Human Rights, Posthuman Ethics, and the Material Aesthetics of Flight in Contemporary Irish Poetry

This article examines a series of poems by Irish authors, and focuses on their engagement with human rights violations and conflicts through the metaphors and imagery of flight and the aerial view. It argues that these poems address the need for a shift away from the perspective of a defined, distinct human subject, and towards a posthumanist framework which emphasizes relational, situated, and embodied ethics and aesthetics in an interconnected world. Since the introduction of modern aviation, Irish poets have frequently employed the imagery of flying to consider poetry's role in relation to conflict and crisis. Here, the adoption of visual and material metaphors of flight and aerial travel in human rights contexts is discussed, particularly in poems by Seamus Heaney, Peter Sirr and Justin Quinn. Through a reimagined poetics of flight, these poets question established dichotomies between proximity and distance, and material embodiment and disembodied abstraction.

By Way of Old Petersburg: Desmond O’Grady and Russian Poetry

The article takes on a direction which has great potential for further studies of contemporary Irish poetry: studying the work of Irish poets through their relation to Russian literature. It focuses on the reception and reimagining of Russian poetry in the work of Desmond O’Grady, one of the leading figures in Irish poetry, who started writing in mid-1950s. The article studies three poems by O’Grady which are addressed to his Russian counterparts: “Missing Andrei Voznesensky,” “Joseph Brodsky Visits Kinsale,” and “My City,” a translation from Anna Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero.” None of these poems has yet been subject of thorough critical analysis. Each of the poems has become a signpost on O’Grady’s poetic map and an important element of his own “private mythology.” When analysed in the wider context of Irish poetry, they help form a clearer picture of the influence Russian literature has had on contemporary Irish poets.

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.

“It Isn’t Race or Nation Governs Movement”: New Writers’ Press and the Transnational Scope of Irish Experimental Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s

In this paper, I seek to contribute to the resurrection from critical obscurity of an overlooked tradition in contemporary Irish poetry: namely, that of small-press poetic experimentalism. Taking as a case study the Dublin-based New Writers’ Press (NWP, established 1967), I will interrogate the absence of virtually any mention of small Irish experimental presses in critical narratives of late modernist poetry of the British Isles in the 1960s and 1970s. By using an array of insights gleaned from the many letters, typescripts and other ephemera in the NWP archive housed at the National Library of Ireland, such absences in scholarship are explored in the context of what the press’ founding editors faced in navigating the small Irish poetry market of the mid-twentieth century. Through this archival lens, the reasons why a cohesive avant-garde network of British and Irish poetic experimentalists never materialised are analysed, and an argument for how Irish poetic experiments of the last half century have not received anywhere near the same degree of critical attention as those of their British counterparts will emerge. In the first half of this paper, I focus on the Irish commercial poetry scene in the 1950s and 1960s, ultimately illustrating how narrow and competitive it was in comparison to the British market, as well as the peculiar individual context of an Irish campus magazine, Trinity College’s Icarus (1950-). This will in turn suggest that the absence of presses such as NWP from critical accounts of late modernist poetic experimentalism may well be due to editorial decisions made by those Irish presses themselves. In the second half of this paper, I foreground some important archival evidence to review a number of instances in NWP’s history in which it comes close to forging alliances with presses within the more cohesive British experimental scene, though it never manages to do so. Drawing on this evidence, I present an archival basis for counterarguments to the possible conclusion that the responsibility for the general absence of Irish presses from narratives of small-press experimentalism lies with those Irish presses themselves.

Pondering from Celia de Fréne's Works: Literary Genres and Sexual Gender at Stake

How can we go beyond historically constructed gender differences, as we read literary genres in the contemporary Irish context? In order to start finding responses to these questions, we aim at looking into how selves are constructed and identities represented as we read Celia de Fréine’s works. Indeed, concepts of identity in postmodernity, represented selves and literary genres, particularly related to the recent Irish literary context are fundamental points of convergence in the understanding of feminisms and literature today. Therefore, this article intends to show how fixed concepts of gender identity and literary genres are, in fact, unstable in contemporaneity. The paralleled, theoretical notions (of gender and genres) matter in the Irish context, because, apart from a few exceptions, women have been excluded from the public literary scene and many of the poets that appeared after the 1970’s account for their condition as women in a patriarchal society. Moreover, it matters due to the proximity of both cases’ unstable condition in our times.Keywords: Contemporary Irish poetry; literary genres; gender; contemporaneity.

Stolen Landscapes

This chapter shows how contemporary Irish poetry grapples with the politicized history of place, from the unfinished “ghost estates” to the recent monetization of water and the converted hotels used to keep asylum seekers in perpetual limbo. Readings of Irish poetry by Paula Meehan, Mary O’Malley, Seamus Heaney, and Sarah Clancy argue that the landscapes of contemporary Irish poetry are the indices of dispossession. The chapter then takes up poetic forms of the “block” and the “grid” to look more closely at the dispossessions produced by financialized capitalism, using as case studies British poet Keston Sutherland's Odes to TL61P (2013) and US poet Anne Boyer's "The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock" (2015). Finally, I turn to the literal displacement of forced migration, as well as its feminization and racialization, by reading the Iraqi poet Manal Al-Sheikh's prose poems.

“Soldier Dolls, Little Adulteresses, Poor Scapegoats, Betraying Sisters and Perfect Meat”: The Gender of the Early Phase of the Troubles and the Politics of Punishments against Women in Contemporary Irish Poetry

This paper examines the literary representation of the beginnings of the Northern Irish Troubles with regard to a gender variable (women’s roles and functions ascribed to them, mostly punitively, by men ), in the selected poems by Heaney, Durcan, Boland, Meehan and Morrissey. The reading of Heaney’s “Punishment” will attempt to focus not solely on the poem’s repeatedly criticized misogyny but on analyzing it in a broader, historical context of the North’s conflict. In Durcan’s case, his prominent nationalist descent or his declared contempt for any form of paramilitary terrorism (including the IRA) do not seem to prevent him entirely from immortalizing female victims of the Troubles. Boland’s attitude seems the most unequivocal: the clear aversion to the language of death and rendering Irish women’s experiences (and children’s) in this discourse. The article concludes with analysis of Meehan’s “Southern” guilt for the situation of Catholics in the North with the simultaneous critique of perpetrated violence and Morrissey’s complicated standpoint: atheist/neutral/Protestant/communist and her striving for the impossible impartiality in a war-ridden and politically divided country. Trying to avoid systemic victimization of Irish women, the paper intends to analyze the historical and political circumstances which made them more susceptible to various forms of attacks at the beginnings of the Troubles, as reflected in the titular labels.