Liquid Labyrinths

Stewart Parker’s play, Northern Star, begins with the character of Henry Joy McCracken reciting his seaborn heritage as a descendant of Huguenots and Covenanters, his mongrel inheritance ‘natural’ to his Belfast birth, the city a port of refuge from ‘the storm of history’. McCracken is remembered now as a United Irishman who was executed for his part in the 1798 rebellion, an insurrection that lingers still in the public consciousness of the city and its past. Northern Star was first performed in 1984 and through it Parker created a space for expressions of identity and place beyond the Troubles; that he did so in metaphors of storms and sea suggests the imaginative depth of the city’s maritime attachments, which form the basis of this chapter’s readings of mid-twentieth-century cultural production in the north of Ireland, including Seamus Deane, Medbh McGuckian, Sinead Morrissey, Glenn Patterson, and Ciaran Carson.

Medbh McGuckian and Ecofeminist Anxiety: “The Contingency of Befalling”

The present article analyses Medbh McGuckian’s “The Contingency of Befalling”, an unpublished poem dealing with present-day climate crisis from an ecofeminist stance. Arguably, the poet is part of the Northern Irish elegiac trend in dealing with issues of her country, but she departs from a male-dominated tradition and connects lament with ethical, political, national, ecological and women’s issues. This poem is related to those in her recent book Marine Cloud Brightening (2019), in which she included mournful poems for both her brother and other Irish poets who passed away in recent times, with special attention to Seamus Heaney. McGuckian’s vision of the situation of the earth and of those living in it is gloomy, and she connects it with hardship, should rulers’ policies remain unchanged.

‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’

The final chapter is concerned with the enormous number of poets that have responded to Casement. Beginning with poetry written by Casement’s close friend and intellectual companion, Eva Gore-Booth, this chapter discusses a range of poetry from throughout the twentieth century. As the chapter illustrates, this poetry depicts Casement in various guises, from the tragic nationalist hero of 1916 in Gore-Booth; to a man wronged and shamed by the British in Yeats’ poems from the late 1930s; to a symbol critiquing regressive U.S. politics and troubled transatlantic relations in Paul Muldoon’s ‘A Clear Signal’. This chapter traces how, throughout the twentieth century, we see poets begin to view the nebulous nature of Casement’s multiple and shifting allegiances as enabling, rather than anxiety inducing, and poets like Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian mobilise Casement as a hopeful symbol of plurality.

The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016

This groundbreaking study explores the literary afterlives of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial son: Roger Casement. A seminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder of a sexual life lived in the shadows, Casement has endured as a symbol of ambivalence and multiplicity. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts, alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialogues between modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost animates issues of historical pertinence and pressing contemporary relevance. It positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrain of Anglo-Irish history.

Rethinking Form (Yet Again) in Contemporary Irish Poetry

This essay provides a reconsideration of the centrality of form in discussions of Irish poetry and suggests ways of revivifying those discussions by moving away from the tired dyad of mainstream lyric and experimental (or alternative or innovative) poetry. Moving through examinations of Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, Sinéad Morrissey, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh, this essay aims to pivot the conversation about Irish poetry so that more attention might be paid to the concrete textures and practices of contemporary poets such that we are better able to see and describe the implications and ramifications of their work.

Medbh McGuckian

Medbh McGuckian (born Maeve McCaughan on 12 August 1950) is one of the most prominent members of the second generation of poets who emerged from Northern Ireland during the course of the Troubles (an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century). Her work is often considered alongside that of her Northern Irish contemporaries Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin. After receiving her secondary education at a Dominican convent, she studied for an English degree at Queen’s University Belfast (1968–1972). She was taught, along with fellow students Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby, by Seamus Heaney. She received her Master of Arts (MA) degree from the same university in 1974. Her first poem, “Marriage,” was published in The Honest Ulsterman in 1975 and, under the pseudonym “Jean Fisher,” she won the National Poetry Competition in 1979 for her poem “The Flitting.” She published two chapbooks in 1980, Portrait of Joanna and Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems, and she received an Eric Gregory Award in the same year. Her first full collection, The Flower Master, was published by Oxford University Press in 1982. Since then she has produced over a dozen single-authored collections of poetry, as well as chapbooks, anthologies, collaborations, translations, and prose works. Her collections of poetry include Venus and The Rain (1984), Marconi’s Cottage (1991), Captain Lavender (1994) and, most recently, Love, The Magician (2018). She was the first woman to hold the post of writer in residence at Queen’s University Belfast (1985–1988) and she has also held a visiting writer position at the University of California, Berkeley (1991). Her early work is notable for its focus on the female body and femininity and, while not relinquishing these, she has turned toward increasingly explicitly political themes since the mid-1990s. The reception of her work has been complicated by two distinguishing divergences from typical practice. The first is the variance of her compositional techniques from that of most of her contemporaries. She frequently employs a collagistic approach, often constructing her poems by combining lines from source material. Several critics (notably Clair Wills and Shane Alcobia-Murphy) have strenuously defended her from the potential accusations of plagiarism that might arise from this practice, focusing instead on the alchemical potential of her techniques of selection and combination. McGuckian’s admirers have drawn attention to the ways in which the words of others are reborn and given new identities and meanings in her poetry. McGuckian has also joined defenders of her work, notably Shane Alcobia-Murphy, in asking why male authors who have engaged in similar practices have not been subjected to the same scrutiny as she has. The sometimes divergent answers that she has given in her many interviews with critics have conditioned the reception of her work. Unsympathetic responses to her strange, discontinuous poems started to appear in the early 1980s and continue in the early 21st century. However, despite the necessity of, at times, challenging routes to its appreciation, her poetry has been widely praised and recognized as well, with several critics hailing her as a major contemporary voice in Irish poetry.