-
rary Irish poetry. Mitsuko Ohno’s interviews with several prominent Irish
poets elucidate the widespread interest in Japanese aesthetics and liter-
ary expression in this cross-section of poets. Mitsuko Ohno, ‘Hokusai,
Basho, Zen and more - Japanese Influences on Irish Poetry,’ Journal
of Irish Studies 17 (2002). See also De Angelis’s The Japanese Effect in
Contemporary Irish Poetry. This later study of the ‘Japanese effect’ per-
ceives variously subtle and significant manifestations of Japanese influence
in Irish poetry, and suggests more profound modes of engagement with
Japanese forms than Ohno’s survey might suggest.
62. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989): p. 40.
63. Lynn Meskill, ‘Memory’s Materiality: Ancestral Presence,
Commemorative Practice and Disjunctive Locales,’ in Archaeologies of
Memory, ed. Ruth M. Van Dyke and Susan E. Alcock (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers Ltd, 2003): p. 40.
64. Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2006): p. 16.
65. Meskill, ‘Memory’s Materiality: Ancestral Presence, Commemorative
Practice and Disjunctive Locales’: p. 40.
66. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies: p. 10; For a
study of the Sheela-na-gig carvings, see Barbara Freitag, Sheela-na-gigs:
Unravelling an Enigma (London: Routledge, 2004).
196 A. McDAID
Technologies of Distance
Disavowals of this sort are the exception rather than the rule in Quinn’s
poetry; in his later collections, he pays little attention to questions of nation-
ality and literary tropes. Like Conor O’Callaghan’s ‘East’ from Seatown
(1999), ‘Ur-Aisling’ is published in Quinn’s debut volume of poetry, and
both poems respond to an obligation to declare an ethical standpoint with
regard to the expectations of Irish poetry. By deflating the bubble of sym-
bolic inheritance, Quinn and O’Callaghan purposefully release themselves
from representative responsibility. This refusal to engage with traditional
modes is independent of (although complimentary to) their positions as
migrant poets; rather, it is a consciously aesthetic decision designed to ena-
ble the kind of innovative poetics developed as their poetry matures.
Quinn’s Fuselage is the product of a 21st-century conviction in the
steady erosion not only of national boundaries but of individual sub-
jectivity. Written in Prague, Quinn’s home city since the early nineties,
Fuselage is inflected by the new republic’s aspiration to membership of
the European Union; Ed Larrissey writes of Quinn’s poetry as represent-
ing ‘a constantly mobile Europe of shifting and merging identities, and
one in which Eastern Europe is fully participant’.6 In other volumes,
Quinn explicitly addresses the changing shapes of Ireland and Prague
within the larger European context, most notably in the ‘Days of the
New Republic’ sequence from The O’o’a’a’ Bird and in Close Quarters
in the sequence entitled ‘Blackrock’, but in Fuselage, the central preoc-
cupation is with the depersonalisation of daily life. The larger acceleration
towards the domination of digital technology at the expense of individual
autonomy is obsessively tracked in Fuselage. Migration and nationality are
outdated concerns for Quinn, superseded by the encroaching technologi-
cal and capitalist systems that Fuselage depicts. There are other Irish poets
writing towards a poetic vocabulary that recognises cyber-spatial as well
as national constructs of existence: Peter Sirr’s Bring Everything (2000)
articulates individual isolation within crushing global connectivity while
Billy Ramsell’s Complicated Pleasures (2007) and The Architect’s Dream of
Winter (2013) take their cues from Quinn’s perception of technogenesis,
as in Ramsell’s ‘Secure Server’: ‘Connect yourself via the posts // in your
face to the system’.7 The ‘depersonalized spaces’ that Keatinge identifies
in ‘The Language of Globalization in Contemporary Irish Poetry’ domi-
nate Quinn’s Fuselage which likewise responds to the ‘impersonal features
of the global technological revolution’.8
The very structure of Fuselage represents this spinning-out into the
unfamiliar territory of an unfolding digital world and forces the reader
5 TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE 201
I had to lie
down on the grass beneath the glinting sun
and feel it in me, as if I had been sown
204 A. McDAID
The lines recall with Vona Groarke’s ‘Away’ (2), and the instinctive
parental longing to ‘touch their silky faces on my screen’ when faced
with her children mediated by technology through the experience of
migration. Where Groarke reaches for her children’s skin through the
screen however, Quinn persists in conflating human and digital into
a new formulation of embodiment. The screen does not approximate
human features—it ‘is flesh’. The collusion and collision between human
and machine in contemporary existence pushes Quinn (and his reader)
to consider the point where conscious embodiment begins and ends. In
206 A. McDAID
Flashes, specks: if not men and women crowding fast in the streets
what are they?
Rather than concluding the litany of human rights abuses, the poem
stages the limited attention span of the blasé consumer in the ellipsis. The
poetic line is distracted by the credit card number, that entwines the con-
sumer into the massive process of production and consumption; swiping
the credit card sees ‘the tiny fibres / / furiously knitting me into the flows,
the circuits, the systems / as data’. Both worker and consumer are elided
in a system of which they are an integral part, a system where ‘figures com-
ing in from Europe and East Asia’ alludes to profit margins and volume of
imports as well as the mass migrations of human beings. The dissolution
of individual and communal concerns in this ‘massive rippling arras of the
world’ speaks to a new kind of migration, in which the movement of prod-
ucts and data are at least as significant as the movement of human beings.
The wide-lens, detached perspective of the opening poems of Part Two
of Fuselage— the ‘billowing array of coloured stitchwork’—shifts to a more
intimate voice in the final poems of Part Two, from ‘Fly into …’ onwards.
Reflecting the entropic ideological qualities of the volume, Quinn offers
another set-within-a-set of poems in the second section of Part Two,
in this case seven sonnets in Onegin or Pushkin form. Fran Brearton
has traced the varieties of sonnets and the investment in formal tech-
niques in Quinn’s work in ‘The ‘nothing-could-be-simpler line’: Form in
Contemporary Irish Poetry’.20 The ease with which he deploys various for-
mal strategies is one of the most distinctive aspects of his poetry. Brearton’s
essay notes the highly stylised approach of Quinn’s generation of poets,
attributing it, to some extent, to the influence of Michael Longley who was
Writing Fellow at Trinity College Dublin when Quinn, Caitríona O’Reilly
and David Wheatley were students. For Quinn, formal variety is truly ena-
bling, permitting his poetry to enter new territories of ideological and
5 TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE 213
The multiplied versions of home for the three brothers suggest the
distance from their shared past that no longer exists. The ‘unmentioned’
reason for the reunion, ‘the legal separation’, has dissolved the final
bond to the irretrievable past with the ‘ancient / family house going on
the market’. As in O’Donoghue’s ‘The Mule Duignan’, the sale of the
family house is a moment of identity rupture, the removal of the site of
memory crucially altering the practice of remembering. In Quinn’s con-
figuration, personal history is sacrificed on the altar of capitalist endeav-
our and memories recede into the abyss of technological representation:
‘Our childhood shrinks, / but flows in coloured hyperlinks.’ The online
webpage of the real estate company now provides the link to the past—
even memories are commodified, offered for consumption to potential
purchasers.
The final poem of the Onegin sequence is a prayer—directly appealing
to a higher power for transcendence. It opens with ‘And, Jesus, get me
out of here’. It is no small irony that the vehicle for transcendence is not
divine intervention but rather an aircraft, not least given the volume’s
preoccupation with globalism, capitalism and displacement. Yet even an
aircraft can provide a secular grace, and the heavenly space aspired to is
an escape from the city and its attendant obligations and impositions.
Here, in fuselage, there is a certain liberation, although within the rigid
confines of the airplane.
Social standings are still encoded within the relative liberty of the
airplane, but the moment of bliss granted in the penultimate lines of
this sonnet is unmatched at any other moment in the entire collection.
‘Exhilaration. / Joy of brightness. Clouds like an ocean.’ While celebra-
tory, the final sentence nevertheless reiterates the inescapable loss of
authenticity that the postmodern world endures. Even the glorious sky
is not itself but rather it is ‘like’ an ocean. Imitation, replication and
assimilation define every interaction in Quinn’s confronting collection.
5 TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE 215
As the poem drifts across the page, it imitates the drift of memory and
imagination which, in O’Callaghan’s poetry, is inexorably drawn back to
some kind of home. The disorientations of migration are related to dis-
tance from the sea; in ‘Inland’, the prairie landscapes are stifling, ‘the air
is chaste, literal’, under the ‘whole afternoon’s glare’. Poetic inspiration
and migrant dislocation merge in the imagined horizons of the poem’s
aspirations:
Some knowledge
you dream, is felt first
ages before it’s known. Take dawn, the way it floods
our curtainless room. Drifting out and in
its wake: petrels, white caps, the tide rolled back to Wales.
Fiction, 23.
The migrant fantasy is deflated in the poem’s final line, simply stat-
ing ‘I wish.’ These disappointments of distance underpin both Fiction
and The Sun King, and O’Callaghan is acutely conscious of the creative
tension which produced by distance: ‘the debt all losses owe to senti-
ment’, as he describes it in ‘Peace’. This sehnsucht is the source of poetry:
‘a grief- / nostalgia some Germanic compound coins / and we don’t
share. A shadow warms to peace. / The heatwave, at its stillest, yearns
a storm.’ It is in these emotional upheavals, the ‘groundless / momen-
tary displacement of hotel lounges’, that O’Callaghan sources his aes-
thetic. Whether as in ‘Time Zones’, where carefully rhymed stanzas are
punctuated by the Wingdings symbol of an airplane, or in ‘The Burbs’
where personal identity is eroded in the way ‘sticks and stones are being
shipped home / surface, piecemeal, with our accents’, the disruptions of
migration dominate Fiction.
The eight-year lapse between the publication of Fiction and The Sun
King brings a new dynamic to bear on O’Callaghan’s mobilisation of
migration as poetic inspiration. An awareness of the possibility of paral-
lel lives, of roads taken and roads left untrodden, brought about by the
realities of migration, inflects O’Callaghan’s poetry and is intensified by
his obsession with technological presence which allows for those multi-
ple identities. Repeat migration, which requires reinvention in a new city
or country on a number of instances, clarifies the manifold varieties of
life available. In the cycle of repeat migration, the migrant can inhabit a
5 TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE 219
certain life for a period: s/he engages in local culture and is immersed in
habits and customs of this particular place. It is an act—the migrant wears
the costume and speaks the lines but is ready to walk off-stage when the
time comes—but it is also alchemy. O’Callaghan inhabits the process in
‘Woodsmoke’ where the purchase of a backyard stove indoctrinates the
speaker into the American way of life. The poem outlines the coping strate-
gies of successful migration: immersion in the strange rituals that mark the
local way of life. Initially, the woodstove is an alien—it ‘hogs the patio … /
looks like some wild creature / in from the sticks to hunt scraps’—but over
time, the speaker comes to take control of the foreign beast by taking own-
ership of the paraphernalia of his new life.
Everyone who tweets has their followers, but the echoes of Christ
gathering his disciples reverberate even more loudly given the deliberate
contextualisation within the Christian calendar. The poem spans a calen-
dar year, as per the poet’s declared intentions, and it is marked as much
by references to the changing seasons of the natural world as to the reli-
gious framework. The ephemerality of nature and weather works in tan-
dem with the fleeting quality of Twitter. This interchange of vocabulary
between natural, technological and religious phenomena increases the
vigour of these energetic lines. Computer controls fail when applied to
the seasons:
Herewith my current credo: all pastoral is virtual, ever was & shall
be, world without end … Boom!
This day of Our Lord I glimpsed into the server room.
The Sun King, 60.
5 TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE 227
The poem wants literally to stop time, and the steady repetition of
the second line’s litany elongates the moment both in and for the poem.
This stanza’s references to poems by W.H. Auden—‘Bucolics’ and the
stopped clock of ‘Funeral Blues’—make explicit the embedded presence
of the older poet in O’Callaghan’s detached and occasionally ironic tone.
As Heaney’s Audenesque succinctly notes
Urging for redemption, this tweet again sees the possibility of sal-
vaged beauty in an urban wasteland. Where Auden’s sequence situates
man in relation to nature, O’Callaghan’s twitter-poem searches for the
human space in a global-capitalist, digital world. Personal devastation is
similarly scoured for potential salvation:
The desire for ‘text’ is enigmatic here; is it the ‘text’ of a phone mes-
sage received whilst asleep? Or perhaps the typeface of an email drawn
up on an azure screen? To wake to ‘text’ is to be open to the redemptive
possibilities of the digital world, while the aspiration for ‘azure’ is the
hope for a clear blue sky as well as a blank computer screen—calm and
unsullied by open windows or icons. The tripled urge for ‘azure’, ‘abso-
lution’, and ‘text’ draw together natural, human, and digital worlds in
a new and necessary configuration that underpins O’Callaghan’s poetic
ethos. These distinct modes of existence jar against each other in this
uneasy tweet—the fundamental human desire for closeness is imagina-
tively at odds with prayers for ‘text’, and yet it is the condition of con-
temporary existence. This constant tug between the abstract and the
actual is key in O’Callaghan’s negotiations throughout The Sun King.
Connection and distance mark the migrant life, as the multiple ties to
various places and cultures show in tweet 4:
Year of the Dragon & red gooseberry lanterns & a prepaid minutes
stall.
My mam IMs all hours: ‘They’re getting northern lights off
Donegal!’
The Sun King, 56.
Funny the way it is that you can confirm ‘friends’ that are virtual
and yet solitude comes exclusively in a form that’s far too real.
The Sun King, 63.
Now not even lonesomeness, they crow, is subject for the muse.
Tell that to crossroads. Tell that to a bullfrog’s mating call in rushes.
Tell that to the blues.
The Sun King, 62.
I love the way a reflection so strong can singe a spot into your field
of vision
like the tiny corona of a frozen lake that you’ve just wizzed on.
The Sun King, 64.
If Joyce is here, so too is Yeats: his recourse to the vocative and his
question ‘[a]re you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?’ echoes in this
tweet. Yeats’s meditation on life, creativity and interconnectivity in
‘Among School Children’ ultimately resolves itself in an appreciation of
the unity of existence. The light emitted by O’Callaghan’s glow-worm
offers a kind of salvation that delivers humanity from the threatening sol-
ipsism represented by technology’s advances. The final stanza celebrates
the spectrum of emotion and rather than concluding the poem, it pauses
on the cusp of something else:
The final articulation of the poem obliges the reader to conclude with
an ‘open mouth’, the shape of ‘the goose-egg symbol of perfection’ of
5 TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE 233
‘perfectly pursed little lips’. Yet again there is solace to be found here,
this time in the pleasing completeness of the poem as spoken word. The
symmetry between the poem’s ultimate celebratory ethos of possibility,
the invocatory ‘o’ sound and the pronunciation of the final stanza enlists
the reader in an oral ovation, and the poem triumphs over the perva-
sive disorientations of technology. For the energetic and innovative way
it bears witness to the changing human experience, ‘The Pearl Works’ is
a poem that is truly contemporary.
In the configurations of global citizenry in O’Callaghan’s poetry,
migration is normative and dislocation inescapable. O’Callaghan’s indi-
vidual migration is subsumed into his poetic responsibility to represent
the actuality of the digital world. While a present and abiding concern,
migration, in itself, is configured neither as cause nor consequence of the
dislocations in his poetry. The dominant ethic in O’Callaghan’s poetry
is not one of responsibility to a defined expatriate or domestic national
group; rather the poetry is committed to representing the shared expe-
rience of a cybernated world that has already proceeded to dissolve
categories of individuality, nationality, and geography. In the way it
merges human experience with digital innovation, O’Callaghan’s poetry
poses new questions for the ways migration will feature in 21st-century
Irish poetry.
Notes
1. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Oxford:
Routledge, 1996): p. 180.
2. Justin Quinn, “Irish Poetry and the Diaspora,” Metre 3 (1997). Metre
published 17 issues between 1995 and 2005. The magazine was known
for its highly formalist ethos, and is fully available now at http://metre.
ff.cuni.cz.
3. Justin Quinn, Fuselage (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2002).
4. Conor O’Callaghan, Fiction (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2005); The
Sun King (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2013).
5. Justin Quinn, The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995);
Privacy (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999); Fuselage (Co. Meath: The
Gallery Press, 2002); Waves and Trees (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
2006); Close Quarters (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2011).
6. Ed Larrissey, ‘Irish Writing and Globalisation,’ in Globalisation and Its
Discontents, edited by Stan Smith (Cambridge: D.S. Breyer, 2006):
p. 131.
234 A. McDAID
7. Peter Sirr, Bring Everything (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
2000); Billy Ramsell, ‘Secure Server’ from The Architect’s Dream of
Winter, (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2013); Complicated Pleasures (Dublin:
Dedalus Press, 2007).
8. Keatinge, Benjamin. ‘The Language of Globalization in Contemporary
Irish Poetry,’ Studi irlandesi. A journal of Irish Studies. no. 4 (2014).
9. Selina Guinness, ‘Atomisation and Embodiment in Justin Quinn’s
Fuselage,’ Wasafiri 25, no. 2 (2010): pp. 36–37.
10. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002): p. 88.
11. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: p. 88.
12. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. John Dryden. www.classics.mit.edu/Ovid/
metam.html.
13. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992): p. 4.
14. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999).
15. Hayles, How We Became Post-Human: p. 104.
16. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, (New York: Scribner, 1996).
17. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar,
Strauss & Giroux, 1983).
18. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1990): p. 212.
19. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose (New York: Library of
America, 1997): pp. 4–5.
20. Fran Brearton, ‘“The Nothing-Could-Be-Simpler Line”: Form in
Contemporary Irish Poetry,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish
Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012): pp. 629–649.
21. Matthew Campbell, ‘Beyond the Jaded Fixities,’ Breac: A Journal of Irish
Studies (2014).
22. Paul Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting,’ Memory Studies 1, no. 1
(2008): p 65.
23. Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting,’: p. 65.
24. Conor O’Callaghan, The History of Rain (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
1993); Conor O’Callaghan, Seatown (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
1999); Conor O’Callaghan, Fiction (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2005).
25. Maria Johnston, ‘Here Comes the Sun King!’ Poetry Matters: Tower Poetry
Reviews, July (2013): p. 1.
26. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities: p. 194.
5 TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE 235
Notes
1. Jens Brockmeier, ‘Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural
Memory,’ Culture Psychology 8, no. 15 (2002): p. 20.
2. Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representations of Memory,’ in Cultural
Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and
Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): p. 334.
240 Conclusion
Primary Texts
Sara Berkeley
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Colette Bryce
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The Whole and Rain-domed Universe. (London: Picador, 2014).
‘Omphalos,’ The Poetry Review 103, No. 3, Autumn (2013).
Harry Clifton
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Office of the Salt Merchant. (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1979).
The Liberal Cage. (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1988).
The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973–1988. (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery
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Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994–2004. (North Carolina: Wake Forest
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Greg Delanty
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Sinéad Morrissey
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Index
N Q
Native American history, 10–12 Queer migration, xvii, 90, 123, 131,
Neumann, Birgit, xx, 153, 237 133–136
New Zealand, 171, 172, 177, 181
Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, xvi, 53, 92
Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, xvi, xxii, 57 R
Nora, Pierre, 20 Ramazani, Jahan, 114
Northern Ireland, xii, xix, 121, 123, Ramsell, Billy, 200
137–141, 167–168, 172–176, Repatriation, 106, 150, 157, 158,
190–191 163
Nünning, Ansgar, xx Rich, Adrienne, 79, 91
Ricoeur, Paul, xxi, xxix
Ritual, 27, 102, 105, 115–119, 152,
O 171–173, 182–185, 209, 219,
O’Brien, Edna, xvii 226
O’Flaherty, Liam, xvii Robinson, Mary, xi, 31–32
O’Grady, Desmond, xxii, 147 Robinson, Tim, 10
O’Loughlin, Michael, xii Rothko, Marc, 16
O’Malley, Ernie, 119–121 Rushdie, Salman, 91
Onegin, 44, 212–214
O’Sullivan, Derry, xxii
O’Toole, Fintan, xv S
O’Toole, Tina, xvii, 131 Sanders, Julie, 92
Ovid, 202–203 Serra, Richard, 6–7, 10
Sirr, Peter, 200
Smyth, Ailbhe, 56
P South America, 34, 168
Papastergiadis, Nikos, 239, 240 Spender, Stephen, 126
Pastoral/post-pastoral, 56–57, 79–84, Stevens, Wallace, 136, 160, 211,
87, 89, 204 225
Pine, Emilie, xx Straub, Jürgen, 110
Pisheogue/piseoga, 92–93
Placenames, 15, 128. See also
dinnseanchas T
Posthumanism, 206, 207 Technogenesis, 200, 206, 208
Postmemory, 169, 170, 194 Technology, 32, 59, 68–70, 89,
Potts, Donna L., 79 196–198, 200, 201, 204, 205,
Prairie poetry, 9–11, 15–18, 39, 60, 215–233
218 Terdiman, Richard, 50
Pratt, Mary Louise, 206 Thoreau, Henry David, 72
Index 265
V Y
Villar-Argáiz, Pilar, xxii, 240 Yeats, W.B., xii, 96, 207, 234