Ambivalent Déjà-vu: World War II in the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles

This article addresses how the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles enters into a dialogue with the memory of World War II. Poems by Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Sinéad Morrissey are analysed, showing how World War II is a controversial source of comparison for these poets. While World War II provides important ways of framing the suffering and claustrophobia of the Northern Irish conflict, evident differences also mean that such comparisons are handled warily and with some irony. The poems are highly self-conscious utterances that seek to unsettle and develop generic strategies in the light of traumatic suffering. This essay draws on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, and it also makes use of Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory in order to highlight how Seamus Heaney in particular makes use of the World War II memories mediated by popular culture to respond to the Troubles.

Elegies for Ireland

This chapter investigates the reception of Roman elegy in the work of W. B. Yeats and Michael Longley, a continuum that brings to light both the constant presence and changing shape of classical reception in the century since the 1916 Rising. Ezra Pound’s anti-imperialist reading of Propertius mediates this reception for the Irish poets, but whereas Yeats takes a similarly partisan and anti-imperial line, albeit blended with his personal affairs, Longley’s approach is more ecumenical, albeit interwoven with the Troubles of his native Northern Ireland. As a genre born in civil war, but which views the world through an erotic lens, elegy is found to give Longley the lyrical form for his anti-war appropriation of epic. His versions of Tibullus and Sulpicia also expose cycles of brutality and the imbrication of public and domestic violence. Longley thus offers a more pacific model of the elegiac woman than Yeats’s revolutionary muse.

Paul Muldoon em tradução

Paul Muldoon (1951 ”“ ) é um poeta norte-irlandês de origem católica nascido em Portdown, condado de Armagh. Integrou junto a Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley e Ciaran Carson, dentre outros, o chamado Belfast Group, organizado por Philip Hobsbaum. Publicou seu primeiro livro, New Weather, em 1973. Desde então, já publicou mais doze coletâneas de poemas, sendo a mais recente Frolic and Detour, em 2019. Além disso, já publicou literatura infantil, libretos de ópera, coletâneas de letras de música e peças de teatro. Já foi premiado com o T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry por The Annals of Chile (1994) e o Pulitzer Prize for Poetry por Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). Mudou-se para os Estados Unidos em 1987, onde foi professor do curso de escrita criativa na Universidade de Princeton até 2017 e foi, até 2016, editor de poesia da revista The New Yorker. As traduções a seguir integram o apêndice da dissertação “Uma Camisa de Força para Houdini: Paul Muldoon, Forma Fixa e Tradução”, defendida em fevereiro de 2020 na UFPR.

Michael Longley and Birds

The following essay attempts to shed some light on Michael Longley’s poems about birds, which form a fairly complicated network of mutual enhancements and cross-references. Some of them are purely descriptive lyrics. Such poems are likely to have the name of a given species or a specific individual representative of that species in the title. Others make references to birds or use them for their own agenda, which often transcends the parameters of pure description. Sometimes birds perform an evocative function (“Snow Geese”), prompt the poet to explore the murky mysteries of iniquity (“The Goose”), judge human affairs from the avian vantage (“Aftermath”), or raise ecological problems (“Kestrel”). Most of the time, however, Longley is careful not to intrude upon their baffling otherness. Many of his bird poems are suffused with an aura of subtle yet suggestive eroticism, a conflation of the avian and the amorous.