Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry [1st ed.] 9783030559533, 9783030559540

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry Daniela Theinová

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

Series Editors Claire A. Culleton Department of English Kent State University Kent, OH, USA Kelly Matthews Department of English Framingham State University Framingham, MA, USA

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness and works that investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American culture, among other things, have not only inspired but affected recent scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature. The series’s focus on Irish and Irish American literature and culture contributes to our twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans, and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14747

Daniela Theinová

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry

Daniela Theinová Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Faculty of Arts Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature ISBN 978-3-030-55953-3 ISBN 978-3-030-55954-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Donal Murphy Photography/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Karel & Daniel

Acknowledgements

While writing this book, I have received generous help and intellectual gifts from many people and it is my pleasure to acknowledge them here. My thanks are due to Máirín Nic Eoin, Máire Ní Annracháin, Brian Ó Conchubhair, Rióna Ní Fhrighil, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Tríona Ní Shíocháin, David Wheatley and Justin Quinn for sharing their own texts and translations, and to Pádraigín Riggs, Irene Gilsenan Nordin, Pádraig Ó Liatháin, Sarah McKibben and Michaela Marková for helping me to obtain materials and sources essential to my research. I am indebted to Irish-speaking friends and colleagues, Radvan Markus, Ken Ó Donnchú and Síle Ní Bhroin for the much-needed linguistic consultation, and to my students, present and past, for their insightful comments about some of the works I discuss. My greatest debts are to Justin Quinn who was the supervisor of the thesis from which this study emerged and whose example as a critic, writer, translator and teacher has been an immense inspiration to me. I am greatly indebted to Matthew Campbell for his valuable criticism and for pinpointing traits worth following in the original text. I would also like to thank Martin Procházka and Ondˇrej Pilný who both provided helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues at the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University in Prague, Clare Wallace, Ondˇrej Pilný, Radvan Markus and James Little, for their encouragement and stimulating conversation and to Brian Ó Conchubhair at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, whose

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friendship and wise advice I treasure dearly. Finally, I wish to thank Mícheál Mac Craith for drawing my attention to some of the poets and works, and for opening up the world of Irish-language poetry to me many years ago. At Palgrave Macmillan, I was initially in contact with Tomas René, the former Commissioning Editor for Literature and Theatre & Performance, who showed faith in the project and found two sensitive readers whom I would like to thank for their generous feedback and immensely stimulating reports. I am grateful to the series editors of New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, Kelly Matthews and Claire A. Culleton, for accepting the manuscript into their series, and I thank the editors for Literature and Theatre & Performance, Vicky Bates and Eileen Srebernik, for taking the book through the final stages of the commissioning process, and the editorial assistants Jack Heeney and Rachel Jacobe for all their help and very useful advice. My thanks also go to Linda Jayne Turner for reading and carefully copy-editing the manuscript. Most of all, I am grateful to Karel whose love and brilliant humour have sustained me through this and every other project and to Daniel who was born around the time the idea for this project was conceived. This book is dedicated to them. Parts of this research have previously been published as “‘Letting in the Light of Laughter’: Traditional Iconic Images of the Feminized Land in the Hands of Contemporary Poets,” in The Politics of Irish Writing (Prague: Centre for Irish Studies, Charles University, 2010), “‘My Dream Sister’: Irish Women Poets Deconstructing the Muse,” in Boundary Crossings: New Scholarship in Irish Studies (Prague: Centre for Irish Studies, 2012) and as “Original in Translation: The Poetry of Aifric Mac Aodha,” in Post-Ireland?: Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry (edited by Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair; Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2017). I am extremely grateful to Biddy Jenkinson for her kind permission to include my English translations of her poems in the study. In April 2020, after the manuscript has been accepted for publication by Palgrave Macmillan, Eavan Boland sadly passed away. This book discusses the poet’s central role in the development of anglophone Irish poetry over the past fifty years and is dedicated to her memory.

Contents

1

Introduction: Uncertain Identities Women on the Margin Women and Languages Works Cited

1 4 11 26

Part I New Lands for New Words 2

3

Revolutionary Laughter: Irish Poets Dismantling Old Icons and Shibboleths Irish Mothers: Eavan Boland and Vona Groarke Chilling Apparitions: Biddy Jenkinson and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Works Cited Figures in a Landscape: Women on Language, Land and Desire Ironic Inversions: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian Shifting Soil: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Eavan Boland Works Cited

41 42 52 68

73 74 84 97

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CONTENTS

Part II 4

5

6

7

8

Secret Scripts

The Muse in Question: Tropes of Inspiration Revisited Radical Reticence: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Paula Meehan All Is Muse: Medbh McGuckian and Biddy Jenkinson Works Cited Poetry of Silence: Rhetorical Concealment and the Possibility of Speech Sounding Gestures: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Caitríona O’Reilly Thinning the Muse: Caitríona O’Reilly and Vona Groarke Works Cited

107 110 119 133

137 139 147 159

Kinds of Between: The Margin as a Mainspring Woman at a Window: Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Ghosts and Bodies: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian and Vona Groarke Works Cited

163

Original in Translation: Poets Between Languages Irish as the Source and Target: Aifric Mac Aodha Reinventing the Language: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Eavan Boland Works Cited

189 190

In and Out of Ireland: New Poets and New Places Words as Things Worth Knowing: Sinéad Morrissey Translating Home: Ailbhe Darcy Works Cited

219 221 232 245

165 172 186

199 216

CONTENTS

9

Conclusion: Feminism After Poetry Works Cited

xi

247 254

Selected Bibliography

255

Index

271

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Uncertain Identities

The close of James Joyce’s Dubliners strikes a conciliatory note as Gabriel Conroy sleepily watches the snowflakes, his eyes filled with “generous tears” of recognition: “snow was general all over Ireland . . . His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”1 The sense of integrity and belonging, previously lost in the turmoil of the night, is restored in the image of the snow enfolding the island and levelling off its edges. It mitigates the negatively defined identity to which Gabriel was driven in frustration upon being accused of “West-Britonism”: “O, to tell you the truth . . . I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!”2 Taken aback by how easily his assiduous cosmopolitanism could turn into a vehement denial of everything Irish, including the language, he polarised his after-dinner speech with the ostensible opposition between the tradition of “genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality” and the “hypereducated” young generation that threatens to destroy the latter with its obdurate republicanism.3 Not only does Gabriel’s dilated consciousness and puzzling wave of panoptic nationalism in the closing paragraph round off the story of his own emotional upheaval but it is intended to be an atoning appendix to the rest of the book. In a letter in 1906, Joyce remarked: “Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attractions © The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_1

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of the city.”4 A year later, “The Dead” was written to make up for that harshness. Beneath the peaceful resolution, however, newly apprehended tensions are lurking; Gabriel’s serenity becomes an illusion when we look away from the surface evened out by the snow. As is revealed during the lancers with Miss Ivors, his sense of identity and self-possession are only maintained with a conscious effort. Pieced together, the various challenges to his will and resolution that come up in the story form its leitmotif. As she abandons the scene laughing and bidding him goodbye in Irish, the committed girl leaves a trace of self-doubt in Gabriel. But the radical Molly Ivors is not the only one stirring up disturbing emotions. Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, undergoing a series of transformations, repeatedly forces him to question his role and attitude. As he waits for her to join him after the party, he wonders “what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of.”5 Imagining himself to be a painter, he promptly adapts to the situation, aware that fixing her in that aesthetic posture is the only way he can deal with her elusiveness. Still, the seed of desire has been sown and the sequel becomes an account of Gabriel’s sexual and emotional disappointment, with Gretta receding further west, lost in her memories of a one-time sweetheart. As he observes her transformation from a desired spouse into an allegory— first a Spéirbhean, a beautiful young figuration of Ireland, and then an old hag or Cailleach—Gabriel finds an answer to his earlier question, discovering the source of the distant music that has triggered and accompanied the uncontrollable sequence of changes. For a moment, seized by an indefinite terror, he imagines some “impalpable and vindictive being . . . coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.”6 Indeed, this terrifying being is Gretta as his unknowable other, as the symbol of death itself, and the personification of Éire claiming the lives of young Irishmen for her cause. Gabriel, empty-handed, resembles a poet-admirer from the Gaelic vision poetry tradition (with a message from the now sleeping motherland figure to ponder), and also a West Briton—the subaltern Irishman who begrudges his wife her rural western origin (to Miss Ivors he pretended that it was just “her people” who were from Connacht).7 Like Molly Ivors, whose name and elusiveness are prefigurings of Eileen and the meditations on Tower of Ivory in A Portrait of the

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Artist as a Young Man, Gabriel’s bifurcated identity foreshadows the conflicted identity and troubled sense of belonging that characterises Stephen Dedalus. In foregrounding a self that “was fading out into a grey impalpable world” just as “the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling,”8 “The Dead” not only concludes Dubliners but also paves the way for A Portrait and the theme of fissured national awareness that figures throughout Joyce’s work. It is not that Gabriel would have accepted as his own the republican ideals of Miss Ivors or come to terms with the threatening reminder of Ireland’s “uncivilised” past in Gretta’s origin as a “county cute.”9 Rather, positioned by the window as the imaginary borderline between Angloand -Irish, between the living present and the pull of the dead past, he finds reassurance by acknowledging the impossibility of a cosy, readymade identity and the beneficial yet also disruptive tensions pertaining to that cleft. As Jacques Derrida writes about his Franco-Maghrebian origin in Monolingualism of the Other, identity, however split or tangled, is never a given and can only be “promised or claimed.” According to Derrida, “[t]he silence of that hyphen does not pacify or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture. It will never silence their memory.”10 The same silent echo resounds in Joyce’s story, most strikingly in the final image of “the snow falling faintly . . . and faintly falling” through the universe.11 The use of this phrase and its inverted form contradicts the connotations of smoothness and repose carried by the snowfall and suggests oscillation. It speaks of the eternal crossings on the threshold between within and without, between west of England and west of Dublin, the living and the dead, between the fringe of the Gaeltacht (a primarily Irish-speaking region, mostly located on the western seaboard of Ireland) and the pale of the anglicised capital. Indeed, in pointing to the contradictions between the pragmatic city and the romantic rural west (including the obvious linguistic connotations), between the proximity of the inaccessible past and the slipperiness of the present, Joyce’s “The Dead” reflects the complexities of Irish political history and the ongoing sense of identity crisis shared by many anglophone and Irish-language writers of the twentieth century.12

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Women on the Margin The experience of being torn apart by multiple affiliations and simultaneously left out on all sides informs the writing of a number of Irish authors of the time when Ireland was striving for an independent cultural, political and linguistic identity. Yet the competing allegiances and antagonistic concepts that Paul Muldoon sums up as “the violent juxtaposition of the concepts of ‘Ireland’ and ‘I,’”13 were still constitutive to the Irish cultural imagination during the final third of the last century and the first decade of the new millennium, the main period covered by the present study. My project aims to show how this motif of cleft cultural and linguistic identity, linked with the concepts of transience and reversibility, features in poetry by Irish women of the time. While I account for the significance of the hyphen for the Anglo-Irish as well as the Irish-language poets, it is not only across the linguistic divide that contradictory tensions are traced. Diachronic in its overall approach, this study also explores the transition by women from the role of poetic subject to that of the subject of poetry and focuses on the shift from the phase in Irish poetry informed by feminist thinking to the next phase which, although clearly defined by the achievements of literary feminism, has abandoned its rhetoric and much of its original agenda. Between the 1970s and the late ’90s, the Irish poetry scene was entered by a growing number of women whose writing engaged, in various ways, with the contemporaneous feminist discourses. In keeping with the emphasis of second-wave feminism on the individual, these poets searched for an authentic expression of their individual autonomy,14 defined mostly against the backdrop of the prevailing masculinist discourse and the restricting images of femininity in the male tradition and in the public mind. Also, in keeping with literary feminism’s view of women’s writing as an experience—a private or intimate and sometimes non-rational experience—they sought to offer expressions of reality not previously addressed in Irish poetry. “Feminism” and “feminist literature,” of course, are not monolithic categories. Pointing to the difficulty of finding a sound definition of the latter, Rita Felski identifies two basic characteristics of feminist analysis: the first is the proposal of “distinctive female consciousness or experience of reality as the legitimation for a feminist aesthetic,” and the second is “linguistically-based” and “appeals to a notion of the ‘feminine,’ construed as a disruption or transgression of a phallocentric symbolic

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order.”15 Both these approaches are relevant in relation to Irish women’s poetry from the aforementioned period. It is to be pointed out that the character of feminist engagement and resistance varies considerably among the exponents of the generation born between the early 1940s and mid-’50s, including Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian and Paula Meehan. Yet, although some of these women occasionally refuse to be categorised as “feminist poets,” it has been customary to consider the poetry by Irish women from the last three decades of the twentieth century according to criteria of literary feminism and women’s writing. Even though feminist-related issues by no means lost their urgency with the turn of the millennium, that phase in Irish poetry ended with women gaining a stable position on the literary scene and with the access of a new generation of strong female voices in the late 1990s and the first decade of this century, including Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Sinéad Morrissey, Aifric Mac Aodha and Ailbhe Darcy. Their poetry, albeit occasionally informed by feminist thematics, generally (and sometimes emphatically) eludes the category of “women’s writing” and is best described, in this context, as “post-feminist.” As will be seen in the following chapters, where I intentionally juxtapose poets from both groups, there are many common themes and outlooks, just as there are some borderline cases—such as the Irish-language poet Biddy Jenkinson who, although chronologically a member of the first group, has only sporadically resorted to feminist rhetoric, and then mostly with the aim of drawing attention to the haphazardness and ultimate irrelevance of gender divisions in poetry. Above all, however, there are a number of distinct poetics and discrete identities that this study aims to document.16 Throughout the book, the tensions between variously defined, often opposing positions are shown as stimulating rather than destructive. In the works discussed, the poets occupy an ambiguous border zone where they are able to reflect on the formation of their identity as writing subjects. Derrida’s proposition that, in any culture, identity never exists but has to be achieved, together with the fundamentally unfinished position of the speaking “I,”17 has special relevance for Irish poetry: due to Ireland’s cultural history and the much-debated politicised concept of the “national language,”18 “Irish poetry” is an inherently equivocal concept that defies the singular. In the broadest terms, my argument is that the hyphenated cultural perspective, delineated above with reference to Joyce, frequently figures in poetry by women in contemporary and

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near-contemporary Ireland, as Irish marginalisation is replicated in Irish women’s marginalisation within the literary canon. Although the days when poetry originated from the centre of power— as in Augustan Rome or Celtic Ireland—are long gone, the status of the poet in society has often been associated with exclusivity. Whether a prominent or a marginal figure, the poet is credited with a special understanding and superior command of words and thus with the capacity to name and help others realise what they know about the world and themselves. This idea of the universal relevance of poetry, however, is in sharp contrast with its inherent inwardness and peculiarity, and with the image of the poet as a loner standing apart. As Muldoon argues, Irish writers have for a long time tended to locate themselves between the concepts of the self and nationality, in order to either accommodate the two or to insist on their incongruity, often attempting both simultaneously. It is, he suggests, “as if they feel obliged to extend the notion of being a ‘medium’ to becoming a ‘mediator.’”19 In this sense, the historical marginality of women should not be seen simply as a drawback but rather as a characteristic that relates to the traditionally dual role of the poet in a community and is shared by Irish poets in general. I will examine in particular how women have used their former position in their poetry, transforming the margin into a productive threshold. If, until the final two decades of the twentieth century, women had been peripheral figures in most poetic traditions, many construed their minor role as a form of resistance. Despite their unchallenged status in the American and modern poetry canon, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop all preferred obscurity, or even insignificance, as a way of maintaining their creative and epistemological independence. Their main concern was not to introduce feminine subject matter but to maintain the referential and formal idiosyncrasy of their poems. I use the examples of Dickinson, Moore and Bishop intentionally to indicate how far some of the Irish women poets have looked for inspiration. Yet their determination to keep poetry’s inner conflicts alive would, of course, be shared by many poets elsewhere, both female and male, for it is the borderline status of poetry that helps individual poems shun the unifying requirements of a genre, trend or culture. Eavan Boland aphoristically noted that “years of marginality suggest . . . the real potential of subversion.”20 It is useful, I think, to revise her remark by removing it from the usual associations with the strategic modesty that helped women reach the centre of the literary forum, and to examine

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instead the implications of the margin itself—not only as a key complaint and limiting factor but as a fundamental enabling metaphor. The essential marginality of the poet’s position resembles the prolonged state of transitory identity of monks or exiles and is conveniently viewed through the concept of the liminal.21 In anthropology, the liminal (from Latin l¯ımen, a threshold) refers to the temporary phase in social rituals when the previous structuring of identity has been shed while no new stage has been achieved. Typically, it is deemed to have spatial as well as temporal relevance.22 Victor Turner defines the liminal as follows: “an interfacial region or . . . an interval . . . of margin or limen, when the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in balance.”23 I use this concept to follow the variable forms of the fundamentally hyphenated, ever-emerging identity that inform many of the poems discussed and that are of particular relevance in terms of the speaking “I” formation. I also argue that various thematic expressions of the liminal often occur in poems that engage with questions of inspiration or address the uneasy—often politicised—issues of linguistic identity and poetic translation. Entering the literary scene in unprecedented numbers in the last three decades of the last century, women poets such as Ní Chuilleanáin, Boland, Meehan, Jenkinson and Ní Dhomhnaill in the Republic of Ireland and McGuckian in Northern Ireland turned it into an open, or even transitory, space marked by the element of change. Their advance and recognition were facilitated by the existence of a number of feminist presses such as Arlen House, Attic Press and, later, Salmon Poetry, set up in the Republic of Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s. Yet many of the poets born in the two mid-century decades quickly established themselves as authors with other prominent publishers in Ireland and abroad.24 They thus contributed to “Irish women’s poetry” becoming an internationally acclaimed category. My point, however, is not that by accessing and transforming the platform these poets have replaced or trumped their established male counterparts but that—precisely by referring to the margin as a powerful, viable motif—they have adopted and reinforced the Irish poet’s inherent role as a mediator interposed between multiple identifications. As Laura O’Connor notes of the pale–fringe interface, “it entails a double movement of polarization and interaction.”25 Perceived and used in this way, the enlivening margin is not a place on the periphery and far removed from the centre but rather an ambiguous frontier between two worlds

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charged with energies that converge and clash. In other words, it is an excellent place to write poems. Naturally, the cleft between Ireland and “I” to which Muldoon alludes would have specific relevance to the generation of major women poets who began publishing in the late 1960s to the ’80s. Perceiving themselves as historically marginalised speakers, they often express a problematic stance to the masculine tradition which, in their eyes, had been hostile to them as authors while exploiting them as objects. Several phenomena contributed to the formation of these sentiments. In 1991, the longawaited publication of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing led to many people objecting to the underrepresentation of women authors (notably in the contemporary poetry section) and lack of female editors. Although there had been a number of female—mostly anglophone— poets who had written and published during their lifetime, especially at the turn of the century and in the early decades of the twentieth century, they were almost invariably excluded from the canon. This, as the critics of the publication asserted, was a historical fact which the three-volume anthology confirmed rather than attempted to amend. Boland complained that it was as if these women had “written in sand: Their names disappear, their effects blur away.”26 Determined to have a more lasting effect on the canon and a larger say in its making, Boland and many other poets of her generation called for change and for that “mechanism of erasure . . . to be dismantled.”27 Eventually, their endeavours led, among other things, to the publication by Cork University Press of two additional volumes of The Field Day Anthology, focusing on Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (2002). Significantly, however, recognition and systematic promotion of their female precursors was not part of this process of creating a more stable position on the literary scene. In her epoch-making contribution to the study of Irish women writers’ history, Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970, Lucy Collins argues that “Boland’s interrogation of the position of the woman poet in Ireland has highlighted the important omissions in terms of critical inclusiveness, yet has in large measure perpetuated the notion that few women of significance published poetry prior to the late twentieth century.”28 As she refused to associate herself with the women of whose existence she is in many cases aware, Boland insisted on their historicity and irrelevance. Yet, while this stance appears to be stubbornly unhistorical, it followed from Boland’s own and her peers’ acute sense of historical exclusion and isolation. Consequently,

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it is possible to interpret the complaints about the lack of continuity by poets such as Boland, Ní Chuilleanáin, Meehan and Ní Dhomhnaill as a mark of heightened awareness of the actual historical circumstances and their relevance for their own situation. Riding on the crest of second-wave international feminism, the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, as well as the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement and the Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement (both established in the 1970s), Irish poets were writing in a changing world where representation of private experience was becoming not only possible but requisite for women artists and writers. As Margaret Kelleher explains, there was no guarantee that the discovery of more actual female predecessors would make up for the sense of seclusion. According to Kelleher, “in becoming aware of [the earlier poets’] existence, rereading their aims and ambitions from the distance of a century, one’s reaction may be less one of ‘celebratory identification’ with predecessors and foremothers and more a consciousness of our own historicity and vulnerabilities.”29 While it does not seek to revise the historical canon, the present study explores the basis of the attitude adopted by Boland and many other poets of the time who claimed to be unable to relate to their male peers and predecessors and failed to acknowledge their female precursors. If this stance was motivated by the urge to start from scratch, as it were, and to create space for new subject matter, unrecorded in poetry to date, its outcomes included a sustained presence of women on the literary scene. In the long run, it has encouraged the abandonment or judicious exploration of conspicuously female topics and concerns. As they worked on developing a distinctive personal style that would enable them to include new themes, these poets would often find themselves torn between the impulse to renounce the literary heritage altogether and the need to find ways of embracing it. Even as they delimit themselves against an older body of texts and set of attitudes, these poets rarely view “the tradition” as something established or easily defined. Just as the women of the past are isolated figures in the poetic tradition they either had been part of or had defied, these poets are, as Collins points out, “individuals working within the compass of their own experience to explore more public roles.”30 They may share the sense of their estrangement from “the literary tradition,” but their varied understanding of what constitutes that tradition, as well as their insistence on its brokenness, testifies to the tradition’s and their own heterogeneity. If the later poets, starting with Groarke in the early 1990s, and including O’Reilly,

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Morrissey, Darcy and Mac Aodha from the second half of that decade onwards, have been able to turn away from the earlier traditions as a source of conflict and a limiting factor, they are indebted here to the changes brought about by the previous generations of women poets. As I repeatedly argue throughout the book, the feminism of many Irish poets in both languages has been inextricably linked to their awareness of the problematic concepts of national and linguistic identity. In each of the chapters, analyses of various themes merge with explorations of language as a creative tool, but also a highly politicised literary topic and the ultimate objective in poetry. While female experience of reality provides the primary subject matter for many of the poems discussed, it is their attention to language that defines them as poetry. Both these characteristics are common to poets who are considered within the rubric of feminism and poets whose stance can be described as post-feminist. Acknowledging the influence of Judith Butler’s concept of “double entanglement,” Angela McRobbie has characterised post-feminism as a movement which encompasses “the existence of feminism as at some level transformed into a form of Gramscian common sense, while also fiercely repudiated.”31 Indeed, post-feminism is a broad enough term to cover the many different and evolving attitudes that these poets have expressed in relation to the language issue but also the phenomenon of “Irish women’s poetry.” Groarke, for example, has been outspoken in her wish to move forward and to draw a line under any such labelling.32 O’Reilly, Mac Aodha and Darcy have all written poems and essays with feminist undertones and spoken of being indebted to their predecessors. Yet they have also been consistent in dismantling some of the topoi and objectives of literary feminism. As used in the pages that follow, the term “post-feminism” by no means indicates a clearly delineated movement with an oppositional stance to feminism. Rather, it refers to yet another transitory, liminal stage in the development of Irish poetry that reflects the current state of affairs and changing conditions as much as poetry influenced by feminism did in the 1970s to ’90s. With literary feminism relegated to the past, feminist thematics are frequently invoked alongside commentaries on cultural and linguistic minorities, atrocities of war and social violence, as well as the positive and adverse effects of the increasingly globalised world.

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Women and Languages As mentioned above, one of the aspects of Irish literature in which the idea of its essentially fissured character combines with the concept of the liminal is its linguistic multiformity. If Irish and the writers of the language have long existed outside the pale of Ireland’s culture, the theme of marginality is particularly pertinent to the women among them. In an essay on the role of women in the Gaelic tradition, Ní Dhomhnaill shows how even in earlier Irish society where poets ranked high, women were unwelcome intruders into the hereditary system.33 Although there are references to powerful women poets to be found in the canon, very little or nothing of their work has been preserved: “whatever the actual literary status of women poets in the Gaelic tradition, they were in general not let near the ink and they were not allowed into the corpus of the canon.”34 This kind of institutional censure is a concern that was shared by women of both languages and that lay at the basis of the various complaints of a broken heritage. In “Outside History,” a well-known essay first published in 1990 but reprinted several times since, Boland (at that time the best-known Irish female poet) had turned to the Irishlanguage canon, referring to the scarcity of women authors within this to account for her own marginalisation by the English tradition.35 Boland’s dismal view was initially vehemently supported by Ní Dhomhnaill (by then and since the best-known Irish-language poet): “Nowhere in the Irish tradition can I find anything but confirmation of Eavan Boland’s claim that women have been nothing else but ‘fictive queens and national sibyls.’”36 Ní Dhomhnaill later toned down her statements,37 admitting that as a poet of Irish she had been lucky to have had two living women poets on whom she could rely as role models at the start of her career: due to this “double exposure” to Caitlín Maude and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, she claims, “women poets, so far as I was concerned, were a natural part of any poetic or scholarly inheritance.”38 In this shift of tone, Ní Dhomhnaill approximated the views of Biddy Jenkinson, another poet writing exclusively in Irish and Ní Dhomhnaill’s near contemporary who dismissed any generalising concepts of the tradition as simple “received truths.” Comparing such notions to sightings from St Brendan’s whale, Jenkinson has observed that [t]he greater the viewer’s confidence in the totality of his vision, the greater the potential for error . . . The view that Irish women poets of the present

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have no antecedents seems to me to be just such a borrowed view from a sounded whale. I have always had a very healthy relationship with my living, though deceased, sisters. The occasional male mistake about them never bothered me. To find Eavan Boland, whose poetry I admire, writing them out of existence . . . was quite another matter.39

Jenkinson’s outspoken reliance on the Irish-language literary canon was prompted by a reaction to Boland’s assertion about its hostility to women authors. However, it also stands as a reproach to the notions (still prevalent at that time) of modern Irish and its literature as mere echoes of a vanished or vanishing world. If, compared to their peers writing in English, Ní Dhomhnaill and Jenkinson profess to both an assured and reverent attitude to their language tradition, it is because they had immediate predecessors. In the 1970s, when Ní Dhomhnaill and Jenkinson first started writing, Máire Mhac an tSaoi had been recognised as one of the three major figures of modern poetry in Irish (along with Máirtín Ó Direáin and Seán Ó Ríordáin); having soon established herself as an authority on linguistic authenticity and a stringent critic of her contemporaries, Mhac an tSaoi never really had to assert herself as a female poet. Meanwhile, Caitlín Maude was widely celebrated among Irish speakers as a language activist, poet and a talented sean-nós singer. This does not mean, however, that for those who write in Irish, the margin would have no relevance. On the contrary, as they often combine complaints about the marginalisation of women with accounts of what it is like to write in a minoritised language, many of these poets have spoken about being doubly removed from the centre to the periphery.40 Mostly, however, the concern for the language comes before the woman question in Irish-language poetry, despite the fact that, as Jenkinson pointed out in 1996, the Irish word for feminism (feimineachas )—although it existed—was not included in the Irish dictionary.41 Ní Dhomhnaill admits that she feels “much more strongly on the language issue than on the woman issue. Much as the exclusion of women in The Field Day Anthology bothers me,” she says, “it angers me far more that Irish is so underrepresented there.”42 In an interview with Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú, Jenkinson claims that she feels sorry for the speakers of English who have no proper literary tradition to rely on, considering the long literary history of the country.43 Yet, elsewhere, she also admits that

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[i]t is true that we suffer erosion. Irish speakers are rather like travellers. We are marginalised by a comfortable settled monoglot community that would prefer we went away rather than hassle about rights. We have been pushed into an ironic awareness that by our passage we would convenience those who will be uneasy in their Irishness as long as there is a living Gaelic tradition to which they do not belong.44

As Rióna Ní Fhrighil argues in her seminal book on Boland’s and Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry—Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí from 2008, which was the first comparative book-length study of the conceptualisations of language, feminism and femininity by poets of both languages—the latter quote by Jenkinson could be taken as an aside to Boland who repeatedly denounced any connection with the Gaelic literary past and considered the literature as well as the language long defunct.45 Indeed, in the abovecited interview, Jenkinson points out that “[b]uaileann Nuala agus mé féin gach re bhuille orthu siúd a bhíonn ag iarradh ‘Irish Literature’ a thabhairt ar litríocht an Bhéarla amháin, mar dhea is nach ann don Ghaeilge agus nárbh ann di riamh” (Nuala and I aim every second blow at those who only mean writing in English when they say “Irish literature,” as if Irish did not exist and never had).46 Ní Dhomhnaill can also be seen as reacting against Boland’s use of Irish as shorthand for her own sense of anachronism and her insistence on presenting the language as safely tucked away in the past. Clearly, the notion of what constitutes “Irish tradition” or “Irish poem” varies greatly among these poets, not least with respect to their linguistic background and individual experience. Jenkinson often finds it necessary to reject the prevalent nostalgia for the Gaelic past. Even as she speaks of being marginalised on account of operating through Irish and thus on the brink of dissolution, she refuses to “burden [herself] with obligations to the dead.”47 In this, she reacts tongue-in-cheek to Mhac an tSaoi who likes to see herself and those she finds worth praising as the exponents of a dying generation, the possessors of a truth found solely in the heart of the oral tradition.48 Jenkinson debunks any such romantic notions by insisting that in Ireland, poetry is only written on the margins (“Déarfainnse nár scríobhadh filíocht in Éirinn ach amháin ar na himill”).49 Obviously, the sense of being relegated to the periphery while caught between two states of mind is intrinsic to the Irish-language poet’s experience. Gearóid Ó Crualaoich notes: “Is é cás an fhile Ghaelaigh . . . bheith ‘bicultural,’ stractha idir dhá saol, dhá theanga, dhá mheon, bheith ‘as

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riocht’ . . . bheith eolgaiseach ar imeall na beatha, ar buile, ar thost síoraí, ar an neamhní” (It is the lot of the Irish-language poet . . . to be “bicultural,” torn between two lives, two languages, two minds, to be “out of shape” . . . to know the edges of life, madness, eternal silence, the naught).50 Despite the exalted tone that seems to be at odds with both Jenkinson’s and also Ní Dhomhnaill’s matter-of-factness, the statement does have relevance for the poets I discuss, as they alternately claim to be outsiders in two languages and to be “at home” nowhere but in Irish. This dilemma is aptly put by Aifric Mac Aodha, the youngest of the three Irish-language poets examined in the present study. Although surrounded by the language from her early childhood, she does not consider herself a native speaker: “I am constantly aware that I come to the language, although it [is] my literary home, as something of a tourist.”51 Indeed, even if poets of Irish generally stress the indispensability of their linguistic medium for their creativity, none of them live in just one language; they are not members of a comfortable settled monoglot community and are not free of doubts, either in relation to the status of the language or to their own competence. Together with Derrida, they may wonder how the language which they, with varying degrees of ease, “inhabit,” “remains always mute . . . distant, heterogeneous, uninhabitable.”52 Still, while Ní Dhomhnaill, Jenkinson and Mac Aodha all know about being pulled between two languages and two minds, this split is rarely expressed in their poems; as in Joyce, the topic is dealt with polemically—if not in after-dinner speeches then in essays and interviews. Typically, the Irish-language poet perceives her medium as either a privilege of choice or an inevitability, often both at the same time. Explaining why she is unable to write poetry in English, Ní Dhomhnaill remarks: “I had chosen my language, or more rightly, perhaps, at some very deep level, the language had chosen me.”53 Similarly, Mac Aodha affirms that writing in Irish is not a matter of choice: “To ask me why I write in Irish is to ask why I write at all.”54 For Jenkinson, Irish is simply a given: “I write in my own language, the language of my household.”55 All three have admitted to feeling responsible for the language and to the Irish-speaking community although, as I argue in the ensuing chapters, they have all found different ways of dealing with this inevitable aspect of writing in Irish.56 Although anglophone poets also speak of inevitability, it is in reference to their lack of choice: writing in English is not the only workable

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option, as Irish is for Ní Dhomhnaill or Mac Aodha, but the only practicable alternative. While all Irish-language writers today are bilingual, only a few of those who write in English are. Writing in Irish entails identification (no matter how hesitant) with the language. The notion of Irish literature in English, as formed in the nineteenth century, has been based on difference. As John Montague suggests, the position of anglophone Irish writing is peculiar in having “the larger part of its past” deposited in “another language.”57 If Ní Dhomhnaill, Jenkinson and Mac Aodha have on occasion placed Irish in opposition to English to stress its role as the natural element for their poetry, no such helpful dynamism is available to the poets working in English: paradoxically, they have often found themselves closer to the “margin” than their Irish-language peers. Short of the advantage of useful role models, Boland and Ní Chuilleanáin in the Republic in the 1970s and then McGuckian in Northern Ireland in the 1980s had to tread their own path. Moreover, their work is marked by a conflicted stance to English. All three have repeatedly referred to their essential alienation from the English language, with a look of nostalgia cast in the direction of the—from their point of view—vanishing trace of Irish whose “persistence, as a cultural force,” as Austin Clarke argues, “is both near-fiction and obdurate if nostalgic longing.”58 Such wavering on the threshold between the present and the past is rehearsed in the problematic attitude to the mother tongue, which can be related to Derrida’s concept of the same as an impossible location or habitat, always linked with notions of exile and nostalgia. Once it is defined as the mother tongue, one is already distanced from it. While Ní Chuilleanáin has remarked that she writes “English rather as if it were a foreign language into which I am constantly translating,”59 McGuckian has called English “this other language which basically gets on my nerves,” asserting that English and “[t]he whole grammar of it is foreign to me.”60 Elsewhere, McGuckian further develops the image of the language as something external and imposed. Using a metaphor of deadly weight, she alludes to how the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has affected everyday life and the sense of identity in the North: “I do feel that there’s a psychic hunger . . . and that all I’ve had in my education has been shoved onto me, and I’m lying like a corpse under it all.”61 The nostalgia, of course, is as “impossible” as its object since, in her case, there is no proper first language besides English, which is described as unnatural. Irish (and the same applies to

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English, after all) is not some lost language of origin, but can only be an ambition, a promise never to be achieved. Viewed in this light, the distinction between Irish as the language of the dead past and English as the language of the living present is in constant tension and undergoing perpetual change. The ongoing process of identification is perceived as desirable in both English-language and Irish-language poets. As Máirín Nic Eoin argues in relation to Ní Dhomhnaill: “In ionad a bheith de shíor sa tóir ar ghrinneall cinnte féiniúlachta, b’fhéidir gur folláine sa deireadh féachaint ar an sealbhú agus ar an athshealbhú cultúir mar thionscnamh cruthaitheach nach mbeidh deireadh go deo leis” (Rather than being constantly in pursuit of the definite location of identity, it is perhaps ultimately healthier to look at the possession and the repossession of culture as a creative project which never ends).62 Both languages are alternately construed as the impossible, unattainable mother tongue that never has existed and that is still (or never) to come. Transformed—always temporarily—into the language of the other, however, each becomes the only possible site of creativity. The works of the poets of the “feminist” generation abound with examples of such blurred oppositions between the mother tongue and the language of the other. The new poets in both English and Irish, however, show an even less clear-cut sense of otherness—in terms of linguistic and cultural identification, or of poetic affiliation.63 While the impossible memory of the mother tongue and the sense of language as an elusive literary home inform their works, the nostalgia is no longer connected with the moribund Irish. Instead, it is traceable on the level of the inevitable alienation in language as such. Although it is the locus of thought and individual consciousness, language is also an acquired skill that marks the necessary rootedness of one’s consciousness in a particular culture. This general notion of language as something that has to be appropriated while it can never be one’s own pertains to the process of the lyric “I” formation. It is always at the same time the language of the individual and the language of the community. The subject’s abstract capacity to say “I” has nothing to do with a stable, pre-existent linguistic identity (which is an impossible concept and can only exist in performance). Thus, as Derrida argues, there is no language preceding the “I,” and they must both be invented at the same time.64 This balancing of the speaking “I” on the edge of language has informed poetry by Irish women since the early 2000s. Although their writing is generally free of the interactions on the border between English

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and Irish, the younger poets are aware that they are operating in a transitional space. As Mac Aodha insists: “All poetry, and certainly all the poetry that I am interested in, is in part a negotiation between tradition and the individual poet, between a notional authenticity and a living artefact, between fidelity and assertiveness, origins and originality.”65 It is with a view to exploring their origins as well as their originality that I approach these works. Tracing the points of contact between cultures and languages in contemporary Irish women’s poetry involves examining various contexts in which limits and limitations are both accented and overcome. ∗ ∗ ∗ Indeed, the productive potential of liminal spaces and situations, as well as the limiting aspects of marginality, is one of the key concerns of this study (with languages and marginalised languages naturally playing an important role in the discussion). There are many ways and moments in which the concepts of limits and languages contained in the title converge, and the abundance of these situations attests to the wide variety of the poets examined. It is also indicative of the multiple binaries and dividing lines underpinning Irish poetry. Beginning with explorations of the gender and linguistic divide, the book moves on to show how female experience and language may indeed be limited as subject matter and a means of communication respectively, as well as how they are also limitless in their immense plurality. The present study is largely chronological. It is divided into two parts: the first accentuates women’s reactions to stereotypes of nationhood and inspiration as recorded in the Gaelic and anglophone Irish tradition while the second pays attention to how these poets conceptualise issues such as poetic affiliation, subjectivity, inspiration and translation. Part I examines how some of the contemporary poets who first published between the late 1960s and mid-’80s have countered the pre-existing tradition and the feminine stereotypes of nation and the Irish landscape recorded in the tradition mainly through their ironic subversion. Discussing works by Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson and Medbh McGuckian, I argue that humour forms the basis of the poems’ polemics as well as their poetic potential. I also propose that the use of ironic distance and heteroglossia by poets born in the 1940s and ’50s often combines a focus on feminist issues with linguistic

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incertitude. Laughter opens up a new space as the securities of motherland are challenged, together with those of the mother tongue and the idea of an unambiguous linguistic identity. Chapter 2 shows how the major women poets of the pioneering generation, namely Boland and Ní Dhomhnaill, have overcome their sense of displacement through a mocking revision of the tropes of the feminised nation in the male canon. The need to define themselves against the past is, indeed, one of the prominent themes in feminist criticism. Taking some of the groundbreaking studies in the field as its starting point, the chapter brings the discussion further by placing women’s reactions within the context of the writing on the same subject by their male precursors. Most importantly, parallels are drawn between Irish literary feminism and the revisionist stream in Irish poetry and criticism in the 1980s and ’90s. Moreover, ironic laugher directed at the glamorised figures of the motherland is presented not only as a factor facilitating historical redress but as an enabling element in poetry. Chapter 3 traces the ways in which women contradict the stereotypical figuring of Irish landscape as a female body and the abstract notions of ideal womanhood. Adopting the viewpoint of the male admirer, poets such as Ní Dhomhnaill, McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin and Boland reverse the conventional distribution of roles between the speaking subject and the inspiring object. As they were coming to terms with the traditional concepts of the motherland and the inspiring feminine, many of these poets referred to the need for an alternative idiom. Although the hopes of a new, distinctly female language in which they could make up for the historical silence of women were frustrated, many of their poems evidence original approaches to the landscape and offer revised views of postcolonial nationality. By means of a broader focus on irony, strategic reserve and willed opacity as driving forces in women’s poetry, Part II explores how women have responded to traditional—not necessarily Irish—figures of artistic inspiration and to the issues of poetic affiliation. Secrets are central to this dynamic. Consideration is given to the effects of concealment and the centrifugal power of silence in reconciling the private and the public in women’s writing. In the first two chapters of this section, the focus evolves from texts informed by feminist and revisionist outlooks to poems and stances that are based on the achievements of literary feminism but go beyond its original agendas. The final two chapters foreground poets who entered the literary scene after the turn of the millennium. The focus

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is on how these authors reconsider issues surrounding various imposed (and denied) identities that were previously addressed by many of the established figures. Chapter 4 proceeds from instances in which women react against the habitual troping of the female muse to make meta-poetic observations on the search for poetic identity and authentic expression, as achieved through mock paroles, grammatical and contextual ellipsis, and clandestine writing in general. I demonstrate how, in their insistence on the essentially elusive character of the speaking “I,” Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan, McGuckian and Jenkinson document the shift from silence and imposed objectivity to assertive subjectivity. Chapter 5 illustrates how that subjectivity is still very much based on silence which poets such as Ní Dhomhnaill, Caitríona O’Reilly and Vona Groarke construe not as a shortcoming but as a benign factor inevitably linked with the possibility of speech. This tendency to salutary silence goes hand in hand with the distancing techniques of self-irony and obliquity—not in the Barthesian sense of mystery as a hidden (theological) final sense, but in the sense of an acknowledged plurality of meaning, its endless emerging and disappearance. Silence is shown to be emblematic of the boundless possibilities of language. Chapter 6 further explores how the themes of the formation of the poetic self and issues of inspiration are conflated with the changes in the lyric “I” that can be traced alongside the shift from feminism to post-feminism in Irish poetry. Attention is paid to works by Boland, Ní Chuilleanáin, Ní Dhomhnaill, McGuckian and Groarke in which a metaphorical threshold is the site of inspiration and the source of the poem’s effect. The same focus on the motif of the liminal informs Chapter 7 which intersperses examples of mocking muse invocations with transactions over the partition between the two main languages of Irish literature. Special attention is paid to the theoretical and practical aspects of poetic translation which is viewed as a zone of passage or transformation. The chapter begins with an exposition of the Irish-language poetry by Aifric Mac Aodha, who has based her poetics on the concept of translation. The latter part of the chapter touches upon the occasions on which other poets of both English and Irish, including Ní Dhomhnaill, McGuckian, Boland and Ní Chuilleanáin, consciously place themselves in a position between the two languages.

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In Chapter 8, the motif of translation is considered in a broader context as it is explored in the works of two poets working in English, Sinéad Morrissey and Ailbhe Darcy, who write about their experience of life abroad. Touching upon the permeability of borderlines between multiple cultures and art disciplines, they offer a critique of the idea of a positively defined identity, not least in view of an increased global consciousness and the multivalent implications of terms such as integrity, centrality, integration and connectivity.

Notes 1. James Joyce, Dubliners: Text and Criticism, eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 224. 2. Joyce, Dubliners, 189. 3. See Joyce, Dubliners, 203. 4. Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 109. 5. Joyce, Dubliners, 210. 6. Joyce, Dubliners, 220. 7. See Joyce, Dubliners, 189. 8. Joyce, Dubliners, 223. 9. See Joyce, Dubliners, 187. 10. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11. 11. Joyce, Dubliners, 224. 12. For a rigorous account of Joyce’s conceptualisation of Irish as representing the disappearance of language and the loss of meaning, as well as an idea of a coherent communal identity that is nevertheless buried in the past, alongside the language, see Barry McCrea, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 20–9. 13. Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I: The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35. 14. See Deborah L. Mandsen, Feminist Theory and Literary Practice (London, Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000), 35. 15. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 19. 16. Some cornerstone anthologies, book-length studies and publications on Irish women’s poetry include: Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) [essays on Ní Dhomhnaill, Groarke and McGuckian]; Patricia

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Boyle Haberstroh, Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Haberstroh, ed., My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Angela Bourke et al., eds., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing : Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, vols. 4 and 5 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002) [sections on Irish women and women writers in both Irish and English from the seventh century to the present day, with introductory essays by Gerardine Meaney, Clair Wills, Margaret Kelleher, Máirín Nic Eoin, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Angela Bourke, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and others]; Matthew Campbell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [essays on Boland, McGuckian and Ní Chuilleanáin]; Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015); Collins, ed., Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012); Jane Dowson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) [chapters on Boland, Ní Chuilleanáin and McGuckian]; Alexander G. Gonzalez, ed., Irish Women Writers: An A-to-Z Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005); Irene Gilsenan Nordin, ed., The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006); Peggy O’Brien, ed., The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967 – 2000 (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1999); Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) [chapters on Boland, Meehan, Ní Chuilleanáin, McGuckian and Catherine Walsh]; Quinn, ed., Irish Poetry after Feminism (Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008); and Ailbhe Smyth, ed., Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Irish Women’s Writing (Dublin: Attic Press, 1989). Important monographs dedicated to individual Irish women poets writing in English include: Jody Allen Randolph, Eavan Boland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014); Boyle Haberstroh, The Female Figure in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry (Cork: Cork University Press, 2013); Leontia Flynn, Reading McGuckian (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2014); Borbála Faragó, Medbh McGuckian (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014); and Irene Gilsenan Nordin, Reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, a Contemporary Irish Poet: The Element of the Spiritual (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). Book-length studies and collections of essays in Irish include: Pádraig De Paor, Tionscnamh Filíochta Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1997); Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, Téacs Baineann, Téacs Mná: Gnéithe de Fhilíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Baile Átha Cliath: An

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17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

Clóchomhar, 2005); Máirín Nic Eoin, B’Ait Leo Bean: Gnéithe den IdéEolaíocht Inscne i dTraidisiún Liteartha na Gaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1998); Rióna Ní Fhrighil, Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí: Filíocht Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2008); Ní Fhrighil, ed., Filíocht Chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2010) [essays on Mhac an tSaoi, Ní Dhomhnaill and Jenkinson]; and Eoghan Ó hAnluain, ed., Leath na Spéire (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1992). See Derrida, 14. Bunreacht na hÉireann/The Irish Constitution (1937) identifies Irish as “an teanga náisiúnta” (the national language) and refers to it as the primary and English the secondary official language of Ireland. In terms of the numbers of their speakers, however, there has been a gaping discrepancy between the two languages and Irish has unquestionably always been the minor one in independent Ireland. Muldoon, To Ireland, I , 35. Eavan Boland, “Outside History,” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 147. For an overview of the “fixed liminality” of solitaires, exiles, soldiers, as well as societies, see Bjørn Thomassen, “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality,” International Journal of Political Anthropology 2.1 (2009): 5–28. See Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge, 1977); Victor Turner, Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology (New Delhi: Concept, 1979); Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93–111; Turner, “Variations on a Theme of Liminality,” in Secular Ritual, eds. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977), 48–65. For the interplay between margin, marginalisation and liminality in literary studies, see Mihai I. Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). Turner, Pilgrimage, 41. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (b. 1942) has published all her books with Gallery Press in Dublin and later on Oldcastle in County Meath, starting with Acts and Monuments in 1972. Eavan Boland (1949–2020) published her first collection, New Territory, with Allen Figgis in Dublin in 1967. In the 1980s, she transferred to Arlen House with whom she collaborated as author and editor for more than a decade; from 1994 onwards she also published with Carcanet in Manchester (and, occasionally, Norton in New York). Paula Meehan (b. 1995) had her first book published by Beaver Row Press in Dublin in 1984 but has mostly published with Gallery Press,

1

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

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Carcanet and Wake Forest University Press (Winston-Salem, NC). Medbh McGuckian was first published by Oxford University Press and changed over to Gallery Press in the early 1990s. Biddy Jenkinson (b. 1949) and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (b. 1954) both soon became prominent on the Irish-language literary scene, having published with Coiscéim (Jenkinson) and Cló Iar-Chonnacht and An Sagart (Ní Dhomhnaill). The latter has also had bilingual selections of her poetry published by Raven Arts Press and Gallery Press. Laura O’Connor, “‘Eater and Eaten’: The Haunted English of W. B. Yeats,” Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and DeAnglicization (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 6. In her study, O’Connor discusses in detail the various pale– fringe zones of linguistic contact between English and Irish, and the instances of historical as well as contemporary concepts of Irish as the “other” of English. See O’Connor, Haunted English. Boland in Kathleen Fraser, “Eavan Boland and Kathleen Fraser: A Conversation,” Parnassus 23.1/2 (1997): 397. Boland in Fraser, “A Conversation”: 397. Collins, “Slow Tide on Tide of History,” in Poetry by Women in Ireland, 2. Margaret, Kelleher, “Writing Irish Women’s Literary History,” Irish Studies Review 9.1 (2001): 8. Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 5. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC: Sage Publishing, 2009), 12. Vona Groarke, “Editorial,” Verse 16.2 (1999): 7. According to Ní Dhomhnaill’s research into oral poetry, “[t]here was a widespread belief that if poetry, which was a hereditary gift (féith nó tréith dúchais), fell into the female line then it was gone from that particular family for seven generations to come . . . A similar taboo existed against women telling Fenian tales—‘tráthaire circe nó Fiannaí mná’ (a crowing hen or a woman telling Fenian tales).” See Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “An Bhanfhile Sa Traidisiun: The Woman Poet in the Irish Tradition,” Selected Essays (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 53. For an in-depth study of the mechanisms through which female narratives were systematically underrepresented in the Irish oral tradition and for an analysis of how Ní Dhomhnaill has striven to reverse those mechanisms in her poetry, see Angela Bourke, “Bean an Leasa: Ón bPiseogaíocht go dtí Filíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” in Leath na Spéire, 74–90. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Traidisiun,” 51.

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35. See Boland, “Outside History,” PN Review 75 17.1 (September/October 1990), accessed 12 May 2011, https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scr ibe?item_id=4549. 36. Ní Dhomhnaill, “What Foremothers?” Poetry Ireland Review 36 (1992): 24. 37. In a later version of “What Foremothers?”—“An Bhanfhile Sa Traidisiun: The Woman Poet in the Irish Tradition” from which I have quoted in this chapter—Ní Dhomhnaill amended the phrase quoted to refer to “the criticism of the Irish tradition [in which] until recently women have been nothing else but ‘fictive queens and national sibyls.’” My emphasis. See Ní Dhomhnaill, “Traidisiun,” 48. 38. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Traidisiun,” 44. 39. Biddy Jenkinson, “A View from the Whale’s Back,” Poetry Ireland Review 52 (Spring 1997): 62. Refuting Boland’s complaint, Jenkinson insists on the basically ungendered character of the anonymous tradition and shows how written records of that tradition and scholarship based on it are problematic, if not ultimately irrelevant. 40. For a detailed summary of the reasons why Irish-language female poets have felt “doubly insulated,” and for an enlightening discussion of the various reasons and self-acknowledged motivations for the choice of the language on the part of women writing in Irish, see Nic Eoin, “Gender’s Agendas: Women Writing in Irish. A Double Marginality,” Graph 12 (Summer/Autumn 1992), 5–8. 41. In an interview with Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú, Jenkinson draws attention to the fact that the closest entry in Ó Dónaill’s dictionary (see Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla) to “feimineach” (feminist) is “feimíneach” which means “tail-eating animal.” Jenkinson in Ní Fhoghlú, “Ceilpeadóir, Rí, Nóinín: Biddy Jenkinson ag Caint le Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú,” Oghma 8 (1996): 63. 42. Ni Dhomhnaill in Laura O’Connor, “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995), accessed 20 May 2011, http://connection.ebscohost.com/ c/literary-criticism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-lauraoconnor. 43. See Jenkinson in Ní Fhoghlú, 65. 44. Jenkinson, “Máire Mhac an tSaoi: The Clerisy and the Folk (P.I.R. 24): A Reply,” Poetry Ireland Review 25 (Spring 1989): 80. 45. See Ní Fhrighil, Banfhilí, 52. 46. Ní Fhoghlú, 65. My translation. 47. Jenkinson, “Reply,” 80. 48. One of Mhac an tSaoi’s categoric criteria is her insistence on authenticity: “unless I hear the voice of the tribe therein, the poetry does not impinge.” Mhac an tSaoi thus resolutely rules out all “modernity” in her conception of the poetic language of Irish-language poetry. See Máire Mhac an tSaoi,

1

49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

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“The Clerisy and the Folk: A Review of Present-Day Verse in the Irish Language on the Occasion of the Publication of Innti 11,” Poetry Ireland Review 24 (Winter 1988): 33–5. Jenkinson, “Nuafhilíocht na Gaeilge i dtreo na mílaoise,” Feasta 53.2 (February 2000): 11. Qtd. by Nic Eoin in “Modern Irish-language Literature: Minor, National or Global?,” keynote lecture presented at the 2017 Canadian Association for Irish Studies Conference, 13 June 2017. Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, “An Nuafhilíocht Ghaeilge: Dearcadh Dána,” Innti 10 (December 1986): 64. Qtd. in Nic Eoin, Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2005), 89. My translation. Aifric Mac Aodha, “A Talkative Corpse: The Joys of Writing Poetry in Irish,” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art (25 October 2011), accessed 11 November 2011, http://columbiajournal.org/a-talkative-cor pse-the-joys-of-writing-poetry-in-irish-3/. Derrida, 58. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Why I Choose to Write in Irish, the Corpse that Sits Up and Talks Back,” Selected Essays, 13. Mac Aodha, “Corpse.” A working version of the text was entitled “Why I Don’t Choose to Write in Irish” and included the sentence cited. Mac Aodha, e-mail message to the author, 15 November 2011. The actual title of Mac Aodha’s blog, “A Talkative Corpse: The Joys of Writing Poetry in Irish,” refers to Ní Dhomhnaill’s well-known “manifesto” in The New York Times Book Review (January 1995). See Ní Dhomhnaill, “Why I Choose to Write in Irish,” Selected Essays, 10–24. Jenkinson, “Reply,” 80. For a discussion of the engagé aspect of much of the writing and criticism in Irish, see Nic Eoin, “Cultural Engagement and TwentiethCentury Irish-language Scholarship,” in The Language of Gender, Power and Agency, eds. Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair (Dublin: Arlen House, 2014), 181–221. John Montague, The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays, ed. Antoinette Quinn (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 110. Austin Clarke qtd. in Michael O’Neill, “Yeats, Clarke, and the Irish Poet,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, 56. Ní Chuilleanáin in Leslie Williams, “‘The Stone Recalls its Quarry’: An Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin,” in Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality, ed. Susan Shaw Sailer (Gaineswille: University Press of Florida, 1997), 31. Qtd. in Justin Quinn, “Incoming: Irish Poetry and Translation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, 343. McGuckian in Kimberly S. Bohman, “Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian,” The Irish Review 16 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 98. McGuckian in L. O’Connor, “Comhrá.”

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62. 63. 64. 65.

Nic Eoin, Trén bhFearann Breac, 281. My translation. See Quinn, “Incoming,” 345. See Derrida, 28, 31. Mac Aodha, “Corpse.”

Works Cited Allen Randolph, Jody. EavanBoland. Cork: Cork University Press, 2014. Bohman, Kimberly S. “Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian, Belfast, 5 September, 1994.” The Irish Review 16 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 95–108. Boland, Eavan. “Outside History.” PN Review 75 17.1 (September/October 1990): 21–8. ———. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. Bourke, Angela. “Bean an Leasa: Ón bPiseogaíocht go dtí Filíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” In Leath na Spéire, edited by Eoghan Ó hAnluain, 74–90. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1992. ——— et al., eds. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, vols. 4 and 5. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. Boyle Haberstroh, Patricia. Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. ———, ed. My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001. ———. The Female Figure in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry. Cork: Cork University Press, 2013. Brearton, Fran, and Alan Gillis, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Campbell, Matthew, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Collins, Lucy, ed. Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. ———. Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. de Paor, Pádraig. Tionscnamh Filíochta Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Dowson, Jane, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

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Flynn, Leontia. Reading McGuckian. Irish Academic Press, 2014. Fraser, Kathleen. “Eavan Boland and Kathleen Fraser: A Conversation.” Parnassus 23.1/2 (1997): 387–403. Gilsenan Nordin, Irene, ed. The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006. ———. Reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, a Contemporary Irish Poet: The Element of the Spiritual. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Gonzalez, Alexander G., ed. Irish Women Writers: An A-To-Z-Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Groarke, Vona. “Editorial.” Verse 16.2 (1999): 7–8. Jenkinson, Biddy. “Máire Mhac an tSaoi: The Clerisy and the Folk (P.I.R. 24): A Reply.” Poetry Ireland Review 25 (Spring 1989): 80. ———. “Nuafhilíocht na Gaeilge i dtreo na Mílaoise.” Feasta 53.1 (January 2000): 10–13. Continued in Feasta 53.2 (February 2000): 9–12. Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. ———. Dubliners: Text and Criticism. Edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. Rev. ed. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Kelleher, Margaret. “Writing Irish Women’s Literary History.” Irish Studies Review 9.1 (2001): 5–14. Mac Aodha, Aifric. “A Talkative Corpse: The Joys of Writing Poetry in Irish.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art (25 October 2011). Accessed 11 November 2011. http://columbiajournal.org/a-talkative-corpse-the-joysof-writing-poetry-in-irish-3/. Mandsen, Deborah L. Feminist Theory and Literary Practice. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000. McCrea, Barry. Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Los Angeles and London etc.: Sage Publishing, 2009. Muldoon, Paul. To Ireland, I: The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. Poems 1968–1998. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Nic Dhiarmada, Bríona. Téacs Baineann, Téacs Mná: Gnéithe de Fhilíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2005. Nic Eoin, Máirín. “Gender’s Agendas: Women Writing in Irish. A Double Marginality.” Graph 12 (Summer/Autumn 1992), 5–8. ———. B’Ait Leo Bean: Gnéithe den Idé-Eolaíocht Inscne i dTraidisiún Liteartha na Gaeilge. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1998.

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———. “Cultural Engagement and Twentieth-Century Irish-language Scholarship.” In The Language of Gender, Power and Agency, edited by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair, 181–221. Dublin: Arlen House, 2014. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. “What Foremothers?” Poetry Ireland Review 36 (1992): 19–31. ———. Selected Essays. Dublin: New Island, 2005. Ní Fhoghlú, Siobhán. “Ceilpeadóir, Rí, Nóinín: Biddy Jenkinson ag Caint le Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú.” Oghma 8 (1996): 62–9. Ní Fhrighil, Rióna. Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí: Filíocht Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2008. ———, ed. Filíocht Chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge. Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2010. O’Brien, Peggy, ed. The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967–2000. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1999. O’Connor, Laura. “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995): 581–614. Accessed 20 May 2011. http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary-critic ism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-laura-oconnor. ———. Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and DeAnglicization. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Ó Crualaoich, Gearóid. “An Nuafhilíocht Ghaeilge: Dearcadh Dána.” Innti 10 (December 1986): 63–6. Ó hAnluain, Eoghan, ed. Leath na Spéire. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1992. O’Neill, Michael. “Yeats, Clarke, and the Irish Poet’s Relationship with English.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, 42–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Quinn, Justin. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———, ed. Irish Poetry after Feminism. Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008. Smyth, Ailbhe. Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Women’s Writing. Dublin: Attic Press, 1989. Spariosu, Mihai I. The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Thomassen, Bjørn. “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality.” International Journal of Political Anthropology 2.1 (2009): 5–28. Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, 93–111. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. ———. “Variations on a Theme of Liminality.” In Secular Ritual, edited by Sally F. Moor and Barbara G. Myerhoff, 36–52. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977.

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———. Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology. New Delhi: Concept, 1979. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge, 1977. Williams, Leslie. “‘The Stone Recalls its Quarry’: An Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.” In Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality, edited by Susan Shaw Sailer, 29–44. Gaineswille: University Press of Florida, 1997.

PART I

New Lands for New Words

In the satirising dissection of the sectarian strife in the North in Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice asks pungently why a country, “like a ship or a car,” should always be construed as female.1 While it may appear in many different shapes, MacNeice complains, like Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the land is always at the same time a threatening presence and an elusive dream. The image of a woman going by, included in MacNeice’s autobiographical long poem written at the close of 1938, is a taunt apparently directed at Yeats’s famous playlet and the figuration of Ireland as Seanbhean Bhocht (Poor Old Woman). But the trope of Ireland as a female figure can be traced back to the early Irish manuscripts and to medieval political writings, including various forms of the sovereignty myth as well as odes composed for Irish lords. Its diverse forms range from the old crone to the trope of a young beauty—regal or plebeian—representing the provinces of Ireland awaiting the return of the rightful ruler. Irish poetry, of course, has no exclusive right to identifying the national with the feminine. Writing of Women in Irish Culture and Politics, Gerardine Meaney adopts the concept of Indian political philosopher Ashis Nandy concerning the history of political colonisation which, according to Nandy, can be theorised as a history of feminisation while the attempts of a people to regain autonomy have been customarily described as a fight to resume a “traditionally masculine role of power.”2 In Western cultures, abundant propagandist use of this metaphor has accompanied the national and literary resurgence resulting from the romantic plunge

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into the unknown waters of the vernacular. It has commonly—and contradictorily—been paraded as a standard on both sides of diverse conflicts, representing the subjugated territories as perceived by the oppressor while at the same time symbolising the resistance of the colonised or marginalised people. However, while the trope is supposed to be of Indo-European provenance, it was employed in Irish literature continuously from earliest times, and even served as the basis of a separate poetic genre. By the end of the sixteenth century, motifs of the formerly fruitful bond between the ruler and the female figuration of his region began to be seen as problematic with the tightening hold of the colonisers on the lives of Irish lords and with their deforestation and landscape-charting activities. While the landscape and its inhabitants were plagued by the invaders, the conceit of the feminised land was taken over by the post-bardic poets of the seventeenth century and subsequently appropriated by Irish Jacobitism. It was at that point that it became the symbol of the colonised nation—an image that would pervade Irish political poetry and nationalist resistance for the next 300 years. The main subgenre of Irish Jacobite verse, the sophisticated, highly ornamental aisling (or vision) poetry refers to the subjugated land most often as the Spéirbhean (Sky-Woman), a regal figure of great physical beauty appearing under one of the Celtic names for Ireland, such as Éire, Ériu, Banbha or Fódla, adopted from the ancient sovereignty myths. In the slightly later development of eighteenth-century Jacobite folk songs, the Sky-Woman was given a body of flesh and blood and a name in the vernacular, such as Caitlín Ní hUallacháin, Síle Ní Ghadhra, Cáit Ní Dhuibhir and, later, Rosaleen or Róisín Dubh, or indeed the Seanbhean Bhocht .3 By the time the national and literary revival were in full swing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, poets had mostly abandoned the conventions of Jacobite forms. Still, the woman image representing all kinds of abstract concepts and ideals remained cherished and used abundantly. Through the Irish Jacobite song in English, it developed into a nationalist symbol and pervaded the rhetoric of the Anglo-Irish cultural revival. As the chief instrument of cultural nationalism, the feminised icon of Ireland became so inextricably linked with the awareness of national identity that the latter was virtually unthinkable without the former.4

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This section of the book focuses on some of the ways in which modern and contemporary poets, both male and female, have confronted the allegorical representations of the feminised land and harnessed them to their own polemics with the inherited literary tradition. The necessity to come to terms with past iniquities is, of course, one of the common themes in feminist theory, and Irish poetry and criticism have paid close attention to the absence of women from both language canons. My aim in Part I is not to give a definitive survey of the existing stances and arguments but rather to review some of the older polemics in the light of the book’s dual focus on limits and languages . To keep the discussion within bounds, I will concentrate mainly on reactions penned by women. My intention, however, is to look at their responses in the context of other writings and criticism of the period, and to show how they are often directed at specific manifestations of stereotyped femininity and nationhood in poetry by their male predecessors and near contemporaries. In their vehement rejection of the old topoi that ascribe to women either silence and passivity on the one hand or intimidating sexual power on the other, female poets often lend their support to the anti-nationalist, revisionist stream in poetry and criticism of the 1980s and ’90s. Also in response to the escalating sectarian conflict in the North, the latter demanded eradication of conventional images of nationality, pointing to their emptiness as well as potential perniciousness. Although revisionist critics such as Edna Longley would occasionally question the conceptual integrity and legitimacy of some of the feminist complaints by Eavan Boland and others,5 it is pertinent, I suggest, to view the two trends as part of one sociocultural milieu.6 In pointing out the decisive role that factors of linguistic and geographical division had played in Irish literary history and categorisation, poetry inflected by the rise of feminism was— particularly within the anglophone production—part of the move towards historical revisionism in Ireland. In keeping with the book’s secondary focus on strategic applications of laughter and secrecy, I will draw attention to the elements of satire and parody that often inform these efforts of transgression. Towards the end of Chapter 2, I will outline certain parallels detectable between these ironic approaches by women poets and the Bakhtinian concept of the heteroglossic forces in language employed to undermine the unitary discourse of ideology.7 At the heart of the following two chapters are poems that originated in the final third of the last century when revisioning of this kind was largely considered to be necessary so that women

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could take up the threads of the predominantly masculine tradition. What is of special interest to me, however, is that satirical revisions of old conventions and stereotypes constitute a unifying element reaching across the sexual divide (as MacNeice’s words quoted at the beginning of this section illustrate) and pertaining to poets of both English and Irish, over a long period of time. By looking at poets of the English as well as the Irish language and by applying the specific perspective of subversive humour and irony, I will extend the feminist critique of Irish poetry in new ways. As the majority of the country’s literary history took place through the medium of Irish, contemporary poets can often be seen exploring the Irish-language canon in their attempts to reconcile with the past. This aspect of literary and feminist revisionism coincided with an inevitable phase in which a number of poets writing in English and Irish concerned themselves in the closing decades of the twentieth century with the language issue. The critical debate on this subject was marked to a large extent by the repercussions of postcolonial attempts to determine the national language of Ireland. In her breakthrough study on Northern Irish poetry, Improprieties (1993), Clair Wills pointed out that the nationalist ideal of a single, unifying common language had been futile from the outset, and insisted that “the language which can unify the various sections of the community in the island of Ireland must necessarily be one which can accommodate difference.”8 In this, Wills alludes not to the limits between languages but to the limitations and ultimate pointlessness of the idea of politically motivated linguistic identity which, no matter how inclusively defined, will always prove to be restrictive and potentially discriminating. One of the most interesting aspects of the current theoretical debate on the future of the Irish language as a creative tool is the question of whether Irish has been successfully detached from its role as a token national language. On this subject, Michael Cronin has lauded the fact that “Irish is no longer locked into an exclusive relationship with English” and argued that its status might benefit from the growing plurality of Irish society and the changing linguistic context.9 In view of this ideal of social diversity prominent towards the turn of the millennium, the very heterogeneity of the poets I discuss can be seen as denial of the concept of a single “national language” based on linguistic uniformity. Provisionally united in their relation to a shared literary past, they show how this pluralistic notion of languages has been

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instrumental in surpassing the limits of discriminatingly defined nationality. If literary production in English and Irish still appear to constitute two separate worlds, they also arguably belong to a space increasingly less marked by division. The almost habitual opposition between the two languages, based on their historical and continuing imbalance, has occasionally been identified with the areas of gender politics or nationalist and sectarian sentiments. While the status of English and Irish remains unequal, the greater diversity and consequent opening up of Irish society has coincided with the endeavours of some poets to further separate the literary languages of Ireland from nationalist conventions and to extricate women from the stereotypical notions of femininity and national identity. It is the constant reworking of the trope of the feminised land, including the aisling conventions and the motherland figure adopted by the national revival that sustains my interest in the diverse instances of poets coming into contact with the Gaelic tradition. In the Constitution of Ireland from 1937, Irish was established as the first official language in the Republic of Ireland. However—both in the Republic and in the North—it has also been the language of a minority. In the South, Irish has been taught as a compulsory subject at primary and secondary level, yet the system has obviously not produced any new native speakers. Irishlanguage education in Northern Ireland in the post-partition period was affected by the withdrawal of official funding and was subsequently run on a voluntary and community basis.10 Although the number of people learning the language on the island has increased since the turn of the twentieth century when Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League), a social and cultural organisation dedicated to preserving and promoting the Irish language, was gaining a wider influence, there is a limited number of those who are fluent in and use the language on a daily basis.11 Consequently, many anglophone readers and writers will have no direct connection with the vast majority of Ireland’s literary past and will have to rely on translation and paraphrase in relating back to the Irish canon. Very few of those writing in Irish today will consider it their first language and be living their lives, personal and professional, exclusively through Irish. Thus, to a number of these poets, the liminal space between the two languages, always privately defined, is a source of genuine concern as well as inspiration. Whenever it comes to the fore, the relationship with one’s creative language seems to be marked by controversy. This awareness of an equivocal linguistic background is particularly apparent in the poetry and criticism of Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian,

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Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and, not least, in the works of the Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. In 1995, Peter Sirr argued that the options left to Irish women poets included “the absurd, the outspoken, and the crafty use of the borderlands between the two, as also of the borderlands between two languages (Gaelic and English) and between two traditions (male and female) which overlap intriguingly.”12 While this is accurate enough, I would claim that by turning the margins to which they had been ascribed into points of interface, women have used their peripherality as a source of opportunity. Attending to the borderlines between the languages and the male and female traditions, as well as, for example, to the dichotomy between the private and the public, they have made marginality a fundamental part of their feminism, as well as their poetry. Indeed, in an environment progressively defined by pluralism and difference, women’s alterity (in the sense of the female “otherness” or specificity) has proven to be a convenient prerequisite. The change of tone and in the approach to genderand language-related subject matter in Irish poetry after the turn of the millennium signals emancipated acceptance of the sexual and linguistic other. If, in their search for new lands for new words, these poets did occasionally approximate an alternative form of expression, it was in their frequent use of irony and heteroglossia.

Notes 1. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 138. 2. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Qtd. in Gerardine Meaney, Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics (Dublin: Attic Press, 1991), 6–7. 3. See Máirín Nic Eoin, “Secrets and Disguises? Caitlín Ní Uallacháin and Other Female Personages in Eighteenth-Century Irish Political Poetry,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an Dá Chultúr 11 (1996): 7–45. 4. The factors leading to the transformation of the image into a nationalist symbol are summarised succinctly by Máirín Nic Eoin in “Sovereignty and Politics, c. 1300–1900,” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, eds. Angela Bourke et al., vol. 4 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 273–6.

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5. See Edna Longley, “From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands,” The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), 173–95. 6. See Longley, “Feminism, Culture and Critique in English,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 4, 1578–87; For summaries of the debate, see Luke Gibbons, “Challenging the Canon: Revisionism and Cultural Criticism,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane, vol. 3 (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), 561– 680; Revising the Rising, eds. Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991); and Longley, The Living Stream. 7. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Islowsky (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1968), 73. 8. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 89. 9. Michael Cronin, An Ghaeilge san Aois Nua. Irish in the New Century (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2005), 49. 10. Studies that explore the dichotomous language situation in Ireland, with a view to language education and politics, include Language and Tradition in Ireland: Continuities and Displacements, eds. Maria Tymoczko and Colin Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Languages of Ireland, eds. Michael Cronin and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003); Camille C. O’Reilly, The Irish Language in Northern Ireland: The Politics of Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1999); and Janet Muller, Language and Conflict in Northern Ireland and Canada: A Silent War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 11. According to the Central Statistics Office, “[o]f the 1,761,420 persons who answered yes to being able to speak Irish [in the 2016 Census of Population in the Republic of Ireland], 418,420 indicated they never spoke it, while a further 558,608 indicated they only spoke it within the education system. Of the remaining group, 586,535 persons indicated they spoke Irish less often than weekly, 111,473 spoke weekly while just 73,803 persons spoke Irish daily.” See “Irish Language and the Gaeltacht,” Central Statistics Office, accessed 15 May 2019, https:// www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp10esil/p10esil/ilg/. In Northern Ireland, the data gathered in the 2011 census indicate that 184,898 (10.65 per cent) have some knowledge of Irish while only 4,130 people (0.2 per cent) speak Irish as their main language at home. See “Irish Language Skills,” Northern Irish Statistics and Research Agency, accessed 15 May 2019, http://www.ninis2.nisra.gov.uk/pub lic/PivotGrid.aspx?ds=2778&lh=37&yn=2011&sk=136&sn=Census%202 011&yearfilter=.

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According to the 1901 census, only approximately 641,000 people were able to speak Irish in Ireland and only 20,953 of those claimed to be monolingual Irish speakers. See Reg Hindley, The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary (London: Routledge, 1990), 19–23. For an account of the complexities of interpreting the language question and the returns of the censuses around the time of the language change in rural areas of Ireland in the early decades of the twentieth century, see Barry McCrea, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 4–7, 35, 148n.6, 14 n.7, 149n.8, 153–154n.9. For an assessment of findings on the language question in the nineteenth-century censuses, see Garret Fitzgerald, “The Decline of the Irish Language,” Ireland in the World: Further Reflections (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2005), 11–22. 12. Peter Sirr, “‘How Things Begin to Happen’: Notes on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian,” Southern Review 32.3 (June 1995): 458.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Tanslated by Hélène Islowsky. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1968. Central Statistics Office. “Irish Language and the Gaeltacht.” Accessed 15 May 2019. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp10esil/ p10esil/ilg/. Cronin, Michael. An Ghaeilge san Aois Nua. Irish in the New Century. Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2005. ———, and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, eds. Languages of Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. Fitzgerald, Garret. “The Decline of the Irish Language.” Ireland in the World: Further Reflections, 11–22. Dublin: Liberties Press, 2005. Gibbons, Luke, ed. “Challenging the Canon: Revisionism and Cultural Criticism.” In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane, vol. 3, 561–680. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991. Hindley, Reg. The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary. London: Routledge, 1990. Longley, Edna. “Feminism, Culture and Critique in English.” In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, edited by Angela Bourke et al., vol. 4, 1578–87. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. ———. The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1994. MacNeice, Louis. Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

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McCrea, Barry. Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Meaney, Gerardine. Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics. Dublin: Attic Press, 1991. Muller, Janet. Language and Conflict in Northern Ireland and Canada: A Silent War. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Nic Eoin, Máirín. “Secrets and Disguises? Caitlín Ní Uallacháin and Other Female Personages in Eighteenth-Century Irish Political Poetry.” EighteenthCentury Ireland: Iris an Dá Chultúr 11 (1996): 7–45. ———. “Sovereignty and Politics, c. 1300–1900.” In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, edited by Angela Bourke et al., vol. 4, 273–6. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. Ní Dhonnchadha, Máirín, and Theo Dorgan, eds. Revising the Rising. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991. Northern Irish Statistics and Research Agency. “Irish Language Skills.” Accessed 15 May 2019. http://www.ninis2.nisra.gov.uk/public/PivotGrid.aspx?ds= 2778&lh=37&yn=2011&sk=136&sn=Census%202011&yearfilter=. O’Reilly, Camille C. The Irish Language in Northern Ireland: The Politics of Culture and Identity. London: Macmillan, 1999. Sirr, Peter. “‘How Things Begin to Happen’: Notes on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian.” Southern Review 32.3 (June 1995): 450–67. Tymoczko, Maria, and Colin Ireland, eds. Language and Tradition in Ireland: Continuities and Displacements. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Wills, Clair. Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER 2

Revolutionary Laughter: Irish Poets Dismantling Old Icons and Shibboleths

Critics of the 1990s repeatedly remarked that the prevalence of the feminine constructs of Ireland contributed to the exclusion of actual women from the country’s historical narratives and literary tradition. Máirín Nic Eoin notes that in the political song tradition, the woman “becomes a site of representation on which are projected political yearnings and hopes as well as deep feelings of historical loss and grievance.”1 According to Gerardine Meaney, women are exploited as “guarantors of their men’s status, bearers of national honour and the scapegoats of national identity. They are not merely transformed into symbols of the nation, they become the territory over which power is exercised.”2 This criticism, however, was largely based on the endeavours of female poets in the preceding two decades to define themselves against the inherited literary tradition in which women were mostly represented as objects of desire and emblems of national and cultural identity. Most of these women felt the need to take a stance on the motherland trope as they attempted to form a poetic identity. Irony and satiric scorn, as we shall see, were some of the main and most effective methods used to achieve these goals and articulate their sense of displacement. The momentous upsurge of literary feminism in Ireland between the late 1960s and ’80s, when female authors of both languages repositioned themselves, in practical terms, from the periphery to the centre of the literary scene, overlapped in part with the burgeoning post-nationalist © The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_2

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stream in poetry and criticism. A common feature of women poets writing in both of Ireland’s main literary languages was the revisionist dismantling of the traditional tropes of the feminised land as well as of the subsequent identification of the feminine with the national. It also coincided, however, with the deconstruction of the same kind of stereotypes by poets and critics whose motivations came from their deep-rooted opposition to the nationalist tone lingering in Irish poetry well into the latter part of the twentieth century. Thus, poets of considerably diverse linguistic, religious and political backgrounds would repeatedly have recourse to the Irish-language canon. The Gaelic tradition came to serve, in this particular context, as a common reference point. Starting with responses to the problematic legacy of Patrick Pearse and the Easter Rebellion, this chapter proceeds from the iconoclastic endeavours on the part of Eavan Boland to the subtle ironising of futile revolutionary zeal in Vona Groarke, as well as Máirtín Ó Direáin’s melancholy outrage, Biddy Jenkinson’s humorous reversal of traditional roles and the satiric scorn of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. It should be noted, however, that none of these poets turn to the Gaelic writing primarily to trace and deconstruct motifs that had been used in the creation of nationalist icons. Rather, they explore it in order to search for the roots of their own sense of belonging and exclusion. For the majority of them, terms such as “Irish tradition” or “Irish poetry” constitute a puzzling paradox whose complexity is enhanced by the different connotations of these terms for anglophone and Irish-language authors. Here, a key role is played by language, construed, on the one hand, as a given and a secure place of origin and, on the other hand, as an unattainable goal.

Irish Mothers: Eavan Boland and Vona Groarke As the traditional figures of the sovereignty myth were adopted into the discourse of Irish nationalism and transformed into idealised representations of Mother Ireland, the poetic discourse of the motherland became closely associated with the republican discourse of martyrdom.3 Accordingly, the image of the motherland became synonymous with the ideal of an unchallenged linguistic identity and the notions of national language as a shared mother tongue. The power of the motherland trope in nationalist discourse is conveniently exemplified in the work of Patrick Pearse, one of the heroes of the 1916 Easter Rising and one of the first modern poets to write in the Irish language.4 Within his small body of poetry, Pearse

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evoked the image in numerous, often contrasting, figurations. However diverse a form this allegorical female figure may take, nevertheless, it appears to serve the objective of revolutionary agitation. And yet, while this propagandist tone has provoked a number of later poets to take Pearse to task, I would suggest that even in his politically engaged texts, a strain of ironic detachment can be detected. Although it is perhaps unwitting and stems from the conflict within Pearse between the ambitious poet and the devout crusader for the case of free Ireland, it is this ongoing internal struggle between the poet and agitator that makes some of his work worth considering here. His was the kind of nationalist rhetoric on which the emphatic androcentrism of an independent Ireland was later based and against which Irish feminism and many of the poets writing in the last three decades of the twentieth century delimited themselves. Still, the mixture of purpose and the relentless balancing of art and politics is something that Pearse and these poets have in common. A great crusader for the use of Irish, Pearse viewed the language as the guarantee of a continuous national identity and as the medium of a new, emphatically contemporary literature detached from the old metrical systems.5 In his demands for modern ways of expression to deal with the new reality of Ireland, Pearse can be seen as paradoxically anticipating some of the anxieties perceived by poets with feminist approaches. Although they often denounce Pearse’s politics and revolutionary overstatement, they manifest similar concerns about the suitability of the inherited linguistic constructs. The present discussion of some of Pearse’s lyrics is therefore motivated not only by the reactions to his use of the motherland stereotype from a number of poets writing with feminist and post-nationalist agendas in mind, but also by moments of heteroglossia detectable in Pearse’s poetry. Thus, interesting parallels can be drawn between the older poet’s cause and that of his opponents. In one of his best-known poems, “Fornocht do chonac thú” (Renunciation), Pearse—obviously in dialogue with Aodhagán Ó Rathaille’s famous aisling “Gile na Gile”6 —shuns the beautiful, inspiring vision in favour of revolutionary resolution: Fornocht do chonac thú, A áille na háille, Is do dhallas mo shúil[.]

Naked I saw thee, O beauty of beauty, And I blinded my eyes[.]7

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Rejecting his muse figure, Pearse makes as if to subvert the entire aisling tradition in which the welfare of the country is placed in the hands of a ruler who is continually ascending or absent, and offers to take action on her behalf. Yet, the prevailing tone of the poem—especially as the poetpersona expresses his resolve to face up to a martyr’s death—is that of melancholic resignation rather than that of defiant enthusiasm for military action. The melancholy, however, stems not so much from fear for one’s own life as from the nostalgia for a literary trope to which generations of poets had been faithful and that is now to be discarded as anachronistic. The same kind of ambivalence informs the canonical “Mise Éire” (I am Ireland), in which the mythological glory of the old Celtic order is invoked and contrasted with the sad reality of a colonised state: “Mise Éire; / Uaigní mé ná an Chailleach Bhéarra” (I am Ireland: / I am lonelier than the Old Woman of Beare).8 While she appears to be asking for pity, this personification of the land stubbornly boasts about her primacy over the Celtic sovereignty figure and claims to be triumphant in every respect, not least in her desolate state. If the Hag of Beare, the protagonist of a ninth-century Old Irish poem, once protested that she was no king’s but the poet’s lover,9 here she is rejected by Pearse in a self-conscious gesture, the poem turning into an apparent apologia of a newer trope. Not unlike in the case of “Fornocht do chonac thú,” it is the renunciation of a traditional literary figure in the name of agitation for “nationality” that can be identified as the true source of desolation. One of the well-known responses to Pearse’s incorporeal, self-pitying persona is the homonymous poem “Mise Eire” by Eavan Boland, included in The Journey (1987), her fifth volume of poetry. The poem, and the book as a whole, documents the shift in focus in Boland’s work from “the craft of the art” to the “ethics” of poetry which she recounts in her oft-cited essay “Outside History.”10 Poetic ethics, she argues, are always of issue in cultures that have been under colonial pressure and where the poets’ relationship to their birthplace is inevitably marked by unease. For Boland, the difficulty lay above all in the sense that—as a woman—she could not relate to the version of nation and nationhood which she encountered in Irish literature and the consequent feeling that she was “cut off from its archive.” The initial need to belong, the unheeded wish to have her work claimed by the national canon led to the resolve to repossess this canon.11 Boland (1944–2020) was born in Dublin but spent part of her childhood and early teens living in London and New York where her father

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was the first Irish Ambassador to the UK and the UN, respectively. In an essay entitled “In Search of a Nation,” she admits that her increased need to identify with the Irish past, formative in the preliminary stages of her work, came above all from her experience of living abroad. She recalls how as a child in New York she was enthralled when she came across Pearse’s “Fool,” a short lyric in which the poet professes to bemoan his lost youth dedicated to “impossible things” (the dream of an armed rebellion), only to declare ultimately that he would do the same over again. Struck by the force of the sentiment and the high-flown rhetoric Boland felt, she notes, as if “a sparkling continuum [were] established. Between action and language. Between poet and patriot.”12 Yet, she writes, she soon began to see that the very notion of nationality as determined heroism was so closely connected to male military martyrdom that it excluded her as a woman. Ironically, she sensed herself silenced by the “powers of language [she] aspired to and honoured.”13 Thus, shut out from the country’s historiography and national literature, she proposed to set out on a quest for a new language, an alternative voice that would help her overcome the clash between her experience as a woman and her aspirations as a poet and gain access to what had been unrecorded in the literary tradition. Unable to take the path of heroism and self-sacrifice (which, she presumes, would have been the shortest route to poetry), she designed her poetic self to speak for “the others”: the women who did not make it into the national poem and narrative and so remained “outside history.”14 Much of her criticism and poetry—and “Mise Eire” is a classic example—is about this conflict and repossession. Boland’s speaker is a destitute young mother forced to emigrate and possibly also into prostitution. Throughout the poem, she strongly insists that she is “the woman” (emphasis added) where Pearse’s representation would perfunctorily repeat “Mise Éire.” This woman may be nameless, but she is no impersonal symbol of the land or, still worse, the nation. In unison with her author, the speaker declares her refusal to return to the past as the site of her own dispossession and to dwell on “my nation displaced / into old dactyls.”15 Nationalist sentiment is a notion fit for poems and songs; it may amount to a few nostalgic memories, but it will not warm or feed her baby. Crouching in her thin coat on board the ship, watching the coastline of Ireland blend with the horizon, she renounces her nationality. In fact, she prepares for her new immigrant identity which is imaged as a loss of language: “a new language / is a kind of scar,” Boland writes, a scar that will heal in time into a mere imitation

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of her previous life.16 As Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has remarked, Boland ridicules the aggrieved whimpering of Pearse’s childless mother/land in showing precisely “what it [is] like to be the bought and sold woman of a captive nation.”17 Justin Quinn detects an even more anti-Pearsean jab in the poem: in having the speaker turn her back on her Irishness, Boland refuses to base her own uncertain sense of identity on the violent nationalism of her forebears. By declaring that she will not “go back to it,”18 she means, in Quinn’s reading, “the patterns of nationalist poetry that led to the blood sacrifices of the likes of Pearse.”19 Rióna Ní Fhrighil has termed “Mise Eire” a radical act of feminist rewriting. She remarks, however, that since it is based on an English translation of Pearse’s poem, its revisionism is, in many respects, beside the point.20 While “Ireland” is, indeed, the English for “Éire,” the equation is invalid if the two sides are reversed. Éire (or Éiru) is not simply the Irish for Ireland but a well-known figure from early Irish mythology and an allegory of the land, older, indeed, than An Chailleach Bhéarra. As Ní Fhrighil argues, Pearse’s poem relies on a connection with the ancient goddess Éiru who competed with her two sisters over the right to have the country named after her. The English version of Pearse’s “Mise Éire” misses this entire dimension by rendering the speaker’s name as “Ireland,” that is, as a political body rather than a poetic figure, and alters the temporal relations in Pearse’s Irish original as well as the relationships of the poet to his persona. As he lets the two ancient figures have it out between them, Pearse takes leave of them both, in order to dedicate himself wholly to the case of modern “Ireland,” and modern Irish poetry. It is paradoxical, Ní Fhrighil suggests, that Boland should take Pearse to task for his flawed ethics and stale aestheticism if we recall his own impatience with Irish poetry of the time.21 He describes poets of both English and Irish as “the most conservative of races” who retained “an outworn set of symbols long after the machinery had become unnecessary and the symbols had ceased to be convincing. There is a place for symbols in literature, but there can be no excuse for using symbols in which you do not yourself believe.”22 The implied conclusion of Ní Fhrighil’s analysis is that while Pearse’s ironies are intentional, Boland is unaware of many that accompany her own poem and that affect its outcome. Indeed, Boland’s plain-spoken monologue can be considered to enact yet another denial: a resolve on her part to ignore metric conventions: “the elements of form [that she had] worked hard to learn.”23 Associated with male poetry, traditional poetic forms must be avoided or used

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advisedly as part of the shift in focus from the final shape of the poem to the particulars of its making: “for somebody like me, who thinks of herself as a lyric poet, writing is not an expression, it is an experience.”24 Yet this emphasis on experience over expression does not denote formal innovations or the precedence of the writing process over its product and intended message. Rather than endorsing the French feminists’ ideal of creative abandon and sublimation, Boland confirms her determination to record in her poems the conditions which led to women’s exclusion from the canon. Although she wished for her poetry and her politics to occupy two separate realms (“Yes, I am feminist. But not a feminist poet”),25 Boland’s context- and content-oriented feminism precluded the formal experiment and linguistic transformation that she advanced in her essays. Besides documenting her own ambition to set things right, Boland— discarding the old forms associated with the poetry of her predecessors—can also be viewed as mimicking Pearse’s revisionism.26 Similarly to Pearse’s “Fornocht do chonac thú” and “Mise Éire,” the gesture of defiant refusal on the part of Boland’s persona in “Mise Eire” is tempered by a sense of regret. Towards the end of the poem, a hint of patriotic nostalgia seeps in through the mention of the persona’s native tongue. The metaphor of a scar or unhealed wound standing for the loss of “Irishness”—which is symbolised in turn by the loss of the Irish language—comes up repeatedly in Boland’s work. Whenever it suits her greater purpose to impart the sense of being culturally uprooted and allude to the figurative “loss of the vocabulary of belonging,”27 shared with the women of the past, a reference to Irish as the suppressed historical speech of the nation is useful. Here, the identification of national identity with national language takes us back to Pearse and his famous pamphlet on the linguistic aspects of the growing Irish consciousness in An Claidheamh Soluis where he argues that “[t]he people which would give up its language in exchange for political autonomy would be like the prisoner who would sell his soul to the Evil One that he might be freed from his bodily chains.”28 Boland’s speaker faces a similar dilemma: she envisages future exile as no more than physical liberty, devoid of the protective shield of the mother tongue as the basis of a clearly defined identity. The end of the poem thus calls into question the persona’s opening gesture of disavowal aimed at the traditional figurations of the country and the idea of nation as it figures in older poetry.

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It is tempting to speculate that in this move, Boland might be commenting on her own work and its standing in relation to the Irishlanguage tradition, and her failure to master the language. Having spent part of her life outside Ireland, she keeps coming back to what it feels like to be exiled in and through language. For Boland, who was not an Irish speaker, the smarting sense of being linguistically displaced— during her privileged childhood in England and the USA where the poet’s family followed her diplomat father, or after her return to Ireland as a teenager—most frequently relates to the idiomatic differences between those three countries. Still, as part of her endeavour to bring to light the Irish (woman’s) past that was displaced by the official history, she occasionally refers to the loss of the Irish language that was silenced together with that past. Ironically, this silencing has occurred through the very language that the poet speaks and writes. Irish and its literary tradition is therefore more often an emblem of the impossibility to fit in rather than a sense of belonging. As Ní Fhrighil argues, Boland does not feel uprooted due to having no access to the majority of the country’s literary past. Rather, her linguistic anxiety is closely linked to her feminist concerns.29 When invoked at all, Irish is construed as a token of an unquestioned but long-forgotten shared identity. For Boland, the notion of the language as something viable blends with the nationalist myth that is to be rejected together with the sexist ideal of male heroism. This approach is conveniently illustrated, for example, in “Witness” in Boland’s “Colony” sequence in The Lost Land (1998) where the poet resignedly admits that whenever she wishes to speak, what comes out of her mouth is “[t]he spurred and booted garrisons.”30 Together with these metaphorical occupying troops, however, also come the speakers of the indigenous language whom the soldiers have dispossessed. “The Scar” from the same collection looks into the cause and consequences of such dispossession, asking: “If colony is a wound what will heal it?”31 With the bodily metaphor extended, the proposed answer is that nothing will, of course, for the mended skin will never feel the same again. The scar will remain as an imprint of a past intrusion, resembling a fleck of otherness grown into the body and consciousness of a person (or nation). In “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951”32 from The Journey, the scar represents a memory from the time Boland, aged six, first moved to England with her parents. She recalls how it was “The bickering of vowels on the buses” that made her realise she was an exile, and how she was reproved

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by a teacher for not speaking proper English. To her back then, England was above all a synonym for loss and exclusion. In “Fond Memory,” the adjoining poem in The Journey, Boland revisits the same period and setting, but this time focuses on a different detail. She remembers how she would leave the school on the same set of buses and arrive home to find what appeared to be a scene of shared identity and secure belonging. While her father was sitting at the piano playing the ballads of Thomas Moore, she would stand spellbound in the doorway, listening to the romantic songs that seemed to represent a strangely familiar “safe inventory of pain.”33 The grafting of a romanticised image of the national past onto one’s own identity can only have one logical outcome, however. The poem begins with a belief that the tunes and lyrics provided the authorial persona’s young displaced self with a clear sense of what her country was, had been and would yet be. It ends, nevertheless, with a sobering realisation that there can be no real connection. Fond memories are not perfect: unlike most unpleasant ones, they are often false. Thus, in hindsight, the poet ridicules her first impulse to identify with the masculine tradition and its requirements of heroism and elevated rhetoric, and she confirms her resolution from “Mise Eire” to turn her back on its heritage. Yet, interestingly, she comes as close to dogmatism in her stance to women and tradition as Pearse did in his fervent attempts at poetic innovation. Despite his forward-looking vision aspiring to a modernised Irish-language poetry, Pearse’s political purpose means that his poetry is very much rooted in its time. Boland’s striving for a new language, which would be perfectly suited to fill up the silences of women in canon and history, has similarly anchored her writing in the intellectual and aesthetic world of second-wave feminism. ∗ ∗ ∗ Pearse’s explicit nationalism has also provoked backlash from other poets. As we have seen, due to her own political intent, Boland failed to discern some of the revisionist potential behind Pearse’s verse. Vona Groarke, a representative of the next generation of poets who have pointed to the limitations of the feminist debate, has explored the ironies and ambiguities surrounding Pearse’s maternal figures down to the last detail. In “The Mother,” written by Pearse on the eve of his own (and his brother Willie’s subsequent) execution in May 1916, we encounter a persona uttering a

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lament for her two sons who have gone out to die “In [a] bloody protest for a glorious thing.” Admitting to being weary of her unceasing sorrow, she ultimately gathers herself to speak in a more appropriate tone: “. . . And yet I have my joy: / My sons were faithful, and they fought.”34 While serving as one of the best examples of the tension detectable elsewhere in Pearse between the demands of poetic language and language as an instrument of political propaganda, this particular shift of tone resulting in the platitudinous exclamation at the close of the poem appears to testify to the triumphal strength of the motherland trope. Through its corrective commentary on the preceding lines that express the mother’s private suffering, the phrase illustrates the common situation, frequently commented on by feminist critics, in which the literary tropes of the feminised nation supplant the lived experience of women. Still, a woman’s life, specified in terms of the domestic, and the established image of femininity, coinciding with notions of national identity, are two interlinked rather than opposing concepts. Clair Wills argues that the legal formulation of the woman’s sphere of activity as domestic (codified in De Valera’s 1937 constitution of the Irish Free State) should be seen as confirming both the private dimension and the public character of the domestic space.35 As it combines elements of personal grief with hyperbolic slogans and propaganda, Pearse’s lyric points, in my view, not only to the prevalence of the literary (and nationalist) stereotypes; it also confirms the general ambiguity of the societally defined concept of domesticity and a woman’s privacy. Intended as guidelines for Pearse’s own mother, telling her how to cope with the loss of her revolutionary sons, the verses contain a very private and at the same time very public message.36 Pearse may thus be seen as unwittingly commenting on the tension between the private and the public dimension of the domestic, as symbolised in the motherland trope. An ironic confusion of the private and the public with regard to Irish mothers informs “Imperial Measure” from Groarke’s second collection Flight (2002). Groarke, a domestic poet par excellence, first published in the early 1990s and has refused to acknowledge any grounds for setting women’s poetry apart as a category in its own right. Although she rarely comments on feminist issues or Irish political history, in “Imperial Measure,” she holds up a mocking mirror to the revolutionary ideals of the Easter Rising and pays tribute to Irish mothers of the time. To set the stage, she prefixes the poem with a quote from a letter that Pearse wrote to his own mother during the occupation of the General Post Office in

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1916: “We have plenty of the best food, all the meals being as good as if served in a hotel. The dining-room here is very comfortable.”37 The ensuing poem itself reads as a map of the risen Dublin. As on a guided tour, we are taken to different parts of the battlefield, each stanza giving us a glimpse of one of the strongholds of the rebels, showing in particular the quality of their food supplies—for what could have been of more importance to a mother of an insurgent son than to know whether he had enough to eat? If the specific historical reference and commentary make “Imperial Measure” unusual among Groarke’s poems, its sly waggishness and dry wit are distinguishing features of her poetic narratives. The gastronomic lists create oddly lush, naturalist images of fighting, suggesting overall that “Irish stew” might actually be intended as a sarcastic metaphor for the Rising: The kitchens of the Metropole and Imperial hotels yielded up to the Irish Republic their armory of fillet, brisket, flank. Though destined for more palatable tongues, it was pressed to service in an Irish stew and served on fine bone china [.]38

Instead of serving to soothe and reassure, this extravagant description of opulent provisions, including “. . . [b]rioche, artichokes, tomatoes / tasted for the first time,” turns into an ironic commentary on the “heady confidence” of the rebels’ political extremism.39 Images of exotic food and drink gone bad and wasted blend in with the aural and visual images of wildfire. Crackers, of which there are plenty, get crushed underfoot, flour sacks burst under fire, and wine acquires “a laden aftertaste” after the cellared bottles had been shaken or burst as a result of the explosions.40 Commenting on the writing of the poem, Groarke admits to the difficulty of finding a new way to deal with a major event of such historical and cultural significance. It is hard, she says, to write an account that would have “resonance in a contemporary poem,” especially with “Yeats having done such a marvellous job” in “Easter, 1916.”41 Yet the “terrible beauty” of her extraordinary metaphorical material serves to underline the failure and futility of the revolutionary zeal that Yeats targets in his canonical poem. Moreover, just as “Easter, 1916,” “Imperial Measure” contains a moment of comforting ordinariness towards the end where the insurgents in Boland’s Mill, covered in flour dust from head to toe, are likened to talced babies with “their grip unclenched, their fists and arms first blessed and, then, made much of.”42

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Then, as if to show precisely what happens when the sons of Ireland elude maternal fuss and turn to Mother Ireland instead, in the very last line of the poem, all the sacrifice is shown to amount to nothing. Indeed, Groarke appears to be more relentless than Yeats in her sarcastic portrayal of the revolutionary spirit. Revealing its pathos and perniciousness, her poem is as much a reply to Pearse’s heightened nationalism as it is a counterpart to Yeats’s elegy. As we shall see again in Chapters 5 and 6, Groarke is above all a poet of private spaces. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that she should use motifs of motherhood and the domestic to reflect on one of the key and most controversial events in modern Irish history.

Chilling Apparitions: Biddy Jenkinson and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill In the Irish-language tradition, the feminised figuration of the subjugated land was from an early stage the subject of parodies and subversive commentaries. The trend began in works such as An Airc (The Ark), the caustic political satire by the eighteenth-century Scottish Jacobite poet Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair, or Brian Merriman’s famous satire Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court) composed orally in the early 1780s and reverberated in the works of a number of modern Irish poets. However, just as the female allegory is often two faced, these critiques have been characterised by their own tangles and contradictions.43 As we have seen with Pearse, the old icons that consist of contrasting figurations and can come across as desirable or repulsive, adorable or intimidating, have provoked equally confounding reactions. A good example of such an ambiguous stance is “Éire ina bhFuil Romhainn” (To Ireland in the Coming Times) by Máirtín Ó Direáin whose first collection Coinnle Geala (Bright Candles, 1942) marked the true beginning of the modern era in Irish-language poetry and whose mature poetry shows his disillusionment with the development in twentieth-century free Ireland and its language politics. The lyric that targets the futility of nationalistic rhetoric and the abstract ideals of nationhood comes from Ó Direáin’s fourth collection Ár Ré Dhearóil (Our Wretched Era, 1962) in which many poems are fuelled by the growing frustration with his life and job as a civil servant in Dublin and nostalgic memories of his idealised childhood in the Irish-speaking Aran Islands.

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Ó Direáin’s Éire is a greedy slut, ready to sell her body “ag gach bodach anall” (to each foreign lout) and unfaithful to her honourable heroic suitors.44 Notably, and most alarmingly, Pearse is among those she is disloyal to, and he is presented as a martyr for an ungrateful Éire. In the light of the harsh reality of the capitalist state, Pearse’s sacrifice and the old-world ideals of glory and bravery are made to appear not only futile but also pitifully ridiculous:45 he was only a poet, after all, “. . . nár fhág ina dhiaidh ach glóir” ([who had] nothing to bequeath but glory).46 Ó Direáin’s outrage in these lines seems intent on taking the exasperated irony of Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” one step further. Yet, through its title—translated from Yeats’s early poem of the same name—the lyric also proposes to question the older poet’s aestheticism and his promotion of cultural nationalism over the convoluted political polemics of the time. As Ó Direáin refocuses on his Caitlín Ní hUallacháin figure, however, the ridicule turns in on itself and the poem launches into an embittered attack on the new generation of greedy hypocrites who have trampled the ideals of the Rising as well as the legacy of Yeats’s “red-rose-bordered hem” and his proclaimed nationalist sentiments.47 If Ó Direáin spurs his feminised Ireland to turn her back on Pearse and sell his glory, it is with tears of anger and disappointment welling up in his eyes that he perceives the outcome. What started out as a repudiation of Pearse’s sacrifice and bartered icons turns into a romanticised apology for the same and a condemnation of Yeats’s aestheticised detachment. One of the most widely recognised contemporary Irish-language poets and a great master of irony and satire, Biddy Jenkinson has on many occasions commented on her relationship to the Gaelic tradition and the image of the feminised land. In conversation with Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú, Jenkinson claimed, provocatively, that she, for one, does not feel uncomfortable with the feminised images of the land or with the fact that these images have been invoked in poetry by men as a source of inspiration. In her view, Irish poetry will only thrive if it remains closely related to the land. If that land has been imaged as feminine, it makes it easier for her as a woman to relate to her muse.48 “Mo Scéal Féin—Á Insint ag Aisling” (My Version of the Story: An Aisling Speaking) from Jenkinson’s first collection, Baisteadh Gintlí (Circumcision, 1986), is an apparently explicit reaction to the aisling tradition. The poem inverts the traditional scenario twice over: otherwise a virtuous soul, the female persona (presumably the Spéirbhean who, having failed to arouse her male object, has usurped the role of speaker

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and admirer for herself) sits up all night so completely taken by the phantom of her sleeping profligate idol that she herself falls into a ghostlike state, turning into a spectre and a slave to her own infatuation. Instead of keeping to the usual sequence and stock images of the genre and simply reversing the gender polarity, Jenkinson’s persona lets go halfway through and abandons herself to desire: Codladh i gclúmh aingil anocht ar mo ghrása Ach spailpín mé féin Taise bhocht nimfeamáineach. Tonight my darling slumbers in angelic down; But I’m just a navvy, A wretched nymphomaniac ghost.49

What is most progressive about this retelling, however, is the way Jenkinson individualises the trope in letting her persona speak in her own voice. Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who is considered, together with Ó Direáin and Seán Ó Ríordáin, to be one of the poets who modernised Irish-language poetry around the middle of the twentieth century, has claimed that writing in Irish allowed her to include material in her poetry that would not go unnoticed by the censors had it been written in English.50 She has also remarked that in the Gaelic tradition, “[d]e ghnáth ní labhrann file Éireannach mar gheall air féin ach amháin i bpearsa choinbhinsiúnta” (the Irish poet does not usually speak in his own voice, but uses a conventional persona).51 Jenkinson, whose poetry is written almost exclusively in the first person singular, is likely to mock male possessive lust as much as her own obsessive desire.52 Indeed, the speaker-poet’s enamoured admiration and satirical reference to the traditional genre defy normative ideas of what is “appropriate” in terms of both social and literary conventions. Máire Ní Annracháin considers the poem to be an important example of one of the primary concerns in Jenkinson’s early poetry: the foregrounding of the female voice, be it coming from the mouth of the land or that of a woman. The poet does, indeed, let the Spéirbhean speak in her own voice. Moreover, in referring to herself as “spailpín,” the speaker usurps for herself—in a brilliant coup, as Ní Annracháin notes—the name of one of the great aisling poets, Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, aka Spailpín Fánach (migrant worker). Thus, she not only identifies herself as part of the Irish-language tradition

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but overcomes the usual gender association and shatters the conventional distinction between the literary subject and object.53 Born in 1949, Jenkinson writes exclusively in Irish (with the exception of occasional polemics and criticism in English-language periodicals) but while her work develops in close dialogue with the Gaelic tradition, her approach to the canon is based on lively, judicious unorthodoxy. Her bantering and elastic yet intense and formally elegant lyrics spring from the belief that the prevalent notion of Irish writing as interrupted and belonging to the past is not only premature but simply extraneous. As long as there are people like herself who manage to live their lives and pursue their careers through Irish, it is ill-advised to speak about its imminent or actual demise. Working from the bosom of an Irish-speaking community, she keeps a relatively low profile and carefully maintains her privacy; Biddy Jenkinson is a pseudonym.54 Contesting Máire Mhac an tSaoi’s deduction that she uses a pen name because she has “embraced the ‘anti-confessional and a-personal conventions historically peculiar to poetry in Irish,’” Jenkinson argues that she has chosen anonymity not in order to adopt some depersonalised, utterly reverent stance to the tradition but rather to show that “the poetic sensibility is not the perquisite of any priestly caste but one of the most common of human attributes.”55 Another motivation for Jenkinson’s self-imposed anonymity has been the desire to give herself the opportunity to move more freely between the various personae and subjectivities she adopts on the page. Yet another has been to provide her poems with greater independence than if they were read and assessed—as poems often are—against the facts of a particular life.56 Máire de Búrca has argued that as a result of this approach, Jenkinson’s poetry does not lend itself readily to gender-based analysis, which commonly relies on the merging of a private life and creative work.57 This seemingly detached, subjective perspective allows the poet to challenge the dichotomies that have frequently been read into the linguistic situation of Irish-language poetry. The stereotyped opposition between the episodic or dwindling Irish-language writing and the thriving anglophone poetry is revealingly disputed by Jenkinson. From her self-imposed marginal position at the heart of the Irish-language tradition, she resolutely rejects such dichotomies, along with the conflict, recognised by a number of critics and writers of both languages alike, between the predatory masculine tradition and the forcefully silenced “female” oral tradition.

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∗ ∗ ∗ As they are mocked in modern and contemporary poetry, the often contradictory figurations of the feminised land draw upon a great variety of models in the Gaelic tradition that range from the worshipped sovereignty figure in the symbolic banais rígi (royal wedding) fertility ritual in the early Irish tradition58 to the Seanbhean Bhocht . Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, first performed in 1902, is perhaps the most famous and certainly the most concise adaptation of the Cailleach–Spéirbhean transformation which, in turn, is one of the common tropes in the aisling tradition. Yeats’s solemn handling of the Mother-Ireland stereotype, recalled with sarcasm by MacNeice in Autumn Journal, has provided a trigger for the anti-nationalist wrath of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. In her 1992 essay “An Bhanfhile Sa Traidisiun: The Woman Poet in the Irish Tradition,” she protested that Yeats’s metamorphosing image “galvanized a whole population at the beginning of [the last] century, and is still shockingly alive in the collective psyche.”59 Insisting on the necessity to free women from the yoke of the antiquated motherland image—and the population from the grips of patriotism—Ní Dhomhnaill uses her own poems to overturn masculinist tendencies prevailing in the canon. On multiple occasions, she has amused herself by reaching back into the tradition and mocking images through ironic juxtaposition. Although she insists that she can only write poetry in Irish, she is undiscriminating when it comes to finding fault with the ways female figures are represented in either of the two canons. Indeed, few of the sexist clichés she has found in poetry by male authors ranging from Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille to Pearse or Yeats have escaped her caustic attention. In “Caitlín,” Ní Dhomhnaill’s speaker recalls with benign irony the good old days of Cathleen Ni Houlihan who keeps boasting, to this day, of her racy past: “go bhfachthas fornocht i gConnachta í, mar áille na háille, / is ag taisteal bhóithre na Mumhan, mar ghile na gile” (how they saw her naked in Connacht, she the beauty of beauty, / and travelling the roads of Munster, she the brightest of the bright).60 The contagious device from Ó Rathaille’s “Gile na Gile” that we saw mimicked in Pearse’s “Fornocht do chonac thú” manifests itself once again. The parody of Ó Rathaille’s phrasing, however, merely serves to set the satirical context. The real sarcasm is saved for the rest of the poem which presents a mocking catalogue of some later moments in the military

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campaign against the British, including the atrocities by the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force (known in the early 1920s as the Black and Tans) or the fervent heroism of the Easter Rising with its dark repercussions in the militant republicanism during the Northern Ireland conflict. The glory of Caitlín—however pathetic it used to be—unquestionably belongs to the past, as Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem playfully insists.61 In its indiscriminate mocking spree, this rejection of the nationalist sentiment is perhaps the most resolute and unambiguous of all the examples we have considered so far. While in “Caitlín” we have encountered Ní Dhomhnaill poking a corpse and ridiculing a harmless, outmoded emblem, elsewhere the trope still retains the power to frighten new generations. In “Cailleach” (Hag), the aisling becomes a nightmare when the vision of the feminised land is transformed into a spectre of the self: “Taibhríodh dom gur mé an talamh” (I dreamt I was the earth). The persona soon forgets all about her dream-vision until her daughter’s terror brings it up again years later. Like a classic “final girl” in a horror film, the child comes running to her mother, crying that she saw the mountains move, like a terrible giantess, till it seemed “. . . go n-éireodh sí aniar agus mise d’íosfadh” (that she would lean forward and swallow me up).62 The good old days of Cathleen Ni Houlihan as a beauty icon may well be over, but the archetype of the Cailleach has been carried over to this day (notwithstanding Pearse’s genuine attempt). In her essay “Mis and Dubh Ruis: A Parable of Psychic Transformation,” Ní Dhomhnaill speculates why it should be “the Negative Mother Archetype rather than another form of the Goddess that describes the underlying psychic reality” of Ireland. Skipping her oft-repeated theme of the inherent male bias of the utilitarian English language, she reaches further back to look for an answer in the times of pre-Christian Ireland. Suggesting that the Celts’ tendency towards the cerebral forced them apart from what the French feminists would have as the “language of the body,” she explains that having been repressed into the depths of the psyche, the feminine then breaks through in the shape of the negative image.63 Not happy with the existing finding, Ní Dhomhnaill has devised her own ways of dealing with the perennial negative image, modelled on the idea of appropriation. One is to introduce a male counterpart, as she does in her sarcastic address of “Masculus Giganticus Hibernicus.” In this parodic address, the iconoclastic laughter not only involves

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a thug who sits around in pubs plotting a “ruathar díoltais ar an bhfearann baineann” (vengeful incursion to female land) but ridicules the clichéd female image, too.64 The punning contradiction contained in the phrase “fearann baineann” inevitably gets lost in translation into English. Fearann (meaning “land” or “terrain”) is a masculine noun based on a root homonymous with the noun fear (“man”). In juxtaposing it with the similarly structured adjective baineann (composed of the stem bean— woman—and the homographic suffix -ann) Ní Dhomhnaill manages, in a single move, not only to challenge the standardised troping of the land as feminine but also to further ridicule the ostentatious masculinity of her object, as well as to bring in, with irony, the linguistic aspect of the English colonisation of Ireland. On one level, the phrase points derisively to the ignorant lustfulness of the usurper who imagines himself basking on “. . . an bhfraoch a fhásann / ar leirgí grianmhara mná óige” (. . . the heather that grows / on a young girl’s sunny slopes).65 On another level, this bullying boor who leaves both land and woman in a sorry state recalls the marching troops pouring out of the mouth of Boland’s female “Witness.” As we shall see again in Chapter 3, both poets frequently combine the language issue with feminist concerns, although they differ as to which of the two comes first. Like Boland, Ní Dhomhnaill expressly rejects the mixture of elitist bravado and martyrdom of militant nationalism that discounts women and possibly causes harm to them. One aspect she finds particularly damnable is the linguistic purism advocated by some of the Gaelic Leaguers and male revolutionaries: It’s a dead thing, it’s cruel and it’s misogynist. My mother was a Gaeltacht girl, and she thought the purer-than-pure male revivalists were an awful crowd. And they were. One of the things that causes me to get up in the morning is the desire to take Irish back from that grey-faced Irish-revivalist male preserve. I’ll be damned if I’ll let them monopolise the language.66

“Masculus Giganticus Hibernicus” is indeed one of the poetic manifestations of that vigorous mission. As the single most widely read Irish-language poet in Ireland and abroad, Ní Dhomhnaill has engaged in repeated public defence of her linguistic choice. Her advocacy of Irish as the proper language for poetry (she writes exclusively in Irish, but most of her critical writing is in English, which she presents as a tool more suitable for analysis) has served to support its public image as a viable medium.67 The poet’s

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use of the language in promoting her feminism, however, has produced its own ironic contradictions. Contrasting English, “intellectualized out of experience,”68 with the eternal feminine emblematised by the Gaelic oral tradition, Ní Dhomhnaill suggests that through writing in Irish, women have a chance to free themselves from patriarchal patterns of thought. While railing against the repeated exploitation of the female body as “female land” or motherland, she has inflected the concept of the mother tongue to serve her own (twofold) political purpose. Elaborating on the distinction between the “poetic” Irish and “analytical” English, she describes her idea of the positive potential of the Negative Mother archetype which is seen as embedded in the Irish language. As she argues that Irish has not been “patriarchalized,” she considers “many things, including this idea of a deeper quality, this negative femininity, this hag energy,” to be part of Irish-language cultural consciousness. In her view, Irish is “the language of the Mothers, because everything that has been done to women, has been done to Irish.”69 However loose some of her argumentation, it has to be admitted that in the privatisation of the “hag energy,” Ní Dhomhnaill shrewdly combines her two main subversive goals: to oppose the subjection of women by patriarchy and to highlight the minority status of Irish. In doing so, however, she risks succumbing to the lure of the eternal feminine and of contributing to another form of stereotyping. Wills points to the danger in feminist revisionism that the authors will simply supplant the passive motherland figure with “a sexually, but not politically, active earth mother.”70 In the poems I have examined, Ní Dhomhnaill and others consciously attempt to avoid this risk by using the disruptive effect of laughter and irony. Thus, they have been ready to confront the variable motherland image that exists on the frontier between the public and the private and on the border between epochs and traditions. ∗ ∗ ∗ The comic has been long established as one of the constituent traditions in Irish writing. But while volumes have been published on the legacy of sardonic and polemic critiques of society by male figures such as Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien and Pádraic Ó Conaire, the elements of comedy and satire in literary works by women have received less attention. Still, even if from at least the 1980s onwards, owing to the research conducted on Maria Edgeworth, Clare Boylan, Edna O’Brien or Lady Gregory, the

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role of women in the tradition of subversive laughter in Irish literature has been determined as indispensable, often even formative in the fields of prose and drama, the study of humour and irony in women’s poetry has been less systematic. In an essay on the comic in the writings of Edgeworth, the renowned Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin argues that the novelist’s greatest achievements are based on the reworking of the dramatic suppression of various, often female voices. She thus echoes Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia and his theory of the carnivalesque function of the novel that is accomplished through a comic juxtaposition of marginalised and official forms of language.71 Indeed, the Bakhtinian notion of the centrifugal (societally distinguishing) forces in linguistic proposition and literary language has been readily adopted by feminist critics such as Nancy Glazener who sees it as compatible with the feminist concept of the feminine as an anarchic and a subversive force.72 Other critics have found Bakhtin’s concept of carnival transgression (formulated in Rabelais and His World) attractive owing to its professed aims of challenging the official culture and discourses, above all the medieval and early Renaissance ecclesiastical culture that renounced the body and the cyclical nature of human life.73 In this respect, Bakhtin’s theory seems relevant to the stream in the French feminist linguistic theory that has proposed the formulation of écriture féminine as a way of shunning patriarchal discourse, insisting on the close affinity of such specific female utterances with the body. Yet this kind of equalising tends to be simplistic. As Simone de Beauvoir writes, the idea of a specifically woman’s language, created anew with the reliance on extra-lingual, primarily bodily drives, is to be rejected. According to de Beauvoir, there is but one language which women simply must “steal and use . . . for their own good.”74 Mutlu Konuk Blasing, in her study of the subversive and constructive potential of poetic language, argues that “one must not—if one wants to think of poetry as such—posit an ‘unconscious’ or ‘instincts’ and bodily ‘drives’ to account for the power of poetry and its threat to rational discourse.”75 Julia Kristeva, whose insistence on the fluidity and plurality of the semiotic material (capable of undermining the symbolic order) make her line of thought compatible with the idea of écriture féminine, has warned against the risks involved in an overeager recourse to the body at the expense of language. With reference to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogised heteroglossia, which in all its aspects presupposes the existence of a literary text, Kristeva contends that

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the process of dialogical “transgression” of linguistic and social conventions can only succeed if it accepts “another law.”76 It is only in terms of its literary qualities and accomplishments that feminist writing can achieve its political goals and bring about a lasting change. Kristeva systematically rejects the controlling intrusive superego that threatens to thwart the achievement of the creative state of jouissance fundamental for the process of a semiotic act of writing.77 Her decision is informed by the Lacanian-Barthesian opposition of plaisir (a controlling homogenising principle) and promotion of jouissance as disrupting the structures and comforts of cultural identification and signification. Together with her definition of poetry as a practice of the speaking subject (formulated as essentially multiple), it recalls, in turn, Bakhtin’s theory of hybridisation and heteroglossia as a combination of voices that creates a “complex unity of differences.”78 Thus, through Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism in literary language and through Kristeva’s use of jouissance, we are brought back to the Irish poets’ polemic with their literary tradition.79 By creating a living (or satirically dead, as we shall see in Chapter 3) literary counterpart to the topos of the feminised land, the humour and sarcasm employed in the writing of many Irish women poets becomes a successful method of transgression. The general thrust of these poems is to usurp stereotypical representations of Ireland as a female body through the distancing techniques of laughter and irony rather than by plunging into the mythologised feminine— represented again by the body. In other words, the elements of satire are equally important in bringing about transformation and in producing good poetry.

Notes 1. Máirín Nic Eoin, “Sovereignty and Politics, c. 1300–1900,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing : Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, eds. Angela Bourke et al., vol. 4 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 275. Nic Eoin addresses similar themes also in “Secrets and Disguises? Caitlín Ní Uallacháin and Other Female Personages in Eighteenth-Century Irish Political Poetry,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an Dá Chultúr 11 (1996): 7–45; and “Athscríobh na Miotas: Gné den Idirthéacsúlacht i bhFilíocht Chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge,” Taighde agus Teagasc 2 (2002): 23–47. 2. Gerardine Meaney, Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics (Dublin: Attic Press, 1991), 7.

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3. See Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 108. 4. Frank Sewel lists two main reasons for which Pearse can be considered to be the founding father of twentieth-century poetry in Irish: he was the first to write “short lyrical poems of personal feeling,” and he was concerned primarily with “the contemporary moment and did not tend to write about Irish as a subject in his literary work.” See Frank Sewell, “Between Two Languages: Poetry in Irish, English and Irish English,” in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 150. 5. In 1905, Pearse claimed to be the only one of his generation to have avoided the problematic dual influence which, in his view, impeded poetry production in Irish in his time: “the fettered, complicated, vacuous 18th century (Irish) model, and the English language model, which had itself colonised the spirit of poetry.” See Seán Ó Tuama, Repossessions (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), 6. 6. See Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, “Gile na Gile” (Brightness Most Bright), trans. Thomas Kinsella, in An Duanaire; 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed, eds. Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1990), 150–3. 7. Patrick Pearse, “Fornocht do chonac thú” (Renunciation), trans. Patrick Pearse, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , vol. 4, 291. 8. Pearse, “Mise Éire,” Suantraidhe agus goltraidhe (Baile Átha Cliath: Irish Review, 1914), 17. In English: “I am Ireland,” trans. Patrick Pearse, CELT, University College Cork, accessed 20 May 2010, www.ucc.ie/ celt/published/E950004-015/index.html. 9. See “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” in Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney, eds. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach and Kim R. McCone (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989), 308–31. 10. Eavan Boland, “Outside History,” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 126–7. 11. Boland, “Outside History,” 128. 12. Boland, “In Search of a Nation,” Object Lessons, 55. 13. Boland, “Turning Away,” Object Lessons, 114. 14. Boland, “Nation,” 67–8. 15. Boland, “Mise Eire,” New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 128. 16. Boland, “Mise Eire,” 128. 17. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “The Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing, Introduction: Contemporary Poetry.” I quote the essay as reprinted under the above title in Ní Dhomhnaill’s Selected Essays (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 179–80.

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18. Boland, “Mise Eire,” 128. 19. Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800– 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 164. 20. Rióna Ní Fhrighil, Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí: Filíocht Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2008), 258. 21. Ní Fhrighil, Banfhilí, 184–5. 22. Pearse, “Some Aspects of Irish Literature,” in Collected Works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Songs of the Irish Rebels and Specimans from an Irish Anthology, ed. Desmond Ryan (Dublin: Maunsel, 1918), 131–58. Qtd. in Ní Fhrighil, Banfhilí, 185. 23. Boland, “Turning Away,” 114. Most of Boland’s verse prior to In Her Own Image (1980) was in rhyme and stanzaic form. In an unpublished essay, she recounts how she first encountered Yeats’s poetry as a teenager and how she was taken by the idea that a place could be claimed through language: “What caught me in Yeats’ poetry to begin with was the shaping grandeur of the words . . . I had never seen such gigantic claims of belonging . . . I wanted there and then to be that kind of poet . . . It was the beginning of Irish poetry to me.” Boland, qtd. in Jody Allen Randolph, Eavan Boland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 26–8. It is interesting to note that for Boland at that moment, Yeats was not an intimidating, unavoidable influence that would threaten to keep her in the shade. Not imagining herself a probable successor, she could actually feel attached to his work. It was on account of his particular kind of cultural nationalism that Boland later rejected Yeats as an influence. Together with the older poet’s treatment of the nation as a theme, she threw away the constraints of poetic form that she had learnt from him, and others, with so much effort. While this move away from the wellmade lyric was undoubtedly also prompted by the universal tendency to free verse and experiment in Ireland and elsewhere in the course of the 1970s, Boland has presented it as a renunciation of the “closed-in Irish poetic tradition.” See Boland, “On ‘The Journey,’” in Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, eds. Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997): 188–9. Qtd. in Allen Randolph, 91. 24. See Boland, Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets, eds. Gillean Somerville-Arjat and Rebecca E. Wilson (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), 82. 25. Deborah McWilliams Consalvo, “Between Rhetoric and Reality: An Interview with Eavan Boland on the Place of the Woman Poet in the Irish Literary Canon,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 81.321 (1992): 92. 26. For a discussion of Boland’s revisionism and the drawbacks of her sweeping rejection of the tradition through the figure of Pearse’s Hag

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27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

of Beare, see Rióna Ní Fhrighil, “Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Revise the Landscape,” in Irish Landscapes, eds. José Francisco Fernández Sánchez and María Elena Jaime de Pablos (Almería: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Almería, 2003), 238–40. Boland, “Nation,” 55. Pearse, An Claidheamh Soluis. Qtd. in Frederick Ryan, “On Language and Political Ideas,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , gen. ed. Seamus Deane, vol. 2 (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), 1000. Ní Fhrighil points out that it is only sporadically that Boland pays attention to Irish and its history: “Is go neamhleithscéalach a labhraíonn sí faoina heaspa cumais sa tenaga, á rá nárbh é seo an rud ba mhó a ghoill uirthi nuair a d’fhill sí ar Éirinn” (She unapologetically mentions her incompetence in the language, saying only that it was not the thing that pressed her most when she returned to Ireland). Ní Fhrighil, Banfhilí, 25. My translation. To illustrate her point, Ní Fhrighil cites another passage from Boland’s essay “In Search of a Nation”: “Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic speech of the country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing.” Boland, “Nation,” 55. Qtd. in Ní Fhrighil, Banfhilí, 25. Boland, “Witness,” New Collected Poems, 247. Boland, “The Scar,” New Collected Poems, 249–50. Boland, “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951,” New Collected Poems, 255–6. Boland, “Fond Memory,” New Collected Poems, 156. Pearse, “The Mother,” in The Literary Writings of Patrick Pearse. Writings in English, ed. Séamas Ó Buachalla (Dublin and Cork: The Mercier Press, 1979), 27. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 60. See Moynagh Sullivan, “I am, therefore I’m not (Woman),” International Journal of Irish Studies 2.2 (2002): 125. Vona Groarke, “Imperial Measure,” Flight (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2002), 63. Groarke, “Measure,” 63. Groarke, “Measure,” 63, 65. Groarke, “Measure,” 63–5. Groarke in Hedwig Schwall, “‘How do you make a teapot be intellectually interesting?’ An interview with Vona Groarke,” Irish University Review 43.2 (2013): 303. Groarke, “Measure,” 64. See the soothing moment of commemorative naming in the final stanza of Yeats’s “Easter, 1916.” W. B. Yeats, “Easter,

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43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

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1916,” The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), 228– 30. The discussion surrounding Merriman’s burlesque variation on the aisling has mostly been read, since the outset of broad-scaled feminist criticism in the 1970s, in terms of empowering women as social figures and speakers and of liberating their sexual desires. For a discussion of the “suggestively indeterminate” effects of Merriman’s Cúirt and its use by Seamus Heaney in his debate on women, sex and gender, see Patricia Coughlan, “‘The Whole Strange Growth’: Heaney, Orpheus and Women,” Irish Feminisms: Special Issue of The Irish Review 35, eds. Moynagh Sullivan and Wanda Balzano (2007): 25–45; and Seamus Heaney, “Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court,” The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 38–62. For a detailed discussion of the work, see Liam P. Ó Murchú, Merriman: I bhFábhar Béithe (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2005). For a reaction to the contemporary “masculinist” readings of the text, see Máirín de Burca, “Analysis of The Midnight Court,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing : Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, eds. Angela Bourke et al., vol. 5 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 1588–91. Máirtín Ó Direáin, “Éire ina bhFuil Romhainn” (To Ireland in the Coming Times), trans. Tomás Mac Síomóin and Douglas Sealy, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1992), 96–7. While certainly provocative, Ó Direáin’s figuration of Ireland is based on some earlier versions of the trope, represented perhaps most notably in Ó Rathaille’s “Gile na Gile,” 150–3. Mícheál Mac Craith points to the fact that Ó Direáin was familiar with Pearse’s prose and poetry and argues that the latter influenced Ó Direáin’s work in the 1960s, in particular his poems from Ár Ré Dhearóil which, in Mac Craith’s view, are informed by the same combination of frustrated dejection with melancholy resignation. See Mícheál Mac Craith, An tOileán Rúin agus Muir an Dáin: Staidéar ar Fhilíocht Mháirtín Uí Dhireáin (Baile Átha Cliath: Comhar Teoranta, 1993), 13–20. Ó Direáin, “Éire,” 96–7. See Yeats, “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” The Poems, 70. The poem, which first appeared under the title “Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days,” is from Yeats’s early collection The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) and concludes a section of poems called “The Rose.” See Jenkinson in Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú, “Ceilpeadóir, Rí, Nóinín: Biddy Jenkinson ag Caint le Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú,” Oghma 8 (1996): 62–3. Biddy Jenkinson, “Mo Scéal Féin—Á Insint ag Aisling,” Rogha Dánta (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 5. My translation.

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50. Mhac an tSaoi in “Máire Mhac an tSaoi: A Legend in Her Own Rhyme,” Irish Independent (28 July 2012), accessed 2 September 2012, www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/mire-mhac-an-tsaoi-alegend-in-her-own-rhyme-3182098.html. 51. Mhac an tSaoi in Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, “Bláthú an Traidisiúin,” Comhar 46.5 (May 1987): 24. My translation. 52. See Máire Ní Annracháin, “Biddy agus an Bandia,” in Saoi na hÉigse: Aistí in Ómós do Sheán Ó Tuama, eds. Pádraigín Riggs et al. (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2000), 339–57. 53. See Ní Annracháin, “Bandia,” 343. 54. For a summary of some of Jenkinson’s key statements and stances, see Caitlín Nic Íomhair, “‘Cé hí siúd Biddy Jenkinson?’: freagra an fhile ina saothar neamhfhicsin,” COMHARTaighde 2 (2016), accessed 15 June 2018, https://doi.org/10.18669/ct.2016.05. 55. Jenkinson, “Máire Mhac an tSaoi: The Clerisy and the Folk (P.I.R. 24): A Reply,” Poetry Ireland Review 25 (Spring 1989): 80. 56. See Jenkinson in Ní Fhoghlú, 62. For more on Jenkinson’s intentional indeterminacy of her personae’s names and gender, see Ní Annracháin, “Bandia,” 341. 57. Máire de Búrca, “Biddy Jenkinson,” in Filíocht Chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge, ed. Rióna Ní Fhrighil (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2010), 168. 58. Banais rígi, a fertility ritual in Ireland of the pre-Christian times performed at the accession of each new ruler in which he was ritually united with his territory (túath), personified as a female goddess. See Goddesses Who Rule, eds. Elisabeth Benard and Beverly Moon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 93–4. 59. Ní Dhomhnaill, “An Bhanfhile Sa Traidisiun: The Woman Poet in the Irish Tradition,” Selected Essays (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 48. A version of the essay first appeared as “What Foremothers?” in Poetry Ireland Review 36 (1992): 19–31. 60. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Caitlín” (Cathleen), in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967 –2000, ed. Peggy O’Brien (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1999), 169. My translation. 61. In the last stanza of “Caitlín,” Ní Dhomhnaill also includes an ironic reference to “Mac an cheannaí” (The Redeemer’s Son), an embittered variation on the aisling genre by Ó Rathaille. In the poem, Ó Rathaille repeatedly alludes to his Éire as a “spreas” (dried branch or twig), reduced to the state of celibacy and bareness in the absence of her rightful king and saviour. Ní Dhomhnaill takes the other meaning of “spreas” (var. “spreasán”) as her clue and uses the word to describe the bewitched admirers of the allegorical figure as “effete” and “worthless” (see Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla): “is fiú dá mba dhóigh le gach spreasán an uair úd / go mba leannán aige féin í, go bhfuil na leathanta san thart” (even if every

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62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

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losel once hoped / that she would become his lover, those days are over now). My emphasis. See “Mac an cheannaí” (The Redeemer’s Son), trans. Thomas Kinsella, An Duanaire, 96–100. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Cailleach” (Hag), Pharaoh’s Daughter (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1990), 136. My translation. See Ní Dhomhnaill, “Mis and Dubh Ruis: A Parable of Psychic Transformation,” Selected Essays, 84–5. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Masculus Giganticus Hibernicus,” trans. Michael Hartnett, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989), 78–9. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Masculus,” 78–9. Ní Dhomhnaill in Laura O’Connor, “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995): 581–614, accessed 20 May 2011, http://connection.ebs cohost.com/c/literary-criticism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterw ord-by-laura-oconnor. For Ní Dhomhnaill’s account of her intellectual and emotional life split between two languages, see Fiachra Ó Marcaigh, “Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill ag caint le Fiachra Ó Marcaigh,” Comhar (January 1982): 26. See M. O’Connor, 152. Ní Dhomhnaill in Somerville-Arjat and Wilson, 154. Wills, 54. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “The Voices of Maria Edgeworth’s Comedy,” in The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, ed. Theresa O’Connor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 20. Nancy Glazener, “Dialogic Subversion: Bakhtin, the Novel and Gertrude Stein,” in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, eds. Ken Hirschkop and David G. Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 110. Bakhtin’s theory was primarily formed on the basis of the language of prose. However, its relevance to the study of poetry has been claimed by a number of scholars. See, for example, Dialogism and Lyric Self -Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre, ed. Jacob Blevins (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2008). Alice Jardine, “Interview with Simone de Beauvoir,” Signs 5.2 (Winter 1979): 229. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 71. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 161–7. See James P. Zappen, “Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975),” in TwentiethCentury Rhetoric and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources, eds.

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Michael G. Moran and Michelle Ballif (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 7–20; and Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990), 20–1. 79. Nic Dhiarmada argues, for example, that Ní Dhomhnaill’s idea of a language determined by pre-verbal or non-verbal impulses and her specific amalgamation of feminist and linguistic concerns point to analogies with Kristeva’s concept of jouissance. See Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, “An Bhean is an Bhaineann,” in Téacs Baineann, Téacs Mná: Gnéithe de Fhilíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2005), 11–19. Nic Dhiarmada also addresses the question of to what extent the specificities of writing in Irish can or should be seen as relevant for the specificities of poetry and women’s writing as such in “Ceist na Teanga: Dioscúrsa na Gaeilge, An Fhilíocht, agus Dioscúrsa na mBan,” Comhar 51.5 (May 1992): 160–7.

Works Cited Allen Randolph, Jody. Eavan Boland. Cork: Cork University Press, 2014. Benard, Elisabeth, and Beverly Moon, eds. Goddesses Who Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Blevins, Jacob, ed. Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2008. Boland, Eavan. New Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. ———. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. ———. “On ‘The Journey.’” In Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, edited by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber, 187–92. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Consalvo, Deborah McWilliams. “Between Rhetoric and Reality: An Interview with Eavan Boland on the Place of the Woman Poet in the Irish Literary Canon.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 81. 321 (1992): 89–100. Coughlan, Patricia. “‘The Whole Strange Growth’: Heaney, Orpheus and Women.” Irish Feminisms: Special Issue of The Irish Review 35. Edited by Moynagh Sullivan and Wanda Balzano (2007): 25–45. de Burca, Máirín. “Analysis of The Midnight Court.” In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, edited by Angela Bourke et al., vol. 5, 1588–9. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. ———. “Biddy Jenkinson.” In Filíocht Chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge, edited by Rióna Ní Fhrighil, 167–80. Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2010.

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Glazener, Nancy. “Dialogic Subversion: Bakhtin, the Novel and Gertrude Stein.” In Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, edited by Ken Hirschkop and David G. Shepherd, 155–76. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. Groarke, Vona. Flight. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2002. Heaney, Seamus. “Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court.” The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, 38–62. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990. Jardine, Alice. “Interview with Simone de Beauvoir.” Signs 5.2 (Winter 1979): 224–36. Jenkinson, Biddy. “Máire Mhac an tSaoi: The Clerisy and the Folk (P.I.R. 24): A Reply.” Poetry Ireland Review 25 (Spring 1989): 80. ———. Rogha Dánta (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000). Kearney, Richard. Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine, edited by Leon S. Roudiez. London: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Mac Craith, Mícheál. An tOileán Rúin agus Muir an Dáin: Staidéar ar Fhilíocht Mháirtín Uí Dhireáin. Baile Átha Cliath: Comhar Teoranta, 1993. “Máire Mhac an tSaoi: A Legend in Her Own Rhyme.” Editorial. Irish Independent (28 July 2012). www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/mire-mhacan-tsaoi-a-legend-in-her-own-rhyme-3182098.html. Meaney, Gerardine. Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics. Dublin: Attic Press, 1991. Ní Annracháin, Máire. “Biddy agus an Bandia.” In Saoi na hÉigse: Aistí in Ómós do Sheán Ó Tuama, edited by Pádraigín Riggs et al., 339–57. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2000. Nic Dhiarmada, Bríona. “Bláthú an Traidisiúin.” Comhar 46.5 (May 1987): 23– 9. ———. “Ceist na Teanga: Dioscúrsa na Gaeilge, An Fhilíocht, agus Dioscúrsa na mBan.” Comhar 51.5 (May 1992): 160–7. ———. Téacs Baineann, Téacs Mná: Gnéithe de Fhilíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2005. Nic Eoin, Máirín. “Athscríobh na Miotas: Gné den Idirthéacsúlacht i bhFilíocht Chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge.” Taighde agus Teagasc 2 (2002): 23–47. ———. “Secrets and Disguises? Caitlín Ní Uallacháin and Other Female Personages in Eighteenth-Century Irish Political Poetry.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an Dá Chultúr 11 (1996): 7–45.

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Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan. “The Voices of Maria Edgeworth’s Comedy.” In The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, edited by Theresa O’Connor, 21– 39. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Nic Íomhair, Caitlín. “Cé hí siúd Biddy Jenkinson? freagra an fhile ina saothar neamhfhicsin.” COMHARTaighde 2 (2016). Accessed 15 June 2018. https://doi.org/10.18669/ct.2016.05. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. Pharaoh’s Daughter. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1990. ———. Selected Essays. Dublin: New Island, 2005. ———. Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta. Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989. Ní Fhoghlú, Siobhán. “Ceilpeadóir, Rí, Nóinín: Biddy Jenkinson ag Caint le Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú.” Oghma 8 (1996): 62–9. Ní Fhrighil, Rióna. Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí: Filíocht Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2008. ———. “Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Revise the Landscape.” In Irish Landscapes, edited by José Francisco Fernández Sánchez and María Elena Jaime de Pablos, 231–41. Almería: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Almería, 2003. O’Brien, Peggy. ed. The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967–2000. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1999. Ó Buachalla, Séamas, ed. The Literary Writings of Patrick Pearse. Writings in English. Dublin and Cork: The Mercier Press, 1979. O’Connor, Laura. “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995): 581–614. Accessed 20 May 2011. http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary-critic ism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-laura-oconnor. Ó Corráin, Donnchadh, Liam Breatnach and Kim R. McCone, eds. Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney. Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989. Ó Direáin, Máirtín. Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta. Translated by Tomás Mac Síomóin and Douglas Sealy. Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1992. Ó Marcaigh, Fiachra. “Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill ag caint le Fiachra Ó Marcaigh.” Comhar (January 1982): 25–6. Ó Murchú, Liam P. Merriman: I bhFábhar Béithe. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2005. Ó Tuama, Seán. Repossessions. Cork: Cork University Press, 1995. ———, and Thomas Kinsella, eds. An Duanaire; 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed. Translated by Thomas Kinsella. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1990. Pearse, Patrick. “Fornocht do chonac thú” (Renunciation). Translated by Patrick Pearse. In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, edited by Angela Bourke et al., vol. 4, 291. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002.

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———. “Mise Éire.” Suantraidhe agus goltraidhe. Baile Átha Cliath: Irish Review, 1914. ———. “Some Aspects of Irish Literature.” In Collected Works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Songs of the Irish Rebels and Specimans from an Irish Anthology, edited by Desmond Ryan, 131–58. Dublin: Maunsel, 1918. ———, trans. “I am Ireland.” CELT, University College Cork. Accessed 20 May 2010. www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E950004-015/index.html. Quinn, Justin. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ryan, Frederick. “On Language and Political Ideas.” In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane, vol. 2, 995. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991. Schwall, Hedwig. “‘How Do You Make a Teapot Be Intellectually Interesting?’ An Interview with Vona Groarke.” Irish University Review 43.2 (2013): 288– 306. Sewell, Frank. “Between Two Languages: Poetry in Irish, English and Irish English.” In The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell, 149–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Somerville-Arjat, Gillean, and Rebecca E. Wilson, eds. Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990. Sullivan, Moynagh. “I Am, Therefore I’m Not (Woman).” International Journal of Irish Studies 2.2 (2002): 123–34. Wills, Clair. Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Yeats, W. B. The Poems. Edited by Daniel Albright. London: J. M. Dent, 1994. Zappen, James P. “Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975).” In Twentieth-Century Rhetoric and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources, edited by Michael G. Moran and Michelle Ballif, 7–22. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

CHAPTER 3

Figures in a Landscape: Women on Language, Land and Desire

The increasing prominence of women in Irish poetry in the last three decades of the twentieth century was closely linked to two phenomena: first, the dismantling of iconic figures of the feminised land, and second, the polemics with the ideal of the inspiring female other detectable in the masculine tradition. As we shall see, the two objectives come together not only in the adoption of the metaphor of woman as topography, making it above all a political gesture, but also in the appropriation of the role of the sexually active, and no less politically conscious, persona. My purpose in this chapter is to re-examine some of the instances of this type of revisionist writing through the prism of ironic distance, as achieved through the reversal of the sexual polarity in the male poet–female object relationship, or in its parodic adoption. A discussion of such playful transpositions in poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian is followed by readings of lyrics by Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in which the landscape becomes alive with buried histories. Throughout, close attention is also paid to these poets’ uncertain stance to their language. While the preceding chapter explored poetic reactions against the motherland trope and the cultural stereotype of the feminised nation, here the central motif will be that of the feminised land which, according to some, was still a prominent trope in poetry written around the time literary feminism was in full swing in Ireland.

© The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_3

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The differences in these poets’ backgrounds and experiences account for the diversity of the landscapes their poetic narratives create and inhabit, as well as the individual formulations of the language issue. Ní Dhomhnaill, as we have noted, often merges her linguistic and feminist concerns, sometimes using the latter to promote the first. McGuckian admits that the main motivation for her writing is to “give voice to things that have been oppressed and repressed in my peculiar culture.”1 She frequently refers to the politically and emotionally fractured Northern Irish society and, particularly in her early and middle work, speaks of a life determined by sectarian violence, as well as the marginalisation of women and of the Irish language. As Chapter 2 has shown, Boland’s feminism delimits itself against the masculine tradition that is both hostile and domineering. Boland’s declared resolve is to create space in her poems to include the experience of women unrepresented in history. Occasionally, this is combined with the concept of the Irish language as the token of a lost, clearly defined nationality. The poet’s quest for a genuinely female language, however, does not count on the recovery of Irish. The feminism or language politics of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin are as difficult to pin down as Boland’s. I will argue, nevertheless, that as she sets out to enact the historical silence of women in her extremely reticent lyrics, Ní Chuilleanáin frequently draws on elements of the Irish language and its earlier literature. Ultimately, all these poetic projects point to the limits of gender, national, linguistic or religious categories, and to the arbitrariness of official map-making and politically defined territories. Their joyful acknowledgement of the vastness and volatility of language, however, makes poetic expression the source and object of continuing desire.

Ironic Inversions: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian Máire Ní Annracháin has noted that Ní Dhomhnaill often combines subversions of established, transnational genres and forms of love poetry with ridicule of some of the standardised images of women and the land in the Irish-language tradition. According to Ní Annracháin, “[t]éann Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill i muinín na sean-mhúnlaí ó am go chéile agus éiríonn léi . . . an chollaíocht a chéiliúradh go hoscailte agus í ag briseadh amach ó smacht lingua franca na n-amhrán grá” (Occasionally, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill resorts to old models and she succeeds . . . in openly celebrating

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sexuality while breaking away from the conventions of love songs’ lingua franca).2 One of the poet’s self-proclaimed tactics in dealing with the symbolic association of the feminine with national and geographic identity has been to overturn the body-landscape trope, representing the land alternatively as a male body. Consider “Oileán” (Island), a love lyric from Ní Dhomhnaill’s 1991 collection Feis (Festival) in which the speaker imagines her lover’s body to be an island “. . . spréite ar bhraillín / gléigeal os farraige faoileán” (spread / on a bright sheet / over a sea of gulls).3 The reversal of roles is most explicit in the closing lines of the poem where the persona dreams of approaching the spread-eagled body of her nude male object who is described as “uaigneach, iathghlas, / oileánach” (solitary, emerald, / insular).4 The choice of the middle modifier points to the Gaelic tradition while it also parodies the fetishising of the national colour. As Ní Annracháin has remarked, “iathghlas” was a term commonly used to describe Ireland in bardic poetry up to the seventeenth century.5 According to the Ó Dónaill dictionary, “iathghlas” means “green-meadowed” or “emerald.”6 It was the latter meaning of the adjective (and its English equivalent), that was then subsumed by nationalist rhetoric and became synonymous with the island, associated, in turn, with a female body. Its use in the poem thus opens up a fruitful terrain for revision. In its multivalency, the word enables Ní Dhomhnaill to comment not only on stereotypes of Irishness and womanhood recorded in the recent canon but to simultaneously reclaim and reposition the term in the context of the past tradition. The sexually proactive female persona and her recourse to various tropes of the bardic tradition earlier in the poem extend its revisionist claim: it serves Ní Dhomhnaill to encompass masculinist ideals of female beauty as well as the patronising concept of the land as either pliable or needy but always effeminate that had been so prevalent throughout history. Of course, in poems such as Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Oileán,” in which a personified landscape, invoked through and merged with the body of the beloved, is addressed directly in the vocative, the outcome is often (intentionally and ironically) inconclusive in terms of the addressee’s gender. We can therefore only presume that Ní Dhomhnaill’s object is male, on the basis of our knowledge of context outside the particular poem.7 A similar problem is posed, for instance, by Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s “Cor Úr” (Fresh Turn) which invokes the poet’s native landscape in Donegal as a lover and muse.8 The opening is in keeping with the conventions of an amorous

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dream-vision as the landscape emerges from a morning mist. The image of a familiar landscape as a seductive body is invigorated by delightful puns on place names (mostly invented) evoking various bodily parts and personal attributes. Playing on figures of the bardic odes and the tropes of the sovereignty myth, Ó Searcaigh appears to be working through the topographical anatomy in order to remind himself of its attraction and to adopt the landscape as a source of inspiration. Yet, considering the emotive charge of the lines, and Ó Searcaigh’s acknowledged homosexuality, it is possible to discern an underlying objective which is not so far removed from Ní Dhomhnaill’s proclaimed goal: that of replacing the atrophied female icon with a male figure of flesh and bones. In “Ag Tiomáint Siar” (Driving West), which Máirín Nic Eoin considers to be a fully conscious act of pursuit and reworking on Ní Dhomhnaill’s part,9 the poet also describes the landscape of her childhood as sustaining her spirit and imagination: “Tá an Chonair gafa agam míle uair / . . . / Fós cloisim scéalta nua uaidh gach uile uair” (I’ve crossed the Conor Pass a thousand times / . . . yet each time it unveils / new stories).10 All the poem’s speaker needs to do is to sit back in her car seat and let the familiar landscape of the Dingle Peninsula in West Kerry ingratiate itself with her through language she can understand. This is a man’s country accessed through places like An Chonair (The Passage; a frequently travelled but precarious inland mountain road to the Dingle Peninsula, anglicised as Conor Pass), Cnocán Éagóir (literally The Hillock of Injustice, anglicised as Knockauneagore and explained by local folklore as the site of a massacre between a horde of tramps and local men over a stolen cake),11 or Dún an Óir (Fort of Gold) where the risen Irishmen joined by the allied Spanish and Italian armies were slaughtered together with many local inhabitants by the English Protestant army in 1580.12 As the poem—and the drive—draws to its close, however, the undercurrent of nationalist pathos suggested in the mention of a late-sixteenthcentury rebellion against the English rule is promptly checked by a fragment of a phrase which—unlooked-for and in an odd register—comes back to the speaker, sending her down the hill from her daydreaming heights. In all its unexpectedness and seeming irrelevance, the line quoted—“nóiníní bána agus cac capaill” (little white daisies and horsedung )13 —is pivotal for the poem’s outcome. The persona’s detached perspective, first formed at the vantage point atop the mountain and then maintained in the dissonant use of the phrase from a half-forgotten Irish ditty, is the important bounty of her westbound journey.

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Indeed, it is a journey to the west as much as it is a journey back (“siar” having both equivalents): a homecoming and a quest for identity. Born in Lancashire, England, in 1952, Ní Dhomhnaill spent her early childhood there with her parents who were doctors and both Irish speakers. Ní Dhomhnaill herself, however, did not start using the language until she was sent to live with an aunt in the Kerry Gaeltacht at the age of five. It was in Corca Dhuibhne (Dingle Peninsula) that she became fluent in the language and interested in its narrative powers. Consequently, it is essentially Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetic birthplace as well as the original source of one of the distinct features of her poetics: the inseparability of her sense of place and her preoccupation with language. Read in this context, “Ag Tiomáint Siar” also appears to revisit “Fill Arís” (Return Again) by Seán Ó Ríordáin, one of the most original Irish-language poets of the previous generation. Having grown up in an English-speaking environment in Cork City, Ó Ríordáin was troubled all his life because he thought his Irish was not sufficiently authentic, particularly following the contradictory reception of his first collection, Eireaball Spideoige (A Robin’s Tail) in 1952. In “Fill Arís” (Return Again), included in his next book, Brosna (Kindling), which Ó Ríordáin took twelve years to complete, we come across the supposedly reformed poet as he announces his decision to leave all uncertainty behind and to immerse himself in the linguistic purity of Dún Chaoin in the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht.14 Uncompromised in its natural seclusion from contact with English and the modern world, the Gaeltacht seems to offer the reassurance the poet has craved. As Barry McCrea remarks, in “mapping the poet’s artistic journey from English to Irish not in psychological but in explicit, and indeed quite specific, geographical terms,” the poem heralds the revelation of “the previously undreamt-of linguistic potential of Dún Chaoin, the discovery of embodied Irish.”15 As the title suggests, however, this poem is not primarily about an unrealistic desire to reposition oneself permanently in this new promised land. Rather, it is a recounting of that precious moment when an idea of wholeness can be perceived from a distance; just before the persona plunges headlong into the comforting otherness of the people and place, over and over again. This instant of pause and recollection at the point of entry is important for the readjustment and linguistic identification that is the desired effect of the journey. Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Ag Tiomáint Siar” replays precisely such a moment of a detached appraisal as she is on her way down to Corca Dhuibhne.

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If the poem is an act of “pursuit,” what is being pursued—also in response to Ó Ríordáin’s drive out west—is a claim to one’s soil through celebration in language. Moreover, as an act of “reworking,” it is a conscious attempt to revise the ways in which such things would have been claimed and celebrated. Above all, the poem is an appropriation (also by means of ironic laughter) of the toponymic tradition of dinnseanchas (alternately, dinnsheanchas ). As Oona Frawley writes, Ní Dhomhnaill is “convinced of the need to root poetry in local lore.”16 Yet, in one of her essays, entitled “Dinnsheanchas: The Naming of High and Holy Places,” the poet warns against an uncritical assimilation of the tradition. Outlining the etymology of its name, she argues that both parts of the compound—“dinn” (with its connotations of “spike or a point” and “an eminent, notable place”) and “seanchas ” (encompassing the various forms of knowledge in the Gaelic world but complicated by its association with the nineteenth-century construct of “national history”)—are related to “[t]he numinosity of place and the values of blood and soil which are fundamental tenets of cultural nationalism.”17 As Ní Dhomhnaill points out elsewhere, the latter can “very easily turn into a deeply fascist, sectarian and sexist movement,” which is something that Ireland saw happening in the twentieth century.18 Viewed in this light, “Ag Tiomáint Siar”—and particularly the rhythmical giddiness of the expression “nóiníní bána agus cac capaill”—can be taken as symbolic of the poet’s subversive attempt to take over the practice of literary writing about Ireland. Not only does this claim pertain to the traditional iconography of the feminised land but the tradition of dinnseanchas itself in which Ireland has, from at least the ninth century onwards, been translated into stories or, in other words, encoded in narratives of tribal male power. It is worth pointing out that leathinis (or leithinis )—the peninsula from the opening lines—is a feminine noun.19 Inscribed with public actions of men and place names that monumentalise their authority, the land, presented at first as a men’s country, is finally accessed through the gesture of ironic detachment, contained in the abrupt change of register. The unexpected quotation serves to Ní Dhomhnaill as a channel for her private as well as poetic homecoming, and as the true source of her initial sense of comprehending unity with the land. According to Ní Dhomhnaill, the large body of preserved dinnseanchas and their continuation in the collective memory of the Irish-speaking

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communities in the west of Ireland show that the landscape itself “contains memory, and can point to the existence of a world beyond this one.”20 Choosing an obscure children’s ditty as her cue to re-enter the scene of her poetic origin, she also appears to indicate that the memory of place does not always need to be stained with blood or linked with heroic sacrifice. Yet this idea of a symmetrical opposition between innocence and violence proves false when tested with the lyric itself, recorded in the “Dánta Beaga” (Little Poems) section of the National Folklore Collection. No less gory than the stories associated with the place names that Ní Dhomhnaill listed earlier in the poem, the ditty reads like a ritual incantation or counting game in which a “nice old horned sheep” (Ó nách deas í an tseana caora adharcach) is killed, boiled and eaten, over and over again.21 Apparently, the poet has chosen this cruel yet playful nonsense narrative as her password so as not to feel like an intruder in the land of battlefields and deeds of conquest. ∗ ∗ ∗ Speaking about what she perceives as Ní Dhomhnaill’s authentic relationship with nature, the Belfast poet Medbh McGuckian has praised Ní Dhomhnaill for her unsurpassed “dynamism and . . . feeling of being at one with the world.”22 While this is in line with Ní Dhomhnaill’s self-avowed appreciation of landscape imbued with narrative as a “lived dimension of life,”23 it points to McGuckian’s more complex relationship with her own (urban, conflict-torn) landscape, and to her sense of linguistic rootlessness. Born in Belfast in 1950, McGuckian was for a long time an anomaly on the Northern Irish scene. When she entered this scene in the early 1970s, it was populated by her illustrious male contemporaries and near contemporaries such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Michael Longley. Having studied English at Queen’s University Belfast where Heaney was among her tutors and Muldoon among her fellow students, McGuckian returned to her alma mater in 1985 as the first female writer in residence in the institution’s history. By this stage, she had already given birth to the first two of her four children. In interviews, she is outspoken about the ironies of the situation,24 and her complex, often perplexing lyrics from that period have commonly been interpreted as autobiographically motivated feminism. I would like to argue, however, that McGuckian’s poetry displays from the outset a broader political engagement and ethical commentary that is

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normally associated with the middle period of her writing. Her esoteric verse is intended to deal covertly with various kinds of taboo subjects, including the details of female bodily experience, as well as sectarian tensions and violence, often all at once. Her first motive in writing poetry, she explains, was to create a private space from which she could contemplate, rather than comment on, the drama of her own experience. In her obscurity and apparent unconcern for the reader, McGuckian can be said to approach the ideal of a new—even distinctly female—language pursued by poets such as Boland. While she clearly does write from a woman’s— albeit extremely variable—perspective, the defining feature of her verse has always been her strong emphasis on language construed as the substance of poetry, as well as a constitutive element of identity. All these tensions and impulses are conveniently illustrated in “The Soil-Map” from McGuckian’s first collection, The Flower Master (1982). Clair Wills describes “The Soil-Map” as the poet’s “most direct reworking of the association between woman and land.”25 Yet, as I would like to show, McGuckian presents a different, less straightforward reversal of the sexual polarity than we have seen in Ní Dhomhnaill. In this poem, we encounter a sexually fluid persona (very typical of McGuckian) addressing a house as if it were a female figure: I am not a woman’s man, but I can tell, By the swinging of your two-leaf door, You are never without one man in the shadow Of another . . .26

The self-professed political intent behind the poem does not need spelling out. The argument is well-rehearsed in many other places, particularly in McGuckian criticism following the publication of Captain Lavender in 1994, as it gradually became commonplace to speak about extratextual and explicitly political objectives in McGuckian’s esoteric verse. Yet, for my present purpose, it is useful to reiterate some of the findings of this criticism, not to simply submit to them or to propose a counterclaim, but to develop, if not to correct, the accepted interpretation of the poem’s central image. The house—a decrepit villa in a former Protestant area of Belfast that McGuckian moved into as a young housewife in the early 1980s—has been construed as a symbol of the nationalist orthodoxies of the feminised land over which the woman herself has no right as it is being passed

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along the male line. The titular “soil-map” refers to the historical practice in Belfast of allotting plots with soil of better quality preferentially to Protestants. Sufficiently run-down to accommodate Catholic owners, the house stands open and devoid of its former glamour, but not entirely empty. It can therefore be seen as an emblem of the land in whose soil Anglo-Irish history has been inscribed over a precolonial Celtic past. The poem becomes an attempt to appropriate that soil through renaming, through creating another palimpsest. In the closing stanza, the persona attempts to deal with the historical fact of colonisation as well as with her own uneasy feeling as a trespasser by concentrating on the memory of the women after whom houses such as the one she is about to settle in were named. Paradoxically, once McGuckian makes use of the houses’ female English names in her poem, she begins to feel less detached from the alienated soil and from the house she is now eager to possess, no longer as a sexually undetermined intruder but in her “power as a bride.” As she begins to identify, through her upcoming domestic experience, with the women of the colonial past who have been monumentalised (but presumably also confined) in the houses and their appellations, these houses are no longer to be read as symbols of loss and emptiness but as “First Fruits” of the poet’s imagination. I have found these places on the soil-map, Proving it possible once more to call Houses by their names, Annsgift or Mavisbank, Mount Juliet or Bettysgrove . . . ..... . . . I drink to you as Hymenstown, (My touch of fantasy) or First Fruits, Impatient for my power as a bride.27

Still, the image of a future utopia where things could be called by their proper names is counterbalanced by the reference to the escalating violence of the Troubles as “the gloom of disputes.” In the next line, the conciliatory process of naming is further complicated by the enjambed “disease / Of language,”28 which reads as a disturbingly prophetic allusion to the interrupted peace process in the 1990s and its repeatedly broken ceasefire declarations.

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In a different context, Peter Sirr notes that “McGuckian constantly names and particularises.”29 It is through the subsequent mention of the seemingly incongruous detail of the “humorous friendship / Of the thighs,” that McGuckian particularises her political theme and brings in her own—Irishised—first name (by way of a reference to mythical Queen Medbh).30 At the beginning of the medieval epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, Medbh, bargaining for the stud bull Donn Cúailnge, pulls out her ace and offers the bull’s current owner her “cairdes sliasta”31 (“friendly thighs,” in Thomas Kinsella’s translation).32 Throughout the poem, McGuckian merges her “gloomy” Belfast neighbourhood with the “humorous” world of the Old Irish heroic tale; the first allusion to Kinsella’s The Táin is to be detected in the initial image (cited above) of the feminised house and its occupants as an endless row of lovers.33 Framing the poem with this particular intertext is significant for its overall effect: what ultimately prevails is not the acrid aftertaste of the house names in the language of the coloniser, but the implied image of the hardy brown bull from the climax of Táin Bó Cúailnge as he trots home through Gaelic Ireland inspiring fanciful place names, although fatally wounded from his self-liberating battle. It was McGuckian’s predilection for naming and renaming that prompted Wills to read the poem as a parody of naming places in the dinnseanchas tradition.34 I would add, however, that while this interpretation of McGuckian’s “soil-map” is valid insofar as the dinnseanchas was a male poets’ method of appropriating the land, traditionally conceived of as feminine, the parody is not without a strong element of self-irony. McGuckian who writes exclusively in English (a grammatically disrupted, but distinctly non-Hiberno-English) has mentioned on multiple occasions her insecure relationship with her mother tongue (which is at the same time the language of the colonist). Accordingly, she has referred to her continuous attempts to make her poetic idiom an instrument for subverting the language so as to create a kind of “a meta-language where English and Irish could meet.”35 In the light of her view of English as “a foreign medium,”36 it is, I believe, appropriate to perceive the cryptic mention of the “disease of language” as referring also to the poet’s own native speech construed not as a token of inbred identity but rather as the language of the other. If there is an element of satire in the very fact that McGuckian, as a female and a Catholic, redraws the soil-map of Belfast by listing the English names of the houses in her poem, the parody is enhanced by, if not dependent on, the self-ridiculing sting contained

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in the direct mention of a language that is problematic. Understood as a reference to McGuckian’s troubled monolingualism,37 the phrase prepares us for the speaker’s ironic simultaneous identification with the mythological Medbh of Connacht and the colonialist women. All this ultimately serves to help her approach the house and the territory as her own. As Shane Alcobia-Murphy remarks, McGuckian’s anxiety about colonial inheritance “is inscribed into the very core of her language.”38 In view of her self-conscious, unstable linguistic identity, the sides in the parody encoded in “The Soil-Map” are as ambiguously distributed throughout the narrative as the blurred sexuality of the androgynous speaker in relation to the female house(s). As she finally drinks a toast to the women whose silenced, domesticated lives have become synonymous with the actual houses, announcing that she is one of them, the names (disregarding the racial connotations) become living spots on the sterile, now anachronistic map. The poem can thus, paradoxically, be read as a nod in the direction of Ní Dhomhnaill’s understanding of the dinnseanchas when she says that a modern road-map transmits knowledge of a kind that primitive Celts would have found inconceivably abstract. Places would have been known to them as people were: by face, name and history. The last two would have been closely linked, for as the dinnsheanchas illustrates again and again, the name of every place was assumed to be an expression of its history.39

In order to reclaim the territory she is about to settle in, McGuckian’s speaker appropriates its place names. Thus, the poet, in a move similar to Ní Dhomhnaill’s emboldened downhill drive “home” at the close of “Ag Tiomáint Siar,” shows that the history of Belfast does not always need to be associated with fighting in the streets, but that the private lives going on behind closed doors are equally important. McGuckian’s unwillingness to claim a position on the map through a defining, unequivocal act of naming may suggest she would like to dissociate herself from the older literary tradition. But the urge to reflect on the turbulent politics and sectarian conflict without wishing to contribute to the debate, as well as an awareness that the act of naming is both a life-giving gesture and a reductive statement of possession, are traits she shares with some of her Northern Irish peers, most notably Heaney and Carson.

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As we have seen, McGuckian’s concerns about imaginative freedom at the beginning of her career were as inextricably linked with the liberation of women from iconic representations as with the problematic status of Irish and with what she sees as her own linguistic uprootedness. This private dimension of the language issue—the poet’s doubts about her own language and her guilty stance towards Irish which she experiences not only as a social and sectarian marker but, in its unattainability, as a very personal matter—informs McGuckian’s uneasiness about the inadequacy of her poetic medium. The same idea is also behind my claim that the upsurge of feminism in Irish and Northern Irish poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century went hand in hand with concerns about the language in many cases.

Shifting Soil: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Eavan Boland The tendency to linguistic anxiety experienced and expressed through issues related to feminism is apparent not only in works by Ní Dhomhnaill and McGuckian but also in poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Eavan Boland who will be the focus of the following pages. Coming from different linguistic and political backgrounds, these women share a common artistic experience marked by linguistic indeterminacy (however variously defined) and by their heightened sense of being shunned from the male-dominated literary scene. In their attempts to reclaim their land through the revision of its feminised images in the inherited tradition, they have all had to deal with the claims of their respective “mother tongue.” Construed as highly equivocal, it can be defined neither as English nor as Irish but as a language based in the terra nullius between two languages. A painful awareness of the absence of the female experience from literary as well as historical accounts is recorded by Ní Chuilleanáin, whose feminist concerns are about striking a balance between the inherited models and the necessity of shaping a distinctive tone to deal with these new thematics. Ní Chuilleanáin, born in Cork in 1942, the daughter of a university professor of Irish and the writer Eilís Dillon, is a renowned poet, Renaissance scholar, translator and Irish folk tradition specialist. Yet she admits that it was necessary for her as a poet to find an appropriate attitude to the tradition. She is fluent in Irish and has published

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on earlier Irish-language poetry and folklore; the term “tradition” in her understanding is inclusive of both language canons. Her clearing of the imaginative space for herself, however, involves a digression from the standard affiliation model. While she rejects the heritage, she does not go so far as to propose a “misreading” of any poems of the past but defines herself against what, for her, epitomises absence in the canon. Often enough, this notion of the tradition as marked by deficiency also encompasses the silence of the Irish language in modern Irish culture and society. Her strategies for writing about these silences have included the use of contextual ellipsis, coded reference, ironic ritualisation of landscapes and appropriation of ancient myths and narratives. Most of those are present in the frequently cited “Pygmalion’s Image” (from The Magdalene Sermon, 1989) in which a feminised landscape starts shifting until it sprouts “A green leaf of language” in the poem’s last line.40 Typically, Ní Chuilleanáin’s narrative ceases precisely at the point where we might begin to get an idea of a coherent storyline or a discernible meaning. In its deliberate vagueness, the closing foliose image suggests two equally plausible readings: it either refers to the “new language” called for by the feminists, or to a new budding hope for the Irish language that is frequently construed as buried deep in the past. I will discuss “Pygmalion’s Image” and its strategic secrecy in greater detail in Chapter 4; but there are also other poems in The Magdalene Sermon that centre on language, landscape and women moving out of silence. While “Pygmalion’s Image” implies that the metamorphoses of the hidden valley’s terrain occurs furtively, the representation of corporeal landscapes and female bodies in poems such as “A Voice” and “Permafrost Woman” is conditional on the attention of a male spectator. In the former lyric, a male persona travels the landscape urged on by the surmised sound of a “distant wailing.” But just as he imagines hearing the enticing female voice say, “You may come in,” he is frightened off by the sight of what appears to be a human skeleton tangled in the brush. In the latter part of the poem, the wanderer returns to the site, determined not to get caught unawares this time, and allows the voice to lead him further until he finds or imagines seeing a body lying in the bed of a creek, an arrangement of “wide bearing hips” surrounded by “Gravegoods of horsehair and an ebony peg.”41 While the former detail suggests this is a woman, the latter two provoke questions about the apparition’s origin and meaning:

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“What sort of ornament is this? What sort of mutilation? Where’s The muscle that called up the sound, The tug of hair and the turned cheek?” The sign persists, in the ridged fingerbone And he hears her voice, a wail of strings.42

The scheme in which the figuring of a female object is wholly dependent on the cognitive process of a male protagonist has been censured by feminist critics as re-enacting the standard situation of the male tradition. According to Catriona Clutterbuck, the female presence in the poem takes on “the shape of a Sleeping Beauty-cum-Heaneyesque bog queen terrifyingly configured by ‘ornament’ and ‘mutilation,’” in order to attract yet “another male seeker of the feminine.”43 However, despite her reservation that the images of the motherland and the archetypal feminine in The Magdalene Sermon are still subordinate to male domineering values, Clutterbuck proposes an optimistic outcome for this particular poem; in her view, the hero finally succeeds “in the nineteen eighties in ‘hear[ing] her voice.’”44 It might be noted that this is something Heaney’s authorial persona proposed to do with the publication of North in 1975 and in some of his earlier bog poems. In terms of its imagery and setting, “A Voice” does indeed appear to be in dialogue with Heaney’s bog bodies and ancient burial places—especially if we consider Ní Chuilleanáin’s own criticism of North as characterised by a “lack of ironic awareness.”45 But while there is irony at play in “A Voice”—which, contrary to Clutterbuck’s belief, connotes the absence of sound rather than an audible cry—this irony is not primarily motivated by a desire to outdo Heaney. Although the resolute reticence of Ní Chuilleanáin’s female figures might recall Heaney’s own “stones of silence”46 cast back in reply to his garrulous “Bog Queen,” it is to be viewed as pertaining to the larger intention of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetics. Its aim is to demonstrate—not to censor—the irretrievability of the silences and absences of historical records and to point to the impossibility of communicating personal histories and individual consciousness.47 Although these objectives may seem unexpected in a poetics concerned largely with the past and the workings of memory, Ní Chuilleanáin has been consistent in carrying them out. “A Voice” is a variation on one of the principal motifs in Ní Chuilleanáin’s work that is conspicuously enacted also in “Permafrost Woman”

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and its strikingly similar scenario. In the latter poem, the male persona escapes from society’s hubbub to become lost in a primeval craggy landscape. But while enjoying his own voyeuristic excitement as the stone “body opens its locks,” he freezes in a perplexed awe at the sight of a torn land and its silent scream: “. . . the wide mouth, packed / With grinding ash: the landslide of his first dream.”48 This methodical foregrounding of silent figures (mostly but not always female) is one of the hallmarks of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry. In “A Voice,” however, yet another familiar pattern is at play: the fact that when, occasionally, someone is reported to be about to speak in her poems, they turn out to be dead. Ní Chuilleanáin often uses this kind of irony to promote her corrective feminist argument. Like many of her other poems, however, “A Voice” is also about the limits of communication and verbal expression as such. As the male persona follows an illusion of sound, he is confronted by embodied silence. The irony is heightened in the concluding image of a “ridged fingerbone” readied to pluck a string or to pull a bow across it. But, apart from the horsehair and ebony peg, there is no sign of a musical instrument in the way the scene is described; the woman’s “voice” echoes with the necessary silence of that hollow gesture, metaphorically expressed as the wail of missing strings. The lost music, symbolised in the missing muscle that helped produce the sound, points to the inexpressible iniquity suffered by women of the past as well as to the lost Irish language whose elusive echo resounds through the landscape. ∗ ∗ ∗ As we noted in Chapter 2, Boland likes to trace moments in her own memory and the national past when, as she puts it in one of her essays, “one tradition laid a hand on the other’s shoulder.”49 In “The Mother Tongue,” the last poem in the “Colony” sequence in The Lost Land, Boland expands on some previously stated dilemmas. The “mother tongue” of the title is a highly ambiguous concept and refers simultaneously to Irish as a symbol of a one-time unambiguous linguistic identity, and to English as the “forked tongue of colony” and a source of separation. This dichotomisation, we now learn, corresponds with the country’s marked divisions of which the poet-speaker was able to find shadows in her own uneasily defined self: the ditches built by the Tudor conquerors in the late fifteenth century to mark out the English pale. The remains of one are still visible not far from the poet-speaker’s suburban

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house, “its ancient barrier of mud and brambles / which mireth next unto Irishmen.”50 Significantly, not a word of Irish is recorded in the poem. In Boland’s own experience, the language has been effectively replaced by English. Having grown up abroad, first in England and then in the USA, she was not exposed to Irish even at school. Moreover, she distances herself from the language as a symbol of Ireland’s literary past which she construes as the site of male oppression and the source of her own sense of exclusion. The only conspicuously incongruous linguistic material in the poem is the above quote, in italics, from a 1494 act passed by the Drogheda Parliament concerning the maintenance of the separating ditch or fence between the indigenous people and the English occupants. As she abandons her persona, wondering how the remains of the original entrenchment could have been a mark of such stark division, Boland returns to another of her frequent themes: that of the struggle between the city and the land. In “Suburban Woman,” from her second collection, The War Horse (1975), the poet-persona observes Mother Ireland outside her own garden wall losing ground to the expanding Suburbia and watches the “town and country” fighting it out among themselves. Inevitably, she is drawn into the struggle and comes out more wounded than the original combatants.51 But, as we learn from the poem, this is what being a witness and a poet often amounts to. In “The Mother Tongue,” the ancient ditch, now overgrown and barely discernible, marks out the ever-expanding boundaries of the city and is an emblem of the battle between civilisation and nature as much as the historical struggle between cultures. As it coincides with a line on the map, drawn between places like Dalkey, Kilternan and Balally (now all part of the Dublin suburban area) and as it alludes to there being another—original—way of saying their names, the clash also denotes the discontinuities between the lost vernacular and the adopted language. In the next stanza, the ditch is imagined to open wide enough to swallow up those it had been designed to keep away. As the rebelling Irishmen came creeping back at night from the woods of Wicklow, whispering in Irish about their resentment, the trench turned into an abyss that swallows up their own as well as their language’s future. Realising that she herself represents that buried “future,” as well as what has replaced it, the poet-speaker admits to her own linguistic uncertainty and sense of guilt: “I was born on this side of the Pale.”52 What saves the

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poem from being a mere gloss on Boland’s persistent themes and quarrels is the tinge of ironic self-awareness in relation to Ireland’s linguistic past and the recognition that listening to the past and its silences means grasping “[w]hat I have lost,” as well as “what I am safe from.”53 It is the semantic caesura between these two contradictory concepts, through which a tone of uncertainty seeps in the last line of the poem, that makes the lyric significant for my present argument. In “Mother Ireland,” also from The Lost Land, Boland has the land narrate the story of its self-origination in a parody of the diction of biblical Creation. At first I was land I lay on my back to be fields[.]54

The regular pattern of progressively indented three-line syntactic units at the start is disrupted from the last line of the second tercet onwards by the deployment of enjambment and a varied degree of indention. Together with the increasing irregularity of the poem’s graphic layout, the enjambed line adds to the piece’s intended subversive effect and thus determines both its manner and content: and when I turned on my side I was a hill under freezing stars ..... Night and day words fell on me. Seeds. Raindrops. Chips of frost. From one of them I learned my name. I rose up. I remembered it. Now I could tell my story.55

The present image of primeval Celtic bliss and fertility stands in stark contrast to the devouring abyss from “The Mother Tongue,” precisely up until the point at which a seed takes root and becomes “a language.”

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The seed containing a promise of speech may remind us of the closing metaphor in Ní Chuilleanáin’s “Pygmalion’s Image.” But where the latter poet would have dropped the subject and resorted to silence that is pregnant with meaning, Boland has the personified landscape up on her feet and wandering around Ireland like a Spéirbhean spreading her story. Fortunately, this cumbersome digression in the direction of the aisling genre is checked ironically in the next two lines as the persona claims that her own narrative has little to do with the stories told about her. The poem thus regains its restorative brisk manner and returns to its main theme which is the birth and final demise of the mythologised land. The merging of Mother Ireland with the “mother tongue” suggested in the image of the budding seed reappears in yet another metaphor of the lost language as a wound or scar: “I could see the wound I had left / in the land by leaving it.”56 In the closing lines, the effect of halted speech— achieved through distorted syntax and loose referential logic (both rather unusual for Boland)—certainly gives the impression of someone in their throes. Ultimately, the sentimental charge we might expect from the author on a subject like this is counterbalanced by Boland’s use of sarcastic disjunction and irony. This hesitancy of tone and uncertainty of stance is supported by the ambiguous effect of the poem’s last line which rejects closure and omits the full stop as the fading persona whispers “Trust me” in reply to her anonymous collective other’s entreaties for her to return.57 It is impossible to tell whether the speaker is trying to reassure her suppliants by saying that she will, indeed, come back to them or that it is time for her to fade away and thus finally bring the Mother Ireland’s sway to a close. It is equally difficult to discern what role the lost vernacular is supposed to play in this ambiguous denouement. As the rhythm of the poem and its layout on the page become more and more irregular, however, the diction is increasingly suggestive of interrupted discourse. While it induces a sense of vertigo in the reader, the bumpy left-hand margin chimes with the poem’s narrative line and contributes to its import. Although the agonised Mother Land may be attempting to assert her messianic ambition, this possibility that she actually perceives herself as obsolete, deprived of speech or, indeed, faulty is what gives the poem its edge. In virtue of irony and ambiguity, the lyric balances successfully between the two extremes of banal bluntness and facile vagueness. ∗ ∗ ∗

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The revisionist aspects of Boland’s and Ní Chuilleanáin’s writing had their counterpart in the feminist criticism of the 1980s and ’90s. One of the significant critical interventions of the period was Patricia Coughlan’s “Bog Queens” essay, first published in 1991, in which she examined the representations of the feminine in the works of Heaney and John Montague from the preceding three decades.58 Coughlan’s critique focuses on the moments in the two poetics where this reliance on stereotyped female objects verges on fetishisation, which she rejects as not only tactless and politically incorrect but also as ultimately obstructing the imagination. Invariably, those are places where she is unable to discern at least a touch of “ironic distance.”59 Coughlan’s critique was certainly valid in its time, receiving a great deal of attention and provoking an extended polemic, and it is important to bear in mind that she was addressing poetry that was highly influential but pre-feminist in the context of Irish literature. Owing to analyses such as Coughlan’s—in combination with the emancipatory successes of women poets and the development of their oeuvres, which are now central to our understanding of modern poetry—writing like this has hardly been encountered after the turn of the twenty-first century. Even Heaney, from Seeing Things (1991) onwards, refrained from relying on stereotyped female figures and tropes of the land. Yet the shift, completed in Electric Light (2001), was consistent with the dwindling of nationalism as an aesthetic ideology in Irish poetry. Indeed, it is more likely to have been the consequence of the generally decreasing prominence of local colour and nationalist sentiments in Heaney’s poems than a conscious move in response to feminist criticism. In a sequel to her 1991 essay, however, Coughlan claimed that by 2007 the poet still perceived women in Irish history as symbols of victimhood.60 While the same would apply, for instance, to some of Boland’s late work, many poets of the generations after Heaney have had nothing to do with genderised views of the Irish past or with the idealisation of the sexual other. Conor O’Callaghan, Alan Gillis, Vona Groarke and Caitríona O’Reilly, for instance, all write lyrical, sensuous love poems in which they avoid any received generic images of men and women, and whose effect lies largely in the application of ironic coolness. This change in subject matter and the resulting shift in tone manifest in Irish poetry from around the turn of the millennium are the combined result of the general tendency to shake off any traces of nationalist agenda on the one hand and the impact of Irish literary feminism on the other hand. Thus,

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feminist-oriented poetry and criticism have succeeded in bringing about a substantial change on the Irish literary scene that has affected women and also contributed to a development in poetry written by men, as the latter have moved away from stereotyped images of the land and the ideal feminine. However, the focus on writings by Boland, Ní Chuilleanáin, McGuckian and Ní Dhomhnaill in this chapter has not been to rehash old feminist debates but rather to emphasise the constitutive role of humour and irony which is often central to the poems’ force as intervention in social discourse and to its value as a textual artefact. In my view, the ironic reversal of poetic arrangements in these works cannot be characterised simply as an attempt on the part of women to adopt male strategies for their own ends, but it has been part of a larger, multifaceted and fundamentally diversifying process. Shifting the emphasis slightly, one might ask whether having been so insistently reminded of their otherness and marginality, women and their texts may not be better suited for accommodating the idea of alterity and pluralism in their polemics with the canon. In their position on the margins of the established scene, women may indeed be better prepared for leading the form of ethical dialogue as required by Simon Critchley, for example, who insists that such a dialogue “should not result in the annulment of alterity, but in respect for it.”61 Consequently, in place of the usual metaphors describing this process as the coming of women to the heart of literary events, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak about a disruption of the very concept of a compact, homogenous centre through the inclusion of a new perspective and the embrace of alterity. In this sense, the emancipation of women on the Irish literary scene did not mean the assimilation of women to the male tradition; conversely, it brought about a beneficial diversification of that very tradition. The various ways in which women have drawn on their former marginality, making it integral to their poetry and using it to open up the speaking subject’s horizon, will be one of the recurrent themes in Part II. The majority of Irish women poets working in the final three decades of the twentieth century engaged in such an ethical, essentially feminist dialogue with the literary past and the inherited canon. Having been designated to the edge of the cultural, social and political life, they have been successful in turning their historically prescribed marginality to their own advantage. They can be said to have located their work in the productive borderland between their private and public experience, between the male and the female tradition and, in a number of

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cases, between the two main languages of Irish literature. By rejecting the impulse to attempt to assimilate themselves or simply to renounce the predominantly male tradition, by exploring the various in-between spheres within an essentially dichotomous Irish literature, they have contributed to the development of the current, more diversified and pluralistic aspect of Irish poetry, and also produced some of the most significant bodies of work in the anglophone world. As will emerge in the following chapters, women’s poetry from those decades often stems from a metaphorical liminal position in which its authors place themselves in order to address issues of verbal creation and to deal with the pre-existing literary traditions. Having examined how women appropriated the literary tropes of the feminised nation and land through the use of subversive humour and irony, I will now explore some of the ways in which they have transformed their status as boundary figures into thematic material. Endowed with specific transgressive potential, the border positions of the poems’ speakers allow them to operate as part of an attempt to reconcile the tensions between the conventional role of woman as the inspiring other and the requirements of the speaking subject. I aim to determine to what extent this frequent situating of the persona in the (extremely variable) liminal space is a conscious strategy with critical relevance.

Notes 1. Medbh McGuckian, “Author Statement,” British Council Literature, accessed 10 November 2014, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/wri ter/medbh-mcguckian. 2. Máire Ní Annracháin, “Ait Liom Bean a Bheith ina File,” in Léachtaí Cholm Cille XII: Na Mná sa Litríocht, ed. Pádraig Ó Fiannachta(Maynooth: An Sagart, 1982), 160. My translation. 3. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “Oileán” (Island), trans. Michael Hartnett, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989), 70–1. 4. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Oileán,” 70–1. 5. See Ní Annracháin, “Affinities in Time and Space: Reading the Gaelic Poetry of Ireland and Scotland,” in Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, eds. Peter Mackay, Edna Longley and Fran Brearton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 112. 6. See Niall Ó Dónaill, Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (Baile Átha Cliath: An Gúm, 2005). 7. Rióna Ní Fhrighil suggests that the island of the title refers to the island off the west coast of Kerry called An Fear Marbh (the Dead Man). See

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Ní Fhrighil, “Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Revise the Landscape,” in Irish Landscapes, eds. José Francisco Fernández Sánchez and María Elena Jaime de Pablos (Almería: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Almería, 2003), 236. Cathal Ó Searcaigh, “Cor Úr” (A Fresh Dimension), trans. Gabriel Fitzmaurice, in Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, ed. David Pearce (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 1183. See Máirín Nic Eoin, Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2005), 266. “Is gníomh an-chomhfhiosach tóraíochta agus athshaothraithe gníomh tóraíochta Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill agus is turas féinaithne agus féintuisceana atá sa ‘turas siar’ sa direadh di” (It is a most conscious act of pursuit and reworking on Ní Dhomhnaill’s part and the “turas siar” is ultimately a tour of self-knowledge and self-understanding). My translation. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Ag Tiomáint Siar” (Driving West), trans. Michael Cody, Pharaoh’s Daughter (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1990), 132–3. See The Schools’ Collection, Vol. 0430, p. 117, National Folklore Collection, UCD. Dúchas.i.e. Accessed 20 May 2017, https://www.duchas.ie/ en/cbes/4687702/4685374. Donna L. Potts, Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2011): 143–4. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Siar,” 132–3. Seán Ó Ríordáin, “Fill Arís” (Return Again), trans. Barry McCrea, Selected Poems / Rogha Dánta, ed. Frank Sewell (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 162–3. Barry McCrea, Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 112. Oona Frawley, “Introduction,” in Selected Essays, ed. Ní Dhomhnaill (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 7. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Dinnsheanchas: The Naming of High or Holy Places,” Selected Essays, 25–6. Ní Dhomhnaill, “An Bhanfhile Sa Traidisiun: The Woman Poet in the Irish Tradition,” Selected Essays (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 57–8. See Ní Dhomhnaill’s play on grammatical gender in “fearann baineann” in “Masculus Giganticus Hibernicus,” which was noted in Chapter 2. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Dinnsheanchas: Holy Wells and Psychic Depths,” Selected Essays, 160. Asking about the ethics of the use of folklore as material for poetry, Sarah E. McKibben explains in relation to Ní Dhomhnaill that “[s]he does not presume to speak for the tradition or for others, but sees them as helping her speak or even, in a sense, speaking for her.” McKibben further quotes the poet’s own words on the link that she perceives “idir mo thrioblóid féin agus gach a thagann anuas chugam

3

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

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trí mheán na teanga agus trí mheán an bhéaloidis (between my own troubles and all that comes down to me through the medium of the language and through the medium of folklore).” Ní Dhomhnaill in Rogha an Fhile, ed. Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (Castleknock: Goldsmith Press, 1975), 58. Qtd. in Sarah E. McKibben, “Speaking Of / Speaking For: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Folkloristic Ethics,” in The Language of Gender, Power and Agency in Celtic Studies, eds. Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair, trans. Sarah E. McKibben (Dublin: Arlen House, 2014), 271–2. See “Cruaidh, cruaidh, liathróid,” Dánta Beaga, The Schools’ Collection, Vol. 0428, p. 235, National Folklore Collection, UCD. Dúchas.i.e. Accessed 20 May 2017, https://www.duchas.i.e.en/cbes/4687693/468 4352/4707989. McGuckian in Laura O’Connor, “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995): 581–614, accessed 20 May 2011, http://connection.ebscohost. com/c/literary-criticism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-bylaura-oconnor. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Dinnsheanchas: The Naming,” 41. In an interview with Ní Dhomhnaill and Laura O’Connor, McGuckian recounts her experience from the late 1970s when, having submitted poems under a pseudonym, she won the National Poetry Competition Prize but received only half of the originally announced prize money after it emerged that she was “Irish, or Catholic, or a woman, or unknown . . . They couldn’t believe I was six months pregnant when they came over with their cameras.” McGuckian in L. O’Connor, “Comhrá.” Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69. McGuckian, “The Soil-Map,” The Flower Master and Other Poems, 2nd ed. (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1993), 36. McGuckian, “Soil-Map,” 37. McGuckian, “Soil-Map,” 37. Sirr, 460. See McGuckian, “Soil-Map,” 37. Born Maeve McCaughan, McGuckian switched over to the Irish spelling of her first name after Seamus Heaney, who was her teacher at Queens University, Belfast at the time, used it when signing books for her. See Lesley Wheeler, “Both Flower and Flower Gatherer: Medbh McGuckian’s The Flower Master and H.D.’s Sea Garden,” Twentieth Century Literature 49.4 (2003): 515. Donald Mackinnon, ed., The Glenmasan Manuscript, CELT Project, University College Cork, accessed 15 May 2019, http://research.ucc.i. e.celt/document/G800012. See Thomas Kinsella, The Táin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 55, 56.

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33. In the opening section of the epic, Queen Medbh boasts to her royal husband, using the same words about herself: “I never had one man without another waiting in his shadow.” See Kinsella, 53. 34. Wills, 72. 35. McGuckian in L. O’Connor, “Comhrá.” 36. Medbh McGuckian, interview by Rand Brandes, Chattahoochee Review 16.3 (Spring 1996): 61, 60. Qtd. in Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 231. 37. Although McGuckian did learn Irish at school (she attended the Catholic Holy Family Primary School and Dominican College, Fortwilliam in Belfast), she insists that it was taught “very badly . . . in a wooden, dead way like Latin, so I hated it. I hate the way it was given to me – or thrown at me.” McGuckian in John Hobbs, “‘My Words Are Traps’: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian,” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 2.1 (Spring, 1998): 114. Elsewhere, the poet describes the experience that made her decide to “leave the Irish-language scene” when she lost a Fáinne competition (a lapel pin indicating fluency in Irish) to a boy whose skills were inferior to hers: “they gave the prize to a boy who stumbled and stuttered his way through the poem, because a male speaking bad Irish was going to get a prize over a woman speaking good Irish. It’s so artificial . . . It’s a dead thing.” See McGuckian in L. O’Connor, “Comhrá.” 38. Alcobia-Murphy, 230. 39. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Dinnsheanchas: Holy Wells,” 160. 40. See Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “Pygmalion’s Image,” Selected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008), 49. 41. See Ní Chuilleanáin, “A Voice,” Selected Poems, 58. 42. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Voice,” 58. 43. Catriona Clutterbuck, “Good Faith in Religion and Art: The Later poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin,” Irish University Review: Special Issue: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 37.1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 139, 141. 44. Clutterbuck, “Good Faith,” 141. 45. See Ní Chuilleanáin, “Review of North by Seamus Heaney,” Cyphers 2 (Winter 1975): 49–51. Qtd. in Rand Brandes, “Secondary Sources: A Gloss on the Critical Reception of Seamus Heaney 1965–1993,” Colby Quarterly 30.1 (1994): 68. 46. Seamus Heaney, “Punishment,” North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975 and 1992), 31. 47. The title of The Magdalene Sermon (1989) refers to the so-called Magdalene laundries or asylums run by the Church to house and segregate “fallen women.” An investigation into their functioning in the mid-1990s caused public consternation in Ireland. Although Ní Chuilleanáin has

3

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

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returned to the theme on several occasions, including some of her more recent collections, she has invariably chosen to thematise the silence still surrounding it and to foreground what she perceives to be the necessary failure of language when confronted by the immensity of private suffering. (See, e.g., “Translation,” in The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, 2001). Ní Chuilleanáin, “Permafrost Woman,” Selected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008), 51. Eavan Boland, “Turning Away,” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 96. Boland, “The Mother Tongue,” New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 256. See Boland, “Suburban Woman,” New Collected Poems, 63–5. Boland, “Mother Tongue,” 257. Boland, “Mother Tongue,” 257. Boland, “Mother Ireland,” New Collected Poems, 261. Boland, “Mother Ireland,” 261. Boland, “Mother Ireland,” 261. See Boland, “Mother Ireland,” 262. In Coughlan’s view, the dependence on conventional female imagery was doubly conspicuous in Montague and Heaney who both engaged in defending the case of another historically underprivileged section of the population, the Northern Catholics. See Patricia Coughlan, “‘Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney,” in Gender in Irish Writing, eds. Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 88–111. I quote the essay from one of its subsequent publications in Theorizing Ireland, ed. Claire Connolly (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 41–60. Coughlan, “Bog Queens,” 49. Coughlan, “‘The Whole Strange Growth’: Heaney, Orpheus and Women,” Irish Feminisms: Special Issue of The Irish Review 35, eds. Moynagh Sullivan and Wanda Balzano (2007): 39. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (New York: Routledge, 1996), 13.

Works Cited Alcobia-Murphy, Shane. Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006. Boland, Eavan. New Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. ———. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006.

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Brandes, Rand. “Medbh McGuckian Interviewed by Rand Brandes.” Chattahoochee Review 16.3 (Spring 1996): 56–66. ———. “Secondary Sources: A Gloss on the Critical Reception of Seamus Heaney 1965–1993.” Colby Quarterly 30.1 (1994): 63–71. Clutterbuck, Catriona. “Good Faith in Religion and Art: The Later Poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.” Irish University Review: Special Issue: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 37.1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 131–56. Coughlan, Patricia. “‘Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney.” In Gender in Irish Writing, edited by Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns, 88–111. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991. ———. “‘Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney.” In Theorizing Ireland, edited by Claire Connolly, 41–60. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ———. “‘The Whole Strange Growth’: Heaney, Orpheus and Women.” Irish Feminisms: Special Issue of The Irish Review 35. Edited by Moynagh Sullivan and Wanda Balzano (2007): 25–45. Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. New York: Routledge, 1996. Frawley, Oona. “Introduction.” In Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 1–9. Dublin: New Island, 2005. Heaney, Seamus. North. London: Faber and Faber, 1975 and 1992. Hobbs, John. “‘My Words Are Traps’: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 2.1 (Spring, 1998): 111–20. Kinsella, Thomas. The Táin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. McCrea, Barry. Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. McGuckian, Medbh. “Author Statement.” British Council Literature. Accessed 10 November 2014. https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/medbh-mcg uckian. ———. The Flower Master and Other Poems. 2nd ed. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1993. McKibben, Sarah E. “Speaking of / Speaking For: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Folkloristic Ethics.” In The Language of Gender, Power and Agency, edited by Amber Handy and Brian Ó Conchubhair, 263–75. Dublin: Arlen House, 2014. Ní Annracháin, Máire. “Affinities in Time and Space: Reading the Gaelic poetry of Ireland and Scotland.” In Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, edited by Peter Mackay, Edna Longley and Fran Brearton, 102–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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———. “Ait Liom Bean a Bheith ina File.” In Léachtaí Cholm Cille XII: Na Mná sa Litríocht, edited by Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, 145–81. Maynooth: An Sagart, 1982. Nic Eoin, Máirín. Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge. Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2005. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan. “Review of North by Seamus Heaney.” Cyphers 2 (Winter 1975): 49–51. ———. Selected Poems. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. Pharaoh’s Daughter. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1990. ———. Selected Essays. Dublin: New Island, 2005. ––––––. Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta. Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989. Ní Fhrighil, Rióna. “Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Revise the Landscape.” In Irish Landscapes, edited by José Francisco Fernández Sánchez and María Elena Jaime de Pablos, 231–41. Almería: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Almería, 2003. O’Connor, Laura. “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995): 581–614. Accessed 20 May 2011. http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary-critic ism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-laura-oconnor. Pearce, David ed. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader. Cork: Cork University Press, 2000. Potts, Donna L. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2011. The Schools’ Collection. National Folklore Collection, UCD. Dúchas.ie. Accessed 20 May 2017. https://www.duchas.ie/ga/. Wheeler, Lesley. “Both Flower and Flower Gatherer: Medbh McGuckian’s The Flower Master and H.D.’s Sea Garden.” Twentieth Century Literature 49.4 (2003): 494–519. Wills, Clair. Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

PART II

Secret Scripts

In coming to terms with the problematic canon, women inevitably concerned themselves with the issues of poetic influence and inspiration, often basing their approach on various applications of irony and coded narrative. A focus on these distancing rhetorical devices provides insights into the interplay between the margin and the centre, between the political and the personal, as well as between what is manifest and what is being withheld in poetry. The following chapters begin with an examination of writing from the 1970s and ’80s in which some of the major female poets of the time either appropriate or repudiate the traditional muse figure, and also include excursions to later verse. This allows me to trace the tone of political non-involvement—in terms of removing feminist and post-nationalist anxieties from the centre of political concern—increasingly prevalent in Irish women’s poetry from around 2000 onwards. At the same time, however, I show that the often encrypted, privatised lyrical discourse—found in poetry by Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Aifric Mac Aodha, Sinéad Morrissey or Ailbhe Darcy—is largely based on content that we are accustomed to associate with the engaged, feminist phase in Irish poetry and stems from the subversive use of secrecy by authors such as McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin or Ní Dhomhnaill. Like women writers of the past whose reactions to misogynist criticism often involved false modesty, some of these later poets have written lyrics replete with irony in response to traditional constructions of women

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as subject matter rather than authors of poetry. In postcolonial vocabulary, these strategies are conveniently described as the “sly civility” with which those discriminated against turn their gaze “back upon the eye of power,” to borrow from Homi Bhabha.1 For the women who accessed the Irish literary scene in the last third of the twentieth century, the controlling eye of power is represented by the masculine tradition, a power that holds them in an impasse as it is impossible either to outstare it or to simply disregard it. Harold Bloom defines this contradictory stance towards one’s predecessors, i.e. the tension between the urge to encompass and to reject, as the precondition of the “agonistic” development.2 The history of poetry, as Bloom construes it, is a struggle to achieve poetic influence in which poets find their tone and position by misreading one another. Women poets in Ireland, however, often felt that they needed not only to absorb and then deconstruct the influence of a particular established poetic or literary figure but to define themselves against a whole range of woman-objectifying tropes, metaphors and forms of rhetoric that pervaded the canon. Thus, their situation was the exact opposite to that proposed by Bloom, whose strong poets wrestle with their forebears “even to the death,” as opposed to weaker talents who tend to idealise.3 The poets discussed below are neither inclined to idealise their precursors, nor are they subject to the anxiety of influence since, for them, the inherited masculine canon already signifies a void or death. The essentially contested concept of “Irish poetic tradition” and the view that both the Irish-language canon and modern poetry in English are marked by a sense of fracture and loss follows, inter alia, from the implicit memory of the Irish language. Paradoxically, this widespread awareness of the dead or lost past, materialised in Irish poetry in the form of a linguistic shift (Irish–English, standard English–Hiberno-English) and chronological development (oral–written/modern/standardised, Old Irish–modern Irish), is catalysed by the sense that, as William Faulkner has it, “the past is never dead,” and that “it’s not even past.”4 The canon is thus at once the site of loss and also a plausible, even inevitable source. The literary tradition is both continuous and interrupted. The discontinuity, however, not only occasions the freedom to create a new poetic self but also provokes a countermotion of nostalgia for the tradition that has been hostile and has therefore been abandoned. Indeed, while they

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have described, mostly in their prose writings and interviews, the aspects of the Irish literary past that prevented them from relating to or drawing from that tradition, the majority of these poets have also commented on the impossibility of overlooking it. While Part I examined ironic subversions of the iconic figures of the motherland, in Part II I would like to focus on how the poets react against the traditional troping of the female muse. I will demonstrate how they reshape these earlier figurations, not least when a shift from silence to expression and vigorous subjectivity, as well as various aspects of the language issue and translation, becomes the very theme of their poems. The study as a whole is based on the idea that the ways in which women have been represented in literature in Ireland have not only changed but kept evolving over the course of the last fifty years. An important underlying feature of this development has been the language issue which I approach as an essentially plural phenomenon with diverse aspects and manifestations. This concept of language as a key factor in the formation of poetic identity will be more systematically highlighted in the individual chapters. In the poems I examine, the hermetic narratives and moments of cryptic personalism often serve as outlets through which the poet-persona eludes established speech roles and conventional gendered scenarios, with the aim of inverting or parodying traditional polarities (sexual as well as linguistic ones). The analyses in the subsequent chapters illustrate how these silences and ironic obscurities not only provide a way out of the public into the private sphere but they are often the moments when the political becomes the poetic, when the poems effectively start. These secret scripts thus serve to help the poets move away from stereotyped social and cultural constraints and also re-establish themselves in the shared, renovated public space of the poem. In these poems, the personal and the political are not opposed to one another; rather, they overlap in new ways, usually in rhetorical silence, mocking, one-way addresses or referential ambiguity. Thus, the poets turn away from public speech just as they comment upon it. Some of the themes discussed earlier will arise again, all relevant to the topic of fragmented representation and encrypted expression. One is the theme of silence—for silence, of course, is “privatisation” at its most extreme—the other is related to issues of marginality and liminality.

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Despite their protests and polemics, these poets generally aim to avoid a dichotomous, genderised concept of literature. Rather, they employ liminal, transitory spaces and situations that signify convergence as much as difference, thus creating an alternative, open position on the borderline. It is often from a point between two extremes, or states of mind (silence and proposition, furtiveness and open polemics) that they set out to work. Transition signals an interim. Liminality allows change to originate, and I argue that temporary liminality is in itself a persistent characteristic in the work of several generations of Irish women poets over the past fifty years. Prominent among those shared representations of the interstice is a tendency in the poets to interpose themselves between the tradition and their own poetic output, between the petrifying male gaze and their speaking (or deliberately silent) personae, between the stereotypes of national or linguistic identity and poetic subjectivity. Through the use of ellipsis, irony, ekphrasis, quotation and the distancing effect of translation, their poems are often not just a medium for self-expression, but they become mediators between those opposing forces. All the chapters in Part II pay special attention to the binary concepts of feminism and post-feminism and focus on the conceptual continuities and contrasts between the two categories. The idea of change as signalling continuity is particularly relevant in Chapters 5, 7 and 8 which discuss the ways in which Irish poets of several generations have explored the originative power of silence, poetic translation and the porous lines between cultures and art disciplines. It can be seen from these chapters that themes related to women’s position in national, literary and social communities are now being approached from increasingly globalised perspectives.

Notes 1. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge Classics, 2004), 132–44, 280. See also Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 71–8. 2. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), xxiv. 3. Bloom, Influence, 5. 4. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 73.

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Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge Classics, 2004. ———. “Sly Civility.” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 71–8. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.

CHAPTER 4

The Muse in Question: Tropes of Inspiration Revisited

In the Irish context, poetry with feminist aspects often combines objections to the historical tradition with attempts to compensate for the omission of women from current political and cultural debate. Yet these protests, though mostly carried out through cryptic reference and frequent imaging of the female body, point not so much to the discontinuity between the official and private world but, as Clair Wills argues, to “the impossibility of approaching the public world except through the prism of private or individual experience.”1 Nevertheless, although feminist poetry often adheres to this pattern, it does not follow that particular poems provide an insight into the private experience of the poets. Rather, they help us appreciate the extent to which the female body—its reproductive and aesthetic functions, together with its formal setting, the domestic sphere—is primarily a public entity and how it must be internalised and claimed for poetry. In this chapter, I would like to show how this personalisation is often achieved through strategies of concealment and enigmatic expression. One such area of conflict and contact is the antithesis of poet and muse which is often effectively fractured or inverted by means of mocking covertness and self-irony. Examining how these moments of strategic withdrawal and simulation are essential for forming the lyric “I,” we will look at verse by women who construe themselves as “muse poets” and openly relate to a gendered, personified muse (Medbh McGuckian © The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_4

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and Biddy Jenkinson), as well as poems by those who either disregard or explicitly deplore the idea of a muse as embodied inspiration (Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Paula Meehan). Poets have been expansive on the subject of inspiration; like everything that is difficult to define, it has always puzzled and intrigued. Although essential for the creative process, there is no consensus on its source or how it can be attained, apart from its general association with the basic concept of vaporousness and the inevitably fantastic notions of its origin and processes at work. Some of the oldest concepts of literary composition reckon with the notion that inspiration is met in a state of rapture, that the poet, when inspired, does not consciously participate in the formation of words but is guided by a higher creative power. In the Laws, Plato gives us the first known description of the poet as a conduit for words, a mere dictating machine: “when a poet takes his seat on the tripod of the Muse, he cannot control his thoughts. He’s like a fountain where the water is allowed to gush forth unchecked.”2 In Phaedrus, he has Socrates note how the Muses induce a state of furor poeticus, an inspired madness in the poet, which is described as “a noble thing.”3 What is key here is the idea of a bidirectional flow or criss-crossing between inside and outside, between here and beyond: in order to achieve inspiration, one has to go “out of one’s mind,” to the outer limits of the self—first to experience an invigorating influx from a supernatural source and then to give vent to a spontaneous outburst of inspired creativity. If in modern theory, starting with John Locke and the Enlightenment, the search for inspiration mostly turns to the unconscious and the realms of psychology, the definitions of its workings still count on an external power or intermediary. The shape and form of this collaborating agent may vary from that of a divine in-breather, through the concept of the muse as an abstract force or a living person, to the effect of hallucinogens. Inspiration is still viewed as a non-rational, unaccountable phenomenon, a power derived from an external impulse or through a source beyond the limits of one’s intellectual capacity.4 From early on, the concept of inspiration employed the figure of a generic female ideal; inspiration is as difficult to grasp as the elusive lady or, by extension, the lady is the source of poetry itself. This gnostic belief in a feminine deity or wisdom principle has its roots in the classical nine Muses of Greek mythology and is shared by the courtly love tradition where the—normally unfulfilled—love of an idealised woman gives rise

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to poems of great lyrical power in the poet. In modernity, the dependence on a feminine muse is explored in Robert Graves’s idea of poetry as worship of the ancient White Goddess. In his understanding, poetic inspiration is “the poet’s inner communion”5 with the compound deity’s human personification. Woman, the goddess’s representative, is placed in a supernatural sphere above the male poet who, like the original mystes, is an ecstatic devotee of the muse. Graves contends: “woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing.”6 Yet there is room for concession within this categorical opposition: “This is not to say that a woman should refrain from writing poems; only, that she should write as a woman, not as an honorary man.”7 What does that imply? Is the expressly female muse prohibited for women? Unambiguous answers to questions like this are not part of Graves’s sweeping plan; he was, after all, concerned with poetry as an honorary male activity and referred to anomalies such as female writers only with the aim of supporting the improbable blending of the ecumenical single goddess of many names with misleading views of Celtic paganism, interwoven with cautions to poets—male or female— against marriage and reproduction.8 While Graves’s devout reliance on a female muse confirms the virility of the poet, the advice provided for the improbable case of a woman poet unconditionally identifies her with the muse. In its obscure dogmatism, however, this advice can be considered “pure poetry” rather than a proposition of any practical or even theoretical relevance: “She should be the Muse in a complete sense: she should be in turn Arianrhod, Blodeuwedd and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow, and should write in each of these capacities with antique authority. She should be the visible moon: impartial, loving, severe, wise.”9 Such descriptions of the female author as a composing muse rather than an intellectual, gifted being were of course doubly irritating for Irish women poets when their writing first emerged as a “category” in the 1970s. Their complaints were directed against received ideas of the Irish tradition as a “great male bardic hierarchical triumph,”10 which excluded women from poetic influence and posterity. Many of the poets express objections to being classified as a male-created concept, insisting instead on figuring as a subject and creator of images. One way of approaching these issues has been to explicitly reject or ridicule the stereotyped notion of anthropomorphised inspiration. Another has consisted in ironic invocations or mocking dismissals of the mythological muse figure. While the

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latter is one of the standard rhetorical devices used by literary women, in the more recent poetry we see further complications of such modes of address. These include the inversion or indeterminacy of the muse’s sex and identity and the tendency to turn to oneself, to use self-reflection in order to drive one’s inspiration and the foregrounding of the muse’s fundamental impenetrability by way of silence and encryption. A secret, Eric Falci notes in relation to McGuckian’s poetry, is communication at a standstill, laden with the possibility that it “could get told.”11 What these women’s elusive narratives do, however, is make covertness their tractive power. It is irrelevant whether they keep or tell secrets, but what is important is that they use secrecy as a method and scheme. In their tendency towards coded or virtually unintelligible expression, they often elude the reader as much as any sense of semantic coherence. Yet it is precisely through this fractured narrative and obscure lexical equivalence and deictic relations that their poems undermine established figures and discourse. Beginning with an account of Ní Chuilleanáin’s and Meehan’s hermetic narratives and unfathomable female personae, the chapter outlines possible motivations behind their unswerving reserve. It also considers poems by McGuckian and Jenkinson in which the rejection of the conventional image of the muse as the poet’s personified other leads to the ironic conclusion that, ultimately, all is muse.

Radical Reticence: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Paula Meehan Ní Chuilleanáin’s emphatically silent female figures, as we have seen in Chapter 3 when discussing “Permafrost Woman” and “A Voice,” often read as personalised bodies that are placed in the public space of poetic narrative. As they are introduced through the awed gaze of a male persona, their role is to confirm the ultimate crypticism of private experience. Moreover, they are emblematic of Ní Chuilleanáin’s self-proclaimed search for strategies to “say ‘I’ in a female persona.”12 The result of this, nevertheless, is a conspicuously detached, impersonal style based on reticence. In my view, this apparent paradox is the outcome of her dual engagement, a specific amalgamation of a gaze cast backwards and forwards at once: if, looking back at the tradition, she encountered silence, she made that the terminus a quo and one of the prevalent principles of her own writing. Discretion is both the aesthetic procedure and

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central theme of her poetry; silence, which once inhibited the poet, now becomes her mainspring. Ní Chuilleanáin’s silence, I propose, has three essential motivations, often barely distinguishable from one another and sometimes detectable within the same poem. The first is the endorsement of tact and the rhetoric of restraint as aesthetic qualities. The second foregrounds constraint as an ethical theme arising from—but also enabling Ní Chuilleanáin to comment on—what she perceives to be the rigid limits of cognition and the representational capacity of speech. The third motivation of Ní Chuilleanáin’s silence involves preterition as a mode of resistance that demonstrates the silencing of women in Irish historical and literary narratives. Poems such as “Passing Over in Silence” (The Brazen Serpent , 1994)— which is an enactment of the rhetorical device of paralipsis , also known as cataphasis, or praeteritio (the latter being the poem’s original title)13 — encapsulate Ní Chuilleanáin’s concept of poetry as a strategy for censuring the course of narrative and of history. In keeping with the formal rules of paralipsis , Ní Chuilleanáin gives an account of a female subject feigning to gloss over a traumatic experience, thus making it the centre of attention: She never told what she saw in the wood; There were no words for the stench, ... She kept the secret of the woman lying In darkness breathing hard[.]14

The negative introductory phrases at the beginning of half of the lines— “She never told”; “She kept the secret”; “She held her peace”—serve to impart distinct contours of what had occurred.15 But the enactment of paralipsis —invocation by denying invocation—is as important as the theme of the insufficiency of speech which the poem also instantiates and which is denoted in its ultimate opaqueness. These phrases refer not only to the inadequacy of language in the face of the mystery of life and death, or of an unspeakable trauma, but also in the face of the historical silence of women. What makes this poem characteristic of Ní Chuilleanáin is the tone of reported narrative, linked to the eradication of the lyric subject. Ní Chuilleanáin’s restrained, mostly third-person narratives rarely record speech

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and, as I have remarked, if they do it is normally by someone who has died. This is what happens, for example, in “St Margaret of Cortona” (also from the same collection) in which the woman—the Italian saint and patroness of single mothers and reformed prostitutes—is reported to have become “A name not to be spoken”; “A pause [that] opens its jaws.”16 The hush, represented by the dense imagery of cavities and hollows, results from the enigma surrounding the woman, the mystery of her alleged sins and the unspeakability of her own personal trauma: “Her eyes were hollowed / By the bloody scene. . .”17 Like the introductory phrases in “Passing Over in Silence,” which signify hollowness, the cavities here seem to be packed with meaning—just as their grimacing reveals a void: “In the mine of the altar her teeth listen and smile.”18 Such personae, who speak about, watch or listen to silence, enable Ní Chuilleanáin to hint at the unnameable, to bring into the space of the poem the body of the woman and her hushed up voice. In this respect, feminism is of relevance for Ní Chuilleanáin’s political themes as well as her lyrical expression. Her cryptic tone is hardly ever personal, and never confessional. Yet, however detached her personae appear to be, she employs them to communicate some deep anxieties—not least those that concern her own poetics and possible conceptions of national, sexual and linguistic identity. Her hermeticism enables her to continually balance on the edge, construing these anxieties as having both public and personal relevance. Her coded narratives and conceptualising of the female body, as well as the structuring of her works, are viewed, in many cases, as correctives to the existing tradition. The female body has to be liberated from the canon in order to be reconceived and then reinscribed in the new poem, and Ní Chuilleanáin manages to achieve this by using elliptic narratives and enigmatic personae. This idea of balancing on the edge is essential in two respects: as well as corresponding to the strategic figuring of liminality in Irish women poets, it is relevant in terms of Ní Chuilleanáin’s relation to the canon and to her subject matter. Her conspicuous reliance on figurative as well as formal restraint means that her poems often seem to afford glimpses of personal thought and recollection, even as they forbid the reader to go any further. Her work is replete with instances of conveying a message by refusing to tell, by highlighting the significance of what is being withheld. Poems such as “Passing Over in Silence” or “St Margaret of Cortona” express reverence for the secrets of an inner life. The poetry’s resolute hermeticism follows from a sense of the limits of perceptual mimesis and verbal

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representation. While this notion of obliquity contributes to the finished character of most of Ní Chuilleanáin’s lyrics (not in the sense of perspicuous content but in terms of significant, and signifying, form), it appears to be in contrast to the prevalent notion of secrecy. This very contrast is the enabling paradox of Ní Chuilleanáin’s work. The privatisation of the female poet’s voice through concealment and rhetorical silence is not only a means of escaping from the canon and shunning the expectations of the discursive function of language in society but it also entails engagement: a subversive return under concealment. Yet, viewed from a different angle, the concealment and fragmentation—in terms of discontinuous narrative and puzzling representation—can be perceived as safeguards against the slipping of this “engaged” poetry into propaganda. The moments of elusion are often those from which not only meaning or its implications arise but also poetry itself. Ní Chuilleanáin’s “Pygmalion’s Image” offers a convenient illustration of these effects. Contained in the poem’s central motif, which can be interpreted at once as a metaphor of the feminised land, the inherited tradition or the mass of women’s voices silenced within this tradition, the Galatea image is an epitome of Ní Chuilleanáin’s radical reticence: Not only her stone face, laid back staring in the ferns, But everything the scoop of the valley contains begins to move ..... The lines of the face tangle and catch, and A green leaf of language comes twisting out of her mouth.19

As is often the case with Ní Chuilleanáin’s explanatory—but hardly clarifying—titles, it is the mention of the Cypriot sculptor at the head of the poem that directs us away from the impression of naturalistic description to other contexts, and foreshadows the lyric’s mocking undertones. It is through its title, too, that the poem appears to address Patrick Kavanagh’s sonnet “Pygmalion” and his imaging of the Roscommon landscape as a “stone-proud” woman of granite along with his hope, encouraged by the woman’s tantalising lips, “. . . frozen in the signature of lust,” that “At dawn tomorrow she will be / Clay-sensuous.”20 Yet, as noted above, Ní Chuilleanáin will hardly limit herself to a reaction against one particular trope or work. If “Pygmalion’s Image” denotes an image come to life, the

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nature and signification of this life have always been a matter of scholarly interest and have figured in theories of representation and artistic imagination. Indeed, while vividness is the defining feature of the sculptor’s artefact, it is not measured by the faithfulness of its representation: rather than a copy (i.e. an image or portrait of any living person), the statue is a living embodiment of the properties of beauty and life. Even before its metamorphosis, induced by divine powers, the stone sculpture already seems lifelike (quam vivere). Gilles Deleuze (in his analysis of Plato’s Sophist ) defines such an image—the nature of which lies not in “likeness” but in “semblance”21 — as an artefact without a model, an image that belongs to the art of simulacrum.22 What makes the concept of simulacrum relevant to my argument about the deconstructive power of Ní Chuilleanáin’s mimetic secrecy and reticence is its indeterminate status, described by some as being inherently subversive, as “fundamentally vague” and “full of dark power.”23 The same kind of dynamism is evident in the mixed connotations of Ní Chuilleanáin’s image: identified with Ovid’s ivory virgin, it simply reads as an object of the male artist’s erotic desire and points to idealised images of the feminine in the tradition.24 Viewed as a simulacrum, however, the stone-faced female object is endowed with disruptive potential. If, following Deleuze, the copy is an image that resembles the original while the simulacrum is an image based on dissimilitude, simulacra must also imply “a perversion, an essential turning away.”25 Thus, the anarchic effect of the simulacrum, which turns away from essence and is founded on no original, “sets up the world of nomadic distributions . . . Far from being a new foundation, it swallows up all foundations; it assures a universal collapse, but as a positive and joyous event, as de-founding (effondement ).”26 Ní Chuilleanáin’s “Pygmalion’s Image” describes such “joyful” and salutary collapsing of foundations—if foundations are to be understood in terms of the nationalist tradition and the conservative images of the feminised land within this tradition. The closing metaphor of the poem announces innovation and marks the beginning of a being, or of being in language. As Deleuze says elsewhere, “[i]n the order of speech, it is the I which begins, and begins absolutely . . . be it a speech that is silent.”27 On the one hand, the awakening “I” of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem serves as an analogue of poetic expression and belongs to the poet herself—as her way of saying “I” in a female persona. On the other hand, it does not relate to any speaking “individual” but represents the metaleptic figure

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of the lyric “I,” which is relevant for the figuration of the female poetic subject in general. In an apparent paradox, the persona is about to open her mouth and declare herself no one’s ivory maiden just as she confirms her status as a simulacrum: an autonomous image with no model, coincidentally represented in one stream of Western thought by Pygmalion’s statue. The fact that the poem stops precisely at this point is significant. Ní Chuilleanáin’s treatment of this interface between silence and speech results from an almost ethical unwillingness on her part to fix her objects with too loud and definite an expression. After all, it is important to bear in mind that this is as far as Ní Chuilleanáin will ever go in terms of representing speech. Her personae, both male and female, are mostly engaged in watching or contemplating silence, mutely. Silence is construed not as a gap or as a deficiency but as a benign—even healing—phenomenon, rich with expressive force. Scholars have read Pygmalion as an archetype of the cultural tendency to see woman as a symbol of representation, as an art object or as a mirror image of male desire.28 While, as Peggy O’Brien says, many of Ní Chuilleanáin’s personae “resist being gazed at by intently looking back,”29 the stifling awareness of the male gaze is apparent in the works of other poets, too. In the examples below, I will demonstrate that although resistance is often explicitly expressed, the poems’ narratives share the same inclination to obscurity and concealment that we have observed in Ní Chuilleanáin. ∗ ∗ ∗ The next poet I would like to discuss here, Paula Meehan, has taken her revisionist stance to the point of wishing to renounce tradition and influence completely. Yet she claims to have found her poetic voice inside the taut space between the future and the past: “I believe that [as a poet] you have to go back in order to go forward, that the way forward is a way back as well.”30 This applies to the poet’s frequent recourse to her own past and family relations, as well as to her occasional jibes at the gendered roles of women and men in society. Born in Dublin in 1955, the eldest child of six in a working-class family, Meehan grew up in the rough and neglected districts of the inner city before going on to study at Trinity College Dublin and Eastern Washington University in the USA. Looking back on her childhood in an area in central Dublin that has since been completely rebuilt and gentrified, she concludes: “My childhood city is

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practically obliterated, the last coherent community in the north inner city. The people had nothing, but they had a sense of sharing. I grew up in an oral tradition. I got my language there.”31 From a young age, Meehan was involved in student protests and street theatre projects and her teaching experience has included creative writing workshops in community centres and prisons around the country. Her early poetry in particular is charged with social and feminist commentary. These poems insist that there is a painful lot to care about and stand up for, but they also aim to make it clear that their author is nobody’s fool. Yet, while suspiciousness and exasperated anger are unsurprising, considering Meehan’s background, underneath all this is a layer of baffling, elliptical narratives and puzzling referentiality that speak of other areas of existence that stretch beyond the limits of the perceptible world and verbal meaning. It is the combination of her thematic treatment of secrecy with the critique of the received idea of a female muse (consistent particularly in her early verse) that make this poet so relevant to the discussion in this chapter. In “Zugzwang” from Meehan’s third collection, The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (1991), a wife is kept hostage by her husband’s searching eyes. Caught in the impasse of a failing relationship and the aftermath of a traumatic experience, she is left with nothing but options that would further aggravate her situation. However, what is most interesting about the poem is not the persona’s condition but the paradox embraced in its outcome: while she threatens to “surrender herself to ecstatic freefall” into insanity, the unwitting husband still thinks he can hold her together with his assessing gaze, imagining himself as a painter “mixing pigment and oil.”32 While she retains her passionate desperation and—keeping it to herself—continues to move restlessly about the house and beyond its walls, it is the uncomprehending husband (reminiscent of Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead,” daydreaming about Gretta) who is left immobile and silently wondering about the time he found her in the middle of the night, “digging in the garden, her nightgown / drenched through . . .”33 Hers is no inspired “Digging” on which a poet’s manifesto could be modelled.34 Rather, she is a trespasser, unsettling and anarchic in her obscure intentions and enigmatic activity, a grubby version of Mrs Rochester. Ignoring her husband’s futile gaze, she threatens to slip away from him while he appears to be stuck in his predictable role. Even after she hits rock bottom, the wife will carry the subdued drama of the present scene far beyond its confines, as part of his image or in the

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vagaries of her deranged mind, while he stays behind in a deadlock. In its reversal of the techniques and effects of ekphrasis, “Zugzwang” objectifies the “artist” and provides a forum for a previously silent object of art. This is, of course, a fairly standard feminist scenario, and Meehan’s criticism of the traditional mixing of love poetry with apostrophes to a personified muse and the dependence of artists on the genderised inspiring other has been uncompromising. In a 2002 interview, she claimed that “[t]here should be a law against muses [for] they’ve been affliction on humanity since time began.”35 An outright rejection of the monumentalising and at the same time belittling regard of an enamoured man is evident from the title of “Not Your Muse” from Pillow Talk (1994). The persona insists on being taken for what she is. If the man’s “love’s blindness” makes her look “whole and shining,” it also makes her feel like “a painted doll,” a picture postcard thing.36 Several ironies inform the outcome of this seemingly playful address: although the speaker makes as if to approach the man, it is clear that the latter cannot hear her monologue; he remains just as unreal as the product of his own aesthetic idealism. The speaker’s final decision to let the man have his fantasy rather than attempt to make him understand the reality of her life is as much a gesture of resignation as one of cunning. It is through her secrecy and judicious reticence that she escapes the power relations of her situation, which reflect those in erotic and elegiac discourse. “Who am I,” she asks by way of a conclusion, to expose “your painted doll [to] the harsh light / I live by. . .”37 As in the previous poem, this dramatic monologue is addressed—but not intended to actually be delivered—to the man. Through its formal and mythological references, it functions as a political allegory, as a protest against the concept of poetry and art as an archetypal sexual act and against the idea of the poem as Pygmalion’s statue. The format of a poetic complaint provides the persona with a rhetorical convention that serves as an outlet for frustration. But unlike conventional amorous complaints that generally amount to a reconfirmation of the problem rather than a solution, Meehan’s speaker does in fact manage to bring about change. Just as she complains about being viewed as a mute icon, she proposes the image of a silently admiring man. Through a kind of aporia—as she introduces the harsh reality of her life while insisting on the necessity to keep it secret—the persona positions herself outside the stifling association while the man appears to be caught inside his illusion. Once again,

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with a nod to the Pygmalion myth, man is presented as an artificer, a “womanufacturer,”38 to use A. R. Sharrock’s term, taken with the object of his creation but perceiving her autonomous life as a threat. Meehan’s lyric polemicises with this universalising tendency in amorous adoration, and with the pairing of cold stone with virtuous silence. Illustrative of Meehan’s feminist phase, it uses encryption to represent the self-imposed, evasive ignorance on the part of the male observer. More importantly, however, it is in keeping with the poet’s opposition to all kinds of possessiveness and the idea that “[t]here is no gain in owning,”39 which comes to the fore with new, reassuring intensity in Painting Rain, Meehan’s collection of poems from 2009. Like the majority of her verse, these later poems are intended to confirm, with ever greater persuasiveness, that there are no truths or values more reliable in life than the appreciation of the fact that all is passing. Thus, the “painting of rain” and the failed attempts at painting “Snowdrops” or “their shadows on the concrete path”40 are not meant to capture and preserve. Rather, they register the awareness that “Mist becomes cloud; becomes rain. Water. Ice. Water.” This heightened sense of cyclicality and the transience of things also helps to convey the message that archival evidence of historical loss is as “fragile as a breathmark on the windowpane”41 ; that remembering per se is but a “breath” that “snags on memory”42 ; and that it is best to “Think memory a river,” a continuous, unstoppable flow, always eluding.43 Like Ní Chuilleanáin, Meehan adopts preterition and secrecy to break the prescribed rule of silence and at the same time to allude to the complexities of a life that cannot be captured in a sculpted image or outlined in a song. While she believes in the restorative function of language and poetry, she simultaneously insists on the role of poetic expression to point to the inevitable incompleteness of all communication and the fragmentary nature of memory. It is best perceived as an act—a process that mirrors but never encompasses its ever-shifting subject matter—rather than as an artefact with its connotations of completeness. As Meehan proposes in “Molly Malone,” one of the seven elegies for “The Lost Children of the Inner City” in Dharmakaya (2000), although it is our duty to reflect and remember, all that we can gather in a poem, or in any attempted account of the past, are just shards of history, a life’s “odds, and ends.”44 For Meehan, we might conclude, secrecy is not so much a method as a major theme. Her unceasing emphasis on the transitory nature of life, memories, objects and environments reconfirms her

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rejection—expressed particularly in her early verse—of the idea that an individual person (real or allegorised) should need to be adopted as the nameable source of one’s art or life energy.

All Is Muse: Medbh McGuckian and Biddy Jenkinson Although less explicit in disclosing its purpose, Medbh McGuckian relies extensively on secrecy, using it not so much to overcome as to discuss various forms of (imposed) silence and absences. Thus, she has created a singular poetic idiom, based on the reductive methods of ellipsis and encoding—as well as on polyphony—that together enhance rather than curb the possibilities of the lyric “I.” McGuckian’s baffling referentiality and fragmented syntax may have provoked a wave of refusal initially but they have now been perceived as her particular strength. Scholars have prompted us to see her puzzling idiom, her use of intertextuality and occasional hermeticism as creatively subversive. In Clair Wills’s view, McGuckian’s poems propose “not representations of the truth of feminine experience, but a private language whose rationale is in part the maintenance of secrecy.” Still, Wills adds, the poet’s work is by no means intended to provide an aesthetic sanctuary but serves to question “redemptive approaches to everyday life.”45 Citing Claudette Sartiliot, Shane Alcobia-Murphy claims that McGuckian’s poetic method encompasses an impulse to the process of rewriting, “a repetition that distorts and misquotes, that destroys in order to transform.”46 Referring to her abundant use of quotations from texts by others, her “openness to inspiration, a willingness to welcome the approach of the Muse through the words of . . . other source,” Alcobia-Murphy asserts that McGuckian’s poetic texts “are original and, even though they are oblique, they possess the coherence which many of her reviewers feel they lack.”47 According to Moynagh Sullivan, McGuckian’s compelling writing that deconstructs the dialectic between the subject and object “literally makes pre-linguistic sense.”48 Like Ní Chuilleanáin, McGuckian uses encryption neither to write simply about feminine experience nor for its own sake as formal ornamentation but rather to symbolise the limitations of verbal representation. Her halting yet polyphonous poetic idiom helps not only to define and instantiate those limitations but to undo them, too. This results, to some extent, from the distortion of the narrative logic and the obscuring of image

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creation, which Sullivan refers to as McGuckian’s “pre-linguistic sense.” It is precisely by refusing to “make sense” within the patriarchal discursive regimes that McGuckian’s secret poems acquire a political dimension and can thus be associated with feminist efforts to deconstruct the authority of the masculine voice and symbolic order. One of the devices she uses as part of her strategy of stealthy privatisation—which proposes secrecy and concealment instead of revealing intimacy—is her extensive reliance on intertextuality. Although it provides the source—together with consistent manipulation of deixis—of the multivocal opacity of her work, her expert dovetailing of unidentified quotations produces a tone that is seamless. Owing to the scattered provenance of her sources, which have included female as well as male authors of various languages and genres—absorbed exclusively through English translations and cribs—McGuckian can hardly be seen as attempting to revise or censure the Irish literary canon. What she does refute, though, is the standard (patriarchal) model of affiliation. While her poetry produces a superficial illusion of smoothness and normality in its use of the stanza and strong rhythmic patterns, the combination of referential and narrative obscurity with the precision and urgency of individual images makes her poetry unprecedented within Irish poetry as well as within the broader field of anglophone writing. Paradoxically, this apparent lack of indebtedness is the effect of McGuckian’s extensive borrowing: by including quotations not to support a particular line of thought but as raw material, she prevents them from disrupting her tone and creates images that are stunningly original. In “The Villain” from her second collection, Venus and the Rain (1984), McGuckian combines notions of artistic inspiration and matrimony (examined above in the discussion of Meehan’s poems) while typically complicating both concepts—and many more—at the same time. The poem opens with an image of a house that is described as “. . . the shell of a perfect marriage / Someone has dug out completely.”49 But the focus on the exterior quickly gives way to the idea of architectural structure and the human body as an interface between the physical and metaphysical. The house is not a mere frame without inner substance; rather, its “mind” Is somewhere above its body, and its body Stumbles after its voice like a man who needs A woman for every book . . .50

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In this barely decipherable tangle of roles, subjects and objects, McGuckian parodies the conception of the body or form of the poem as feminine, as well as that of poetic expression as the product of the male mind. Subsequently, the speaker—characterised by a typically fractured body and self that recall the “housified” persona in “The Soil-Map”—identifies with the house through . . . this my Brownest, tethered room, the unloved villain The younger year may locate, and take into its own.51

Indeed, she seems to make it all her own—the voice of the poem as well as that of every man’s book, the interior of the house perceived as the body of the self, as well as its surroundings fused with the inquisitive mind—using it to enhance the possibilities of her poetry. While she indicates she is able to see the hidden, reverse side of things that least “wish themselves known” she manages to make the words of the poem, as well as its borrowed concepts, appear to be all of her own making. The idea of the exterior of the house (or the body) as an extension of a human mind points to McGuckian’s latent yet repeated allusions to the indeterminacy of Cartesian dualism. Like many of her other poems, the image here serves to overthrow the opposition between interior and exterior, thereby challenging the contrast between the body and the self as well as the distinction between the self and the other. Yet, as the poet herself admits, most of her work grows out of an intense personal attachment that is both particular and variable, fundamental and unfeasible: “I must fix the words into a face I am loving for the poem.”52 Otherwise, she thinks there is no point in trying to write. Many of her poems comment on their own specific manner (the intended shape or “face” of the poem that is being written), just as they address the person, the real human being who inspires them. If the listener is mostly shrouded in a concoction of identities, this includes the unclear distinction between “you” or “we,” and “I.” The encompassing of the speaker’s self in the address, the turning of the speaking voice back on itself, enables the poet to speak through and at the same time to the poem. According to McGuckian, “all poetry is erotic,” and writing a good poem feels like “going to bed with your muse.”53 It seems as though she needs a body for every poem: “there is usually one special person the poem is a private message to.”54 Still, in “The Villain,” which is a

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love poem to a man as much as to a house, McGuckian alludes to the principles of male creativity in order to ridicule her own dependence on her muse and male listener.55 At the same time, however, she wishes to show her ultimate independence from everyone and everything and to illustrate the liberating effects of imagination. Blurring the limits of the house and questioning its solidity, she undermines the genuineness of the marriage that “someone has dug out completely.” While the persona seems to be left behind by the departing husband, her inquisitive mind is shown as encompassing—and trespassing—the limits of the house, thus finding a way out of the confines of domesticity. Unlike in Meehan’s “Not Your Muse,” this greedy, compulsive appropriation seems to say, all is muse. What McGuckian’s poem has in common with the other poet’s work, however, is the figure of an invisible, silent listener. Imagination, together with the sense of secretly grasping things unknown to others, provides an outlet of private communication. Its outcome, nevertheless, is as personal as it is allegorical and political. McGuckian’s subversion consists in her adoption of the Gravesean— essentially sexist—concept of poetry. The success of her gesture is due to the fact that she does not simply invert the polarity but complicates it through entanglement of the gender references and distinctions, and through the use of self-irony. Most of all, the half-mocking tone resembles that of a letter not intended to be sent, or an entry in a diary. However, as is the case with McGuckian’s verse in general, with sources and voices of many origins moulded into the narrative, it is virtually impossible to categorise “The Villain” according to its style. One of the hallmarks of McGuckian’s style is her ironic play on the common register associated with poetic language and specific genres. In “The Villain,” all the rhythms and phrases that would link it to a particular form (here mostly to that of an ode or a farewell song) are juxtaposed with ironising, stylistically distinguishing images that undermine not just the mimetic but also the formal integrity of the poem. Irony seems to be not only the saving grace but the driving force behind McGuckian’s poetry.56 What the irony is based on is, again, the provocatively cryptic character of the poet’s writing. She needs to gain distance from the conventionally prescribed ideal of womanhood, from her muse, as much as from her particular textual sources, and, most importantly, from her own pose as a poet. Typically, those unwilling to see the irony have been puzzled and affronted by McGuckian’s apparent hermeticism, and have accused her of arrogance and solipsism, even literary “autism.”57

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McGuckian admits to relying on her own personal experience in her writing, pointing out that it is meant to stay like this: “Every poem I’ve written is about something that’s happened to me . . . but I’ve coded it.”58 These encoded references to her personal life along with the poet’s continuous use of unspecified intertextual allusions are the source of McGuckian’s characteristic ambiguousness. They connote issues of broader societal impact and the discrepancies between ideologies and the facts of women’s lives. As Wills notes, “[a] seemingly personal poet [McGuckian] is radical precisely in her attempts to talk about public and political events through the medium of private symbolism.”59 Wills predicted the tendency in McGuckian’s writing from the mid1990s onwards to centre her poems and entire books around various events and symbols of Irish nationalist resistance. Beginning with the publication of Captain Lavender (1994) and continuing in Shelmalier (1998), McGuckian further foregrounded the contrast between proclaimed, though utterly obscure, external reference and the rhetoric of uncommented, but manifest, concealment. The impulse for Shelmalier, as we learn from the author’s note, was the bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion of the United Irishmen. The three collections published in quick succession just after the turn of the millennium—Drawing Ballerinas (2001), The Face of the Earth (2002) and Had I a Thousand Lives (2003)—allegedly refer to various crises in Irish political history, including the 1916 Rising, World War I, the Northern Irish Troubles and the situation in post-ceasefire Belfast. Typically, none of these references surface in the poems themselves; indeed, as Falci put it, the lyrics “include history by forgetting or submerging its details.”60 McGuckian’s opacity can thus be linked to Ní Chuilleanáin’s reticence and Meehan’s secrecy. On the one hand, her private, encoded symbolism dismantles the gendered stereotypes of the female muse. On the other, it also enables her to include meditations of the past and present-day political disturbances, and, as I have argued in Chapter 3, to incorporate the (vicarious) memory of the loss of the Irish language. ∗ ∗ ∗ An open ironisation of the idea of the muse as an abstract female figure conjured up by the male poet to stimulate his creativity informs some of the poetry of Biddy Jenkinson, who claims to have a “healthy” stance to the tradition and refuses to feel indebted to her precursors

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(male or female), “no more than I would burden the next generation with obligations towards myself,” regards literary influence as occasional “wind-blown pollen on the stigma of imagination . . . as a free gift.”61 In “‘Ait liom . . .’ agus rl.” (“Strange to Me . . .” etc.) from her 1997 collection Amhras Neimhe, she rejects the affiliation as well as the woman-qua-muse scheme. Similarly to the infatuated speaker in “Mo Scéal Féin—Á Insint ag Aisling” discussed in Chapter 2, Jenkinson mockingly inverts conventional tropes and “makes free with” man (which is about the most precise translation of “le dánaíocht ort” in the present poem’s second line). Leag uait do pheann, a fhir —le dánaíocht ort mo dhán— Tusa tú féin an bior Bíodh d’imscríobh faoi na mná Tú an fhoinse fíor tobar inspioráide ..... Gin ionamsa an dán go seolfad é, a fhir

Lay down your pen, my man, and I’ll dare you in my poem. You alone are the nib; let women circumscribe you. It’s you, the true fountain, the well of inspiration. ..... beget the poem in me and I will deliver it, my man.62

Having no patience for sentimental brooding over the past, Jenkinson turns to some of the revered male figures of Irish-language poetry and mockingly dares them to collaborate with her. Having no patience either for what she considers the “heathenish” aspects of certain works of the masculine tradition and the exploitative (and ultimately self-destructive) relationship of the male poet-creator to his muse, she proposes the poem as a companion piece to her amused reaction to the same stereotypes in the title poem of her first collection, Baisteadh Gintlí (Circumcision, 1986).63 In keeping with her determination to be considered exclusively as part of Irish-language writing, not only does Jenkinson deal with the customary idea of inspiring womanhood, but she also turns to particular expressions of that attitude in the Irish-language canon. As the seventeenth-century poet Piaras Feiritéar paraphrased in her first line,64 she makes as if she wishes to do without the man, pretending at the same time to praise him as fuel for her creative energy. The general disowning tone of this parody ode is intended to deconstruct the trope of the female

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muse and, more importantly, to claim that neither of the sexes is essential or of primary importance for the process of poetic inspiration and creation. The poem’s title refers to the opinion shared by many Irish male authors and critics well into the second half of the twentieth century that woman was unacceptable as anything but the subject matter of poetry. This stance was infamously expressed by Seán Ó Ríordáin who, in his poem “Banfhile” (Woman Poet), insisted by way of a refrain that “Ní file ach filíocht an bhean”65 (woman is not poet but poetry), provoking reactions from poets and feminist critics alike in both languages. According to Sullivan, this repetition carries with it “more than an Irish cultural taboo against women becoming poets, but also, crucially, an understanding of the matter of poetry as feminine, that is as the material matrix from which a distinctive poetic voice is individuated.” In Sullivan’s view, “this poetic economy masculinises voice, and feminises form, that is, the body of the poem.”66 Indeed, Jenkinson refutes this model by announcing herself to be the holder of both the voice (go seolfadh é) and the body or the vessel (árthaigh) of the poem. Rejecting feminist genderised approaches to the tradition as well, she goes even further, however, and collapses the whole masculine–feminine polarity in an ironic mix of role-play and quotes.67 When asked whether the sarcasm that informs the title poem from the same collection, “Baisteadh Gintlí,” was aimed specifically at those who would like to relegate women to the role of subject matter, Jenkinson replied in the negative, explaining that “[b]híos ag faire na ndeartháireacha ag stracadh lena gcuid béithe agus ag déanamh suilt dom féin go rabhas, ag an neomad áirithe sin, suaimhneach agus gaol iníne agam léi féin . . . Le gean dóibh a bhím ag magadh fúthu” (I was watching the brothers struggling with their muse and chuckling to myself that at that particular moment, I was at peace and in a daughterly relationship with her . . . I ridicule them lovingly).68 Yet again, Jenkinson does not say any of this to assert women over men. Generally, she prefers to leave all the bickering out of the writing process and would like to have her poems read first of all “[mar] d[h]án, seachas feardán nó bandán” (as poetry rather than poetry by men or poetry by women).69 In a 1985 interview with Gabriel Rosenstock, Jenkinson trivialised the opposition between men and women explored by much of the period’s critical debate: “[n]í chreidim go bhfuil aon difríochtaí móra idir fir agus mná ach difríochtaí fisiciúla atá greannmhar” (I do not believe

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there is any big difference between men and women, apart from the physical differences which are laughable).70 Her idea of poetry as an essentially democratic space independent of gender-related issues comes to the fore in how she images the Gaelic tradition: “Samhlaím go minic nach bhfuil i bhfilíocht aon mhuintire ach dán amháin agus go gcuireann gach glúin a línte féin leis” (I often think there are no forebears in poetry but that it is one long poem to which each generation adds its own line).71 While she sets out to subvert the notion of the poem as either feminine or masculine, Jenkinson undermines the idea of the tradition as belonging to either of the two sexes, wishing to point to the irrelevance of such thinking. She may protest against Ó Ríordáin’s rejection of women as authors in Irish-language poetry, but she also contradicts the universal notion of “muse poetry,” particularly the romanticising concept of poetic inspiration based on the confusion of sexual and creative drives. Feigning to ask the man to beget the poem in her, she parodies the understanding, common to McGuckian and many others, of poetry writing as an erotic act. Although she admits that “[l]ove is the only possible theme for a writer [and that] the writing itself is a matter of love,”72 Jenkinson’s idea of love and its role in verbal creation seems to be broader than that expressed by Yeats, for example, in his famous ironic complaint towards the end of his career that “no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it.”73 Her notion of love poetry exceeds the horizon of erotic motivations: for her part, she says, “poetry takes the place of formal religious observance, as a way of loving whatever there may be.”74 As in Meehan or McGuckian, Jenkinson’s persona turns to a fictive, generic auditor, pretending to usurp all there is in the poem. In a joking gesture, she ironically adopts the role of the muse and appropriates the diction of the self-birthing male poet, too. Her deliberate confusion of the subject-object dichotomy, her strangely ambiguous syntax and the indeterminacy of her challenge ultimately show that it is pointless to squabble over the past (including the canon). This reluctance to support the once popular idea in the field of Irish culture that—as Claire Connolly puts it—“the country is obsessed with its own past,”75 is relevant to Jenkinson’s position on the Irish-language situation. In reply to Máire Mhac an tSaoi’s review of contemporary poetry in Irish on the occasion of the publication of the Innti magazine in 1988,76 Jenkinson challenged the elder poet’s view that, as she paraphrases, “poetry in Irish is written by a ‘dámh’ of necrolatrous, alienated, priests chanting in the ruins of the Gaelic Tradition.”77 Opposing

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the notion of Irish-language poetic production as a talking spectre, Jenkinson counters Mhac an tSaoi’s heroising image of Irish-language poets as writing in defiance of death and she objects to being praised on account of working in “a fast dying minority language”: “I write in a living language for living friends.”78 Yet, even if she refuses to revere the past and disapproves of the Pygmalionesque notion of Irish as something dead that needs life breathed into it, her parodic allusions to the objectification of women in the Irish-language canon show her as engaging with the older tradition. Although the prevailing tone of “‘Ait liom . . .’ agus rl.” is less polemic than its title and the mocking citations at the beginning suggest, its censure comes from a female persona who, in defending her own selfhood and integrity, speaks up for an absent, thus necessarily silent and universal, male addressee. ∗ ∗ ∗ Such enabling irony is also found in the above-cited poems by Meehan and McGuckian whose male objects share the conviction of the unknown and unaccountable nature of woman that prompts them, nevertheless, to pin her down. Meehan’s males with artistic ambitions clearly seem to be more comfortable with a generic ideal than with a living individual. Even though in McGuckian’s, Jenkinson’s and Ní Chuilleanáin’s verse we rarely encounter such explicit polarity between men and women, and between withdrawal and communication, what they have in common with Meehan, however, is the portrayal of speakers and personae through the foregrounding of their basic elusiveness. The insistence on the impossibility of knowing the self, paired with applications of secrecy and mocking silence, is to be understood as an enlivening, rather than a stifling element. The poems offer critical accounts of the male personae’s “epistemological scepticism” which Stanley Cavell identifies as “essentially a masculine affair.”79 In his analysis of gnoseological mechanisms in Shakespeare’s plays, Cavell notes that in Othello as well as in The Winter’s Tale, the man’s refusal of knowledge of his other, his insistence, in other words, on seeing or hearing what he is expected to see or hear, is represented in an image of stone. Othello’s extreme picture of the dead Desdemona is that of a piece of cold marble: “Whiter skin of hers than marble, / And smooth as monumental alabaster.”80 It is Othello’s jealousy of the woman’s autonomy in her “unknowability” that drives his impulse to deprive her of life.

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This construing of woman’s independence as entailing corruption and perversion chimes with the traditional reading of the Pygmalion myth, particularly emphasised during the Renaissance, as containing a moral threat. In keeping with the self-promoted image of Elizabeth I as “marble stone,” epitomising her long-lasting reign and virginity, the Ovidian narrative was either rejected as prompting lewdness and perversion (in its reference to the Propeptides as well as in the foregrounding of Pygmalion’s necromantic idolatry) or praised as a symbol of the rejection (on the part of Pygmalion) of base human passion in favour of the worship of a mute ideal. This pairing of the steady virtue of Galatea with cold silence is consequential. In The Winter’s Tale, which contains elements of Ovid’s Pygmalion, Hermione is rendered practically voiceless: no one will listen to her pleadings of innocence. Thus, she becomes an emblem of silenced truth which, in its turn, signifies death. Deprived of speech, Hermione goes into hiding, pretending to have died and adopting the appearance of cold stone. Some three acts and sixteen years later, looking back on his own jealousy, Leontes imagines the stone to chide him “For being more stone than it” (V.iii, 36–8),81 before he finally realises that “she’s warm!” (V.iii, 109) and allows—and hears—her speak. It is this idea of melting and softening—the moment of transformation from a lifeless icon (or copy) which connotes coldness and muteness into an independent, individual life with a voice—that has informed the above references to the Pygmalion myth. Moreover, the likening of the ivory image to snow and its connotations of speechless attractiveness remind us of the ideal of female purity and beauty as recorded in the Irishlanguage literature, and to the prevalent figurations within this of Ireland as a white-limbed, white-browed maiden. Here, the Pygmalion image is of relevance for the revisionist treatments of Irish myth and oral tradition, not least in terms of the latter’s silencing in written text and in translation. The issue of poetic translation will feature as one of the main themes in Chapter 7. The following chapters will examine the creative possibilities of secret writing and reticence, in close readings of poems that share a tendency not only to fragmented narrative and opaque expression, but also to a tone of political non-engagement. I will try to illustrate how this apparent though variously expressed detachment—foreshadowed in the privatisations of the iconic images of the female muse to which I have referred here—also serves to comment on the canon.

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Notes 1. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43. 2. Plato, Laws IV, 719c3–8, trans. Trevor J. Saunders, in Plato, Complete Works. Irish literary tradition contains various concepts of the poet as endowed with an “insight,” including the classical category of the blind poet or seer (starting in the Irish context with the myth of Ossian the Bard) and monastic scribes composing in darkness. Laura O’Connor refers to the Old Irish filí as archaic poets with the connotations of a seer. See Laura O’Connor, Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 15. 3. Plato, Phaedrus, 244c, trans. Harold N. Fowler, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925). 4. For an account of the importance attached to the mysterious and supernatural in the creative process of the Celtic filí (poets) see Daithí Ó hÓgáin, An File: Staidéar ar Osnádúrthacht na Filílochta sa Traidisiún Gaelach (Dublin: An tSoláthair, 1982). 5. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 448. 6. Graves, 446, 447. 7. Graves, 446–7. 8. See Graves, 448–57, 490–1. 9. Graves, 447. 10. Ní Dhomhnaill, “An Bhanfhile Sa Traidisiun: The Woman Poet in the Irish Tradition,” Selected Essays (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 54. 11. Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 87. 12. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin qtd. in Carmen Zamorano Llena, “Overcoming Double Exile: (Re)construction of ‘Inner-Scapes’ in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry,” Nordic Irish Studies 3.1 (2004): 158. 13. See Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry After Joyce (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 285. 14. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Passing Over in Silence,” Selected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008), 71. 15. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Silence,” 71. 16. Ní Chuilleanáin, “St Margaret of Cortona,” Selected Poems, 72. 17. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Cortona,” 72. 18. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Cortona,” 72. 19. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Pygmalion’s Image,” Selected Poems, 49. 20. Patrick Kavanagh, “Pygmalion,” Collected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 28.

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21. Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27 (1983): 47. 22. See Plato, Sophist, 235c–236c. 23. Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 9. 24. The delirium of the mythological sculptor’s love experience has been re-enacted by artists of all times. In her discussion of the Pygmalion myth, aimed at disclosing the gendered power relations at work in erotic and elegiac discourse, A. R. Sharrock recapitulates: “Love poetry creates its own object, calls her Woman, and falls in love with her—or rather, with the artist’s own act of creating her.” Alison R. Sharrock, “Womanufacture,” The Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991): 49. 25. Deleuze, “Simulacrum,” 47. 26. Deleuze, “Simulacrum,” 53. 27. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 15. 28. See, for instance, Sharrock, 36–9; and Martin A. Danahay, “Mirrors of Masculine Desire: Narcissus and Pygmalion in Victorian Representation,” Victorian Poetry 32.1 (Spring 1994): 35–53. 29. Peggy O’Brien, “Editor’s Preface,” in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967 –2000 (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1999), xxvi. 30. See Llena, “Double Exile,” 159. 31. Paula Meehan in Ciaran Carty, “Paula Meehan: The Poet at 60,” The Irish Times (28 February 2015), accessed 20 November 2017, https://www. irishtimes.com/culture/paula-meehan-the-poet-at-60-1.2115401. 32. Meehan, “Zugzwang,” The Man Who Was Marked by Winter (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1991), 12–14. 33. Meehan, “Zugzwang,” 15. 34. See Seamus Heaney, “Digging,” Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966 and 1991), 1. 35. Meehan in Eileen O’Halloran and Kelli Maloy, “An Interview with Paula Meehan,” Contemporary Literature 43.1 (Spring 2002): 27. 36. Meehan, “Not Your Muse,” Pillow Talk (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1994), 24. 37. Meehan, “Muse,” 24. 38. See Sharrock, 36–49. 39. Paula Meehan, “Liminal,” in “Six Sycamores,” Painting Rain (WinstonSalem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2009), 33. 40. Meehan, “Snowdrops,” Painting Rain, 37. 41. Meehan, “Them Ducks Died for Ireland,” in “Six Sycamores,” Painting Rain, 32. 42. Meehan, “In Memory, Joanne Breen,” Painting Rain, 35. 43. Meehan, “Peter, Uncle,” Painting Rain, 41, 44.

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44. Meehan, “Molly Malone,” Dharmakaya (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), 41. 45. Wills, 191. 46. Claudette Sartiliot, Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 76. Qtd. in Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 85. 47. Alcobia-Murphy, 85. 48. Moynagh Sullivan, “The In-formal Poetics of Medbh McGuckian,” Nordic Irish Studies 3.1 (2004): 90. 49. Medbh McGuckian, “The Villain,” Venus and the Rain (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2001), 22. 50. McGuckian, “Villain,” 22. 51. McGuckian, “Villain,” 22. 52. McGuckian in Kimberly S. Bohman, “Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian, Belfast, 5 September, 1994,” The Irish Review 16 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 104 53. McGuckian in Bohman, 104. 54. McGuckian in Kathleen McCracken, “An Attitude of Compassion,” Irish Literary Supplement (Autumn, 1990), 20. Qtd. in Alcobia-Murphy, 43. 55. McGuckian has claimed that she “write[s] to please a male audience and also to make them aware how a woman thinks.” Michael Allen, “The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian,” in Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Andrews (London: Macmillan, 1992), 304. Elsewhere she admitted to feeling very gender-conscious when writing: “I always feel very aware that I’m doing something that is traditionally a male preserve and that I’m trespassing, and that when I’m trespassing most successfully, it’s because I’m turning into a man.” McGuckian qtd. in Ailbhe Smyth, “Introduction,” in Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Women’s Writing, ed. Ailbhe Smyth (Dublin: Attic Press, 1989), 12. Justin Quinn refers to McGuckian’s poetry as consisting of a “continual conversation with a silent man in the midst of metamorphosing landscapes and house interiors.” Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 167. 56. The prevailing element of self-irony is strengthened by the fact that McGuckian’s dependence on the living muse has its counterpart in her direct inspiration not least in letters and diaries by other female writers, such as Marina Tsvetaeva or Tatyana Tolstoy. See Alcobia-Murphy, 57–60, 231–6, 72–8. 57. See Steven Blyth, “Gift Rapt,” PN Review 106 (November/December 1995): 59. Qtd. in Alcobia-Murphy, 6.

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58. McGuckian in Catherine Byron, “A House of One’s Own: Three Contemporary Irish Women Poets,” Women’s Review 19 (May 1987): 33. Qtd. in Alcobia-Murphy, 45. 59. Wills, 61. 60. Falci, Continuity and Change, 84. 61. Biddy Jenkinson, “Máire Mhac an tSaoi: The Clerisy and the Folk (P.I.R. 24): A Reply,” Poetry Ireland Review 25 (Spring 1989): 80. 62. Jenkinson, “Ait liom . . .’ agus rl.,” Amhras Neimhe (Baile Átha Cliath: Coiscéim, 1997), 76. My translation. 63. See Jenkinson, “Baisteadh Gintlí,” Rogha Dánta (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 1. Verbatim, “baisteadh gintlí” means “pagan baptism.” 64. See Piaras Feiritéar, “Léig dhíot th’airm,” in An Duanaire; 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed, eds. Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, trans. Thomas Kinsella (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1990), 96–100. (“Léig dhíot th’airm, a mhacaoimh mná, / muna fearr feat cách do lot . . . Folaigh orthu do rosc liath, / má théid ar mharbhais riamh leat; / ar ghrádh th’anma dún do bhéal, / ná faiceadh siad do dhéad geal.” [Lay your weapons down, young lady, / Do you want to ruin us all? . . . Conceal those eyes of grey / if you’d go free for all you’ve killed. / Close your lips, to save your soul; let your bright teeth not be seen.]) 65. Seán Ó Ríordáin, “Banfhile” (She-Poet), trans. Mary O’Donoghue, Selected Poems / Rogha Dánta, ed. Frank Sewell (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 200–3. Apart from a barb aimed at Ó Ríordáin for his apparently misogynous attitude, Jenkinson’s title pays tribute to a cornerstone article of feminist criticism in Irish by Máire Ní Annracháin. See Ní Annracháin, “Ait Liom Bean a Bheith ina File,” in Léachtaí Cholm Cille XII: Na Mná sa Litríocht, ed. Pádraig Ó Fiannachta (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1982). The phrase is also taken up in the title of Máirín Nic Eoin’s 1998 monograph on gender politics in the Gaelic tradition. See Nic Eoin, B’Ait Leo Bean: Gnéithe den Idé-Eolaíocht Inscne i dTraidisiún Liteartha na Gaeilge (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1998). 66. Sullivan, “Poetics,” 75, 76. 67. Jenkinson insists that the critics who take Ó Ríordáin’s phrase as a serious and definitive statement of his stance have lost their sense of humour. “‘Ait liom . . .’ agus rl.” is an ironic reaction to what she sees first of all as a poetic challenge. It is necessary to “add sex to sense and sensibility,” she explains, for “a poem isn’t a poem unless it has compressed many layers of meaning and a few paradoxes.” E-mail message to the author, 24 April 2012. I am indebted to Mícheál Mac Craith for having mediated the communication.

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68. Jenkinson in Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú, “Ceilpeadóir, Rí, Nóinín: Biddy Jenkinson ag Caint le Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú,” Oghma 8 (1996): 63. My translation. 69. Jenkinson in Pól Ó Muirí, “Fuinneamh cúthail na filíochta faoi ainm pinn,” The Irish Times (20 August 1997): 18. Qtd. in Nic Íomhair. My translation. 70. Jenkinson in Gabriel Rosenstock, “Comhar-Rá . . . le Biddy Jenkinson,” Comhar (May 1985): 34. Qtd. in de Máire de Búrca, “Biddy Jenkinson,” in Filíocht Chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge, ed. Rióna Ní Fhrighil (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2010), 168. My translation. 71. Jenkinson in Ní Fhoghlú, 65. My translation. 72. Biddy Jenkinson in Irish Women Writers: An A-To-Z -Guide, ed. Alexander G. Gonzalez (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 155. 73. Yeats’s letter to Olivia Shakespeare from 25 May 1926. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press [InteLex Electronic Edition], 2002), 4871. Qtd. in Joseph M. Hassett, Yeats and the Muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 157. 74. Jenkinson in Irish Women Writers, 155. 75. Claire Connolly, “Introduction: Ireland in Theory,” in Theorizing Ireland, ed. Claire Connolly (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 12. 76. See Mhac an tSaoi, “The Clerisy and the Folk: A Review of Present-Day Verse in the Irish Language on the Occasion of the Publication of Innti 11,” Poetry Ireland Review 24 (Winter 1988): 33–5. 77. Jenkinson, “Reply,” 80. “Dámh” means “Bardic company or faculty,” according to the Ó Dónaill dictionary. 78. Jenkinson, “Reply,” 80. 79. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 125. 80. Cavell, 125–6. 81. See Barbara Roche Rico, “From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare’s Recasting of the Pygmalion Image,” Huntington Library Quarterly 43.3 (Summer 1985): 285–95.

Works Cited Alcobia-Murphy, Shane. Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006. Allen, Michael. “The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian.” In Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Elmer Andrews, 286–309. London: Macmillan, 1992.

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Blyth, Steven. “Gift Rapt.” PN Review 106 22.2 (November/December 1995): 59. Bohman, Kimberly S. “Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian, Belfast, 5 September, 1994.” The Irish Review 16 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 95–108. Byron, Catherine. “A House of One’s Own: Three Contemporary Irish Women Poets.” Women’s Review 19 (May 1987): 32–3. Carty, Ciaran. “Paula Meehan: The Poet at 60.” The Irish Times (28 February 2015). Accessed 20 November 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ paula-meehan-the-poet-at-60-1.2115401. Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Connolly, Claire, ed. Theorizing Ireland. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Danahay, Martin A. “Mirrors of Masculine Desire: Narcissus and Pygmalion in Victorian Representation.” Victorian Poetry 32.1 (Spring 1994): 35–53. de Búrca, Máire. “Biddy Jenkinson.” In Filíocht Chomhaimseartha na Gaeilge, edited by Rióna Ní Fhrighil, 167–80. Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. ———. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” Translated by Rosalind Krauss. October 27 (1983): 45–56. Falci, Eric. Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Gonzalez, Alexander G., ed. Irish Women Writers: An A-To-Z-Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Hassett, Joseph M. Yeats and the Muses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Heaney, Seamus. Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber and Faber, 1966 and 1991. Jenkinson, Biddy. Amhras Neimhe. Baile Átha Cliath: Coiscéim, 1997. ———. “Máire Mhac an tSaoi: The Clerisy and the Folk (P.I.R. 24): A Reply.” Poetry Ireland Review 25 (Spring 1989): 80. ———. Rogha Dánta. Cork: Cork University Press, 2000. Johnston, Dillon. Irish Poetry After Joyce. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Kavanagh, Patrick. Collected Poems. London: Penguin Books, 2005. McCracken, Kathleen. “An Attitude of Compassion: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian.” Irish Literary Supplement (Autumn 1990): 20–21. Meehan, Paula. Dharmakaya. Manchester: Carcanet, 2000. ———. The Man Who Was Marked by Winter. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1991. ———. Painting Rain. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2009.

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———. Pillow Talk. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1994. Mhac an tSaoi, Máire. “The Clerisy and the Folk: A Review of Present-Day Verse in the Irish Language on the Occasion of the Publication of Innti 11.” Poetry Ireland Review 24 (Winter 1988): 33–5. Ní Annracháin, Máire. “Ait Liom Bean a Bheith ina File.” In Léachtaí Cholm Cille XII: Na Mná sa Litríocht, edited by Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, 145–81. Maynooth: An Sagart, 1982. Nic Eoin, Máirín. B’Ait Leo Bean: Gnéithe den Idé-Eolaíocht Inscne i dTraidisiún Liteartha na Gaeilge. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1998. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan. Selected Poems. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. Selected Essays. Dublin: New Island, 2005. Ní Fhoghlú, Siobhán. “Ceilpeadóir, Rí, Nóinín: Biddy Jenkinson ag Caint le Siobhán Ní Fhoghlú.” Oghma 8 (1996): 62–9. O’Brien, Peggy, ed. The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967–2000. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1999. O’Halloran, Eileen and Kelli Maloy. “An Interview with Paula Meehan.” Contemporary Literature 43.1 (Spring 2002): 1–27. Ó hÓgáin, Daithí. An File: Staidéar ar Osnádúrthacht na Filílochta sa Traidisiún Gaelach. Dublin: An tSoláthair, 1982. Ó Muirí, Pól. “Fuinneamh cúthail na filíochta faoi ainm pinn.” The Irish Times (20 August 1997): 18. Ó Ríordáin, Seán. Selected Poems / Rogha Dánta. Edited by Frank Sewell. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Ó Tuama, Seán and Thomas Kinsella, eds. An Duanaire; 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed. Translated by Thomas Kinsella. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1990. Quinn, Justin. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Roche Rico, Barbara. “From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare’s Recasting of the Pygmalion Image.” Huntington Library Quarterly 43.3 (Summer 1985): 285–95. Rosenstock, Gabriel. “Comhar-Rá . . . le Biddy Jenkinson.” Comhar (May 1985): 34. Sartiliot, Claudette. Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Sharrock, Alison R. “Womanufacture.” Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991): 36–49. Smyth, Ailbhe. “Paying Our Disrespects to the Bloody States We’re In: Women, Violence, Culture, and the State.” In Stirring It: Challenges for Feminism, edited by G. Griffin, M. Hester, S. Rai and S. Roseneil, 13–39. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994.

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———. Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Women’s Writing. Dublin: Attic Press, 1989. Stoichita, Victor I. The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Sullivan, Moynagh. “The In-formal Poetics of Medbh McGuckian.” Nordic Irish Studies 3.1 (2004): 75–92. Wills, Clair. Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Edited by John Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press [InteLex Electronic Edition], 2002. Zamorano Llena, Carmen. “Overcoming Double Exile: (Re)construction of ‘Inner-Scapes’ in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry.” Nordic Irish Studies 3.1 (2004): 157–67.

CHAPTER 5

Poetry of Silence: Rhetorical Concealment and the Possibility of Speech

Even as they complain about the enforced historical and literary silence of women, poets with feminist outlooks often base their poetic expression on various techniques for naming the unspeakable. From the Irish oral tradition through the bourgeois image of the ideal feminine, woman’s speech and loquacity is mostly rejected as signifying the lack of male control. Yet, from an early stage, various applications of rhetorical silence were used by women so that the inexpressible could be implied or enacted. Arguing for the fundamental role of silence in the writings of nineteenth-century English sonneteers, Amy Christine Billone suggests that the female poets who embraced the compressed sonnet form at a time when women could only with difficulty enter the lyric tradition were drawn to its structural affinity for reticence . . . the sonnet, better than any other form, allowed nineteenth-century women poets to investigate and promote gendered interpretations of silence.1

Silence in poetry is not to be understood simply as voicelessness (although it may refer to this); the lyric, with its compact forms, formal restrictions and emphasis placed at the end of the line, not only calls for considerable verbal reticence and economy but is favourable to metaphorical expressions of silence. Yet silence, even if it is integral to the poem’s structure and subject matter, can never be its sole dimension or the poet’s objective intention. © The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_5

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As Susan Sontag points out, “‘[s]ilence’ never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand on its presence . . . any given silence takes its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.” What we can find in art, according to Sontag, are not instances of “raw or achieved silence” but, instead, “various moves in the direction of an ever-receding horizon of silence.”2 It is this emphasis on silence as simultaneously indicating direction and boundlessness that informs the discussion of poetic silence in the following pages. In an extreme understanding, silence with its unrestricted horizons can be seen as a token of the endless possibilities of language. In Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault writes: There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.3

Starting with an examination of the referential breadth of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s images of bucolic stillness and continuing with readings of poems by Caitríona O’Reilly and Vona Groarke in which musings on the elusiveness of their muse coincide with commentary on the necessary scantiness of language and communication, this chapter deals with the multiplicity of poetic silence. The works I discuss are subversive not so much in inverting or modifying the gendered polarity of the conventional address to a muse but in their heightened ironisation of the very trope and in further emphasising the fleetingness of inspiration. Unlike the unyielding reticence of Ní Chuilleanáin or Meehan whose works were examined in Chapter 4, the conversational and thematic silence of the post-feminist generation is to be viewed as a mark not of revisionist scepticism but of a new accentuation of poetry’s aesthetic necessities. In its focus on language rather than woman or woman’s language, these authors’ poetic expression often consists in displaying its own limitations and much can be read between the lines. It thus testifies to the way in which lyric poetry naturally encompasses the energies of opaqueness and transparency inherent in language.

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Sounding Gestures: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Caitríona O’Reilly We have ascertained that Ní Dhomhnaill combined her objective of making women (real and allegorical) and the oral aspects of the Irish language heard in her poems. Paradoxically, images of silence are often called up not only to alert the reader to the critical situation of women or the language but also to allude to the subversive and expressional potential of reticence. Consider Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Toircheas 1” in Pharaoh’s Daughter (1990). It opens with the speaker asking: “An féidir scríobh ar chiúineas?”4 (Is it possible to write about silence?). McGuckian, who provided an English version of the poem for the bilingual edition, renders the title as “Ark of the Covenant,”5 with reference to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, thus adding a religious undertone that is not part of the original.6 However, the literal meaning of “toircheas” is “pregnancy” or “offspring” and the imagery Ní Dhomhnaill proposes by way of an answer to her own question is that of a benign growth: Ins an chré phatfhuar, thais, tá síol gan chorraí. . . . San eadarlinn éalaíonn luid deireanach an tsolais ó bhun go barr binne faoi mar a éalaíonn go minic an mhéanfach ó dhuine go duine. In the coldish, damp soil lies a motionless seed. . . . In the halt the last of light eludes from bottom to the top of the hill just like yawn is often sent from one to another.7

The two stanzas that immediately follow the initial question consist of images of various forms of roundness that connote silence, including clouds hanging motionlessly in the sky (“a seolta arda, bolgacha, gan chorraí”) and bubbles revealing predatory fish that lie lurking in the depths of the lake (“. . . i bhfianaise go bhfuil éisc / go scuaideáil thíos sa doimhneas”).8 But the third and final strophe (from which I quote above) suggests the possibility of speech and a discovery or a new life, thus recalling the final image in Ní Chuilleanáin’s “Pygmalion’s Image.” It is only a promise, but, in connection with the infectious yawn, the dormant seed signals birth and reverberation. The overall effect of silence neither simply follows from the peaceful natural images, nor does it merely imply the awed hush that surrounds

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pregnancy. The prevailing stillness is coupled with the elusive possibility of speech given in the representation of pregnant and enabling hollows, encapsulated in the final stanza in the image of a motionless seed lying in the soil. Through the latter, I claim, the lyric relates to some of the dominant themes in Ní Dhomhnaill’s work: her idea of the Irish landscape and collective memory as embedded with folkloric material and the awareness of the untranslatability of the oral tradition into writing. The question posed at the beginning of the poem can be said to refer to the essential paradox inherent in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, which lies in her insistence—through the very act of writing—on the essential orality of her medium. The halt of the interim (“eadarlinn”) mentioned towards the close of the poem can be read, of course, as the pause before a breath is taken and before a word is uttered. But it also lends itself to another interpretation in which the hush stands for the inevitable fissure underlying the transformation of Irish as the language of the oral legend into modernity, and the transcription of oral utterances into written texts. It is this “process of linguistic disturbance,”9 as Eric Falci puts it, that Ní Dhomhnaill’s work at once epitomises and heals. Commenting on other poems in her oeuvre where silence gains the upper hand over loquacity, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith remarks that while language and speech are generally perceived as “a crucial defining characteristic of humanity,” for Ní Dhomhnaill, “the loss of this faculty is tragic and, at the same time, a source of morbid fascination.”10 In “Toircheas 1,” Ní Dhomhnaill enacts the popular troping of the Irish language and its literary tradition as a resuscitated corpse: a breath is taken and the yawn, handed over from mouth to mouth, sums up the very principle of the oral tradition (béaloideas ). The seed, lying in the coldish, damp soil, symbolises the close adherence of the oral literature to the landscape as evidenced in the toponymic tradition of dinnseanchas . On the one hand, this perspective relates the poem back to “Ag Tiomáint Siar” and my discussion in Chapter 3 of Ní Dhomhnaill’s revisionist claim that dinnseanchas has primarily patriarchal connotations. On the other hand, it lends new significance to the aforementioned connection with Ní Chuilleanáin’s “Pygmalion’s Image” and the proposed interpretation of the green leaf of language in the poem as representing the enlivening potential (either topical or historic) of the Irish language. Viewed in the dual context of the Ovidian narrative and the traditional local lore, Ní Dhomhnaill’s metaphorical figurations of rounded silence in the poem indirectly subvert the stereotypical necromantic evocation

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of the language that informs, among others, her concept of a talkative cadaver. In one sense, this foregrounding of silence demonstrates that it is indeed possible to write about the unspeakable. In another sense, it evidences, through the imagery of pregnant hollows and rounded shapes, the potential of silence for writing itself. Ultimately, it bypasses the notion of writing (especially of writing in Irish) as a Socratic memory-killer or the Derridean “dead letter.”11 ∗ ∗ ∗ In the poetry of Caitríona O’Reilly, silence with its epistemic and creative potential often presents itself as the only plausible way to record what is both astonishing and appalling. O’Reilly was born in 1973 in Dublin and studied at Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge. A freelance writer and critic, she has lectured in creative writing in the USA (Wake Forest University) and the UK (Sheffield Hallam University and King’s College London) and has been the editor of Poetry Ireland Review and a contributing editor of Metre, among others. She writes free verse as well as rhythmically adroit and aurally seductive lyrics. Her poems combine bold explorations of the mind with caustic commentary on global themes and testify to the necessity and impossibility of accounting for oneself and for the world in defiance of the inadequacy of words. From an early stage, silence has been one of the defining themes and concepts in O’Reilly’s work. A true Pygmalionesque persona figures in O’Reilly’s “II Tall Figure in Studio,” the second of her four meditations on “Statuary” in her first collection, The Nowhere Birds from 2001. The sequence of four close-ups, in which diverse sculptures are observed as they make “marble remarks” (“III Bargello”), “ring the room” (“I The Crouching Boy”), or—in the second poem—contemplate out loud their own conception, is ironically prefixed with a quote from Beckett’s Molloy: “To restore silence is the role of objects.”12 Embedded in this context, Beckett’s cryptic dictum appears to be an allusion to Socrates’s speech to Phaedrus on the limits of mimetic representation in art: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of

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written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.13

O’Reilly’s ekphrastic sequence, nevertheless, invites us to consider a different aspect of the old belief that painting (representing visual arts) and poetry are alike, as it is famously formulated in the Horatian analogy. Pointing to the randomness of the effects of art, Horace argues that ut pictura poesis: since the reception of a painting (similar to that of a poem) will necessarily vary from viewer to viewer and from moment to moment, it is equally capable of impressing and disconcerting the beholder. Accordingly, no work of art or poem can be considered “complete” or definite in terms of their momentary or planned effect; irrespective of their maker’s intent and the consumer’s expectations, both paintings and poems appear to lead a life of their own. In line with this, O’Reilly’s poems propose a response to Plato’s scepticism about painting and poetry as possible sources of knowledge and their dismissal as mere simulacra (life-like illusions): it is futile to ask poems or statues questions and expect them to explain themselves since they do not require any “understanding.” Moreover, in her insistence on silence as part of the effect and purpose of art, O’Reilly seems to offer us an antidote to this agnosticism and to suggest that it is only as we acknowledge the elemental muteness and volatility of art that we may be able to hear what a poem or a statue want to tell us. Although there is no definitive way to approach an art object, silence remains the preferred mode, even a prerequisite. As Susan Sontag asserts, “silence is a metaphor for a cleansed, non-interfering vision.” While perceiving and contemplating art requires self-denial on the part of the viewer/reader, “an object worthy of contemplation,” Sontag supplies, “is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject.”14 This, in turn, throws a different light on Beckett’s maxim about objects restoring silence. Like his prose, O’Reilly’s poetry points to the sly rebelliousness of the material world and subverts the subject-object opposition. The governing paradox of “Statuary” lies in it being a sequence of narratives prompted by the observation of—and observations made by—objects carved into cold stone. The poems, indeed, embody the pregnancy, the ringing of the silence that is launched by the final stroke of the chisel. In “II Tall Figure in Studio,” a statue speculates about the intentions of the erratic sculptor: “I think I am as he wanted me—/

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the one upright amidst this studied dereliction.”15 The suggested aporia between the reality and his intended design, her conventional nudity (“this spoon-shaped pelvis, a suggestion of breasts”) and the insinuated lust of her creator, underlines the defiance of her tone, despite its apparent subservience: I stand rigid, obsessed by my wire core ..... . . . like a plucked string, remembering his fingers as his final silence became proper sound.16

Like the mute “wail of strings” at the close of Ní Chuilleanáin’s “A Voice” (discussed in Chapter 3), the concluding acoustic image in O’Reilly’s poem inverts the polarity of silence and sound. Culminating in the closing line, which defines the silence following the noisy act of the sculpture’s making not as the ending but as the true beginning of sound, the poem focuses on the art object as an eloquent embodiment of silence, of which the poem itself is ultimate proof. Once again, we encounter a female persona speculating about a man’s perception, and conception, of herself. While it might seem that silence—due to the persona’s stone substance— would be her only option, she wants to show that, for her, real life, and speech, begins at the very point when his control inevitably stops. Yet the gender of the object-persona is not the key issue here; it is, rather, the fact that silence does not necessarily entail muteness or notional vacuum. The function of art and poetry, as O’Reilly appears to be telling us with Bishop, is to restore in us as we experience it “the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”17 It is in the absence of the conscious self that poetry (and statuary) most willingly speaks to us. Nevertheless, just as a halt to external noise does not mark the point from which silence prevails but allows other, more persistent sounds to be heard, solitude rarely amounts to the abandonment of the self. As John Cage shows us, it is impossible to experience or create true silence for “[s]omething is always happening that makes a sound,” even if it were the coursing of blood in one’s own head or the sound of someone breathing.18 The fundamental role of silence is to reveal that there is no such thing as silence. Similarly, it is in moments of consciously savoured seclusion that the self is most insistently present. In “There is a solitude

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of space,” Emily Dickinson refers to this dual sense of self as “That polar privacy” and puts it above the solitude of “space,” “sea” or “death” that are all attributed to the perfunctory workings of the communal being. A superior state of seclusion is that in which—in the absence of others—the self is revealed: “A soul admitted to itself—/ Finite infinity.”19 Solitude and the concentration within is where poetic imagination in its boundlessness begins and Dickinson repeatedly emphasises this as a locale for the exploration of the self. Dickinson’s poetic meditations on space and consciousness have, indeed, special relevance for O’Reilly’s writing. In her PhD thesis, defended at Trinity College Dublin in 2002, she pointed out the importance of spatial metaphors in the poetry of Dickinson, H.D. and Sylvia Plath.20 Elsewhere, she argues that space, in fact, is “a metaphor for their poetics, their sense of poetic power.” On Dickinson, she expands: . . . there is a vastness, despite the tininess of the lyric space—somehow an imagination of the whole North American continent is lensed into her sequestered New England brain. I argue that this is an expression of her consciousness of her own immense poetic gift, even if it could never be stated explicitly.21

In the same interview, she names Dickinson and other American “giants,” Moore, Stevens and Lowell, as her strongest influences.22 Analysing the dynamic dimension of solitary contemplation, Gaston Bachelard introduces the concept of “intimate immensity.” As if with a nod in the direction of Dickinson, he argues that even “[f]ar from the immensities of sea and land . . . we can recapture, by means of meditation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur.”23 Since the inclination of reverie is to reflect on grandeur, its natural radius is “the space of elsewhere.” Yet, while daydreaming is situated in the mobile space of elsewhere, its (intimate) vastness pertains to the privacy of the self: “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense.”24 In a different poem, Dickinson expresses the same notion, summing it up in just two lines: “All things swept sole away / This—is immensity—[.]”25 In its indifference to the pedestrian everydayness, daydreaming connotes poetry and potentiality (“I dwell in Possibility—/ A fairer House than Prose—”26 ). However,

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although requisite for the imagining mind, this freeing detachment from one’s surroundings and volition is not only difficult to achieve but potentially threatening. If the latter is part of the reason why daydreaming consciousness often serves as a gnosiological template in poems, it also accounts for the prevalence of dreams in poetic narrative. For what could be further removed from the public mind and its logic than the realm of dreams and what could be at the same time more potentially haunting than the self being detached from one’s consciousness and looming up from the depths of dreams? One of the many poems in which O’Reilly searches the dark recesses of the mind in order to apprehend the workings of the imagination is “Persona” from her second collection, The Sea Cabinet (2006). Dreams—“These unmoored pieces of the night”—are imaged both as rooms and as an unstoppable flow “clotted with débris.”27 The poem starts as an attempt to sort out the clatter of the eerie fragments of dreams that have become loose and wash up on the shore of daylight: “What can I do with these dark adhesions?”28 As is frequently the case, O’Reilly’s choice of form is directly related to her subject matter. Here, the paradoxical combination of phantasmagoric imagery with the dry diction of metaphysical reasoning is enhanced by the repetition of fanciful lines and metaphors in a series of quatrains interwoven according to a strict metrical pattern known as pantoum. Thus, each verse in the poem is reiterated, almost word by word, until the impression of trance-like circularity is confirmed in the last line which is a repetition of the opening line. The final insistence that “Still the mud-brown river is clotted with débris” confirms the conceptual ambiguity of the equivocal punchline that comes up in the last two stanzas, “Nothing is different from nothing.” Printed in italics in order to mark it off from the rest of the repeating verses, it is intended to suggest that the poem either concurs or argues with the Heraclitian concept of panta rhei, depending on whether “nothing” is understood as a positive or a negative concept. In the idea that everything but the macabre features of the unmoving self changes, O’Reilly’s haunted room of the mind is akin to another of Dickinson’s lyrics. This is “One need not be a Chamber” in which the persona’s encounter with the “superior spectre” of the self occasions a similarly paradoxical mixture of fantasising and rationalising about nightmarish material.29 In Dickinson, however, the speaker’s idée fixe resurfaces even more urgently.

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One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— One need not be a House— ..... Ourself behind ourself, concealed— Should startle most—[.]30

In comparison with the dark alcoves of the brain, the external dangers of killers and nocturnal ghosts are far less frightening. Similar to Dickinson’s startling spectre of the self in whose light all material perils go pale, O’Reilly’s persona comes to realise that the “chrysanthemum dragons” scintillating in the cold light of the day are by no means as fearsome as the self mired in the cloudy flux of the dream. Shrinking away from the morbid “slyness of [her] puppet-smile,” she undergoes a frightening identification with her clichéd, nightmarish masque—“See me there with the pained carved face.”31 Significantly, the other is only a marginal presence: while Dickinson has it metamorphosing from stanza to stanza until it reaches the minor horror of the assassin, O’Reilly’s other is inscribed in the unexcited anticipation of the lost lover’s return. In both poems, the narrative is controlled by the enigmatic self, an embodiment of the Freudian notion of the uncanny as a combination of the familiar and the sinister. Although it appears to be everywhere, the self is always near and stationary. Indeed, as Bachelard asserts, “immensity is the movement of motionless man.”32 If Dickinson’s poem is about the suspected selves squatting behind the façade of consciousness, it is in the unspecified space of the “interior” of one’s brain that immensity resides. In a similar manner, O’Reilly emphasises the impossibility of coherent speech or even a meaningful gesture and illustrates the inevitable focus on, and also the necessary detachment from, one’s self. Not unlike in “Statuary”—“I stand rigid, obsessed by my wire core”—it is the ultimate stillness of “Persona” that makes the lyric an expressive commentary on the process of inspired poetic utterance and a powerful enactment of the “proper sound”33 of the self and of poetry. In her thesis, O’Reilly introduces her own analysis of Dickinson’s “One need not be a Chamber” by referring to the poet’s letter dated 1876 which, according to O’Reilly, contains “[t]he most striking and emphatic

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structural metaphor” on Dickinson’s part: “Nature is a Haunted House— but Art—a House that tries to be Haunted.”34 The first part of the analogy speaks, with typical equivocalness, of two things at once: on the one hand, it can be taken to anticipate Bachelard’s foregrounding of open-air spaces as the best kinds of “rooms” conducive to creative concentration and a sense of harmony with the self; on the other hand, it refers to human nature as inherently divided and haunted. But hauntedness, as the latter half of the comparison clarifies, is fundamentally a good thing and, in art, it is tantamount to imagination. This same conceptualisation of inner (psychological and architectural) spaces as topographies of fear and paranoia and also as labyrinths that lead to freedom and a flight of imagination informs many of O’Reilly’s poems.35

Thinning the Muse: Caitríona O’Reilly and Vona Groarke Self-chosen stationariness and isolation marks many other poems in The Sea Cabinet in which O’Reilly appears to turn directly from the self “To the Muse.” The poem that announces such an address in its title, however, is as far from a standard muse invocation as can be. If anything, it is an ironic inventory of various calamitous outings together, erotic disasters and unsuccessful, “one-way conversations.”36 Again, the other—the “lost loved one”37 approached here as the muse—is hardly mentioned at all: the lines evolve around the void that marks the couple’s time together and around the self-obsessed loneliness of the speaker. The listener is out of reach, presumably not even meant to hear what is being said. It is from the self that the poem originates and the self is also the addressee. All in all, “To the Muse” reads as a refutation of the whole concept of personified inspiration. Any idea of romantic amorous experience is checked with hints of the bleak reality of shabby hotel rooms and memories of all kinds of failed interactions with the persona’s lover/muse. This ironic stance to the trope comes across also in other poems in the collection which pay close attention to the muse figure, although they do not refer to it in their titles. In “Heliotrope”—named after the wild flowering plant that derives its name from its alleged tendency to turn its flower head towards the sun—the opening lines evoke the stony but greening, and finally leaf-sprouting image of Ní Chuilleanáin:

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Past beautiful, stuck in the dust ..... so anthropomorphised and mute . . .38

Identifying with the flower, the poet re-enacts the muse scenario, placing herself in the role of an “eternal follower” and a silent admirer. The next three lines, however, reverse the classic distribution of roles as “the circle’s story” is said to have fixated the subject/object at the centre of the sun’s orbit.39 The poem, of course, is based on an old Greek myth, as told by Ovid in Book IV of the Metamorphoses, about the water nymph Clytie who loved Helios so much that she turned into a plant—the turnsole or heliotrope—after being rejected. Here, however, the sun’s disc, which was supposed to be the focal point of the persona’s “padlocked gaze,” is shown to make her the pivot of its daily course.40 As we have seen with O’Reilly’s “Persona” and “Statuary,” it is in its motionlessness that the persona is able to address the poem’s true subject and comment on the motives for its own creation. In “Heliotrope,” the purpose is to parody the ceremonious tone of an ode and to ridicule amorous infatuation as such, including the expectations of a certain register that it carries. This logical twist that appears midway through the narrative and muddles how the roles are assigned prepares the ground for further sarcasm. Towards the close, a playful metaphor of spring confirms the ironic tone of the whole piece through vocabulary that evokes free love of the flower children “whose lost testes / and ovules stir to life” in the budding flowers of a new generation of hyacinths, lotuses and the “narcissus / on his sexstruck stem.”41 In this sense, the poem reads as much as a subversion of Helios as of the venerated muse. In “Electrical Storm,” possibly sparked by a U2 song of the same name and its musical video, O’Reilly plays out an almost McGuckianesque medley of images, fusing dreams with rooms and bodies with water. The persona recounts an experience of a miraculous healing which felt as if “the weight of the sea fell away.”42 In an ensuing night storm, the speaker unites with her lover in an intensive amorous encounter. The violent weather separates them from the surrounding time and space and, consequently, the lover’s “prismatic face” becomes not only the speaker’s focus but also the lens through which the world is perceived and

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experienced: “The voice of the storm became your voice, / its lightning, your eyes’ most delicate veins.”43 As in “Heliotrope,” the female persona allows herself to be circumscribed by the presence of her unknown other and looks out at the world through the filter of his presence. She places herself at the centre from where she can observe. Yet, through an analogy with sexual intimacy, she becomes fused with the outside world. Letting it invade the private room of the imagining mind, she realises that the latter is the only place where she can afford to be one with her other, without needing to be explicit or to decipher his baffling identity. But still, the same acceptance of the enigmatic other and self, and their emphasis through the use of elusive, non-representational language has informed the poem from the outset. Indeed, the speaker-poet’s own voice issues from that inner secret room and from the persuasion that the poet’s task is to be the conduit for mystery. The generic idea of “a room” that at once provides a shelter from and a connection to the climate outside is in line with Elaine Scarry’s concept of the room as signifying “an enlargement of the body”: while its walls connote warmth and seclusion, in its windows and doors—as “crude versions of the senses”—it enables the self to move out into the world and allows the world to enter.44 The persona in many of O’Reilly’s poems feels at home in the “room of the air”45 that is experienced as an extension of the body, and expresses the awareness of the body as a perceiving entity, as well as of its epistemological uniqueness—and ambiguity. Apparently, the poet is as fond of rooms as she is interested in secrets, dreams and nightmares. Typically, she searches for a meditative space and is willing to go into hiding so as to be able to blend in with the scene observed, or she examines the innermost reaches of the mind in order to apprehend the workings of the imagination. In the rooms of the poems discussed above, however, she strives to become one with her muse while representing the impossibility of really knowing this muse. Together with McGuckian and Jenkinson, O’Reilly shares the sense that creating a poem is a mutual act; the loud squalls of the “Electrical Storm” become the inspiring other’s voice while the persona happily admits to not knowing who this particular other or “you” might be and does not falter in her report of the blustering upheaval in deixis, causality and representation. Yet O’Reilly’s poetry should be considered independently of the feminist debate among the older poets. The erotic objects in O’Reilly’s love poems are not intended to give the poet a sense of propriety and appropriateness. Rather, in their fleetingness,

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they help her foreground the creative power of the solitary self and to perceive and appreciate the unrestrained power of the elemental qualities of the world. ∗ ∗ ∗ Born in 1964 in County Longford, Vona Groarke studied at Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork but spent long periods living and teaching creative writing at universities in the USA (Villanova University and Wake Forest University) and UK (University of Manchester). Many of her poems deal with the subject of domesticity and combine a sense of at-homeness with rootlessness as they pay attention to detail and examine the disparate trivialities of everyday life from unexpected angles. Throughout Groarke’s work, not least starting with her second collection, Other People’s Houses (1999), the house has been not so much an image as a continuous presence, a steady yet extremely versatile factor. Just like its attendant motif, memory, the awareness of an architectonic structure is fundamental to the poet’s conscious being in time and place. Houses are occasions of memories and bring about alertness to the present moment. Above all, however, they are the locale of daydreaming which, as Groarke shows over and again, is the sine qua non of poetry. It is in the moments of recollection and reverie, often but not exclusively triggered by a domestic detail, that Groarke most often turns to her muse. Much of Groarke’s poetry acknowledges reliance on a male muse and shows the same tendency to irony and obliquity whenever it strays into the mode of muse invocation as we have encountered in O’Reilly. If many of Groarke’s lyrics are addressed to an expressly absent, thus silent, listener, her 2009 collection Spindrift reads largely as a farewell to the muse. “Orchard with Lovers,” an ekphrasis of Gustav Klimt’s The Park (combined with the memory of several other of his paintings, including the famous Kiss aka The Lovers ), uses third-person narrative; but the poem is not so much about Klimt’s work or about the two lovers projected by the poem’s speaker onto the symbolist tangle of shades and shapes as about the omniscient narrator’s point of view. Groarke uses metaphors of flickering to capture the transience of a moment and give us a glimpse of the imagined scene. However, while the poet both aches and dreads to see what appears to be disguised yet at the same time outlined by “the tracery / of a thousand leaves,” ultimately, it is the fixating gaze of the poem’s

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male protagonist that gives substance to the “gloss” and “burnish” on the woman’s eyelids: . . . her lover’s eye steadies her from a kindred darkness that will vouchsafe the outcome of desire.46

Despite the denouement suggested in the last lines quoted above, the painting provides a formal distancing tool that shields the poet-persona from too much pain while watching her male muse, or perhaps lover, in a silent embrace with another woman. She may be left out of the lovers’ embrace but the position of onlooker enables her to write the poem. Groarke manages to be precise in her tone and representation, yet keeps “enough implication in it to suit [herself],” to use Marianne Moore’s phrase.47 The sense of precision and definiteness that comes from the easily recognisable visual source(s) behind the poem focuses us on the depicted scene and draws a line that separates both the narrator and the reader from what is implied. The notional frame of detachment that does not connote aloofness but might lead to acceptance, even forgiveness, is manifest in the last stanza with the metaphor of light flashing through the dense line of trees, creating “. . . a hall composed of screens / that close over, nightly.”48 This remedial effect of an adapted source is similar to that described by Randall Jarrell in relation to Marianne Moore’s use of quotations: “quotation is armor and ambiguity and irony all at once.”49 All three are relevant to Groarke’s poem: the “undertext” of the well-known painting, or paintings, serves as a formal mask behind which emotion can be hidden and suppressed, only to be brought up in the descriptive, ironic treatment of the artworks’ arrangement of details. The irony serves both to facilitate and avoid communication of the unspeakable melancholy and emotional pain. Thus, the poem ultimately points to the inadequacy of words for transmitting feelings, using the visual art and graphic description as means of expression. If, according to Socrates in Phaedrus, both painting and poem will remain mute when asked about their meaning, they can, to an extent, enlighten each other. Groarke’s poem is an ekphrasis in reverse; Klimt’s Park is referenced not in order to spell out what the poem cannot but to illustrate the idea (mentioned above in relation to O’Reilly) that it is fine for a poem, just as it is fine for an art object, to remain ambiguous or not

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to say everything at once and always in the same way. The final image in “Orchard with Lovers” foregrounds the poem’s autonomy and confirms the situation it signifies as essentially inexpressible: “There we leave them, wishful and enamoured // as the loved world asks them to be.”50 In this sense, the lyric dovetails with “An Teach Tuí” from the same collection, a poem based on the memory of the “straw-coloured months of childhood” spent in a typical west-of-Ireland cottage that appears to have “. . . the wherewithal / to sit out centuries.”51 Although she has spoken of the sweetening effect of the distant images of childhood homes and of their relevance to her work, Groarke has also repeatedly commented on how the precise sense of comfort and the freeing effect of their recollection were virtually impossible to capture in words. While the recollection of this “noun house” is surrounded by sounds—as “Tea roses bluster the half-door” and “Rain from eaves footfalls the gravel”52 — their representation and meaning remain beyond the poem’s range. The elusiveness of both the material and recollected reality, which is one of the main themes of the lines, is expressed in the wholehearted song of the robin that makes the poet-speaker realise that If I knew how to fix in even one language the noise of his wings in flight I wouldn’t need another word.53

Despite the gradual disappearance of memory and sensory experience that it foregrounds, the poem testifies, in its very existence, to a competing notion behind it: that of lyric writing as a remedy to the painful insufficiency of words. For it is above all through elliptic and compacted expression that poetry is able to deal with, as Paul Muldoon puts it, the “complexities of being here,”54 while acting out the difficulty of these themes. Although there is no mention of the muse, what “An Teach Tuí” has in common with “Orchard with Lovers” is not just the ambition to tackle the limits of cognition and speech but also the reassuring conclusion in which the irrevocability of such limits is confirmed. While I do not wish to argue for any systematic pairing between Groarke’s muse poems and her poems of home, there are significant and recurrent instances when the material image of a house is instrumental in the composition of the elusive concepts of love and poetic inspiration. Naturally, as symbols and containers of intimacy, rooms are expected to provide—as in “Windmill

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Hymns” from Juniper Street (2006)—a shelter “for the lives we thought we’d live, that wouldn’t be banked / in small talk, disappointments, lack of cash.”55 But houses, like people, arouse affections and fade into memories, instead of holding and fixing happiness. If at first the house was an emblem of hope in “Windmill Hymns,” it is subsequently shown to be in decay—until the body of the remembering mind is merged with its ruined walls in a comforting, conciliatory gesture: “That what’s missing should be called ‘the coping’ makes me / want to lay my face against the stone.”56 Throughout her work, Groarke conceptualises loss as a possible gain or solution, and it is most pronounced in the poems that connect images of various past dwellings with the elusiveness of the muse and love as such. In “The Return” from Juniper Street , the speaker finds “our young day” walled up in another once familiar house.57 As with the other house images, “The Return” blurs the distinction between imagined memories and imagined futures while the architecture, reminiscent of dream narratives of interior castles, catches the persona “. . . somewhere / between surprise and reassurance.”58 The poem knows but will not tell: the past may have been inscribed into the walls and the very atmosphere of the house—but in words that lost their significance years ago. As before in “Windmill Hymns,” however, this nexus of elusive memories and insufficient words is accompanied in “The Return” by the soothing illusion of continuity, the idea that nothing, after all, gets lost with time. Together with this illusion, the shell of the house provides access to the half-sweet, half-shattering memory of lost shared youth. Despite the mixed feelings that it creates and in its refusal to be deciphered, the memory also feeds the fantasy of cohesion and constancy in the final, hopeful image of the couple walking “. . . out beyond this final door, into the glare / of our release, another headlong day.”59 Still, Groarke’s sense of speechlessness can be linked with yet another issue, which is the gap left by the loss of the Irish language. “An Teach Tuí” refers, in Irish, to the thatched cottages in the Irish countryside, typical not least of the west of Ireland where, on the edge of the Connemara Gaeltacht (in a house to which part of the title sequence in Spindrift and a number of her other poems are dedicated), Groarke has spent many summers since her childhood. During these stays, she notes, she frequently heard Irish spoken.60 Even though she claims that she has always been at one with the English language, the theme of Irish

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arises occasionally as a symptom of homesickness or melancholy. In Spindrift , she has two poems called “Away” about her experience of living and making a home in a place that “isn’t home,”61 about the periods she spent living and teaching in the USA. “The idea of home,” she admits, “is the foundation . . . for most of what I write.”62 The idea of home also seems connected, however vaguely and marginally, with the memory of Irish. In the first of those poems, she speaks about the tricks that living abroad can play on one’s sense of linguistic integrity, of feeling settled in one language: I grow quiet. Yesterday I answered in a class of Irish at the checkout of Walgreen’s.63

On one level, the lack of words, congruent with a linguistic mix-up, is reminiscent of being taught Irish at school. On another level, it is part and parcel of the speaker’s exiled state and her self-consciousness about her accent. Here, the idea of being “dim, far-reaching” and “lost for words” recalls Boland’s linguistic displacement stemming from her childhood and youth divided between England, the USA and Ireland. Boland’s sense of dislocation is most specifically expressed in an uncollected poem, “Port of New York. 1956,” in which what has been lost through exile is measured by the idiomatic difference between the countries, precisely by “what is severed in us” as part of the inevitable linguistic adaptation in exile.64 “Language can be an agent of estrangement, as well as a mirror of it,”65 notes Jody Allen Randolph in relation to Boland’s poem. The same idea informs Groarke’s “Away.” However, Groarke’s poems cannot be reduced to simple narratives of nostalgia. She acknowledges that “the truest homes may be ephemeral anyway and the quickest way to access whatever it is that home might mean is through a projected version of the physical place.” Accordingly, she considers herself lucky that her childhood home is no longer available to her and that she is “free to conjure it at will so that it now has purely symbolic value . . . I have no way to assess my memories in terms of reality and there is freedom in that. Also in the very notion that loss may confer freedom.”66 Indeed, the sense of loss or want is one of Groarke’s main themes, be it related to the idea of home, muse or linguistic rootedness. Almost as often as we encounter her lyric “I” revisiting the different houses she used to occupy in the past, she can be

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observed in various foreign homes, dealing with the sense of disjointed freedom and the absences and distances they signify. Groarke’s typical line of thought is that while poetry may provide the means for healing the gap and conquering the dividing darkness between the poet and her muse, the latter’s absence in fact confers freedom and facilitates poetry. Occasionally, as we have seen, the missing or elusive muse is coupled with the image of a distant, lost home which, in turn, might be associated with a vague memory of the Irish language. ∗ ∗ ∗ What Groarke has in common with O’Reilly, as well as Jenkinson, McGuckian, Meehan and Ní Chuilleanáin, is that dismissing her traditional identification with the muse on the basis of her gender, she foregrounds referential indeterminacy and various distancing devices, positing them as important for the workings of her inspiration. Like popular concepts of desire as a perpetually stretched-out hand or a force that alters the mind, inspired imagination has always been linked to the idea of a driving urge. If the muse is approached through irony, a mocking tone, an encoded narrative and concealment, the same tactics serve to confirm its unattainability—for it is in the space separating the creating mind from the source of inspiration and galvanised by absence that poems most often originate. This, of course, applies to poetry and artistic creation in general. What I have also been concerned with here is that the void appears to be registered differently in the works of feminist and post-feminist poets in Ireland. In the case of the former (as we have seen in the previous chapters), the space between the poet and their inspiration can be frequently seen as charged by a sense of the broken tradition as well as by attempts to detach themselves from patriarchal discourse, and by the awareness of the linguistic fissure. The works of the latter group (represented here by O’Reilly and Groarke) are mostly driven by a different kind of tension: they point to a new reconciliation with the internal pressures and contradictions that are behind a poem’s coherence and its logic as an aesthetic and discursive whole. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to refer only to discontinuities between what are, in any case, arbitrarily defined poetic “generations.” In 2001, Boland expanded on her idea of “history” (the official narrative and canon) as opposed to “the past” (the accounts of the lives that history has served to obliterate): “Poets have written at the centre, in courts, at

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the seat of power. But that’s one kind of poetry . . . What draws me in is the idea of a poetry which can fathom silences, follow the outsider’s trail.”67 The implied argument is that the “other” kind of poetry, that emerges on the margin and that Boland prefers, is represented in particular by women’s writing. While it is a fact that women poets of the past were mostly reluctant to write and edit their work so that it would suit the public eye, there have always been male poets who neglected their “civic duties,” to use James Longenbach’s phrase. Refusing to take up the epic challenge, they followed Apollo’s advice to Callimachus to keep his “muse slender,” i.e. toned down to lyric poetry.68 Yet, the marginality of poetry, as Longenbach argues, is essential for its effectiveness which lies in “poetry’s capacity to resist itself more strenuously than it is resisted by the culture at large.”69 While the former marginality of women in literature provided them with natural resistance to the male tradition and with a ready-made field of tension and lively opposition, this brought with it the threat of the lyric “I” being supplanted by a gendered “we” and its ideological intent. Recognising this pitfall of literary feminism, many of the poets I have discussed so far have looked for ways to avoid it. In the preceding chapter, we saw how Ní Chuilleanáin relied on reticence and resisted representation, and how McGuckian “revivified” language and made “empty words full” by ridding them of their usual context of allusions and meanings.70 In the present chapter, we have encountered Ní Dhomhnaill enacting silence while insisting on the orality of her medium and O’Reilly whose poems all seethe with various kinds of tensions (not least those between the trim shape of her formally inventive verse and the churning chaos of the subconscious it often registers). We have also examined the work of Groarke whose architectural images imply many apparent points of entry which, nevertheless, vanish as soon as poetic utterance threatens to turn into diegesis. All these authors—irrespective of their age or stance on the masculine tradition and language politics—testify to the belief that great poetry is never sure of itself, in terms of subject matter, tone, form or outcome, and that the best of metaphors are impossible to read unequivocally. Their poetic silence thus alludes not so much to the limits of language but to its infinite possibilities.

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Notes 1. Amy Christine Billone, Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the NineteenthCentury Sonnet (Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2007), 3. 2. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Styles of Radical Will (London: Vintage, 1994), 11. 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 27. 4. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “Toircheas 1,” Pharaoh’s Daughter (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1990), 50. My translation. 5. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Toircheas 1” (Ark of the Covenant), trans. Medbh McGuckian, 51. 6. See McGuckian and Ní Dhomhnaill in Laura O’Connor, “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995), accessed 20 May 2011, http:// connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary-criticism/9508243323/comhra-for eword-afterword-by-laura-oconnor. 7. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Toircheas 1,” 50. My translation. 8. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Toircheas 1,” 50. 9. Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 162. 10. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, “Metaphor and Metamorphosis in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Éire-Ireland 35.1/2 (2000): 172. 11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 17. 12. Caitríona O’Reilly, “Statuary,” The Nowhere Birds (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2001), 34. 13. Plato, Phaedrus, 275d–e, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1997), 552. 14. Sontag, “Silence,” 16. 15. O’Reilly, “Statuary,” 34. 16. O’Reilly, “Statuary,” 34. 17. Bishop in Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Twayne, 1966), 66. 18. John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 191. 19. Emily Dickinson, # 1695, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 691. 20. See O’Reilly, “‘I Carpenter a Space for the Thing I Am Given’: Influence and the Consciousness of Space in Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Sylvia Plath,” PhD Thesis, Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland), School of English (2002), accessed 6 November 2017, http://www.tara.tcd.ie/han dle/2262/78578.

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21. O’Reilly in Shannon Magee and Alex Muller, “‘It Felt Like a Breaking of Some Taboo I’d Placed Myself Under’: Caitríona O’Reilly on Writing Geis ,” Wake Forest University Press (7 October 2015), accessed 5 November 2017, https://wfupress.wfu.edu/caitriona-oreilly/it-felt-likea-breaking-of-some-taboo-id-placed-myself-under-caitriona-oreilly-on-wri ting-geis/. 22. O’Reilly in Magee and Muller. 23. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 183. 24. Bachelard, 184. 25. Dickinson, # 1512, Poems, 635. 26. Dickinson, # 657, Poems, 327. 27. O’Reilly, “Persona,” The Sea Cabinet (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2006), 14. 28. O’Reilly, “Persona,” 14. 29. Dickinson, # 670, Poems, 333. 30. Dickinson, # 670, 333. 31. O’Reilly, “Persona,” 14. 32. Bachelard, 184. 33. O’Reilly, “Statuary,” 34. 34. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 236. Qtd. in O’Reilly, “I Carpenter,” 93. 35. See, for instance, “Thin” and “Pandora’s Box” in O’Reilly’s The Nowhere Birds , “Poliomyelitis,” “Maze” and “In the Deaf Man’s House” in The Sea Cabinet , and “Ariadne,” “Geis” and “Jonah” in the poet’s 2015 collection, Geis (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books). 36. O’Reilly, “To the Muse,” The Sea Cabinet, 21. 37. O’Reilly, “Persona,” 14. 38. O’Reilly, “Heliotrope,” The Sea Cabinet, 56. 39. O’Reilly, “Heliotrope,” 56. 40. O’Reilly, “Heliotrope,” 56. 41. O’Reilly, “Heliotrope,” 56. 42. O’Reilly, “Electrical Storm,” The Sea Cabinet, 57. 43. O’Reilly, “Storm,” 57. 44. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 38. 45. O’Reilly, “Hide,” The Nowhere Birds, 60. 46. Groarke, “Orchard with Lovers,” Spindrift (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2009), 38. 47. “Interview with Marianne Moore by Donald Hall,” in Poets at Work, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 87. 48. Groarke, “Orchard,” 39.

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49. Randall Jarrell, “Her Shield,” in Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Charles Tomlinson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 120. 50. Groarke, “Orchard,” 39. 51. Groarke, “An Teach Tuí,” Spindrift , 50. 52. Groarke, “Teach,” 50. 53. Groarke, “Teach,” 50. 54. See Paul Muldoon in John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 136. 55. Groarke, “Windmill Hymns,” Juniper Street (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2006), 12. 56. Groarke, “Hymns,” 12. 57. See Groarke, “The Return,” Juniper Street, 26. 58. Groarke, “The Dream House,” Other People’s Houses (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1999), 24. 59. Groarke, “Return,” 26. 60. Groarke, e-mail message to the author, 15 August 2009. 61. Groarke, “Away,” Spindrift, 14. 62. Groarke, e-mail message to the author, 15 August 2009. 63. Groarke, “Away,” 14. 64. See Eavan Boland, “In Port of New York. 1956,” qtd. in Jody Allen Randolph, Eavan Boland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 181. 65. Allen Randolph, 182. 66. Groarke in Daniela Theinová, “Literární vzor je hezká starší sestra” (Influence Is Your Good-Looking Older Sister), A2 5.21 (2009): 24. 67. “Eavan Boland,” Caffeine Destiny (2001), http://www.caffeinedestiny. com/boland.html. Qtd. in Allen Randolph, 2. 68. See James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 2. 69. Longenbach, xi. 70. Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 83–4.

Works Cited Alcobia-Murphy, Shane. Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006. Allen Randolph, Jody. Eavan Boland. Cork: Cork University Press, 2014. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Billone, Amy Christine. Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 2007.

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Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. ———. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Falci, Eric. Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Groarke, Vona. “Editorial.” Verse 16.2 (1999): 7–8. ———. Flight. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2002. ———. Juniper Street. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2006. ———. Other People’s Houses. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1999. ———. Spindrift. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2009. ———. X . Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2014. Haffenden, John. Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Hall, Donald. “Interview with Marianne Moore by Donald Hall.” In Poets at Work, edited by George Plimpton, 561–680. New York: Penguin Books, 1989, 85–98. Jarrell, Randall. “Her Shield.” In Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Charles Tomlinson, 114–24. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969. Longenbach, James. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín. “Metaphor and Metamorphosis in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Éire-Ireland 35.1/2 (2000): 150–72. Magee, Shannon and Alex Muller. “‘It Felt Like a Breaking of Some Taboo I’d Placed Myself Under’: Caitríona O’Reilly on Writing Geis.” Wake Forest University Press (7 October 2015). https://wfupress.wfu.edu/caitriona-ore illy/it-felt-like-a-breaking-of-some-taboo-id-placed-myself-under-caitriona-ore illy-on-writing-geis/. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. Pharaoh’s Daughter. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1990. O’Connor, Laura. “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995): 581–614. Accessed 20 May 2011. http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary-critic ism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-laura-oconnor. O’Reilly, Caitríona. Geis. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2015. ———. “‘I Carpenter a Space for the Thing I Am Given’: Influence and the Consciousness of Space in Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Sylvia Plath.” Ph.D.

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Thesis. Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland), School of English (2002). Accessed 6 November 2017. http://www.tara.tcd.ie/handle/2262/78578. ———. The Nowhere Birds. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2001. ———. The Sea Cabinet. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2006. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” Styles of Radical Will, 3–34. London: Vintage, 1994. Stevenson, Anne. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Twayne, 1966. Theinová, Daniela. “Literární vzor je hezká starší sestra” (Influence Is Your Good-Looking Older Sister). A2 5.21 (2009): 24.

CHAPTER 6

Kinds of Between: The Margin as a Mainspring

The present chapter examines how various forms of semantic disruption and situational as well as linguistic marginality are used to explore the indeterminacy of poetic inspiration. Chapter 4 looked at the figuring of the muse in concepts of poetic affiliation, focusing on the galvanising use of sources by Medbh McGuckian and the refusal of the constricting male gaze in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Paula Meehan. In Chapter 5, we saw how the elusiveness of the muse was emphasised in order to illustrate the workings of the imagining mind and observed the essentially creative tendency towards “privatisation” and fragmentation in works by Caitríona O’Reilly and Vona Groarke. Here, the discussion of poems by Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian and Vona Groarke is motivated by the significance of the poet–muse encounter for identity of the speaking subject. I do not argue that women relate to the muse in a way that is markedly different from men; rather, I believe there is a striking analogy between the fact that the muse is mostly met in a liminal state or location and that women previously occupied a marginal position in the canon. Although theories of inspiration are myriad, they all stress the element of inexplicability. Inspiration is best understood as experienced by a migratory subject undergoing outward and inward movements, somewhere between resigned rapture and fierce concentration. Most of the following examples share the image of a life-giving crevice from which issues of © The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_6

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creativity are approached, sometimes even through direct address to the muse. Although they find the traditional notion of the female muse inhibiting, rather than rejecting the canon’s strictures, the poets often place themselves or their personae in a figurative liminal sphere from which they deal with, inter alia, the themes of originality and inspiration. This liminal zone in which the latter is achieved is the locus of entry for the female subject and the base of its discursive position. My point is that the historical marginality of women in literature accounts for the prominence and the beneficial use of metaphorical representations of the liminal (such as windows, doorways and various other borderline locations) in contemporary women’s poetry. The liminal is employed as a metaphor of the abstract concepts of time and space, relating both to the external source of inspiration and to the self. It is an essentially ambiguous, forked position on the margin, imagined as a threshold or a space in which a different state of mind is reached. It is at the same time transitory and marked by stillness, and combines the elements of passage and potential of change with a sense of taut balance. The liminal is therefore relevant to women’s marginal position which gets construed as a generative state of otherness, an equal separateness from what came before and what is still to come. In considering the political aspects of this shift—through which the margin ceases to be a restriction but becomes the mainspring and prominent motif in women’s poetry—I will discuss the implications of that shift in terms of the individual poetic style. Thus while attending to the particular features of each poet’s approach, I emphasise some points of overlap which include references to problematic linguistic identification or the beneficial tension between the matter and the content of the poem. Most of the works discussed include meta-poetic reflections on the process of their own creation or the functioning of poetic inspiration as such. In tracing this move from the periphery to the centre, I do not wish to review the admission of women from a margin to the centre of the canon, but rather note the ways in which this development is reflected and utilised in their work—both as a motif and a strategy. Thus, following on from the previous chapter, I will demonstrate how the practical as well as creative aspects of writing poetry are often effectively addressed from a transitional position between opposing concepts such as inside–outside, silence–speech and communication–secrecy, or between the constitutive poles of identity.

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In more recent writing, attempts to redress the historical silence of women have mostly been replaced by poems that are based on dense poetic expression and fragmented procedures. If fragmentation and relativisation of the narrative functions of art have long featured as characteristics of postmodernism, along with the deconstruction of the author, in contemporary women’s poetry they can be seen as a continuation of the coded narratives and the various rhetorical forms of silence also used in earlier female writing. While most of these poems ignore the feminist call for “coherent subjects,”1 there is no tendency towards postmodern problematising of subjecthood as such: rather, the poems testify to the variety of ways the speaking “I” is redefined. In other words, the coded reference and narrative in the works I discuss (not least in terms of the indeterminacy of the speaking subject and the muse figure) can no longer be seen as simply subversive but as conducive to reinstalling and reconfirming the lyric subject.

Woman at a Window: Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Eavan Boland made the disparate experiences of being both a woman and an author the focal point of her early poetry. In her own words, she used the “flawed space” between the two polarised forms of her existence as a springboard to creativity: “In a certain sense, I found my poetic voice by shouting across that distance.”2 She sensed herself marginalised by the gender politics of Irish literature and, at the same time, located firmly between the given “obligations of her womanhood and the shadowy demands of her gift.”3 By rooting her creativity in that problematic interface, however, she was able to redefine her position and construe it as productive. In her essay, “New Wave 2: Born in the 50s; Irish Poets of the Global Village,” Boland asserted that “all poems in their time [made] a fragile, important negotiation between an inner and outer world.”4 Yet, by “inner and outer world” she means a mixture of various contrasting concepts, such as the tensions between the conventions prescribed by the community and the demands of her profession, between the public and the private mind, and between the limits of the inherited literary past and her own experience. The poet-persona of her lyrics—particularly the suburbia poems that recur throughout her oeuvre from The War Horse (1975) onwards—is often located within the walls of a house. The speaker’s ability to change shape, however, allows her to

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escape the confines of the domestic, suburban setting and thus to extend the poems’ representational limits. The “Suburban Woman” sequence from the 1975 collection abounds with figurations of an in-between zone. The plurality of the authorial persona’s experience is represented in images of constant shifting between incongruous modes of being and in the leitmotif of a desirable middle ground. As mentioned in Chapter 3 where I briefly allude to the poem, the compound character of the woman’s identity (in which the poet competes with the housewife) is merged with the theme of the changing landscape as the city and country had battled with each other “between a space of truce until one night // walls began to multiply.”5 Another ongoing struggle which the sequence reports is that between concepts of Ireland’s present situation and its history; these leave each other (and the female subject’s own past and consciousness) marked with scars. The binary persona is “the sole survivor” of this daily struggle in which her poetry is at once the prize and the necessary compromise: “Defeated we survive, we two, housed // together in my compromise, my craft.”6 Significantly, it is the “white flag” of the kitchen blind pulled down that foreshadows the temporary truce, described as a period of productivity during which the woman becomes whole again and, shrugging off “a hundred small surrenders” of the day, prepares to use them as images in her poems. The blind is the line that separates the day of chores from the night of poetry writing, but it also corresponds with the image of the blank page on which the two agents come together as “. . . veterans of a defeat // no truce will heal.”7 Even though the conciliatory tone appears to stand in contrast to the poet’s vehement confirmation of woman in the role of the lyric subject, the conclusion of “Suburban Woman” presages the many times Boland will return to this theme in her corpus. As if to counter the Barthesian notion of writing as the place where the identity of the writing body is lost,8 Boland insists on positioning the self-reflexive female subject within the poem. The blind that is both in contact with and obscures the outside world is an emblem of the woman poet’s split identity and a figuration of the liminal position vital for her creativity. If Boland often finds her inspiration at a metaphorical threshold which is positively defined as a “field of force,”9 that threshold also represents the notion of her craft as a healing process but, at the same time, a compromise that is never satisfactory. Another good illustration of such a potentially beneficial interface is to be found in “The Muse Mother” from Night Feed (1980). The poem

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opens with the poet-persona standing by a window, watching a woman in the neighbouring garden wiping her child’s mouth until the onset of rain makes her move out of the speaker’s visual field. The stylised simplicity of the scene emphasises the timelessness of the woman’s experience. Her potential as a muse lies in her spanning of the past as well as the future; the speaker hopes to be able to learn from her how “to be a sibyl” and how “to sing the past.”10 Interpreted in this way, the poem’s key premise seems to be straightforward and optimistic: that which is eternal has a claim to the divine and is bound to be suitable as a subject for poetry. Through the figure of the woman outside and the fact that the scene observed is commonplace, the speaker desires to acquire a gift of omniscience and to draw in the knowledge of a language that is normally the privilege of gods. Yet Boland ultimately uses the ambivalence to demonstrate the otherness of the muse and thus the irreconcilable polarity of the woman-poet’s experience. The narrative position of the poet is shown as essentially incompatible with that of the mother who is left secluded in a distinct climatic—as well as acoustic—environment: she is a stray trope from the past who might—if only she could be deciphered—teach the poet “a new language.”11 What is of particular interest here are the poem’s contradictions and paradoxes concentrated in the image of the semitransparent, rained-on window pane. As already suggested, it is often from a distinct liminal position that Boland proposes to deconstruct cultural and literary stereotypes and to replace them with images taken from the lived experience of women in the present and past. The window is a device that at once allows the speaker to gain distance from her subject and to become inspired through an encounter—however restricted—with the muse figure. It also enables her to detach herself from the scene’s domesticity in order to make it into art. In “The Muse Mother,” she makes as if she would like to counter the tradition of the monumentalising male gaze and its reliance on the abstract feminine as a source of inspiration. By mentioning the hope of a new language, she creates expectations of a changed perspective. Yet her craving for an alternative medium, a language facilitating representation that would not lead to the confinement of the woman within the boundaries of the poem, is left unsatisfied. The dual promise constituted by the window’s transparent boundary and the hope for a new idiom is compromised by the shift in focus, by the poem turning away from “this rainy street” and its own poetry to old figures of speech and

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unknown roots that possibly allude to the loss of Irish as the language of the community.12 Just as in “Suburban Woman” and some of Boland’s other attempts to reinsert women into the narrative of Irish poetry and history, here, she is unable to keep to a single point on her agenda. As a result, the speaker-poet’s mind paradoxically “stays fixed” in concentration on the excessive, self-prescribed task. Boland portrays herself as unable to reach out to her suburban muse, sensing herself to be as much “out of context” as her ultimately silent object.13 The muse, no matter how mundane, remains elusive. Ironically, the declaration of the desire to pin down the muse prevents the poet from interiorising the conventional trope that confirms woman in the role of an abstract, immutably silent ideal. Ultimately, this particular attempt to evoke a muse that would outdo the muse of men—“who made theirs in the image of their myth” as Boland puts it in “Envoi” from The Journey (1987)—comes to a dead end.14 In its determination to “bless the ordinary” and “sanctify the common,”15 that “The Muse Mother” shares with the above-mentioned poem, it becomes an instance of what David Wheatley calls “this dangerously in-between state,”16 in reference to Boland’s unyielding insistence on a set of widely scattered, irreconcilable oppositions such as the past and history, the city and the country, Irish and English, and her own life as a woman and poet. Boland’s “The Muse Mother” thus illustrates the possibilities as well as the limits of the interstitial space, attesting to how complicated the distinction between within and without—and between the poet and her subject matter—can be. The hope expressed in the closing couplet of finally being able to speak “my mother tongue”17 can be related both to the Irish language that Boland never learnt and to English which is indeed her first language but is laden with a sense of historical guilt. In its multilayered ambiguity, the poem addresses an issue shared by most women writing poetry in the second half of the twentieth century who felt it necessary to define their space in the canon. Regardless of intralingual tensions, many of these poets perceived their particular poetic medium as inadequate for expressing female experience. Some, as we have seen, search for an alternative idiom that is ostentatiously at odds with the tradition in which there had been little space for women’s speech, or for a tone which could be situated in the “flawed space” between English and Irish. Others have consciously resorted to the precarious but prolific margin between silence and statement. Boland’s poem, nevertheless, demonstrates that no specifically female language can

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be found or developed, that it can at best be a compromise. Indeed, her lyric could be more compelling—not only in its revisionist purpose but also as a poem—if it were free precisely of the pining for a “new language” made of “lost noun[s]”18 that may or may not be of relevance to Irish and that would enable her to spell out and control her numerous anxieties. In the following sections, I will examine how some of the other poets, namely Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian and Vona Groarke, have placed their authorial personae in various interstitial places and positions in order to reconcile the conflicting identities of the speaking subject and the silenced object, the artist and the muse. ∗ ∗ ∗ Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, as we have seen, deals with silenced Irish women but is, at the same time, alert to the unspeakability of woman’s experience. Her work also abounds with the motif of an enabling interface. Although there is no direct mention of the muse, “The Absent Girl” from the poet’s second collection, Site of Ambush (1975), begs to be read as a counterpart to Boland’s “The Muse Mother.” The lyric revolves around an apparently immobile yet dramatic image of a womangirl reclining against a courtroom window. The vaporous and at the same time very corporeal female figure is one of Ní Chuilleanáin’s frequent personae conspicuous for their silence. In the course of the poem, she is transformed from a young girl to an ageing woman and further to a mere spectre of her former self. This notion of atemporality is linked to the historical experience of woman as invisible apart from as a generic passive object. In the window, the woman’s face is erased by the face of the clock reflected in the glass; thus, Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem suggests how woman has been removed from history: “. . . when they look for her face / [they c]an only see the clock behind her skull.”19 On the one hand, the window seems to connect the woman to the world outside; on the other, it reminds us of her acute sense of isolation, of the immutable fact of her absence from the court of history. Yet the poem represents that very absence and is thus a recuperation and refiguration of cultural history, drawing attention—like many feminist works—to what has been erased.

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However, in emphasising the timelessness of woman’s experience as being “invisible”—in the sense of the continuation of that experience— Ní Chuilleanáin uses different means from Boland. In her essay “ The Woman Poet in a National Tradition” (1989), Boland described the situation of women in Irish poetry at the beginning of her career by alluding to Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man: “Years ago I came to realise when I published a poem that what was seen of me, what drew approval, if it was forthcoming at all, was the poet. The woman, by and large, was invisible.”20 If Boland resolved to use her own invisibility as a woman behind the poem to approach that “greater invisibility . . . the suffering which lay below the surface of Irish history”21 and, ultimately, to bring those voices and images out into the open, Ní Chuilleanáin does not seem to seek a remedy. In “The Absent Girl,” instead of expressing impatience with her subject’s reticence, she proposes silence, along with a thorough use of the interstice, as the element that confirms the very continuity and universality rather than incommunicableness of her past. The figure is a symbol of passing time—dramatised by the lack of reflection in the glass as it is blocked by the image of the clock—and demonstrates the physical process of a woman’s ageing, in contrast to the unchangeability and invisibility of women’s history. According to Guinn Batten, the greatest merit of Ní Chuilleanáin’s carefully balanced lyrical narratives has been in her resolution to encompass polarities and ambiguities. Batten lauds the poet for “finding throughout her career subtle strategies for representing by not claiming to represent authentic ‘muscle and blood’” and for “serving others by not serving as a subject who represents what she calls in [this] poem ‘the absent girl.’”22 This tangled and paradoxical statement refers to Ní Chuilleanáin’s consistent, we might say insistent, reserve. While Batten offers no help in disclosing the referential relevance of the poet’s images and narratives, she does pinpoint the core of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetics, based largely on the ellipsis and paralipsis that she consistently uses when writing about woman’s experience. Batten’s conclusion is simple and apposite: even if the lives of women of the past cannot be recreated in poetry, the poet thematises the silence that surrounds them. In her own commentary on “The Absent Girl,” Ní Chuilleanáin identifies her persona as one of the women in history who had to face the “experience of being invisible”23 and, indeed, the blankness of the image is highly reminiscent of Boland’s invisible woman. Despite the differences in their approach and objectives, the outcome of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem

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seems to be the same as in Boland’s “The Muse Mother”: the girl’s experience may be timeless, but in the end, it is the same kind of elusiveness, the same unspeakability that the poem in fact communicates. Yet, if Boland was perhaps too verbal in naming the issue, Ní Chuilleanáin may be going to the other extreme: while the poet does not expect her subject to speak, she brings the tone of the poem down to her. Equating non-expression with non-existence, the lyric is particularly difficult to grasp. Even though Ní Chuilleanáin never talks about her muse, I would argue that besides the women absent from history, the shape-shifting image of “The Absent Girl” also represents something akin to the elusiveness of inspiration. The association, however, is somewhat complex. Since Ní Chuilleanáin’s work is devoid of any figurations of the muse (male or female, incarnate or abstract), it would be too much to claim that the female image is designed as a revision of that trope in male writing. Still, her similarity to the poet’s other female characters with coded, broken or silenced “histories” make her an obvious part of a broader plan. A spectre representing the actual women absent from historical and literary discourse, Ní Chuilleanáin’s image does stand in contrast to the idealised, female other in male writing. Similarly to her nun figures, for example, she symbolises the women invisible in the literary canon and the historiography that preceded feminism. Yet it is precisely in these female ciphers that Ní Chuilleanáin often finds her creative impulse, if not her source of inspiration. The question is, then, what the elusive figure reveals about Ní Chuilleanáin’s lyric subject. While she identifies with her silent personae, using them mostly to comment critically on the silencing of women in history, there are many occasions, including in “The Absent Girl,” when the poet seems to celebrate their reticence instead of attempting redress. While this puts her in the same starting position as male poets, it is impossible to judge whether these figures are the result of Ní Chuilleanáin’s verbal restraint or an excuse for it. According to Justin Quinn, Ní Chuilleanáin has placed her determination to be “true to the dead,” to embody their silences in her verse, over the requirements of her art. The resulting referential blankness, Quinn concludes, has produced “poems for an esoteric circle of one.”24 One might add, however, that the poet’s consistent abstruseness does not follow primarily from an excessive faithfulness to the silences of the past but has other, more general motivations: even when Ní Chuilleanáin does not write a meta-poetic commentary on an absenting (female) subject, her work often reads as a radical and resolute experiment in the expressive

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possibilities of silence. “The Absent Girl” illustrates that Ní Chuilleanáin willingly takes the risk that its merit, as well as its content, will stay obscured in the falling dark behind the window glass. This perpetual temptation towards silence may render many of her poems impenetrable. It is singular, however, that by subduing the tone of her writing and foregrounding silence with such consistency she has been able to insert the female subject into the poem while enacting (in an unprecedented way) the situation of women in history and the canon. If she has failed to represent the multifarious nature of womanhood, this has arguably never been her ambition.

Ghosts and Bodies: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian and Vona Groarke The muteness of the “muse” comes as no surprise in Ní Chuilleanáin. But it certainly does in the case of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill whose provocative, garrulous idiom can be said to be the opposite of Ní Chuilleanáin’s reserve. In “Filleadh na Béithe” (The Return of the Muse) from Ní Dhomhnaill’s 1993 collection Spíonáin is Róiseanna (Gooseberries and Roses), the muse figure is confronted by the poet-speaker. As we shall see, however, its potency lies elsewhere than in verbal methods of communication. Unlike Meehan, who proposes to do away with the muse altogether, Ní Dhomhnaill admits to being “a muse poet.”25 Yet the form and shape of the muse is not fixed in her conception. With reference to Kristeva’s notions of the pre-symbolic and the chora, Ní Dhomhnaill stresses the unattainability of inspiration and refers to the muse as “the never-to-beaccessed-again body of the mother.”26 While understood as necessary to poetry, the muse is at the same time seen as problematic: “There have been periods when I’ve gone dry because there is nobody or nothing in my immediate vicinity which carries that particular focus.”27 In “‘Filleadh na Béithe” a creative crisis is averted with the return of “The Prodigal Muse” (in McGuckian’s translation), following a rather blasphemous supplication to a deity in the vein of “[p]atois Ghaelscoileanna Bhaile Átha Cliath” (the Bunscoil lingo): “Féach anseo, tusa, faigh as!” (“You can bugger off, dickhead!” as McGuckian translates with abandon).28 Here is the quibbling report of the process, as it is addressed to the muse (and its rather risqué interpretation by McGuckian):

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Siúlann tú isteach im’ chroí chomh neafaisech, chomh haiclí, amhail is nár fhágais riamh é ar feadh na mblianta.

You saunter back in as cool and dandy as if you’d not been on your travels since the Lord-knows-when.

..... . . . Tá sceitimíní áthais orm timpeall ort.

..... I come out in an all-over body-rash,

Faoi mhaide boilg as tsimléara is faoi chabha an staighre, geofar láithreach na coda beaga.

my erect nipples in for a nuzzling by the stomach of the chimney stack, or the cubby-hole under the stairs.29

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Presuming that the muse will maintain its usual reticence, the poet readjusts the standard scenario and, allowing the visitor to just sit there on a comfortable version of the muse’s tripod, willingly does all the talking. Not content with the poem itself as testament to the success of her invocation, the speaker suggestively describes the encounter. By means of contraction and double entendre, the lyric swerves from the mode (however ridiculed) of a muse address, outlined in the first two stanzas, and approximates the tone of a love poem. The two approaches merge in the final line of the poem consisting of two words: “na coda beaga.” The binary implications of the collocation are necessarily lost in a translation, for no translation can render “little pieces” simultaneously as “bits” of poetry (its formal and lexical elements) and as the objects of amorous desire (as the speaker’s “little treasures” which McGuckian translates boldly as “nipples”). There is nothing in the original to ascertain the muse’s gender grammatically as either feminine or masculine. While the many instances in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry where she extols a male lover would appear to make the male option more likely, she admits to having gone through periods when she identified her muse with a woman and when “[t]he poetry came in a huge welling up . . . and reached a level of incandescence that I may never be able to retrieve again.”30 The poem’s drama, nevertheless, lies not so much in the rejection of the traditional notion of

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the artist’s muse as feminine in favour of a supposedly masculine impersonation—or indeed in keeping the embodied muse feminine—but rather in the swerve from the connotations of a generic, supernatural muse to a human representative at the sight of whom the speaker melts. Obviously, one of the lyric’s aims is to undermine the traditional, “platonic” notions of the poet–muse relationship. Through a hint of irony and the suggestion of sexual embrace, the poet surpasses the opposition between the “I” and the other, thus achieving inspiration. However, despite the arousal provoked by its appearance, the muse’s presence remains somewhat shadowy and I suggest that it is the very fleetingness of the muse that secures the effect of productive liminality. Having stalked overconfidently back to the poet, it is still always on the verge of disappearing, always on the threshold where presence and absence continuously merge and diverge. Therefore, while an illustrative physical interstice is lacking in the poem, the muse has arrived from without, thus securing the poet access to the creating self.31 The inconclusive sketching of the muse, including its sex, brings to mind John Montague’s axiomatic remark on women and the muse, as Ní Dhomhnaill reports, with only slight exasperation: “You can’t be a muse poet because people will think you’re a lesbian.”32 Ostentatiously demonstrating that she does not care what anyone might think, Ní Dhomhnaill mixes indications of bawdiness with ironic overstatement to upset expectations concerning the set genres with which her poem could be associated. As Mary O’Connor notes, Ní Dhomhnaill “does not present herself as a moral lamppost in the light of which men may see their own mistakes; she mocks propriety while freely donning the mask of the clown herself.”33 Openness about the body and its erotic drives, often combined with self-irony, are among the cornerstones of the poet’s style. Typically, Ní Dhomhnaill approaches the muse just as she pretends to denounce the very trope. As Frank Sewell puts it, she uses “transgression as a strategy in the process of becoming the master/mistress of her self, life, and work.”34 While there is an erotic undercurrent to the poem, it is also worth noting Ní Dhomhnaill’s cunning way of pushing her language to the limits of social acceptability, and considering it in the light of McGuckian’s much more overt version. If, as O’Connor argues, Ní Dhomhnaill refers to the body without shame in order to break the established literary codes and rules that “repress women’s speech in the name

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of propriety,”35 in her translation, McGuckian proposes to support and stretch this interpretation while appropriating the “body” of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem in order to argue her own point.36 While the raciness of her version testifies to the change that Irish poetry had undergone since the heyday of censorship more than half a century previously, it tells us primarily about McGuckian’s own idea of muse poetry and poetic translation. If things are put more plainly in McGuckian’s version, it also overshadows the original to the extent that there is barely an echo of it perceptible as we read the translation. Some of the shifts are, of course, inevitable, such as the loss in the last stanza of the effect of gradual revelation that is secured in Irish through the placing of the adverb, and also the verb, before the object, or the foregoing of the inconclusiveness suggested through the passive voice in the penultimate line of the original. On the whole, however, the bravado and the foregrounded erotism of “The Prodigal Muse”—which abandons Ní Dhomhnaill’s attractive insinuation—is intentional: it serves to support McGuckian’s concept of poetry as an archetypal sexual act, her essential belief that all poetry is “erotic,” and her frequent matching of love and muse poetry. Note also the use of a third language and a Latinate word (patois ) on Ní Dhomhnaill’s part to comment on the macaronic mixture of English syntax and Irish phraseology in the first stanza of the poem: “patois Ghaelscoileanna Bhaile Átha Cliath.”37 While it might seem the product of rhythmic and stylistic requirements, McGuckian’s translation of “patois” into “lingo” (with its connotations of an incomprehensible, possibly foreign language) is in fact judicious: instead of referring to the features of macaronics, which are lost in the translation as it is impossible to render the anglicism of the relevant phrase in English, she refers to Irish as alien. No matter how corrupted by its proximity to the English grammar the original phrase might be (so that it sounds “foreign” to itself), the notion of otherness contained in McGuckian’s choice of “lingo” arguably corresponds with her own feelings about Irish. Although it may seem paradoxical, Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish original can be seen as feeding McGuckian’s creativity which is, as she has repeatedly claimed, driven by her continual awareness of the “native silence” of the Irish language and her declared desire for a language that is as close to Irish as possible.38 ∗ ∗ ∗

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Like Ní Dhomhnaill, McGuckian uses the space of the poem to come together with her muse. Yet, although she identifies the trope positively with a real person, her muse is not a stable concept, either. The encounter generally leaves her uncertain about her own role in the process in which “there is this other person, who you can’t actually speak to in real life, but you can in this space that you create . . . and it’s not something you can control.”39 In “The Rising Out” from Venus and the Rain (1984), this lack of control acquires a more definite shape. The muse, ironically presented as a disturbing element, is not only addressed directly but is reported as doing most of the talking. The poem is about a crisis of inspiration, telling of an uninvited visitor—an anti-muse pictured as the persona’s ominous alter ego. As such, it is an early enactment of the poet’s creative process as described in an interview around twenty years later: “and then you have to do that liminal thing again, of suspending the conscious, or letting the conscious and the subconscious drift in and out of each other, like dreaming.”40 Illustrating the—by definition uneasy—relationship between the author and her inspiration, the poem ironically deconstructs the whole muse concept: “My dream sister has gone into my blood / To kill the poet in me before Easter.”41 Strategically dismissing the anti-muse as a figment of her own imagination, the poet hopes that “She will recede with all my heroes”42 ; identified with her other creations, the “dream sister” no longer presents a threat. Participating in the persona’s fluid identity, the chimerical muse-saboteur can be contained “if my body can hold her bone to term.”43 But although it is suggested that she is the speaker’s “own invention,” a “dream,” it is not clear who is dreaming her—whether it is me or it. The parody consists in the contracted, elliptical argumentation, in the chain of apparently nonsensical utterances and citations that, on the one hand, seem to be randomly taken from various discourses and contexts, and on the other, appear inevitable and have the authority of absolute truths. All the disjointed soliloquies and out-of-place remarks about the weather amount to nonsense reminiscent of Alice and her wonderland where she is constantly presented with similar plain “truths.”44 Like Carroll’s Bruno or Queen Alice, McGuckian’s poet-speaker, connate with the poem’s object, keeps fading in and out of her subjectivity: . . . In my mind, I try and try to separate one Alice

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From the other, by their manner of moving, The familiar closing of the unseen room, The importunate rhythm of flowers.45

The intimacy of imagined places and narratives, however astonishing they may be, evokes the hazy, shifting world behind Alice’s looking glass. Like Carroll’s novels with their underlying chess-board structure and abrupt transitions between the vivid, yet obscure scenes, McGuckian’s highly allusive idiom accumulates apparently disparate images. Moreover, the poet often employs baffling architectural metaphors like “a window not made to open”46 or the “Door that we close, and no one opens, / That we open and no one closes.”47 Placing the “I” in this unstable, always shifting position between presence and absence, variable identities and states of mind, McGuckian relies on what theories of the prolific inconsistency of postmodernity and the hybridity of postcolonialism have termed “interstitial perspective.”48 It is the dual effect of the interstice as both a connecting and a dividing element, as representing separation from the self and, at the same time, enabling self-reflection that makes the window (and the same would apply to her doors and walls) such a privileged motif in McGuckian’s work. In “The Rising Out,” McGuckian construes the “I” and the other (whose speech is always reported by the poem’s speaker) as two separate voices, not only to show how the voice of the other is enfolded in the body of the speaker, but also to confirm her shifting identity. Those ambiguous thresholds that remind us of Ní Chuilleanáin’s revealing boundary lines and gaping pauses are crucial points in McGuckian’s obscure narratives.49 In their relative abundance, they may be said to represent the moment of transition between identities in which the speaking subject resides. Indeed, in the above poem it is immediately after the mention of “The familiar closing of the unseen room” that the potential of the anti-muse is recognised and the poet’s work comes to fruition in the final image. ∗ ∗ ∗ Throughout her work, Vona Groarke can often be found contemplating the world outside and within through a window or from a doorway. In the title poem of Juniper Street , she describes waving off the “laburnum school bus” from the porch and then going back inside to talk to her absent muse in the hope that her imagination might help her bridge

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space and time. It is this constant shifting and contact between different worlds—between inside and outside and between now and then—that signals the prominence of the liminal in Groarke’s work. In many of her poems, she ultimately shies away from what takes place out in the open and focuses on her aloneness, which is both lamentable and self-healing— it is in that state of perfect stillness achieved in solitude that she can come to terms with her sense of isolation. In “Annotated House” from the same collection, she admits to being baffled by the profusion of concepts and images offered by the window’s interface: The window is flush with words, but my page hangs limp as the snow cloud slouching over Carlo’s house. I am killing time between lines I have written in dust on the sill . . .50

The remoteness of the world visible through the pane is replicated in the confusion of what happens within, which is all distant and vague: the tangles of faded laundry in the basement, the unspecified noises from the kitchen, or indeed the cryptic “boiler downstairs” that seems to be “breaking news.”51 While it has been ascribed to masturbatory arousal,52 the speaker’s absent-mindedness and the abstruseness of her observations also correspond with Elizabeth Bishop’s aforementioned idea of “selfforgetful concentration” as necessary for creation.53 It is not my purpose here, however, to establish the motivations behind Groarke’s poems; instead, I would like to record how indeterminacy is one of the hallmarks of her work, not as a sign of irresolution but as a state of conscious anticipation that extends beyond the capacity of will. In her sixth collection, called laconically X , this purposeful ambivalence is presented as a prolonged state “[b]etween acts, mindful / of the present tense,” while the sense of time and self is dependent on what “has already occurred / or what might be going to.”54 As before, moreover, the poet-persona is frequently positioned by the “muslin” on a window,55 pondering the mutual mirroring of the outside world and her own inner world. However, while some of the poems in the previous collection, Spindrift , read as laments for the departed muse, X offers a celebration of meditation in solitude. If this enforced solitude is not always a preferred way of being, it is the matrix of poetry. Not surprisingly, it is in the state of apparent inactivity and in the variable marginal position that the poet occasionally meets and finds reconciliation with the muse.

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The opening poem, “A Pocket Mirror,” registers a number of moments like this whose fleetingness links them to the mirror’s illusory depth. The day the first snowdrop in my winter garden insists in its own insistent way that the promise I buried last September would finally come to light . . .56

In its transience and multifacetedness, a snowdrop can “[keep] faith with the world”—just as “a pocket mirror, / matt on one side, is true to life on the other.”57 In a single stanza, Groarke introduces several concepts and patterns that inform the entire volume: the seasonal setting predicts the motif of circularity in which every event reflects the preceding one and thus epitomises reminiscence. This particular “ghost” of a recalled pledge in “A Pocket Mirror” is the first of the many occasions in X on which Groarke illustrates her idea of ghosts as “almost-memories . . . something like traces, like a degree of physical presence.” She believes, after all, that “[e]very day depends on the ghost of the preceding day. Every dream is a ghost. And every breath.”58 Writing about ghosts thus amounts to an acceptance of the past with its wounds, just as writing about the past entails acknowledging the relevance of ghosts. The titular “x” is a multivalent image that recurs throughout the collection not only as a metaphor of the runaway muse or the Cartesian symbol for “unknown quantities”59 but in countless other figurations. In several places, we encounter the persona as she folds her memories between sheets, as if she wished to square the present with the past, and then retraces them in the crossed lines of the creases. In the eponymous “X,” she begins with an image of unbending angularity—“straight lines only / no curve or arc”—and futility: “a shape / signifying nothing.”60 Towards the end, however, the speaker imagines some way of coping with the bleakness and the absences marked with an “x”: she will start folding herself “along four even lines / into the centre of those days,” even as . . . the blades of a bedroom ceiling fan come to a perfectly obvious stop.61

The perceiving mind will not come to rest, however. Imagination prevails just as memories keep following on from one another.

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Some of the poems in the collection begin as keen experiments in just how many observations and reminiscences a “today” will hold, or in what can occur between one minute and the next. In “Midsummer,” today “. . . is a garden / with clothes on the line that smell of childhood.”62 Yet, “today” proves to be many other things, too, including “everything between.”63 Clearly, this parenthetical but all-embracing notion of “in between” as a synonym for everything that words and thoughts cannot convey is the impetus behind many of the poems in X . Together with the “x” standing for unknown quantities, it connotes the immensurability of our being in the world. In the latter stanza of “Midsummer,” the unrestrained daydreaming blends seamlessly into the limitless realm of dreams: . . . tonight there will be two hundred moons stowed between panes of double glazing in both my dovetailed dreams of being here.64

When asked about the prominence of the word “between” in her earlier poems, Groarke elaborated on the significance of the concept for her poetry: “I am more interested in the silences and the gaps and the absences than I am in the tumult of what happens. I believe in stillness more, much more, than I believe in things happening . . . I find it steadying.”65 In the same place, though in a different context, Groarke touches on her admiration for the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard. Her belief in the dynamic role of motionlessness and tranquillity in the imagination indeed seems to relate directly to his concept of intimate immensity as “a philosophical category of daydream”66 which we have noted in Chapter 5. For Groarke, these moments of halt and solitude—that are claimed as an ideal, productive state, albeit marked by violence and loss— afford two kinds of conciliation. The first is the acceptance of the fact that while to touch upon the vastness of experience is one of poetry’s main tasks, it can aspire to no more than a fleeting glance and “a skim of meaning,” as she has it in “The Front Door.”67 The second is the awareness that it is in those instants of suppressed volition that the “I” appears to be unaccompanied even by the self that inspiration occurs and ghosts are a benign presence. On such occasions, the imagining mind itself is a borderland territory in which the past and present meet, in which daydreaming blends with the elastic category of “in between” that can liven up, at times, with reflections of what is to come.

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If many of Groarke’s lyrics read as musings on the origin of poetry and lyric subjectivity, this makes them akin to the poems by McGuckian, Boland, Ní Chuilleanáin and Ní Dhomhnaill we have also examined in this chapter. Her approach, however, marks a shift in emphasis. As she tunes in for the silences and the “gaps” in time and consciousness in which nothing is supposed to happen but where speech and images originate, she does not seem to be in search of a generic or gendered lyric “I.” Rather, she is keen to record as many of its countless moods and expressions as those fleeting moments of stillness and stimulating solitude will allow. If these are also moments in which she has a chance to make up with her muse, it is above all to come to terms with its fundamental otherness and separation: . . . I am a shadow behind the glass and the ghost on the road is a ghost on the road[.]68

An encounter with the other may be an essential part of inspiration. But it is in the consequent turn back to one’s self and in the necessary acceptance of the hole left by the dismissed muse that the productive, and original, tensions of the lyric “I” arise. ∗ ∗ ∗ As we have seen in this chapter, the meeting with the muse mostly entails a bi-directional crossing of limits, at once leading away from one’s consciousness and inwards to the subconscious. Like theories of inspiration, lyric subjectivity is an essentially equivocal concept: while it relies on the consonance of the speaking “I” with the inner self, this productive unity entails a specific form of dislocation, often figured as an encounter with the other found on the margin of the self. These delicate transactions between depth and surface are often facilitated by a problematic threshold or interface, where inspiration can be attained but where it is also perpetually being lost. As if in keeping with Kristeva’s definition of the speaking subject as a subject “on trial” or a “subject-in-process,”69 the speakers of these poems seem to be as indefinite and elusive as their (mostly silent) inspiring other. Occasionally—and most notably in McGuckian—this incessantly morphing lyric “I” coincides with the

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muse. Quite frequently (as we have noted with Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Filleadh na Béithe” as well as with Groarke and previously with O’Reilly), the sexual polarity of the conventional muse invocation is reversed. In other cases, as in Ní Chuilleanáin, the poet foregrounds her historically silenced female subject by securing its place within her poem. Thus, she images the disappearance of the speaking “I,” which may coincide with a lack of reference to the figure of the muse. Wherever the muse emerges in these poems, it is evasive and evanescent, which, of course, conforms with the tradition. This is particularly pertinent in the case of Groarke whose source of inspiration dons the mask of a ghost and whose verse instantiates post-feminist rapprochement with the reformed muse. Notions of unattainability and silence inform various concepts of inspiration. Together with commentaries on the act of lyric proposition that make use of a figurative margin or threshold, they address the topics of translation, identity and poetic expression. In the next chapter, I will explore how the concept of poetic language, particularly as it touches upon the loss of Irish, is frequently identified with the notion of the inspiring other. As Mutlu Konuk Blasing notes, poetry already speaks a kind of “second language.” Since language constitutes both the “outside” and the “core” of poetry, poetry collapses the distinction between the other and the self, thus representing “the discourse of the constitutive alienation of the subject in language.”70 In the context of Irish poetry, this notion of a second language and the subject’s linguistic alienation is recorded on the grid of linguistic fissure and anxiety. As it makes poetry communicable, language pertains to the “surface” of poetry. Yet, at the same time, it constitutes its very essence. While we become human through the “universal historicizing . . . experience of acquiring a language,”71 without language, without our mastery of a mother tongue, there would clearly be no history. “By far the greatest mass of the past as we experience it,” writes George Steiner in After Babel, “is a verbal construct.”72 But if there is no history without language, what language can be used if there is no history, if a history has been “silenced,” or, for that matter, if a language has been silenced in history? While these are all questions that these poets ask, the following chapters will also explore the significance of linguistic integrity and the concept of translation for their creative process.

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Notes 1. Patricia Waugh, “Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism: Gender and Autonomy Theory,” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Patricia Waugh (London: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 194. 2. Eavan Boland, “Author’s Preface,” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), xi. 3. Boland, “The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma,” Object Lessons, 247. 4. Boland, “New Wave 2: Born in the 50s: Irish Poets of the Global Village,” in Irish Poetry since Kavanagh, ed. Theo Dorgan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 137. 5. Boland, “Suburban Woman,” New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 63. 6. Boland, “Suburban Woman,” 65. 7. Boland, “Suburban Woman,” 65. 8. Barthes’s essay first appeared in English in 1967 in the American journal Aspen. See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” trans. Stephen Heath, Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–8. 9. Boland, “Dilemma,” 240. 10. Boland, “The Muse Mother,” New Collected Poems, 103. 11. Boland, “Muse Mother,” 103. 12. See Boland, “Muse Mother,” 102. 13. Boland, “Muse Mother,” 103. 14. Boland, “Envoi,” New Collected Poems, 150. 15. Boland, “Envoi,” 151. 16. David Wheatley, “Changing the Story: Eavan Boland and Literary History,” The Irish Review 31 (Spring/Summer 2004): 105. 17. Boland, “Muse Mother,” 103. 18. Boland, “Muse Mother,” 103. 19. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “The Absent Girl,” Selected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008), 30. 20. Boland, “ The Woman Poet in a National Tradition,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 76.302 (Summer 1987): 156. 21. Boland, “National Tradition,” 156. 22. 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), 186. 23. Ní Chuilleanáin in Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, Women Creating Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 103. 24. Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800– 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 173.

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25. Ní Dhomhnaill in Loretta Qwarnström, “Travelling Through Liminal Spaces: An Interview with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Nordic Irish Studies 3.1 (2004): 70. 26. Qwarnström, 70. 27. Qwarnström, 70. 28. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “Filleadh na Béithe” (The Prodigal Muse), trans. Medbh McGuckian, The Water Horse (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2000), 90–1. 29. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Filleadh,” 90–1. 30. Ní Dhomhnaill in Laura O’Connor, “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995), accessed 20 May 2011, http://connection.ebscohost.com/ c/literary-criticism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-lauraoconnor. 31. For a discussion of the prominence of liminality in Ní Dhomhnaill’s work, see Tríona Ní Shíocháin, “An tairseachúlacht bhuan agus múnlú na suibiachta i nuafhilíocht na Gaelainne,” Léann 4 (2016): 63–84. 32. Qwarnström, 71. 33. Mary O’Connor, “Lashings of the Mother Tongue: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Anarchic Laughter,” in The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, ed. Theresa O’Connor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 151. 34. Frank Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 186. 35. M. O’Connor, 168. 36. See Rióna Ní Fhrighil’s account of McGuckian’s translations of Ní Dhomhnaill. Ní Fhrighil, Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí: Filíocht Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2008), 238. 37. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Filleadh,” 90. 38. McGuckian, “Cathal’s Voice,” Had I a Thousand Lives (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2003), 34. 39. McGuckian in Elin Holmsten, “Double Doors: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian,” Nordic Irish Studies 3.1 (2004): 96. 40. Holmsten, 94. 41. McGuckian, “The Rising Out,” Venus and the Rain (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2001), 36. 42. McGuckian, “Rising Out,” 36. 43. McGuckian, “Rising Out,” 36. 44. See Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 14. 45. McGuckian, “Rising Out,” 36. 46. McGuckian, “Ode to a Poetess,” Venus and the Rain, 13.

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47. McGuckian, “On Not Being Your Lover,” Venus and the Rain, 19. 48. See, for instance, Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge Classics, 2004), 4, 24. For a discussion of McGuckian’s “interstitial subjectivity” see Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 91, 118. 49. See Ní Chuilleanáin, “St Margaret of Cortona,” Selected Poems, 72. 50. Vona Groarke, “Annotated House,” Juniper Street (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2006), 55. 51. Groarke, “Annotated House,” 55. 52. See Selina Guinness, “The Annotated House: Feminism and Form,” in Irish Poetry After Feminism, ed. Justin Quinn (Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008), 74–8. 53. Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Twayne, 1966), 66. 54. Groarke, “Interval,” X (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2014), 73. 55. Groarke, “Aubade, Winter Solstice,” X , 67–8. 56. Groarke, “A Pocket Mirror,” X , 11. 57. Groarke, “A Pocket Mirror,” 11. 58. Groarke in Hedwig Schwall, “‘How Do You Make a Teapot Be Intellectually Interesting?’ An Interview with Vona Groarke,” Irish University Review 43.2 (2013): 294. 59. By way of epigraph, Groarke quotes from Florian Cajori’s A History of Mathematical Notations (Chicago, 1928; republished by Dover Publications, 2011): “René Descartes’ La Géométrie (1637) introduces the use of the first letters of the alphabet to signify unknown quantities.” See Groarke, X , 9. 60. Groarke, “X,” X , 14. 61. Groarke, “X,” 15. 62. Groarke, “Midsummer,” X , 36. 63. Groarke, “Midsummer,” 36. 64. Groarke, “Midsummer,” 36. 65. Schwall, 295. 66. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 183. 67. Groarke, “The Front Door,” X , 35. 68. Groarke, “The Ghost on the Road,” X , 63. 69. Julia Kristeva, The Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 22, 25. 70. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 13. 71. Blasing, 12. 72. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 30.

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Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–8. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Batten, Guinn. “Boland, McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin and the Body of the Nation.” In The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell, 169–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge Classics, 2004. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Boland, Eavan. New Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. ———. “New Wave 2: Born in the 50s: Irish Poets of the Global Village.” In Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh, edited by Theo Dorgan, 136–46. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996. ———. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. ———. “The Woman Poet in a National Tradition.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 76.302 (Summer 1987): 148–58. Boyle Haberstroh, Patricia. Women Creating Women. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Groarke, Vona. Juniper Street. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2006. ———. X . Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2014. Guinness, Selina. “The Annotated House: Feminism and Form.” In Irish Poetry After Feminism, ed. Justin Quinn, 74–8. Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008. Kristeva, Julia. The Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. McGuckian, Medbh. Had I a Thousand Lives. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2003. ———. Venus and the Rain. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2001. Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan. Selected Poems. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. The Water Horse. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2000. Ní Fhrighil, Rióna. Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí: Filíocht Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2008. Ní Shíocháin, Tríona. “An tairseachúlacht bhuan agus múnlú na suibiachta i nuafhilíocht na Gaelainne.” Léann 4 (2016): 63–84. O’Connor, Mary. “Lashings of the Mother Tongue: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Anarchic Laughter.” In The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, edited by Theresa O’Connor, 149–70. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

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O’Connor, Laura. “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995): 581–614. Accessed 20 May 2011. http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary-critic ism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-laura-oconnor. Qwarnström, Loretta. “Travelling Through Liminal Spaces: An Interview with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Nordic Irish Studies 3.1 (2004): 65–74. Schwall, Hedwig. “‘How Do You Make a Teapot Be Intellectually Interesting?’ An Interview with Vona Groarke.” Irish University Review 43.2 (2013): 288– 306. Sewell, Frank. Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stevenson, Anne. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Twayne, 1966. Vendler, Helen. Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Waugh, Patricia, “Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism: Gender and Autonomy Theory.” In Postmodernism: A Reader, edited by Patricia Waugh, 189–204. London: Basil Blackwell, 1992. Wheatley, David. “Changing the Story: Eavan Boland and Literary History.” The Irish Review 31 (Spring/Summer 2004): 104–20.

CHAPTER 7

Original in Translation: Poets Between Languages

Exploring the effects that the encounter—or the lack of it—with the muse had on various poetic styles, I noted in Chapters 5 and 6 how Irish sometimes escapes characterisation as being endangered or on the brink of extinction and becomes part of the conscious search for the expression of the lyric “I” as well as a source of inspiration in its own right. The main focus of this chapter is on language which is present as the vehicle of the poem as well as a factor determining its content. Besides its fundamental function in poetry and inspired composition, language is instrumental in not simply confirming but also calling into question one’s status as a communal being and one’s sense of belonging. As Mutlu Konuk Blasing remarks, the speaking “I,” “whose position any reader occupies, is a radically social construct within a linguistic community.”1 I argue that the language factor is impossible to disregard in a discussion of Irish poetry, in which the notion of a linguistic community is often fraught with complex oppositions.2 It is seminal to consider Irish–English oppositions when examining the genealogy of the Irish lyric “I.” Below I will discuss the relationship of poets to this linguistic community (perceived as more or less cleft), to their own poetic medium and to the Irish language which is sometimes construed as the lost national language or even a dispossessed notional “mother tongue.” Issues of linguistic choice and identity inform all the works in question, albeit with varying intensity. The concept of the liminal as a point of entry and site of © The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_7

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change is also relevant to the understanding of the two languages of Irish poetry as contiguous or discrete: it prompts us to examine their various interactions that I argue to be reflected in some of the texts discussed. In the context of Irish poetry, an important occasion of such proximity—at times idealised and at times condemned—is translation. I will examine the term for its literal and metaphorical applications and argue how its various effects inevitably interact and complement each other in any cultural exchange. Beginning with a look at poetry by Aifric Mac Aodha whose work systematically explores various interlingual and intralingual tensions, the chapter illustrates to what extent similar threshold positions can be perceived as inspiring to authors such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian, Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Irish as the Source and Target: Aifric Mac Aodha The theme of inspiration, together with critical assimilation of the tradition, determines the poetic debut of Aifric Mac Aodha, Gabháil Syrinx (The Capture of Syrinx, 2010). Although it includes poems spanning a period of almost ten years, the collection is compact in terms of form, expression and subject matter. Still, the initial impression of solidity— supported by the strong rhythm of Mac Aodha’s verse—gives way upon a closer reading to the idea of fractured temporality. As the poet herself says, her texts are the result of an attempt to transpose the historical literary tradition to modern Irish. The features of anachronism that follow from her study of older poetic metres are countered by the poet’s unconventional use of Irish syntax and lexis: for her, writing in Irish always entails recovery of a language that has been construed alternately as flourishing and as moribund.3 Mac Aodha was born in 1979 in Dublin into a family in which the Irish language, folklore and literature were shared interests. She studied at University College Dublin and lectured there in Old and modern Irish. For several years, Mac Aodha was part of the team of translators working on the New English-Irish Dictionary launched by Foras na Gaeilge in 2013 and has been an Assistant Editor for An Gúm, a foremost publisher of Irish-language books in Ireland responsible, inter alia, for the publication of The New Irish-English Dictionary. She has also served as poetry editor for various literary periodicals, including Stinging Fly, Gorse and Comhar. Poised between the two languages, Mac Aodha embraces the language issue and the often controversial subject of poetic translation

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from Irish into English both as a polemic stance and an enabling factor in her writing. Accordingly, she promotes the idea of poetic writing as “translation” between languages, levels of consciousness, cultural epochs and literary traditions. The opening epigram “File” (Poet) is a direct confrontation of Irish literary legacy. This satirical account of an idiosyncratic inspiration ritual functions as the volume’s epigraph or overture. Its blunt description of the appalling practice, allegedly found in the oral tradition—“De bhéaloideas na hÉireann é go n-itheadh an file amhfheoil an chait roimh dhul i mbun pinn dó” (Irish folklore records that the poet would eat the raw flesh of a cat before composing)4 —is in tune with the prevalent self-mocking tone of Mac Aodha’s poetry. Combined with Mac Aodha’s compact, contemporary tone, the reference serves to effectively telescope the tradition. The notion of a nexus between the literary past and the present, between what is borrowed and what is new is even stronger if we view the poem as a sarcastic response to the famous ninth-century Irish lyric “Pangur Bán” about a fruitful alliance between a scholar and his faithful cat who each practise their special art—“bíth a menma-sam fri seilgg, / mu menma céin im saincheirdd” (his mind is set on hunting, / my mind on my special craft).5 Rather than taking inspiration from the nimble cat, Mac Aodha’s poet prepares to devour the animal, fur, claws and all. But while the contrasting arrangement and mood of the two poems is self-evident, it is interesting to also take into account the rather popular practice of emulating “Pangur Bán” in English. As Seamus Heaney, who himself authored a translation of “Pangur Bán,” concedes, “Irish writers like to try their hand at [the poem], not in order to outdo the previous versions, but simply to get a more exact and intimate grip on the canonical goods.”6 Indeed, Mac Aodha’s “File” does make us think twice about “Pangur Bán”: if the sense of gritty immediacy in her lyric stands in contrast to the “donnish” style of the Old Irish poem, the two texts are obviously connected through their shared concern with the hard-to-come-by fruits of the “stealthy art” of concentration.7 Although not strictly a “translation,” Mac Aodha’s “File”—as a naturalistic, “wild-gone” image of Dionysian furor poeticus —is the first of the various expositions of the slipperiness of poetic inspiration that come up throughout the collection. Many of the ensuing poems follow a similar pattern of introducing a literary or mythological “source” followed by a modern “version” or a personal commentary.

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Indeed, translation or transposition is the principal mode not only of this first collection, but also of Mac Aodha’s approach to poetry in general and, specifically, to poetry in Irish. In her contribution to the blog of the American literary journal Columbia, she remarks that writing in the language “forces you to think about translation, for practical reasons as well as artistic ones.”8 The article shows she is reconciled with the fact that her poems will mostly be published with a translation and that many of her readers will not have read the original. This pragmatic attitude to translation is Mac Aodha’s way of coming to terms with the fact that she writes in a minority language—a situation that has led others to discourage English translations of their poetry in Ireland. If Biddy Jenkinson prefers not to be published in English as “a small rude gesture to those who think that everything can be harvested and stored without loss in an English-speaking Ireland,”9 Mac Aodha forestalls such thinking by declaring translation part of her creative method. Reasoning of this kind, however, poses more questions than it clarifies. The first uncertainty is related to her target audience. While she knows that it would be pointless to “yearn for the ideal Irish reader,” Mac Aodha’s “translations” are triggered by something other than concern for the generic, ignorant anglophone and it is thus possible that she has no specific type of reader in mind at all. Her lyric “I” speaks to itself or to no one in particular, engrossed in its attempts to reveal the self to the self. Another question relates to the indeterminate nature of her “source.” If translation is the basis for her creative approach, Mac Aodha’s “original” is her medium that is loaded with ambiguities. Bordering between the Irish of historical literary tradition and contemporary usage, her poetic language is innovative and extremely flexible. Her reliance on the old metres can be detected in the close attention paid to all sounds: in her frequent use of alliteration, assonance and consonance. Nevertheless, besides these formal characteristics, it is the fluid, multilayered quality of her poetic narratives and the absence of all explanation that makes them sound archaic at points. Mac Aodha’s poetry is reminiscent of the associative wisdom of the Irish triads and legends not so much through its themes and imagery as in its combination of pedestrian tone and contemporary lexis with the sense that much is being held back. Despite occasional allusions to established tropes like “. . . an chailleach / Le cniotáil an bhrait” (the hag / knitting her cloak) in “La Tricoteuse,”10 and to old-time rituals and seanfhocail, touched upon, for example, in “Briseadh an Dúchais”11 (Breach of Heritage), the

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obvious truth is that if it were written in English, Mac Aodha’s poetry would be much more difficult to localise. Yet, although it might seem that her language choice is meant to sustain the Irishness of her poetry, she constantly disrupts this image by unorthodox usage, mixing archaisms with coinages, colloquialisms and equivocal syntax. Moreover, not regarding herself a native speaker of Irish, at the start of her career Mac Aodha described her position in relation to the language of her poetry as that of an outsider.12 Accordingly, she has consciously (if inevitably) disregarded the requirements of caint na ndaoine, i.e. using one of the recognised dialects of contemporary Irish, championed by the older schools of criticism.13 Mac Aodha’s reliance on translation manifests itself in her distancing from her medium and its simultaneous adoption as the ultimate impetus behind her work. Her method is thus in line with Walter Benjamin’s description of the purpose of translation as “merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other,”14 as well as with his insistence on its curative potential. Reconciled with the obvious fact that translation cannot have any influence on the original, she is happy to operate in a sphere that proceeds from the original. Consequently, her poems, which she describes as “translations,” secure the continuance of the original. If her source is a language that is “technically” dead, her work, in Benjamin’s terms, constitutes its “survival” (Überleben).15 Mac Aodha’s poetic idiom is at once the original and the product of translation. She is her own translator— not primarily in the sense of translating from her native English into Irish but in her attempt to act as a translator for the language of her ancestors “into a vibrant living version of their Irish.”16 While I have concentrated on this last objective of Mac Aodha’s writing, she insists that her straddling of the border between English and Irish is equally important. This aspect of her situation indeed does come into play when she has her work translated into English.17 Commenting on the collaboration between Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon and what she terms their “fruitful poetic team,” Mac Aodha argues that [t]he poetry resides not simply in the original poem, nor can it be located in the translation. It exists between them in a kind of dynamic tension between the source poem and its English version, in the gaps, historical and linguistic, between the Irish way of expressing an idea conceived in Irish and in that idea’s translated equivalent.18

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Mac Aodha’s work aspires to “translation” in both the aforementioned senses. But while Irish is in part the “source,” it can hardly be considered the “target language” since “target” implies finality and completeness. Asserting, like Ní Dhomhnaill, that she is unable to write poetry in English, she calls Irish her “literary home,” while at the same time admitting that for all its familiarity, she finds it “full of exotic delights.”19 If Mac Aodha, who approached the field of Irish poetry after the rise of feminism in the last three decades of the twentieth century, does not explore the tradition in order to confirm her stance as a woman, there are contexts in which she still needs to struggle for her position as an Irish-language poet (and many in which she finds herself promoting the position of a female speaker). Identifying “translation” as a determining element in her poetics, she removes herself from the margin where she may feel relegated on account of her language choice, and finds a position halfway between the languages, claiming both simultaneously. Whether the shifting dichotomy is between Irish and English or between Irish as the language of Ireland’s past and Irish as the language of her poetry, Mac Aodha makes the intersection the centre of her writing and the core of her method and subject matter. Her insistence on translation as inherent to her poetics is intended as yet another “small rude gesture” to those who believe that Irish might be preserved if it could be spared contact with English and those who would prefer the two language traditions to have existed, as Terence Brown has put it, in a “state of quarantine.”20 In Mac Aodha’s approach, the idea of the inevitable but salutary foreignness between languages applies not only to interlingual relations but, more importantly, to the language of her own writing. Her poetry thus epitomises a reconciled acceptance of the Gaelic past no longer in existence but also of the notion that as it undergoes constant change, language itself is translation. Consider the title sequence of the collection, “Scéal Syrinx” (Syrinx Story), in which language—its opaqueness as well as its outward, communicative thrust—is as an inspiring factor. The premise of “Scéal Syrinx” is the Greek myth of the god Pan who, unsuccessful in his courtship and pursuit of the nymph, turned her into the famous reed flute. Yet the poem—a sequence of three non-symmetrically organised poems inspired by the nymph’s fate—is no simple retelling of the myth: it is as much a reflection on the theme of inspiration as it is a tribute to nature’s endless transformations. There are several ways in which Syrinx, in her metamorphosed reed shape, can be attributed with the role of the muse. The most

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obvious one, of course, is to see her as inspiring Pan’s song. But what is perhaps of greater interest here is her bearing on the poet herself. At first, it might appear that Mac Aodha identifies with the nymph as she is about to be captured. Yet through the imagery of constantly shifting light, the moving leaves and wings, and the fleeting shapes of waves, it gradually becomes apparent that she has made Syrinx her muse. The ephemerality of the natural world is closely linked with the elusiveness of the runaway Syrinx. But although she stands for the fleetingness of inspiration, the poem with its flowing imagery, veiled contours and indecipherable causality, serves as its perfect embodiment. Indeed, almost every image in the three-part sequence is received through a liminal point or state of being: “Spágfaidh an eala aníos / Ó mhínshruth a scátha” (The swan flip-flops its way / out of its shade’s smooth flow); “Scarfaidh cúr coipthe / De chraiceann an uisce” (The frothy foam will part / along the water’s skin); “Critheann an solas / Ar chothrom an locha” (The light shakes slightly / flush with the lake).21 Though clumsy-footed (“spágach”), the swan’s exit at the very beginning of the sequence signals quiet triumph. Ultimately, all is cohesion: “Feileann an t-iomlán / Do theorainn na luachra” (The belt of reeds / hoops all this in).22 The latter, self-enclosed image anticipates the final section of the sequence with its meta-poetic material and the sudden revelation of the speaking “I”: Ligim uaim le haimsir Pictiúr seo na bruinnille: .....

In time I let it go, the likeness of this maiden. .....

Anáil mhná, ní scaoileann Ach eadarghlór ar tinneall: I láthair na gabhála, Ceiliúrann sí is critheann.

A woman’s breath. She readies a half-voice that will sing. It’s time: her body shaken, abandon as she’s taken.23

Not only does this “epilogue” sum up the whole sequence but it also brings together several of the historical theories of artistic inspiration— from the trope of the majestic and desirable yet unattainable female muse through the perception of creative genius as a life-giving breath to the localisation of the source of inspiration in the composing mind. If, however, the poet can be identified with the nymph and Syrinx is her

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muse, what does it mean if she now wants to let her muse go? Obviously, we are glimpsing neither the denouement of the Syrinx story nor a series of beautiful natural images but a parable of Mac Aodha’s poetic maturing. While the lines recall the ostensible renouncement of the muse on the part of the poet’s female predecessors, the final message is that she will sing her song, not in spite of anyone else but despite every attempt to stop her. She is no longer in need of a mediating muse and releases the image of the girl just as she describes her capture. She readies a half-voice and, pretending to allow it be seized, in fact sets it free. Mac Aodha’s poetry illustrates that there is rarely a single, coherent identity or, indeed, only one other involved when a lyric “I” is speaking. Her poetic oneness always encompasses at least two others—that is, English and Irish. The latter, of course, can be divided into a long chain of possible compound identities—such as the Irish she writes and the Irish she speaks or the language of older Irish writings and the Irish that she views as a viable poetic idiom. Ambivalences of this type are common to most poets of different languages but in relation to Irish they have a special urgency. One of the possible ways of reading the closing section of “Scéal Syrinx,” then, is to associate the seemingly subdued half-voice with the Irish language which is lost as the language of the every day for most of the island’s population. In her highly original “translations,” Mac Aodha perpetuates the language. Associated with the notion of the original, the language itself is construed as a source of inspiration. But if Irish is her muse, the latter’s dismissal at the end of “Scéal Syrinx” does not mean the poet is taking leave of or giving up on the language. Mac Aodha’s settling on a position between English and Irish may be ascribed to the poet knowing her place within the Irish-language tradition and community rather than taken as a sign of despondency or rebelliousness. Yet her realistic acceptance of a position at the beneficial threshold has proven to be imaginatively stimulating. The elusiveness of the muse and the corresponding motif of unpredictability imply other binding characteristics, among them the prevalent opacity of language and the tendency towards abstraction. In “Buaine” (Permanence) from the “Athar agus Iníon” (Father and Daughter) sequence, this non-representational tone combines with the idea of the unattainability yet irreversibility of human bonds as the father’s love for the child is compared to a yarn of lamb’s wool caught up in bramble (Mar shnáithín uainolla, / É i bhfostú i ndriseog).24 In Mac Aodha’s

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poetry, images and events seem transient inasmuch as they represent no more than a fraction of time captured in words. They live on, nevertheless, thanks to the intensity of feeling and their place on the page. Still, autobiographical motifs, identifiable through the poems’ titles and occasional dedications, elucidate nothing.25 The ubiquitous snatches of stories and personal histories are mere cover for what takes place under the surface: what determines the content and the form of these poems is the prevailing sense of secrecy that nevertheless connotes meaning. Semantic indeterminacy based on sparse syntax and contextual ellipsis is the nexus of Mac Aodha’s writing. In this concept, words and images can be mere pointers to meaning—elusive cicerones, often misleading and always only followed from afar: “Ní féidir gur uaimse / An teachta sin romham” (that messenger ahead / cannot be from me).26 Accepting the moment of mystery is an essential part of belief. As Mac Aodha claims in “Focal Faoisimh” (The Soothing Word), poetic images, just like myths and superstitions recorded in language, simply command belief. The lyric opens with an image of a colony of mice swarming about wooden sleepers; this is how it concludes: “Tagadh an traein, sa deireadh / Ach roimhe sin, asláithriú” (Let the train come in the end, / but before that: displacement).27 “Focal Faoisimh” testifies to the poet’s persuasion that there is no point in asking verbal images questions about their significance since they will tell a different story each time and always mean more than just one thing. In this sense, it is also a parable of the instant of “removal” (another equivalent of “asláithriú”) that completes the act of translation—that most profound but ultimately most reductive mode of reading—when countless other guessed-at meanings are effaced just as one equivalent is chosen. Still, Mac Aodha’s baffling referentiality and occasional hermeticism serve to prolong this moment (just before the whistle blows) charged with conceptual possibility. Mac Aodha believes that language, like poetry, develops and functions by way of analogy. If language is translation, then translation can be poetry. Since Irish had been excluded from various areas of public life and aspects of modern usage, writing about twenty-first-century life requires finding new words for new phenomena. The poet thus becomes an etymologist as well as a coiner of new expressions and meanings. Lexicographers in Irish, she points out, have “a more active role in the forging of the language than their counterparts in English . . . To my mind that wilful renewing of the language at the most basic level of vocabulary is an act of poetry.”28 Mac Aodha’s penchant for dictionaries is at the base

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of the purposeful ambivalence of her verse. Derived from the wealth of connotations and poetic potential behind individual words, it perpetuates uncertainty through linguistically ambiguous expression, thus confirming the crystallising role of language in her writing. ∗ ∗ ∗ In 2016, Mac Aodha was awarded the prestigious Oireachtas Prize for the body of poems that were to form her second collection in Irish. Yet, instead, they were included in a dual-language publication by The Gallery Press in October 2017, along with a selection from Gabháil Syrinx. In this way, Mac Aodha circumvented the general practice of Irish-language poets of having their work appear in single-language book format before going into a bilingual edition. The move, I suggest, corresponds with Mac Aodha’s previous acknowledgement of translation as an inherent part of her poetic consciousness. Accompanied by David Wheatley’s versions, the poems in the collection entitled Foreign News show a continuing trend towards linguistic pluralism and a new level of cultural in-betweenness in Mac Aodha’s writing. Like Ní Dhomhnaill and other poets of Irish before her, she also acknowledges that translation is vital for those writing in a minority language and presents many of her poems as meditations on what it means to be such a writer in an increasingly globalised world. The idea of translation seems to enhance the “joys of writing poetry in Irish” to which Mac Aodha alludes in the subtitle of her Columbia blog. More equivocally, the linguistic fissure and the related issues of translation and originality are essential for most of the other poets I have so far considered in this study, too. As in Mac Aodha, the relevance of translation can be detected on the interlingual as well as intralingual levels; its bearing on their work is based in the prevalence of the phenomenon in Irish poetry from the 1980s onwards.29 Having discussed Mac Aodha’s original method at some length, I have shown that her choice of language is a strategic move with significant political as well as creative and theoretical consequences. I will now briefly review these other poets’ attitudes to the “other” language and its implications for their respective poetic medium, and reinspect some of the poems discussed in the previous chapters for expressions of these attitudes. This is not only to demonstrate how Mac Aodha’s clearly defined stance differs from the outlooks of the

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others, but primarily to argue that it can mostly be perceived as a continuation and a natural outcome of processes and constellations that formed in Irish poetry in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

Reinventing the Language: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Medbh McGuckian, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Eavan Boland The subject of translation is particularly relevant in the case of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, not simply because she writes in Irish but also because her close collaboration with some of the leading anglophone poets, including Medbh McGuckian and Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as Paul Muldoon, Michael Hartnett, Ciaran Carson and Michael Longley, might be seen as a clear precedent for Mac Aodha’s positive stance towards translation. Yet there are important differences in the two poets’ approach to the language which they profess to communicate through their verse. Mac Aodha, who began publishing her work after the turn of the millennium, has not had her work assessed according to criteria “established from beyond the grave”30 —promoted by critics such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi—or on the basis of the proximity of her style to the language of the Gaeltacht. Ní Dhomhnaill, conversely, has been hailed as an advocate of those very standards.31 Both poets make ample use of the idiomatic character of Irish and include references to the Gaelic tradition. But while the central tension in Mac Aodha’s poetry hinges upon the contrast between her occasional new coinages and civil contemporary setting, and a loose application of traditional bardic forms, Ní Dhomhnaill has generally abstained from using complex Irish-language metres; she engages with the tradition mainly on the level of subject matter. Although she claims that her “primary audience is those who read my work in Irish only” and that she has always expected to be able to count her readers “on the fingers of one hand,”32 Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry has become so closely associated with the English version on the opposite page as to lead some of her anglophone audiences to ask why she would insist on reading (and writing) her poems in Irish at all. This is hardly surprising when we consider that only a minority of her readers will be completely unreliant on the English translation. If she has been termed the most “visible” of the modern Irish-language poets33 and has been assigned with a “space apart” in the world of Irish and transatlantic

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poetry,34 it is primarily because most of her work has appeared in bilingual editions since the publication of Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta in 1986. Consequently, Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry became extremely popular in what Michael Cronin calls the Irish “translation risorgimento”35 of the 1980s and its aftermath in the following decade. Particularly since the publication of Pharaoh’s Daughter (which included translations by thirteen different Irish poets) in 1990, critics have commented on the inextricability of her work from translation. At the same time, however, many of them have pointed to the considerable looseness of some of the actual translations, describing her Irish lyrics as mere “starting points” from which the others proceed to write poems that are “emphatically theirs,”36 referring to Ní Dhomhnaill as a source of inspiration or the muse37 and wondering where her own voice can be found in this variety of tone and style.38 Some went so far as to suggest that these liberties are the inevitable result of the fact that some of her translators are simply “far superior” poets and that some of the translations ultimately “amount to a criticism of her limitations.”39 While critics have duelled on her behalf,40 Ní Dhomhnaill has been nonchalant about the liberties that her translators, not least McGuckian and Muldoon, have taken. On occasion, she has commented on the drawbacks of translation and her bilingual editions: “most of the translated poems, for example, are taken out of context, and the architectonics of the original publications therefore mislaid.” She also concedes, however, that “the whole act of translation seems to me vitally important. What we gain is still so much greater than what we lose.”41 Much of the Irish-language criticism, and some of the anglophone criticism, too, has bemoaned a tendency towards the “excessive,” “domineering” fluency of poetic translations from Irish into English.42 Whatever the relevance of such reproaches in general, they seem to be substantiated in the light of some of the seamless English translations of Ní Dhomhnaill’s work that do indeed appear to eclipse the Irish original. There is more to it, however. Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry tends to draw on the oral tradition and folklore rather than the values of the historical literary canon. Moreover, she has cited this overlapping of the reality and the “otherworld” allegedly still echoed in spoken Irish as precisely the quality she has been missing in English. In her view, this framework that . . . exists in Irish to describe and deal with the “otherworld” is . . . virtually untranslatable due to an inbuilt bias in the English

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language against the validity and tangibility of otherworldly experience. Put into English this perfectly serious and alternative state of consciousness is reduced to superstition or “Pisroguery.”43

As her poetic language and expression are grafted onto that alternative state of consciousness (sometimes referred to as instinctive, strictly non-rational and even “preverbal”44 ), they are easily considered to be “virtually untranslatable.” Indeed, as she promotes pagan orality over the alleged “prosiness,” in other words inadequacy, of English, Ní Dhomhnaill seems to suggest that her work is above translation altogether.45 Even if the author herself is implicitly aware that a “true” translation of her poetry into English would reduce her work to mere superstitious gibberish, it does not follow that the independence of much of her work in English from the Irish original is to be taken as the only plausible and constructive option. This is not to extol or disparage the existing translations of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, or to subscribe to the view that it is beyond translation. Rather, I suggest that in her coupling of feminist issues with those of language (as she links Irish to a primeval hag energy and construes it as the only proper mother tongue, albeit lost for most of the population) she is prone to what we might term “Celtic haughtiness.” For all its ironic distancing and her message of “boo to taboos,”46 her approach verges at times on gender-essentialist and language-essentialist mysticism.47 If this has not discouraged the multiple translations of Ní Dhomhnaill’s work, her poems concerned with the transposition of Irish as the language of the oral legend into modernity have posed a real challenge to translators.48 Like Mac Aodha several decades later, Ní Dhomhnaill has from the outset referred to the sphere of the poem in Irish as a point of contact with her creativity and with her inner self; she has asserted that Irish is indispensable for poetic composition, and also for the integrity of her own personality, “that is maybe so deeply fractured that otherwise it might not survive as a thinking entity.”49 Nevertheless, Mac Aodha’s self-irony in choosing the outsider’s position has nothing in common with the indignant resignation of an exile resounding in Mhac an tSaoi’s phrase “[b]ím balbh i dhá theanga” (I’m speechless in two languages), something Ní Dhomhnaill has been known to agree with.50 Mac Aodha’s tactical move of claiming “translation” as part of her poetic method might indeed spare her the uncertainties surrounding the translations and dual-language publications of Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish oeuvre. Arguably,

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Mac Aodha’s starting position on the outside from where she was able to face Benjamin’s metaphorical “high forest” of the language has had its advantages.51 It has perhaps allowed her to make better use of her liminal position and marginality as an Irish-language poet than Ní Dhomhnaill is able to in her tendency to internalise the language and to readily succumb to its attractions and drives. ∗ ∗ ∗ Although this is not immediately apparent, the linguistic binary drives the poetry of Medbh McGuckian to some extent. The author of some of Ní Dhomhnaill’s more questionable “translations,”52 she has expressed frustration with her medium and her wish “to reach an English that would be so purified of English that it would be Irish.”53 Yet, while she claims to aspire to the language, there is no discernible influence of Irish in her experimental, formally elaborate English verse. McGuckian’s poetic idiom may be disjointed and deconstructed, but this is not through proximity to Irish syntax, lexis or the influence of traditional bardic forms. In fact, it is precisely her attention to the generative potential of language and the sound of words rather than their meaning, along with a syntax that is continually undermined by non sequitur, which affirms McGuckian as one of the most original voices in anglophone Irish poetry. Like her notion of this elusive “other person” whom she admits she needs for every poem, the shadow of Irish as the lost language of the (united) Irish past is a continuing source of inspiration. Similarly to the uncontrollable muse McGuckian claims to be able to speak to in her poems, she expresses her concern for the fate of the Irish language, although its structures and sounds leave no discernible imprint on the page. I propose, therefore, that it is possible to compare McGuckian’s self-professed reliance on the Irish language to the notion of the poet’s unattainable yet unforgettable other, the “dream sister” that metamorphoses incessantly and is behind her poetic identity. Interestingly, the interiorising of the difficult muse in “The Rising Out” (examined in detail in Chapter 6) involves a gesture that at once dismisses the problematic trope and prefigures the idea of poetic fruition in the last stanza of the poem. The speaking voice metamorphosing between the silenced other and the anticipated fulfilled self resembles Mac Aodha’s half-voice and its covert triumph at the close of “Scéal Syrinx” from which I quote earlier in this chapter. Mac Aodha’s word choice in

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the last line of the poem is symptomatic: “Ceiliúrann sí is critheann” (she trembles and vanishes).54 By the end of the account of Syrinx’s capture, we naturally identify the nymph with her voice. Indeed, the wide semantic range of the verb “ceiliúir” serves as further confirmation of the initial reference to the mythological source: the dispersed lexical equivalents, that include the verbs “warble, sing” and “celebrate,” as well as “fade, vanish” or “bid farewell,” add up to the forked message of the Syrinx story with its contradictory connotations of capture and liberation. The closing couplet thus refers to the image of the nymph as transformed to voice or the sound of the flute. Moreover, as I have argued, through the switch to the authorial first person, the conclusion of Mac Aodha’s Syrinx sequence encourages identification of the final grammatical subject with the poet’s lyric “I” and her complex but thoroughly enjoyable medium. McGuckian’s shifting subjectivity, often assisted by inclusion of architectural images and the questionable margin of windows and make-believe doorways, signifies a preoccupation with her speaking voice. It might appear that we have no choice but to take McGuckian’s word that her fascination with Irish, though purely platonic, feeds her poetic creativity. Although there are virtually no direct references to the language, in her early work in particular, there is a dynamism apparent in how her key concepts are presented that relates to the poet’s mourning for the silenced Irish. At the same time, however, the language is occasionally presented as a hoped-for presence. In poems from On Ballycastle Beach (1989), “The Dream Language of Fergus” and “The Dream in Three Colours,” McGuckian associates Irish with dreams.55 Dreams are recurrent throughout her work and often associated with images of the voice. In her words, dreams are essential because they mean liberation. Although she admits that it is an impossible dream, she points out that “to have your language back would be the greatest freedom.”56 Through this analogy, it is possible to read the object in “The Rising Out”—the dream whose purpose seems at first to be “To kill the poet in me” with ironic monologues that “rise out of sleep”—as referring to the Irish language. In a self-protective urge to defend her poetic integrity, the poet-persona imagines her other dead and captured in a frame. Yet, in the last two lines, McGuckian reverses and concludes the poem with a metaphor of germination, conceding to the beneficial effects of the other’s presence whose dream “Is the same seed that lifted me out of my clothes.”57 By helping the speaker heal her cleft identity, the dream provides her with a state of perfect freedom and

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unexpected wholeness that are preconditioned by the unreserved acceptance of the other (language) into her blood, until the seed is seen as fruit. McGuckian’s treatment of the contradictions inherent to poetic translation is in tune with her own writing. When asked about the complexity and referential opacity of her work, she replied by drawing attention to the decisive role of language itself in the process of poetic inspiration: . . . within the world of the poem, the words mean exactly what they say . . . I come out shaped by me. I can’t come out any other way. They expect you to be able to control the way you come out. All you’ve got are the words, and sometimes I think they forget about the words and go into ideas. The words stand for themselves really.58

Rather than through “ideas,” the speaking “I” is audible through the specific formality of poetic language, which is perceived as primarily nonrational.59 Paul de Man points to the independence of language “of any intent or any drive or any wish or any desire we might have,” adding that language “does things so radically out of control, they cannot be assimilated to the human at all.”60 The same idea of the independence of words and their primacy over contextual meaning determines McGuckian’s approach to poetic translation. She follows the contours of her own line rather than listening for echoes of the original and accordingly alters the tone as well as the referential meaning of the poem she translates. Arguably, this is not simply a result of her working from cribs, but it also marks her concept of translation and poetic composition. Translation that aims to transmit something can convey nothing but a message, which is, as Benjamin remarks, “something inessential.” If, in his view, poetry communicates “very little” to those who comprehend it,61 any attempt to translate McGuckian’s lyrics will show that her main subject is poetic language per se. In the light of her realistic appraisal of its paradoxes, translation can be said to have bearing on her creative process. ∗ ∗ ∗ Certainly, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s continual reticence is relevant in terms of language and translation. Although fluent in several languages (she has translated poetry from Italian, Romanian and Irish), Ní Chuilleanáin’s main concern is with a different form of translation which, as Quinn puts

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it, “listens hard at the silences of history and other people’s lives.”62 Her starting point is precarious in its combination of her choice of the “original” (absent personal histories but also missing linguistic codes) and her resolution to be true to the “language” that she aims to echo: there is, of course, no echo to be recorded. It is as if she set out to live up to Benjamin’s enigmatic definition of the “true language” in which “all the ultimate secrets to which all thinking strives are stored up, at peace and even silent.”63 Although Benjamin refers to the superiority of words over meaning as defined through the sentence and syntactic relations, Ní Chuilleanáin’s use of language that is apparently stripped of meaning bespeaks a parodic direction. The tendency towards mockery is evident in her reluctance to do the obvious, that is, to attempt to overcome the historical silences by putting words and thoughts into the mouths of the absences that populate her lyrics. The irony, however, is also directed against her own work as she focuses on the absence epitomised by silence and makes it one of the governing themes in her poetry. In “The Absent Girl” (discussed in Chapter 6), the echo of silence, augmented by the speaking position hollowed out, is so overwhelming that it makes other people voiceless (“they pass her without a sound”).64 Like McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin realises that what is essential is mostly untranslatable into language. There are substantial differences in the two poets’ attitudes and conclusions, however: while McGuckian represents this untranslatability by having the unspeakable muffled by discontinuous narrative and dense linguistic growth, Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry insists on being in control. It is based on a sparsity that may appear to constitute coherence but ultimately refutes that expectation by letting little else but representations of silence make it onto the page. To overcome the difficulties of recording non-presence as such, however, Ní Chuilleanáin focuses on reproducing the missing content symbolised by the silences she sets out to illustrate. Thus, despite being so cryptic, she almost risks pointing towards a message, albeit a lost one, which, as we have seen, is not indispensable in terms of the effect of poetry and the workings of poetry translation. Nevertheless, although Irish is conceived of as constituting muteness, the musings on its loss occasionally coincide with an ironic tracing of its imprints in modern English and the identity of the Irish poet. It is worth examining how Ní Chuilleanáin’s coded reference corresponds with the articulation of the language issue and exploring her notion of poetic language and writing as “translation” faithful to the echoing

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absence of Irish. The fictitious yet benign notion of closeness between the two languages, occasioned by their historical proximity, is summed up in “Gloss/Clós/Glas” (The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, 2001) in which a translating scholar stays up late at night, “Raking the dictionaries,” frantically trying to accomplish a task: His nightwork, to make the price of his release: Two words, as opposite as his and hers Which yet must be as close As the word clós to its meaning in a Scots courtyard Close to the spailpín ships, or as close as the note On the uilleann pipe to the same note on the fiddle[.]65

The multiple references to Irish throughout the poem are both lexical and motific. Consider the punning proximity of the English adjective “close” to the Irish noun “clós” which means “enclosure” or “courtyard”66 and is obviously etymologically connected to the English “closure” and their common source, the Latin “clausura.”67 Alongside these, we have Irish phrases that are commonly used in Hiberno-English, such as “spailpín ship” and “uilleann pipe,” which then develop into a series of references to traditional Irish music and culture. While at first Irish appears to be a mere “gloss” on the English, it ultimately proves to be the source of hope and possible revelation, a life-giving breath surmised to be behind a bolted door. In the closing stanza, snippets of meaning and sound taken from the dictionaries are likened to the fluttering strips of cloth on the rag trees in the Gaelic tradition. Words flow both ways between the languages, Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly, Until he reaches the language that has no word for his, No word for hers, and is brought up sudden Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door. Who is that he can hear panting on the other side? The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.68

The language that brings two words “as opposite as his and hers ” together is, of course, Irish which—although it distinguishes the grammatical gender of nouns—has only one possessive pronoun for third-person singular and plural: the word “a” that can mean both his and hers (as well as theirs ). In the last verse (quoted above), we see the persona finally reach

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this coveted “language,” as he stands in front of “a small locked door,” overwhelmed with a sense of awe and promise. Both the word “lock(ed),” that appears three times in the last three lines, and the final word in the poem, “green,” have a common equivalent in Irish, which is “glas,” the last word in the tripartite title: “Gloss/Clós/Glas.”Although it may seem like oversimplification to associate this breath that turns the “locked lock green” with the lost native tongue of the Emerald Isle, the notion of language as a promise and latent growth is, as we have seen, a common image in Ní Chuilleanáin’s work. The female presence suspected behind the bolted door has been interpreted as the figure of the muse, shared by the poet and the translating scholar. But since it is also a metaphor of language as a desirable but unattainable force, the poet and the translator become one in this poem, as Ní Chuilleanáin sets about her task of “translating” the tradition and recording its fading echo. According to Nicholas Allen, “[t]he ending of ‘Gloss/Clós/Glas’ sums up the ruminations on the question of history in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry, as it urges us to apprehend plural, parallel presents and a time filled by now.” “The realization of the limits of language,” Allen argues, “is a first step to freedom.”69 In Ní Chuilleanáin’s alternative narratives which present history as silence and language as “a blank that registers presence without form,”70 the language is construed as less a sign of a lost past than a token of desire and poetic inspiration. Indeed, it is not only the chromatic, grammatical and lexical references that place the poem in the proximity of the Irish-language canon. In the silk thighs of a tomcat, there is a reference to the famous “Pangur Bán.” It is the explicit likening of the feline moves to the translator’s efforts—as the words that keep pouring and slipping away through the gap between languages are compared to the way a cat effortlessly squeezes through a crack—that prompts the reading of Ní Chuilleanáin’s “Gloss/Clós/Glas” as a version of “Pangur Bán.” Moreover, the related image of the “rags of language” as constantly drifting and shifting direction indicates yet another link to “Pangur Bán.” “Movement” or “move” in Irish is gluais with the primary meaning of “gloss” or “glossary” which, indeed, is the “form” in which the Old Irish poem has survived to us on the margin of a manuscript.71 The same notion of frailty and elusiveness—of the link between the words on the page and their possible meaning—informs Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry in general. After all—and here we come to yet another of her poetic paradoxes—her encrypted narratives and reserved personae are not

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primarily designed to echo any secret desires or histories. Just as the poem discussed above enacts the fragile connections between English and Irish, while alluding to the fleetingness of creative concentration and inspiration, a large part of Ní Chuilleanáin’s oeuvre can be read as foregrounding the very process, rather than the product, of silent contemplation. ∗ ∗ ∗ Unlike Ní Chuilleanáin, Eavan Boland proposes to be the interlocutor and the translator for the past.72 I have referred to Boland’s frequent figuring of the status of the Irish language as a void, as a wound that stands for the compromised “Irishness” and is often associated with accounts of the silencing of women in Irish history and literary tradition. As we have noted in the previous chapter in relation to “The Muse Mother,” the poet’s wish “to sing the past” is caught up with a hope for “a new language.”73 This apparent anachronism, the paradoxical collapsing of the opposition between the old and new, is discernible in poems such as “Mise Eire” where Boland proposes to undermine the formal image of Irish femininity through ironic use of Pearse’s refrain. The gesture also contains a tendency towards unintended self-irony: despite her concern and self-professed admiration for the language, Boland never seriously applied herself to the study of Irish which, indeed, she would have needed to learn from scratch as a “new language.”74 Instead, she seems content to comment on the silence of Irish, as if once it was denied her as her birthright, she could never be able to fully grasp it by learning it later. Therefore, her pragmatic acceptance of the liminal position (“[m]arginality within a tradition, however painful . . . allows the writer clear eyes and a quick critical sense”75 ) does not embrace the linguistic binary. In other words, Boland does not position herself between the languages but inside English from where she can lament the inaccessibility of the language of her absenting foremothers. The immediate relevance of this arrangement for her poetics is alluded to in “The Muse Mother”: focusing on the “strangeness” of English, Boland admits she has lost the sense of being at home in her poetic language. As stated above, Boland’s concern for the “mother tongue” is part of a discourse that is marked by the poet’s emotional politics. Her hope for a “new language” is continually checked by the notion of its inaccessibility and vicious cyclicality: it will only ever be a smarting scar, an emblem of

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“what went before.”76 Yet, as Blasing argues, commenting on the interlaced concepts of the lyric “I,” poetic language and translation, “[w]e are never at home in poetry” since with poetry “we must think of language as a foreign mechanism and an intimate, constitutive history at the same time.”77 Because Boland, unlike McGuckian or Mac Aodha, does not come to terms with the foreignness of language (above all that of her own) and because she is conscious of having lost the sense of intimacy with the language of her forebears, her attempts at translating the speech of the past and her effort to become a spokesperson for its silences are left frustrated. ∗ ∗ ∗ The focus in the preceding pages has been on the liberating and purgatorial functions of translation. I have alluded to the occasions where poets place themselves in the position between languages and elaborated how this liminal position can truly, or only apparently, be perceived as inspiring for the individual works. Of course, the conception of the Irish language as a severed connection with the past, as the lost national tongue that sometimes gets confused with a rightful but withheld “mother tongue,” is neither the prerogative of women nor a common unifying element in Irish poetry at large. In the poets I discuss, however, the sense of language fissure and the heightened sensibility to the marginal status of Irish can be argued to have a bearing on the authors’ actual or former marginality as female poets and citizens. This is in line with my general thesis that the apparent shifts in relatively recent Irish lyric poetry (from the masculinist to the feminist and from the feminist to the post-feminist phase) are best understood as continuities, as true and logical outcomes of earlier cultural situations and developments, rather than seen in terms of the reaction and counter-reaction principle. Some of those continuities run across the seam between English and Irish, and constitute the traffic and commerce between the two languages. It would be misguided, however, to allow this focus on continuity and the—admittedly limited—interactions between the two language and literary scenes detract from the fact of the uneven historical status of English and Irish and the ongoing imbalance between the two languages. No level of engagement on the part of poets of either language in the translation process can change the fact that literary translation in Ireland over the past forty years has been mostly one-way traffic. This, as we

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have seen, has led to a situation where a number of Irish-language poets remain sceptical about the merits of poetic translation from a minority language into a major one and refuse to have their work published in English translation in Ireland. A sense of historical and linguistic fissure inevitably also affects the works of those who have accepted translation and interlingual influence as an unavoidable part of their poetic situation. But if there is any development detectable in, for example, Mac Aodha’s concept of poetic language and the linguistic divide or in her use of the muse figure and her voicing of the lyric “I,” it is her calm embrace of Irish and the realistic acceptance of its status accompanied with relieving irony, based positively in self-ridicule. Her contribution to the linguistic debate lies in taking the language further away from nationalist sentiment and local allegiance. In suggesting that no language can be fully transparent to itself, Mac Aodha’s poetic idiom has kept refusing to disguise its own strangeness but insisted on that very quality as one of its main stimuli and characteristics. Indeed, besides transformations, there are similarities and continuities evident in the other poets’ treatment of the language issue and in its bearing on the lyric “I.” A subject in poetry can only be a speaking subject by virtue of language—“an inhuman code,” as Blasing puts it, which it first had to acquire in order to be “human.”78 Through their obscurity, by alluding to the inevitable alterity of the code, to the alienated forms and the uncertain concept of the “mother tongue,” the women I have discussed here illustrate the “humanity” of the speaking subject. Yet neither the puzzling images of Mac Aodha, nor the encrypted narratives of McGuckian, nor the deliberate obscureness of Ní Chuilleanáin point to meaninglessness. On the contrary, they serve—through the use of preterition, ellipsis, miniaturisation and compaction—to insinuate meaning. Meaning can be ostentatiously discharged (as it is left behind the glass in the case of Ní Chuilleanáin and Boland) or it constitutes its own arbitrariness (as in McGuckian and Mac Aodha, or in O’Reilly, Groarke and Jenkinson whom I discussed in the previous chapters). The semantic obscurity, however, is revelatory as it serves to testify to the untranslatability and the ultimate superfluousness of message to the effects of poetry. According to James Longenbach, a poem “can’t help but to be meaningful.” Yet, as he further elaborates, “especially when it has something urgent to say, a poem’s power inheres less in its conclusions than in its propensity to resist them, demonstrating their inadequacy while

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moving inevitably toward them.”79 In this sense, poets like McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin, Groarke, O’Reilly and Mac Aodha all take lyric poetry to the extreme.

Notes 1. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 12. 2. By way of reference to the governmental language and culture policy around the middle of the twentieth century, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill speaks about “[t]he destruction of a community whose life and culture had been idealized to the point of extinction.” Ní Dhomhnaill, “Linguistic Ecology: Preventing a Great Loss,” in Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity, ed. Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 82. 3. See Aifric Mac Aodha, “A Talkative Corpse: The Joys of Writing Poetry in Irish,” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art (25 October 2011), accessed 11 November 2011, http://columbiajournal.org/a-talkative-cor pse-the-joys-of-writing-poetry-in-irish-3/. 4. Mac Aodha, “File,” Gabháil Syrinx (Maynooth: An Sagart, 2010), 11. Trans. David Wheatley. 5. “Pangur Bán,” in Old Irish Reader, ed. Rudolf Thurneysen (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1981), 40. “‘White Pangur’: A Scholar and His Cat,” in Early Irish Lyrics, trans. and ed. Gerard Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 3. 6. Seamus Heaney, “Translator’s Notes: ‘Pangur Bán’ by Anonymous,” Poetry 188.1 (April 2006): 4–5. 7. “Pangur Bán,” trans. Seamus Heaney, Poetry 188.1 (April 2006): 4. 8. Mac Aodha, “Corpse.” 9. Biddy Jenkinson, “A Letter to an Editor,” Irish University Review 21.1 (Spring/Summer 1991): 34. 10. Mac Aodha, “La Tricoteuse,” Gabháil Syrinx, 38. My translation. 11. Mac Aodha, “Briseadh an Dúchais,” Gabháil Syrinx, 43. My translation. 12. Mac Aodha, “Corpse.” 13. Originally promoted by language revivalists such as Father Peadar Ó Laoghaire on the turn of the twentieth century, caint na ndaoine (the language of the people in one of its dialectal forms) was adopted as a standard of linguistic authenticity by critics of modern poetry in Irish, including Máire Mhac an tSaoi. See, for example, Michael Davitt, “Comhrá le Máire Mhac an tSaoi,” Innti 8 (1984): 48. 14. Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” trans. Steven Rendall, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10.2 (1997): 157.

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15. Benjamin, 153. 16. Mac Aodha, “Corpse.” 17. Although Mac Aodha translated some of her early verse, since the publication of Gabháil Syrinx, her main translators have been David Wheatley and Justin Quinn. Some of the translations by Wheatley have appeared in Poetry (September 2015), The Stinging Fly 20.2 (Winter 2011/2012) and on the Poetry International website (see https://www.poetryinternati onal.org/pi/poet/19748/Aifric-Mac-Aodha/en/nocache). Mac Aodha’s second book of poetry, published bilingually as Foreign News (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2017), contains new poems and a selection of poems from Gabháil Syrinx, all in Wheatley’s translations. 18. Mac Aodha, “Corpse.” 19. Mac Aodha, “Corpse.” 20. Terence Brown, “Translating Ireland,” in Krino 1986–1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, eds. Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996), 137. 21. Mac Aodha, “Scéal Syrinx,” Gabháil Syrinx, 12–14. Trans. Quinn (“Syrinx Story”). 22. Mac Aodha, “Scéal Syrinx,” 14. 23. Mac Aodha, “Scéal Syrinx,” 14. 24. Mac Aodha, “Buaine,” Gabháil Syrinx, 37. My translation. 25. Apart from the “Athar agus Iníon” (Father and Daughter) sequence, Gabháil Syrinx includes a series of poems dedicated to her siblings and the memory of her parents. See Mac Aodha, “Seachtar Dílleachtaí,” Gabháil Syrinx, 38–44. 26. Mac Aodha, “La Tricoteuse,” 38. My translation. 27. Mac Aodha, “Focal Faoisimh,” Gabháil Syrinx, 16. Trans. Wheatley, “The Soothing Word,” Foreign News, 45. 28. Mac Aodha, e-mail message to the author, 15 November 2011. 29. Some of the key works concerned with the subject of translation and its bearing on contemporary Irish literature and culture are: Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996); Cronin, Translation and Identity (London: Taylor and Francis, 2006); Cronin, Translation and Globalization (London: Routledge, 2003); Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction; Quinn, “Incoming: Irish Poetry and Translation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, eds. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 341–54; Rui Carvalho Homem, Poetry and Translation in Northern Ireland: Dislocations in Contemporary Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Terence Brown, “Translating Ireland”; and Tomás Mac Síomóin, “Debate: Thoughts on Translation—Tomás Mac Síomóin, Mícheál Ó Cróinín, Alan Titley, Seán Ó Cearnaigh,” Poetry Ireland Review 39 (Autumn 1993): 61–71.

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30. Máire Mhac an tSaoi, “The Clerisy and the Folk: A Review of PresentDay Verse in the Irish Language on the Occasion of the Publication of Innti 11,” Poetry Ireland Review 24 (Winter 1988): 33. 31. See Mhac an tSaoi, “Introduction,” in Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989), 9–12. Mhac an tSaoi praises Ní Dhomhnaill’s Irish for being “like that of children brought up by their grandmothers, a hundred years old.” 32. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Why I Choose to Write in Irish,” Selected Essays (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 16. 33. See Peter Denman, “Rude Gestures? Contemporary Women’s Poetry in Irish,” Colby Quarterly 28.4 (1992): 253; and John Goodby, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 260. 34. Alan Titley, “Innti and Onward: The New Poetry in Irish,” in Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh, ed. Theo Dorgan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 89. 35. Michael Cronin, “Altered States: Translation and Minority Languages,” TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction 8.1 (1995): 91. 36. Douglas Sealy, “A New Voice for the Seanachie,” The Irish Times (8 December 1990): 9. 37. See Mary O’Donoghue, “Not Their Muse: Irish-Language Poetry in Translation, Cross-Gender Linguistic Ventriloquism, and the Problem of Pharaoh’s Daughter,” Babson Faculty Research Fund Working Papers, accessed 15 June 2012, http://digitalknowledge.babson.edu/bfr fwp/12/. 38. Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 153. 39. Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction, 150. 40. Falci, for example, challenges some of Quinn’s arguments about the origin of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetic idiom and the outcome of Muldoon’s liberal translations. See Eric Falci, “Translation as Collaboration: Ní Dhomhnaill and Muldoon,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, eds. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 328– 40. 41. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Unalive Beings and Things That Don’t Exist,” Selected Essays, 200. 42. The growing apprehension in the course of the 1980s and ’90s was that the overconfident, slick English version would efface the Irish original. Critics complain about “the total absence of any foreignising approach and the utter compliance with strategies of fluency.” See Brian Ó Conchubhair, “The Right of Cows and the Rite of Copy: An Overview of Translation from Irish to English,” Éire-Ireland 35.1/2 (2000): 104. 43. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Mis and Dubh Ruis,” Selected Essays, 86.

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44. Ní Dhomhnaill describes herself as “diglossic rather than bilingual, with Irish being the language of the emotions and . . . English being for me a bridge to the outside world.” Ní Dhomhnaill, “Linguistic Ecology,” 85. 45. See Pádraig De Paor who explores Ní Dhomhnaill’s work in terms of premodern gnosticism and offers a close analysis of the poet’s complex genderisation of the Irish language and some of its literary archetypes. Pádraig de Paor, Tionscnamh Filíochta Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1997). 46. Frank Sewell, “Between Two Languages: Poetry in Irish, English and Irish English,” in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 157. 47. I owe this formulation of Ní Dhomhnaill’s essentialist thinking to Matthew Campbell. 48. See Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, “Metaphor and Metamorphosis in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Éire-Ireland 35.1/2 (2000): 150–72. In his revelatory essay, Mac Giolla Léith traces various language issues and strategies at work in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, including the question of openness or resistance to translation and “an escape into the silence of inhumanity,” often found in the supernatural world of Irish legend and myth. Mac Giolla Léith, 153. 49. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Cé Leis Tú?,” Selected Essays, 149. 50. Mhac an tSaoi quoted in Ní Dhomhnaill, “Cé Leis Tú?,” 149. In the same place, Ní Dhomhnaill refers to her sense of linguistic displacement in the Dublin suburbs: “there are times when I feel as much in linguistic exile in Dublin as I ever did among the wide whistling wastes of the Anatolian plateau.” Ní Dhomhnaill, “Cé Leis Tú?,” 148–9. As she explains elsewhere, one of her favourite images for the Irish speakers in an anglicised Ireland is that of the sea folk who are out of their element on the dry land of English (“. . . gurbh í an Ghaeilge an fharraige agus gurbh é an Béarla an tír, agus an phian gur ghabhamar tríd agus sinn ag teacht aníos ar an dtalamh thirim.”) Ní Dhomhnaill in Louis de Paor, “Ó Liombó go dtí Sráid Grafton: Comhrá le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Innti 12 (November 1989): 44. My translation. 51. Benjamin, 159. 52. McGuckian’s translations feature in Pharaoh’s Daughter (1990) as well as in The Water Horse (2000). 53. McGuckian in Laura O’Connor, “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995), accessed 20 May 2011, http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/lit erary-criticism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-laura-oco nnor. 54. Mac Aodha, “Scéal Syrinx,” 14. My translation.

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55. McGuckian proposes that “The Dream Language of Fergus” and “The Dream in Three Colours” are both political poems, with the former dealing with English as her son’s first language rather than Irish while the second expresses a utopian vision that “we could be, all English and all Irish and all Europeans.” Susan Shaw Sailer, “An Interview with Medbh McGuckian,” Michigan Quarterly Review 32.1 (1993): 123–5. 56. McGuckian in Kimberly S. Bohman, “Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian, Belfast, 5 September, 1994,” The Irish Review 16 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 99. 57. Medbh McGuckian, “The Rising Out,” Venus and the Rain (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2001), 36. 58. Bohman, 105. 59. See Blasing, 1–3. 60. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 96, 101. 61. Benjamin, 151. Benjamin claims that “the word, not the sentence, is the original element of translation. For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering is the arcade.” Benjamin, 162. 62. Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction, 172. 63. Benjamin, 159. 64. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “The Absent Girl,” Selected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008), 30. 65. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Gloss/Clós/Glas,” Selected Poems, 119. 66. See Niall Ó Dónaill, Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (Baile Átha Cliath: An Gúm, 2005). 67. See Ernest Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, vol. 1 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications), 315. 68. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Glas,” 119. 69. Nicholas Allen, “‘Each Page Lies Open to the Version of Every Other’: History in the Poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin,” Irish University Review: Special Issue: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 37.1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 34. 70. Allen, 33. 71. The Old Irish poem was preserved on the margin of a Latin primer by an Irish monk, originally compiled at a monastery in South Germany in the early ninth century and now preserved in St Paul’s Abbey in Lavanttal in Austria. 72. For an insightful commentary on Boland’s occasional attempts at “translations” and her versions of canonical Irish-language poems, including “Pangur Bán,” see Ní Fhrighil, Briathra, Béithe agus Banfhilí: Filíocht Eavan Boland agus Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 2008), 245–9.

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73. Boland, “The Muse Mother,” New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 103. 74. Having grown up abroad, in the UK and later the USA, Boland would not have learnt Irish at school. 75. Boland, “Outside History,” Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 147. 76. Eavan Boland, “Mise Eire,” New Collected Poems, 129. 77. Blasing, 9. 78. Blasing, 9. 79. James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 10.

Works Cited Allen, Nicholas. “‘Each Page Lies Open to the Version of Every Other’: History in the Poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.” Irish University Review: Special Issue: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin 37.1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 22–35. Benjamin, Walter. “The Translator’s Task.” Translated by Steven Rendall. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10.2 (1997): 151–65. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Bohman, Kimberly S. “Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian, Belfast, 5 September, 1994.” The Irish Review 16 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 95–108. Boland, Eavan. New Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. ———. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. Brown, Terence. “Translating Ireland.” In Krino 1986–1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, edited by Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams, 137–40. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996. Carvalho Homem, Rui. Poetry and Translation in Northern Ireland: Dislocations in Contemporary Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Cronin, Michael. “Altered States: Translation and Minority Languages.” TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction 8.1 (1995): 85–103. ———. Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures. Cork: Cork University Press, 1996. ———. Translation and Globalization. London: Routledge, 2003. ———. Translation and Identity. London: Taylor and Francis, 2006. Davitt, Michael. “Comhrá le Máire Mhac an tSaoi.” Innti 8 (1984): 37–59. de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Denman, Peter. “Rude Gestures? Contemporary Women’s Poetry in Irish.” Colby Quarterly 28.4 (1992): 251–9.

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de Paor, Louis. “Ó Liombó go dtí Sráid Grafton: Comhrá le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Innti 12 (November 1989): 41–54. de Paor, Pádraig. Tionscnamh Filíochta Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar, 1997. Falci, Eric. Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ———. “Translation as Collaboration: Ní Dhomhnaill and Muldoon.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, 328–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Goodby, John. Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Heaney, Seamus, trans. “Pangur Bán.” Poetry 188.1 (April 2006): 4. ———. “Translator’s Notes: ‘Pangur Bán’ by Anonymous.” Poetry 188.1 (April 2006): 4–5. Jenkinson, Biddy. “A Letter to an Editor.” Irish University Review 21.1 (Spring/Summer 1991): 27–34. Longenbach, James. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Mac Aodha, Aifric. Foreign News. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2017. ———. Gabháil Syrinx. Maynooth: An Sagart, 2010. ———. “The Poet.” Translated by David Wheatley. The Stinging Fly 20.2 (Winter 2011/12): 80. ———. “A Talkative Corpse: The Joys of Writing Poetry in Irish.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art (25 October 2011). Accessed 11 November 2011. http://columbiajournal.org/a-talkative-corpse-the-joys-of-writing-poe try-in-irish-3/. Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín. “Metaphor and Metamorphosis in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Éire-Ireland 35.1/2 (2000): 150–72. Mac Síomóin, Tomás. “Debate: Thoughts on Translation—Tomás Mac Síomóin, Mícheál Ó Cróinín, Alan Titley, Seán Ó Cearnaigh.” Poetry Ireland Review 39 (Autumn 1993): 61–71. Mhac an tSaoi, Máire. “The Clerisy and the Folk: A Review of Present-Day Verse in the Irish Language on the Occasion of the Publication of Innti 11.” Poetry Ireland Review 24 (Winter 1988): 33–5. ———. “Introduction.” In Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, 9–12. Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989. Murphy, Gerard, ed. and trans. Early Irish Lyrics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. “Linguistic Ecology: Preventing a Great Loss.” In Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity, edited by Isabelle de Courtivron, 79–92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ———. Selected Essays. Dublin: New Island, 2005.

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Ó Conchubhair, Brian. “The Right of Cows and the Rite of Copy: An Overview of Translation from Irish to English.” Éire-Ireland 35.1/2 (2000): 92–111. O’Connor, Laura. “Comhrá: A Conversation with Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.” Southern Review 31.3 (June 1995): 581–614. Accessed 20 May 2011. http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/literary-critic ism/9508243323/comhra-foreword-afterword-by-laura-oconnor. O’Donoghue, Mary. “Not Their Muse: Irish-Language Poetry in Translation, Cross-Gender Linguistic Ventriloquism, and the Problem of Pharaoh’s Daughter.” Babson Faculty Research Fund Working Papers. Accessed 15 June 2012. http://digitalknowledge.babson.edu/bfrfwp/12/. Quinn, Justin. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. “Incoming: Irish Poetry and Translation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, 341–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sailer Shaw, Susan. “An Interview with Medbh McGuckian.” Michigan Quarterly Review 32.1 (1993): 111–27. Sealy, Douglas. “A New Voice for the Seanachie.” Irish Times (8 December 1990): 9. Sewell, Frank. “Between Two Languages: Poetry in Irish, English and Irish English.” In The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell, 149–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Titley, Alan. “Innti and Onward: The New Poetry in Irish.” In Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh, edited by Theo Dorgan, 82–94. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996. Thurneysen, Rudolf, ed. Old Irish Reader. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1981.

CHAPTER 8

In and Out of Ireland: New Poets and New Places

From the mid-1990s onwards, Irish poetry has shown a tendency to dispense with clear-cut distinctions. No longer hinged on the contrast between things Irish and things extraneous, between women and the canon, or between poets and stereotyped notions of nationality, it has avoided some of the established oppositions and sharply defined categories. Yet, this is not to say that poets would have shied away from conflict or resigned themselves to facile relativism. Rather, due to the manifold and expanding interstice in which these authors position themselves, we see an intriguing widening of the horizon in their works. A typical persona is suspended between various inclinations, oscillating over a threshold between worlds. This indeterminacy, the impossibility of relying on a net of contradictions—which would snap the moment the threshold was crossed either way—is where the poems’ secrets as well as their potency lie. When asked in 1998 whether it troubled him that he might be considered an American rather than an Irish poet, Paul Muldoon replied, tongue in cheek: “I’m happy to belong to any group that’ll have me, but then on some level I’m with Groucho Marx: I don’t want to belong to any groups at all—particularly those that’ll have me.” While this is puzzling enough, he complicates matters further by admitting in the same breath that he would, in fact, see himself mainly as an Irish poet: “My poetry reflects my life and its complexities.”1 If those complexities have sprung, inter alia, © The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_8

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from a life in emigration and Muldoon’s seizing of the Troubles, his own evolving lyric “I” testifies to the way in which the speaking subject has opened up to comprehend differences and the periphery. Nevertheless, as the latter part of this book with its focus on the elusive lyric “I” has argued, it is not in the public sphere that the concept of a coherent self has been primarily shaken; the waiving of old dichotomies together with the expansiveness of the poetic self has been marked by an underlying move inward. The previous chapter addressed the issue of poetic translation and the sometimes more, sometimes less confident inhabiting of the no-man’s land between languages. In this chapter, by way of an extended coda, I would like to take a close look at works by Sinéad Morrissey and Ailbhe Darcy who can both be said to explore the principle of translation without appearing to be in the least concerned about the fact that they work in English or about the Irish language and its predicament. The focus here is on how members of the post-feminist generation view themselves as authors and nationals, as well as sexual and linguistic beings. Morrissey was born in 1972 in County Armagh in Northern Ireland and raised in Belfast. After receiving a BA and PhD from Trinity College Dublin, she spent several years living and travelling abroad, including faroff destinations such as China, Japan and New Zealand, before returning to Belfast where she lectures in creative writing at Queens University Belfast. Darcy (1981) is originally from Dundrum, Dublin, but has lived in London, Paris, the USA and Germany. Following her BA studies at University College Dublin, she took an MA at the University of the Arts London and went on to do a PhD at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She has lectured there, at the University of Münster in Germany and at Cardiff University. The two poets’ experience of many different places outside Ireland, often in non-English speaking countries, informs many of their works and combines with the motif of a journey which, as Lucy Collins writes in relation to Morrissey, has been “not only geographical but also linguistic.”2 Such poems highlight the authors’ relationship to place and language while, as Collins has stated elsewhere, they “[express] the contingent nature of all such explorations.”3 The association of limits and languages thus takes on pronounced pluralistic as well as territorial qualities, as considerations of various cultures, climates and eras are brought together and back “home” in order to reveal the universality as well as the frailness of human existence and the transience of life on the planet.

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Words as Things Worth Knowing: Sinéad Morrissey Morrissey, who cites the Australian poet Les Murray as her most important influence, writes poetry that is equally rooted in her native Belfast and avidly cosmopolitan. Her eagerness to register and accommodate heterogeneity has been fuelled from the outset by her extensive travel and stays abroad. From an early stage, however, Morrissey has also insisted on poetry as a solitary enterprise and claimed that it was as important to stay open to influences as to know “what not to listen to” (attributing this piece of wisdom to another of her acknowledged lodestars, R. S. Thomas).4 In “Nomad” from the “Mercury” sequence in her first collection, There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Morrissey addresses a typical persona—homeless and constantly searching for something that can only be found close at hand but at the same time seeking relief from the wandering self, its seclusiveness and endless demands. In place after place, the speaker comes to the conclusion that whatever they are searching for, It’s not here either— Beauty, home, whatever— That leaves you where you are[.]5

As in many other places, Morrissey proposes a variation on Horace’s Quod petis hic est and the idea that “[w]e strain at achieving nothing [if] we seek happiness in boats and carriage rides” (Strenua nos exercet inertia: navibus atque Quadrigis petimus bene vivere).6 All this pursuit of a better place to live, as well as the search for memories of earlier dwellings and the former shapes of the mercurial self, brings about only nostalgia for places that are no longer there, that may never have been there. The inference is that there is “No space to hold.”7 Thus, “Nomad” also testifies to how far Morrissey navigates from the currents of feminism conceived as a joyful “movement that aims to change life.”8 Her globe-trotting personae show nothing of the Dionysian energy of nomadic philosophy formulated, around the time these poems were written in the early 1990s, by scholars such as Rosi Braidotti.9 Rather than being driven by a desire for self-assertion against societal constrictions, they aim to show that there is little that we can determine in life or ourselves. Horace stipulates that, in order to gain insight and bring about

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change “here at Ulubrae,” it is essential not to forfeit one’s peace of mind (animus si te non deficit aequus ).10 Morrissey’s poems demonstrate how difficult it is to meet such preconditions, particularly in times of escalating political conflict and social upheaval. Her scepticism, however, does not make her liable to partake of feminism’s opposition to postmodern pessimistic views of depleted subjectivity, but it suggests that if peace and jouissance are to be looked for within the locale of the self, that self can be a crowded and an oppressive place. The concept of rootlessness combined with the sense of confinement within one’s own problematic, overwhelming subjectivity speaks from “Gull Song,” the next poem in the same sequence. One of the striking features of Morrissey’s early verse is the absence of architecture as a sheltering or organising structure. Buildings appear as part of an indifferent cityscape which is either depopulated or swarming with an anonymous crowd, or as emblems of emptiness. The underlying thought is that human constructions (and institutions) offer no refuge from the elements or from one’s own restlessness. The omnipresent seagulls epitomise the estrangement of life in the city, as well as voraciousness and perseverance. The birds come and go as they please and are able to populate these deserted places not least thanks to their capacity to cope with the harsh climate. Ultimately, however, it is the gulls’ own heartbeat, “The music of [their] loneliness,” that is impossible to escape. Thunderstorms do nothing I shelter In my own wings fly over the torn monastery ... I have nothing to fear in weather or distance[.]11

The conclusion here confirms that expressed in “Nomad”: what you seek is wherever you are, but also wherever you go. Urged to trace the elusive sense of belonging to a place, the avian persona is simultaneously dealing with the haunting self. If many of Morrissey’s Belfast poems manifest a sense of alienation and detachment, these are often attenuated by the idea of homecoming. “Double Vision,”12 the opening poem in There Was Fire in Vancouver, foregrounds such a state of divided consciousness. The mind of the speaker is divided between self-assured worldliness and a desire for alternative destinations, and the readiness to see the city anew on the weekly

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commute between the Republic and the North. Finally, however, once the city and home are reached, all these uncertainties are transformed into a sense of a climactic relief: “And every street lamp a chorus in neon: You’re Back—/ Glimmering with victory.”13 Throughout the poet’s second collection, Between Here and There (2002), seagulls reappear as symbols of the authorial persona’s undecided stance to the city and her intermittent sojourn. In “In Belfast” the gulls “stay in off the Lough all day,” soiling and trivialising the city’s bleak architecture and landmarks, among them the statue of Queen Victoria at the City Hall, imaged as “a ballast of copper and gravitas.”14 Again, the perspective on Belfast combines doubtfulness about regional identity with a hint of attachment and Morrissey points out the benefits of cultural and linguistic variety for the broadening of one’s poetic, personal and ethical outlooks—until they are finally able to encompass the problematic place of origin: I have returned after ten years to a corner and tell myself it is as real to sleep here as the twenty other corners I have slept in.

The reasoning, however, is hopeful rather than decisive: “. . . I am / as much at home here as I will ever be.”15 As its title suggests, the collection deals with negotiations between “here” and “there,” between the sense that there is “No Need to Travel,”16 and the urge to get away. As Morrissey reveals in the eerily prophetic, untitled poem that opens the volume, it pays to let one’s poetic voice go astray and then rein it back in. But if the voice, “burdened with presents from being away,”17 is a figure of a poetics galvanised by translation and cultural transposition, the lyric as a whole also mocks the precarious ease with which the globalised (anglophone) consciousness inhabits other cultures and languages. At first I didn’t notice, my flexible throat full of a foreign language and my attention on the poison of the puffer fish.18

The motif of contact between cultures is evident in a reference to the territorial jostling in the East China Sea as the speaker imagines travelling “along the coast of Honshu, facing the Chinese frontier.”19 The territorial

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setting signals war and ecological disaster (“I fished on the Sea of Japan / within sight of a nuclear reactor”)20 and also indicates that the persona is reflecting on the situation back home. “Translation” is thus relevant in terms of Morrissey’s politics as well as her poetics. Since, at a superficial level, language is defined through the nationality and social status of its speakers, translation between languages is always also a political statement and Morrissey repeatedly calls attention to this engagé aspect of culture and translation. In “Wish,”21 from There Was Fire in Vancouver, she does not need to travel too far from home to achieve the necessary detachment: any distance will do to remind herself that the city’s familiarity is a mere illusion. To gain perspective, she takes herself and her estranged lover to the Mourne Mountains south of Belfast: “I’ll stand you by the Mourne Wall / And it shall be Easter. Sheep and mist.”22 The fifteen-kilometre natural granite wall surrounding the Silent Valley Reservoir may look like a miniature “Chinese Wall” but it also evokes, through the implied sense of its name, the Wailing Wall on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Still, designed to accommodate rather than to shut anyone out, it metaphorises the speaker’s “wish” for a world without barriers—interpersonal or intercultural. Entirely hand-built, the wall was constructed in the 1920s to protect the water reservoir, but also as a strategic project to provide work for the unemployed. It thus stands in sharp contrast to the dividing “peace lines” of Belfast, disturbed in the mid-1990s by the ongoing conflict and dysfunctional dialogue between the opposed sides of the fractured community. Like a wall of white noise, the blustering wind seems to render the speaker’s other inscrutable as his words are scattered about the mountainside: “I hang on your every word, / But the wind is too greedy.” All she can catch is: “Jesus Cold Viking Afterworld.”23 As elsewhere in Morrissey, the “Weather [becomes] a creature”24 and the roaring but speechless elements reveal a great deal by means of ellipsis and silence. The four capitalised words in italics, singled out by the penetrating noise and thereby ironically interconnected, outline the region’s history (and future) in a nutshell, as it were. In their disparity and sketchiness, these concepts, ranging from the Ice Age to the mythical Otherworld and the post-human future of the earth, may be seen as encouraging hope for solidarity and reconciliation. Thus reassured, the speaker imagines being able to contain the shrieking cacophony of wind in order to justify the place’s name (Silent Valley) and so that the other’s perspective could be

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heard. Like the inarticulate screeches of the seagulls in the Belfast poems, the string of isolated exclamations at the centre of “Wish” imparts two seemingly contradictory messages: that while dialogue is desirable, words taken at face value are easily manipulated and prone to change significance. This idea may then be taken as a reference to the repeatedly failed peace talks in Northern Ireland and the Middle East and also as an awed acknowledgement of the unknowability of the world. As we have seen with “In Belfast,” in this context, “wishing” for the right words and for an understanding is the most appropriate frame of mind: . . . what I have been given is a delicate unravelling of wishes that leaves the future unspoken and the past unencountered and unaccounted for.25

The thought of acquiring knowledge through a failed communication and interpretation of “words” becomes a focal point in “To Imagine an Alphabet” from Between Here and There. Laid out as a quasi-translation of assorted Chinese characters, it testifies to the freedom following from not knowing a language well enough or not knowing it at all. While the images on the page offer the persona an almost inexhaustible choice of likely meanings, the absence of syntactic structure—a possible nod in the direction of what Edna Longley calls Pound’s “Chinese restraint”26 —has its own liberating effects. Producing hilarious ambiguities, it seems to ridicule the false idea (shared by Pound) that oriental scripts are purely ideographic systems devoid of phonetic characteristics. Reminiscent of the associative workings of the imagination, this “translation” is a metacommentary on the process of writing. Opening with a case of praeteritio, the poem becomes an enactment of what it proclaims not to be equal to at the start. Too far back to imagine It all was dissolved Under soft black strokes Of a Chinese brush Diminishing the fatness Of original things[.]27

The substance of the physical world is eased out as corporeal presence gives up the ground for the light-footed proceedings of the mind. Words

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and images are arranged in a collage of direct juxtapositions and the conspicuous avoidance of linguistic convention suggests an attempt at— or a benign parody of—the Imagist “direct treatment of the ‘thing.’”28 Words become things and vice versa, bursting out in an extravagant jumble of possible meanings: Patterns from flattened Ants of a lake drained the facts That are trees in winter The spokes of the world went down[.]29

As the mind gets all absorbed and eventually “. . . lost in a landscape of noisy ideas that cross and flare in fireworks of strokes,” the impression of immediacy increases until suddenly, “Sex is everywhere, money / Rice fields wives . . .”30 Remarking towards the close of the poem that “My pictures defy the eyes,”31 Morrissey’s persona acknowledges that the (distorted) idea of an exotic communication system is being used to boost creativity rather than as material for interpretation. As images of aestheticised violence and off-stage killings become more blatant towards the end, the lyric turns on itself with a jeer, taking the insatiable artistic ego to task: “I see Lamentation as five falling stars, / . . . // And a terrible stag, flames shooting from his heart, as he prepares to walk and preach.”32 At one stroke, through an allusion to Pound’s “White Stag,” Morrissey’s poem becomes the translation of a translation, or several translations at once. But while it makes the associative method suddenly chime with the ideal of the “mosaic poem,” which Pound brought to perfection in The Cantos, the allusion hardly serves to pay an awed tribute to the older poet. On the contrary, the “terrible stag” directs us to Pound’s take on Malory’s The Tale of King Arthur, included in Personae (1909) which finally brought him fame (invoked with a majuscule in his “White Stag”: “Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, / Bid the world’s hounds come to horn!”33 ). The image of a preachy loner also recalls Pound’s exclamations in 1915 on the subject of war and democracy: “And in the midst of these awakenings Italy went to rot, destroyed by rhetoric, destroyed by the periodic sentence and by the flowing paragraph, as the Roman Empire had been destroyed before her. When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.”34 Declining to “come to [Pound’s] horn” and waving aside as preposterous the idea of a hunt for images as pure “objects,” Morrissey points out that, however sparsely

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used, words treated as “things” offer no safeguard against futile or deadly rhetoric. Yet, for Morrissey, this is no new argument. In “If Words” from There Was Fire in Vancouver, she calls up a procession of words and collocations as nagging, harmful, battered things. The difficulty is, of course—as “Das Ding an Sich” from the 2017 collection On Balance explains—that in poetry and human experience per se there is no such thing as “. . . nouns / unmoored from speech.”35 Words, particularly when deprived of syntactic relations and taken out of the frame of linear narrative, never stand for a sum of meaning but are part of an ever-changing stream of meaning. If this is one of the default modes on which the effect of lyric poetry has always depended, it is also the principle behind slogans that serve to sell guns and incite violence and greed. If words became things I’d watch a stream of unfortunates Fall from the mouth . . .36

The proposed antidote to this ambivalence of words is to accentuate the fluidity of imagination and language, to know that the fixity of concepts and phenomena is always only provisional. This type of remedy is proposed in the next poem, “The Juggler,” in which the figure of an artist/translator is shown to make epochs and cultures meet. Admiring the acrobat’s skills, the speaker wonders what “Anachronism he took up before / Using medieval skills . . .”37 in order to stop the flow of time. In the end, the viewer feels herself drawn in and transfigured by the performance. Although she counts herself among the “[n]atural begrudgers,” she admits to being fascinated by “. . . the weightlessness, the controlled / Mechanics of air.”38 The transposed consciousness, attained through the experience of the other, is instrumental in bringing us closer to ourselves. Face to face with an expression of art and life that surpasses us, “. . . we are not as far out / From faith as we were.”39 With this, we are brought back to the idea of translation. If true translation, in Benjamin’s terms, is “transparent” and, rather than blocking the light of the original, allows “pure language . . . to shine even more fully on the original,”40 Morrissey’s poems as “translations” are perfectly in line with this ideal. Still, this is not to suggest that the poet would use substitution, juxtaposition, ekphrasis and transcription with a view to shedding

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light on things. “Life flourishes on belief,”41 in her words, and the same is true for art. Anything but explanatory, much of the poet’s work shows how perception only allows us to glide along the surface while poetry and art make us aware of the world underneath, imbued with silence. If Aifric Mac Aodha insists that “everything is translation,”42 Morrissey has been perfecting her approach to poetry as translation—of “everything” as it were. Monitoring the frontier with “a world that can’t be entered” she is sometimes able to say “I’ve been there.”43 Most of the time, however, she is content to register her exclusion: . . . When I bend to the surface the room underwater clouds and furrows with breath like a door closing over. I am not theirs and they will not give me up.44

Viewpoint variation becomes the key method in Parallax from 2013. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cited in place of the book’s motto, parallax is an “[a]pparent displacement, or difference in the apparent position, of an object, caused by actual change (or difference) of position of the point of observation.”45 “Difference” and “apparent” are key terms in a poetry that concerns itself with “displacement.” If with this volume the poet appears to have finally settled down back home in Belfast (see, e.g., “The Coal Jetty,” “Last Winter” and “Photographs of Belfast by Alexander Robert Hogg”), the individual lyrics are as difficult to pin down as before. From poem to poem, different worlds are brought together through the interchange of genres, artistic disciplines and media, including photography, film, maps, documentaries and prose writings. The opening poem, entitled “1801,” is a rearrangement of Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journal in a loose variation on the “tennyson”; a stanzaic form coined by Alfred Tennyson which uses introverted quatrains with a repeated fifth line as a refrain (substituted in Morrissey’s poem by an interstanzaic rhyme on the fifth line). Yet, rather than simply turning the diaries into poetry by virtue of an intricate poetic form, it is the “tennyson,” we might say, that is transfigured here by the force of Dorothy Wordsworth’s (and Morrissey’s) striking moments of vision. The cursory diction, typical of diary style, allows the verbal images to stand out, both direct and suggestive. Despite the fragmented structure and the received stanzaic shape, however, the prevailing effect—brought about by the unobtrusive half-rhymes and the uneven length of the lines—is that of natural-flowing prose:

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William as pale as a basin, exhausted with altering . . . I boiled up pears with cloves. Such visited evenings are sharp with love I almost said dear, look. Either moonlight on Grasmere—like herrings!— or the new moon holding the old moon in its arms.46

No matter how subdued (and most likely coincidental) the metric reference appears to be, tracking Morrissey’s lyric down to Tennyson’s work can nevertheless be useful in order to unravel it. The first known “tennyson” is the ironic song “Ask Me No More” included in the third edition of The Princess, A Medley, a blank verse comic utopia originally published in 1847. Introducing the character of the “wild,” liberated Princess Ida, Tennyson appears to advocate the emancipation and higher education of women while showing the unfeasibility of their complete self-reliance. The key to happiness, he seems to propose, lies in the assimilation of sexes. In the end, Tennyson has the defiant princess—who had forsworn men and gone into hiding—give into her former beau, still allowing her to set her own conditions and thus assert her individuality and heroic self, albeit within the confines of wedlock. “Ask Me No More” recounts her last attempt at resistance, and her final defeat as she reluctantly surrenders to her wounded suitor’s charms. Critics, feminist critics in particular, have not come to an agreement about the outcome of this controversial jeu d’esprit, about whether its message is that at the end of the day women—or rather men—could have it all.47 This inconclusiveness is relevant to Morrissey’s “1801” in which Dorothy Wordsworth—who, of course, is the opposite of heroic boldness—is purported to have achieved a more subtle form of non-defeat. The inconspicuous poetry of this genre transposition serves to bring to light the lyric potential of the journals. Besides signalling a possible triumph, it simultaneously discloses the necessarily restrained character of William Wordsworth’s sister’s and housekeeper’s creativity. Early in 1801, Dorothy learnt of William’s intention to marry their childhood friend Mary Hutchinson, a step that took almost two years to realise but was to lead to a major change in Dorothy’s life. The melancholy tone of her diary entries from the time reveals how she was trying to brace herself for the shifts in her position within the household and her relationship with her brother that the new situation would necessarily bring about.48 It is striking how the fifth line in each stanza of Morrissey’s

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“1801” not only rhymes with the rest but breaks away from the prevalent domestic setting,49 thus shrewdly suggesting the kind of detachment that Tennyson’s title and refrain in “Ask Me No More” stubbornly but in vain attempt to assert. Foregrounding Wordsworth’s emotional turmoil, as well as the power of her natural and domestic imagery, Morrissey’s “version” offers a more sober, if also more ingenious and captivating, alternative to Tennyson’s dubiously optimistic denouement. There is another reason why Morrissey’s “1801” signifies change and transformation. Besides performing a genre alternation, it is precisely in introducing the theme of domesticity and the idea of home as a shelter that the poem serves as a perfect illustration of the concept contained in the collection’s title. For Dorothy Wordsworth, Dove Cottage at Grasmere where the Wordsworths moved in 1799 was always a “felicitous space,” to use Gaston Bachelard’s terms, the place she experienced as an ideal setting for concentration and cosmic expansion.50 As early as 1800, Dorothy noted: “Grasmere was very solemn in the last glimpse of twilight it calls home the heart to quietness.”51 Grasmere—and its memory, after the family had left it in 1808 to accommodate William’s growing household—is not so much the image of an ideal home as that of an ideal state of mind; Dorothy’s little “tower of Joy” and her Ulubrae. In its position at the beginning of the book, “1801” serves to demonstrate Morrissey’s own resolve to “come home.” It foreshadows poems such as “Daughter” or “Lighthouse” that are set in a house on the Belfast Lough, a house whose openings become frames through which views on life in various parts of the world and times in history are taken.52 It is not that Belfast poems would proliferate in Parallax, but there is a marked shift in how the setting is construed. Even if the exteriors are still perceived as harsh, this ruggedness is now recorded mainly for its emotional, aesthetic and aural appeal. What’s left is dark and quiet— barnacles, bladderwrack, brick—but book-ended by light[.]53

What is new, and only natural, as motherhood becomes one of the dominant themes in this collection, is the move inside so that the socially informed approach in some of the dock poems is counterbalanced by

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poems set in the house by the water. The latter becomes an important point of departure on forays into worlds beyond its limits and deeper into one’s memory and the unconscious. It is a place where peace of mind can be achieved that is essential for gaining insight and procuring change. The motifs of memory, light and transformation combine in “‘Ladies in Spring’ by Eudora Welty” which declares itself to be “a translation” in its subheading. But typically, although it synopsises the story’s main moments, this retelling throws no new light on the original’s notorious ambiguities. Indeed, what makes Welty’s prose narrative a likely source of a poem by Morrissey, is the way light and its varied images are employed to figure its opaqueness. Consider the bewildering, unexpected presence of the town’s women in the woods by the river where the main character, a boy named Dewey, is taken fishing by his father—although it must be clear that there are no fish in the river which, after weeks of drought, has become a “half-drained basin with the bottom poking through.”54 In Welty’s short story, an unknown female face appears among the trees, shining “clear as a lantern light in nighttime,”55 which later proves to belong to the young Opal Purcell, the boy’s father’s rejected lover. Morrissey presents the girl and her mostly silent cries with which she attempts to get the man’s attention as “Some other lady entirely” who has “. . . gone and placed her round bright face in the branches / where a circle of sun has landed and uttered this cry.”56 Using synaesthesia and insisting on the aural qualities of light, she references the latter’s capacity to simultaneously focus our attention and to dazzle the eyes. In the end, as the long-expected rainstorm finally breaks out in the narrative, it is all left to the elements and the incapacity of speech to contain them: And if the rain could be translated into words Little You and Little Me, Little You and Little Me would be the closest thing to meaning you could catch.57

In his meditation on “Silence and Light,” Louis Kahn considers “Light as the giver of all presences and material as spent light.” For Kahn, “Light” represents a sense of being in the world, a sense of a “Threshold, Light to Silence, Silence to Light, the ambience—Inspiration, wherein the desire to be, to express, crosses with the possible. The rock, the stream the wind inspires the will to express, to seek the means of imparting presence.”58 Light, synonymous with silence, is a crucial element in

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Morrissey’s poetic structures. The main thrust of her poetry is to attain the silence which inevitably accompanies “material” and to show its radiance with words. Many of her best poems thus read as meditations on the moving, epiphanic moments when light breaks through shadow and silence or, more often still, when it breaks out in the form of silence. The closing lines of “Juist, 1991,” the last poem in Morrissey’s first collection, recalls the reverence felt in the moment the surface of the sea lit up with bioluminescence—the light itself a kind of an artist—and winds up with a variation on the third verse in Genesis: It is as though God said Let there be light in this world Of nothing let it come from Nothing let it speak of nothing Let it go everywhere[.]59

The lack of punctuation denotes resumption and continuance. With these lines, Morrissey sends her debut out into the world and prompts us how to receive it. The task she sets herself, as we have observed, is not so much to translate things and silences into words but to translate words back into those “things.” If she sets out to show, with as many words as necessary, that our knowledge of things can only be cursory, her poetry also tells us that life and language in their vastness and endless variety consist of innumerable things worth knowing.

Translating Home: Ailbhe Darcy In 1990, Derek Mahon as co-editor of The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry remarked, together with Peter Fallon, that “Irish poets, of course, have always looked abroad.”60 The editors commented on the continuities and developments in recent Irish poetry, naming Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson as examples of a new openness to a broadening scope of foreign impulses. The ensuing decade, however, saw the onset of a new generation of poets, including Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Justin Quinn, Conor O’Callaghan, David Wheatley and Sinéad Morrissey, who would be defined by their outspoken rejection of the

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traditional notions of Irishness and who would refer to themselves as the “first genuinely post-national generation.”61 For many of them, Mahon’s emphatically internationalist outlook and keen awareness of the environmental crisis was a major source of inspiration—together with his and Michael Longley’s verbal inventiveness and what they saw as their refreshing formal conservatism. Until this day, in O’Callaghan’s terms, poets have been keen to trace an ever “more international perspective”62 in the newest poetry from Ireland. Ailbhe Darcy is an exponent of this newest poetic development and clearly an inheritor to the 1990s poets. But she is also a critic who has paid systematic attention to her immediate precursors. In both her poetry and academic writing, Darcy has critically explored the thematic and formal developments introduced by the 1990s group. If she argues that having set out from a Mahonesque self-conscious globalism, these poets have gone in radically different directions, it is interesting to see how she herself relates to the same source and, at the same time, departs from her models. Her poetry of globalised concern is carefully counterbalanced with a continuing awareness of the formative role of her original place and tradition. Poems that are sparked off by political crises and developments elsewhere are interleaved with those in which she relates back to her native Dublin. While her lyrics show her as confidently cosmopolitan, they— together with her literary criticism—also reveal how cautiously Darcy navigates the waters of internationalism and transculturalism. If her poems of travel and return bespeak nostalgia, it is not simply a longing for a former dwelling place but for a never-to-be achieved sense of at-homeness. Juxtaposed with daring probes into the workings of the mind and caustic commentary on globalised themes and ecological concerns, her various Dublin poems do not re-enact the common drama of exile and return. Rather, they testify to the desire to account for the world, for both its variousness and invariability. The moment of relocation thus implies in her case not only a pushing of boundaries (as in the blurring of national frontiers) but the widening of imaginative spaces. She explicitly counters notions about a “postmodern” artistic consciousness that is free to choose “one’s own tradition from whatever source”63 and insists that “[o]ur language—and, as a result, our thought—is inflected by our origins, our upbringing, our familial and social history, and our present location.”64 Towards the end of Imaginary Menagerie (2011), Darcy writes:

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There is always a way to go home, even if home has shifted continents . . .65

These lines, like so many in her debut collection, speak of severed ties and continuities. Having lived abroad for almost a decade, Darcy embarks on a personal as well as philosophical quest to find coherence in a world that is both impressive and elusive. Her verse, often based on the techniques of simultaneity and juxtaposition, foregrounds particularities while it insists on being comprehensive and on embracing difference. Poems informed by a youthful verve and defiant spirit combine with those dictated by a sense of knowing detachment. Darcy’s numerous Dublin poems register a sense of willing absorption but also willed separation. In a sequence entitled “Unheimlich,” the city exists twice removed from the speaker’s consciousness: introduced as a place in a remembered narrative, it is an emblem of emptiness as much as that of burnt bridges. Described as “a pentimento” it connotes afterthought and painful reminiscence: On the way home to wake you, Dublin a pentimento, redbirds seagulls, squirrels pigeons, clouds thunderheads . . .66

The peculiar distribution of punctuation and the resulting oddly arranged categories manifest impatience with clichéd memories of the city. Yet, underneath the mask of boldness, nostalgia seeps in through the persona’s reaction to seeing that the place keeps changing in her absence. In her own nomadic self, she is only capable of looking for home “in burnt spaces between / one line and the next.”67 The in-between here is not a place of contemplative repose but becomes a region of instability and disorder. It coincides with a life informed by confusion, mismatching names, shifting ideas and desires, a life spent in an ongoing, vain attempt at “horse sense.”68 If settling permanently in a place seems to offer a solution, there is no winning against the transient character of reality: [you] saw it all from where you started, spread-eagled in sneachta, glittering fish scales, hospitable numnah, let it all have you,

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settle in, arms outstretched to a world— Gadje, snow angel, bowerbird, Blanche.69

The four disparate concepts in the last line of the poem may seem to have been randomly chosen. However, besides illustrating how readily the poet gives herself over to the associative play of language, they represent a consistent, premeditated idea—similarly to the four words at the centre of Morrissey’s “Wish.” “Gadje,” “snow angel,” “bowerbird” and “Blanche” can all refer to an attempt to make an imprint, or an impression, and to get a hold on things. But they also speak of futile ambitions that will be trampled on and melt with the sneachta—like the shape left in the snow, or the disappearing language in which the image here survives; or be ignored by a prospective mate while performing one’s mystifying building ritual—like the romantic bowerbird in the Australian Outback; or be disappointed, yet again, in “the kindness of strangers” (like Blanche— DuBois). “Gadje,” the disparaging Romani term for anyone who is not Romani, is intended to remind us that there is no point in being stationary. Indeed, as it relates back to the initial section of the long poem, where the speaker identifies with a ghost of a house being exorcised in “a nomad’s clan’s” attempt “. . . to moonlight flit their own / haunting,” it shows how staying in one place could finish someone off: “[I] am shackled to my post like a nag in heat, / swan-upped, lackeen, bracketed in a fixfax.”70 The word choice and the energetic rhythm of these lines point to bravado intermingled with playful irony. Yet the poem also communicates a sense of regret and a desire to reconnect with the place and its people, despite their ills and contradictions. With its arms outstretched to the strange world, this poetry touches upon our fearful fascination with the unknown and teaches us a lesson about tolerance. The wealth of linguistic borrowing, slang, dialect and scattered cultural references points to the arbitrariness of language and its uselessness when facing the ungraspable yet strangely familiar other. In this respect, the poem approaches Mahon’s idea of our essential homelessness in the world and perhaps surpasses his self-conscious, wishful gesture of identification with the uncanny in “Gipsies.”71 Like Mahon’s poem, Darcy’s “Unheimlich” is informed by the speaker’s genuine ambivalence about the value

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and possibility of claiming a place as one’s own and the awareness of the ultimate elusiveness of one’s consciousness and determinations. In another poem in the collection, Darcy proclaims that she has the city under her skin, which makes it difficult to get her body or the city into perspective, “. . . As though I were something divorced / from the skin I’m in.”72 But where Morrissey would have displaced her persona to gain distance, Darcy keeps throwing herself back in: . . . I cannot leave. It is a narrow, self-effacing swathe, the shape of me— enough scar . . . If Dublin is kicks in the shins, my shin is the sweet spot, summer lunchtime Stephen’s Green.73

The potentially comforting conclusion, suggested in the rhythmic regularity of the rhymed couplet and the jingle-like final clause, is disturbed by a typical complication of meaning. The centrifugal allusion to the insidious “kicks in the shins” effectively spoils the image of a lunch-hour idyll at Dublin’s best-known public park—as does the elliptical allusion to Eavan Boland’s favourite image and shorthand for all kinds of collective and personal hurt. Although, on the one hand, Darcy makes as if staying on was the worst thing one could do, on the other, she cherishes the small sense of familiarity these places in the original hometown seem to offer, despite their tendency to change or disappear. Moreover, as she proposes repeatedly, there is some relief in letting things go their own way, in moving with life’s ebb and flow—like Aristotle’s nomads do, indifferent to location and inclined to regard anyplace as mine.74 Yet, she is aware that, for her as a member of a privileged group, this line of thinking is problematic. “If it is true,” she writes, that recent generations of Irish poets have been able to transcend Irishness . . . then we, as writers, occupy a position of almost unbearable privilege. Our position mirrors that of the latest generation of Irish emigrants, who have been able to use their white skin, English language, and European passport to move through the world as though borders were permeable, while others are stopped and turned back.75

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Darcy’s travelling poetics is informed by a genuine openness and curiosity which, as Edna Longley points out, are the essential conditions of “functional internationalism.” Accordingly, Darcy’s poems do not polarise home and elsewhere, or Ireland and abroad, knowing, along with Longley, that “[b]eing abroad without leaving home is also a definition of poetry.”76 The notion of mobility and inclusiveness in her case takes on pronounced pluralistic as well as territorial qualities. Time and again, Darcy points to the paradoxes of the multifarious and often bewildering reality, to the unheimlich within ourselves and the eerily familiar in the unknown other. Although her prevailing tone is that of shrewd irony, deep engagement of thought and sincerity of feeling play an equally important role in translating these conceptual paradoxes into text. “Translation” in this sense, to be sure, is a crucial principle in Darcy’s poetics. Characterised by constant shifting and transmutations, her poems are intended to overcome the variedness of life experience while simultaneously highlighting the foreignness of it all. To illustrate these points, she often contrasts references to particular works of art with visions of life as nightmare or disaster. Markedly eclectic in her choice of visual source materials, the poet patiently attends to the uneasy relation between the ethical and imaginative efficacy of art. Her poems thus instantiate the capacity of ekphrastic poetry, as identified by James A. W. Heffernan, “to question and challenge the art it ostensibly salutes” while making “the act of homage a work of critique.”77 A telling example of how the aesthetic immunity of artistic—and indeed poetic—expression is frequently challenged and deconstructed by Darcy is “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit ” which recounts the persona’s reaction to photo images from a 1968 project by performance artist Valie Export: A caption reads: The artist walks a man like a dog through Vienna on a leash . . . ..... I scare you over breakfast, baying, Was this funny before Abu Ghraib! Passers-by stop to watch, in the photograph.78

In the last line quoted, Darcy needs only a single comma to let herself into the scene described. Donning a mask, she often makes herself part of these

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ekphrastic expositions and an object of vicious self-irony. As Lawrence Venuti argues, an ekphrastic text always involves interpretation which is “overdetermined by the cultural situation and historical moment in which the ekphrasis is produced.”79 Venuti later alludes to analogies between an ekphrastic text and interlingual translation, insisting that the interpretive capacity of both lies in the fact that the textual or visual source is “not only decontextualized, but recontextualized” and thus divested, in part at least, of its original stimuli and objectives while provided with a new significance80 : As a result, [the process of] establishing the new context is never simply interpretive, but potentially interrogative . . . Yet once an interrogation is set going, it need not stop at the source materials; they may in turn be used to probe the translation or ekphrasis, along with the cultural forms and practices that constitute it as well as the traditions and institutions to which it is affiliated.81

The dual focus of Darcy’s ekphrastic poems allows for precisely such double-edged censure, while the critical take on whatever artistic and aesthetic object for its failed or misguided engagement with a particular crisis turns into an ironic self-attack. In the hilariously playful yet chillingly graphic “Shoes,” for example, the persona sides with Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush in 2008, and identifies in quick succession with the barefoot women of Africa, Marie Antoinette of France and the Filipino dictator’s wife Imelda Marcos (known for her personal collection of over 7000 pairs of shoes)—all this while she imagines slipping into a pair of absurdly extravagant “mallard heels in black” found online.82 The poem as a whole, certainly, is a meditation on the fun—and the potential fear—in trying to step into other people’s shoes. Ultimately, however, it speaks of the guilty relief at cutting off the avalanche of information pouring off the screen and being able to step back into familiar terrain. “[B]ut not us!” exclaims the speaker a little too determinedly just as celebrities in stilettos have been superseded by an online report about a little girl somewhere in the world who stepped on a landmine, “. . . with both / of her feet,” and as the poem becomes the site of an erotic fantasy triggered by the image of those kinky designer heels.83 The close of “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit ,” however, brings no such release, but finds the persona outraged at the photographs’ apparent

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brashness and ignorance. Starting, as we have seen, with a commentary on what is perceived as a lack of historical sensitivity, the poem finally undercuts its own authority. It is not without a hint of ironic self-denigration that the authorial persona complains of being weary of her role as critic and interpreter, particularly when there prove to be no words to match the horrors of reality: I want you to stop stopping your mouth with toast and speak, to make the story better, without my having to tell it: It’s about a man, a Jew, tied up outside the camp and scratch scratch bark bark ruff ruff ruff ruff[.]84

The use of paralipsis follows from the poet-speaker’s reluctance to name the harrowing associations which she insists the visual image evokes. While it inevitably leads to their expression, however, the onomatopoeic, agrammatical language of the closing lines accentuates the fundamental idea that the resources offered by her medium are woefully insufficient. In this, Darcy’s ekphrastic interrogations exemplify Philip Lewis’s concept of “abusive fidelity” and his argument that a translation should pay attention to the instances in which the original text deviates from linguistic norms and reproduce them by resorting to analogical “abuses” in the target language and culture. Such a translation, Lewis explains, possesses a double expository “function—on the one hand, that of forcing the linguistic and conceptual system of which it is a dependent, and on the other hand, of directing a critical thrust back toward the text that it translates and in relation to which it becomes a kind of unsettling aftermath.”85 Darcy, as we have seen, relies on this type of double-edged ambivalences in her ekphrastic poems that are presented, on the one hand, as transformative interpretations of their visual objects and their cultural and social relevance and, on the other hand, as important self-searching and intratextual correctives. As she insists on inhabiting the visual object for the moment of experiencing it and as she challenges and questions it in her attendant poetic utterance, Darcy makes it clear that while much of her poetry springs from the observation of art, those works are more than mere sources of thematic material. These poems become occasions on which description and perception coalesce until they both are part of an altered state of

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consciousness. In her poems as acts of verbal description and critical selfinterrogation, Darcy relies on montage and association to show how those worlds and experiences are permeable rather than incompatible or merely contiguous. Crucial to this thinking is the elusiveness of concepts such as universal truth or permanent home. “Now” is the governing principle in this poetry which has grown out of a life abroad and which translates back and forth between a conceivable home and elsewhere. ∗ ∗ ∗ Indeed, translation takes on an altogether different significance in Morrissey’s and Darcy’s poetry which is concerned with the limits of language and cognition as such. The uncertain presence of the Irish language is touched upon only occasionally, in Darcy’s verse. These sporadic usages and allusions, however, are among the things—together with mentions of Belfast life in Morrissey and Dublin topography in Darcy—that enable us to identify the speaking voice as distinctly Irish. Yet, rather than confirming the Irishness of their poetry, the variety of reference and subject matter helps to underline the complexities and the limitations of a national, linguistic or any other form of identity. Both poets perceive the idea of home defined unequivocally as a place of belonging as a laughable pretention and they construe the variousness and particularities of life elsewhere as attesting to the essential uniformity and transferability of experience. Yet, in both authors, the willingness to explore the world and expand one’s horizons is accompanied by a readiness to acknowledge one’s place of origin. On many occasions, straightforward, seemingly natural identification with a “home” is challenged by an encounter with the unknown; in other places, detachment is achieved through a relocation to the world of art (Darcy) or by way of mercurial vision and wide-ranging cultural reference (Morrissey). Accordingly, many of these lyrics explore how medialised, globally shared images of the world and our innermost cravings and fears—as in art, photography, television or social media and on the internet—affect our sense of origin, privacy and communal being. As their intriguingly obscure poems show, the elusive “original” (world and experience) that they propose to “translate” hardly becomes more intelligible in the process. Morrissey’s “The Rock Pool” and “‘Ladies in Spring’ by Eudora Welty” or Darcy’s “Unheimlich” and “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit ” all illustrate how interpretation can throw light

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on the source while literally obscuring it with words. The key question the two poets seem to be asking is whether words can after all be considered things. The idea behind so many of these poems is that there are truths and thoughts that render words irrelevant and that poetry, as James Longenbach insists, is capable of “performing serious work by disrupting normative discursive patterns”86 and proposing, thus, to overcome the outside limits of language. If some of these lyrics document feelings of loss and despair, suffering is depicted—taking cue from Auden’s “Old Masters”—in “Its human position.” Significantly, it occurs “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just / walking dully along.”87 Both Morrissey and Darcy seek to expose the arbitrariness of language and the fleetingness of meaning and to demonstrate how they can best be captured indirectly, in moments of preoccupation with what appears to be something else.

Notes 1. Earl G. Ingersoll and Stan Sanvel Rubin, “The Invention of the I: A Conversation with Paul Muldoon,” Michigan Quarterly Review 37.1 (Winter 1998), accessed 15 May 2014, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo. act2080.0037.106. 2. Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 6. 3. Collins, “Northeast of Nowhere: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey & Post-Feminist Spaces,” in Irish Poetry After Feminism, ed. Justin Quinn (Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008), 64. 4. Gerard Smyth, “When Not to Listen,” Dublin Review of Books 67 (May 2015), accessed 4 June 2015, www.drb.ie/contributors-articles/whennot-to-listen. 5. Sinéad Morrissey, “Nomad,” There Was Fire in Vancouver (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), 34. 6. Horace, Epistles bk. I, no. I2, l. 27. Qtd. in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 386. 7. Morrissey, “Nomad,” 34. 8. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167. Braidotti identifies the phrase as one of the famous slogans during the 1968 riots in Paris. 9. See Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 160, 263. 10. Horace, Epistles, 386.

242 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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Morrissey, “Gull Song,” Vancouver, 35. Morrissey, “Double Vision,” Vancouver, 9. Morrissey, “Vision,” 9. Morrissey, “In Belfast,” Between Here and There (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 13. Morrissey, “Belfast,” 13. Morrissey, “No Need to Travel,” Vancouver, 38. Morrissey, “My Voice Slipped Overboard,” Here and There, 9. Morrissey, “Voice,” 9. Morrissey, “Voice,” 9. Morrissey, “Voice,” 9. Morrissey, “Wish,” Vancouver, 58. Morrissey, “Wish,” 58. Morrissey, “Wish,” 58. Morrissey, “Darwin Man,” Here and There, 26. Morrissey, “Belfast,” 13. Edna Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 100. Morrissey, “To Imagine an Alphabet,” Here and There, 54. Ezra Pound, “Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. and introduction T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions Books, 1935), 3. Morrissey, “Alphabet,” 54. Morrissey, “Alphabet,” 54. Morrissey, “Alphabet,” 55. Morrissey, “Alphabet,” 55. Pound, “The White Stag,” Personæ: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, eds. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions Books, 1990), 24. Pound, “Affirmations VI: Analysis of this Decade,” New Age 16.15 (11 February 1915): 410. Morrissey, “Das Ding an Sich,” On Balance (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017), 41. Morrissey, “If Words,” Vancouver, 55. Morrissey, “The Juggler,” Vancouver, 56. Morrissey, “Juggler,” 56. Morrissey, “Juggler,” 56. Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” trans. Steven Rendall, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10.2 (1997): 162. Morrissey, “Rock Pools,” Here and There, 25. Aifric Mac Aodha, “A Talkative Corpse: The Joys of Writing Poetry in Irish,” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art (25 October 2011), accessed 11 November 2011, http://columbiajournal.org/a-talkative-cor pse-the-joys-of-writing-poetry-in-irish-3/.

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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Morrissey, “Lighthouse,” Parallax (Manchester: Carcanet, 2013), 51. Morrissey, “Pools,” 25. Morrissey, Parallax, 9. Morrissey, “1801,” Parallax, 11. For various conflicting views on Tennyson’s proposition to blend and thus reconcile the opposed sexes, see, for example, Terry Eagleton, “Tennyson: Politics and Sexuality in The Princess and In Memoriam,” in Tennyson, ed. Rebecca Stott (London: Longman, 1996), 76–86; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990); Donald E. Hall, “The Anti-feminist Ideology of Tennyson’s The Princess,” Modern Language Studies 21.4 (1991): 49– 62; and Katherine Frank and Steve Dillon, “Descriptions of Darkness: Control and Self-Control in Tennyson’s Princess,” Victorian Poetry 33 (1995): 233–55. According to Harold Bloom, Dorothy was so exhausted with emotion that she could not attend the ceremony when the date arrived. See William Wordsworth, ed. Harold Bloom as part of Bloom’s Biocritiques BBC Series (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2003), 35. I owe this observation to Britta Olinder and her paper “Changes of Place and Experience in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry,” presented at the IASIL 2016 conference, University College Cork, 25–29 July 2016. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 16. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 131. The year 1801 marks change in many other respects (not least the implementation of the 1800 Acts of Union and the abolition of the Parliament of Ireland as a final response to the suppressed Irish Rebellion of 1798) whose very diversity is of significance to Morrissey’s lyric. Morrissey, “The Coal Jetty,” Parallax, 3. Morrissey, “‘Ladies in Spring’ by Eudora Welty,” Parallax, 54. Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace, 1982), 251. Morrissey, “Ladies in Spring,” 54. Morrissey, “Ladies in Spring,” 55. Louis Kahn, “Silence and Light (1968, 1969),” in Louis Kahn Essential Texts, ed. Robert Twombly (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 229. Morrissey, “Juist, 1991,” Vancouver, 59–60. Peter Fallon and Derek Mahon, “Introduction,” in The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 1990), xxi. Justin Quinn, “The Irish Efflorescence,” Poetry Review 91.3 (Autumn 2001): 46.

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62. Conor O’Callaghan, The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, vol. 3, ed. Conor O’Callaghan (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2013), xv. Qtd. in Ailbhe Darcy, “Dorothy Molloy: Dual Citizenship in the Kingdom of the Sick,” in Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry, eds. Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2017), 97. 63. O’Callaghan, xvi. 64. Darcy, “Dual Citizenship,” 97, 98. 65. Darcy, “Like a Ball,” Imaginary Menagerie (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2011), 60. 66. Darcy, “Unheimlich,” Menagerie, 44. 67. Darcy, “Unheimlich,” 43. 68. Darcy, “Unheimlich,” 44. 69. Darcy, “Unheimlich,” 44. 70. Darcy, “Unheimlich,” 42. 71. Derek Mahon, “Gipsies,” Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1999), 67. 72. Darcy, “He Tells Me I Have a Strange Relationship,” Menagerie, 24. 73. Darcy, “He Tells Me,” 24. 74. In Politics, Aristotle asserts that “[t]he Idlest men are nomads” (1256a, 31), explaining that the nomads stay put as long as there are enough provisions for their herds and that their travels are determined by the sheer necessity to follow these herds once they have grazed the local pastures. See Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Trans lation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 75. Darcy, “Dual Citizenship,” 98. 76. Edna Longley, “Irish Poetry and ‘Internationalism’: Variations on a Critical Theme,” The Irish Review 30.1 (Spring/Summer 2003): 51. 77. James A. W. Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation,” New Literary History 22 (1991): 309. Qtd. in Lawrence Venuti, “Ekphrasis, Translation, Critique,” Art in Translation 2.2 (2010): 134. 78. Darcy, “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit,” Menagerie, 28. 79. Venuti, 134. 80. Venuti, 138. 81. Venuti, 145–6. 82. Darcy, “Shoes,” Menagerie, 34. 83. Darcy, “Shoes,” 34. 84. Darcy, “Hundigkeit,” 28. 85. Philip E. Lewis, “The Measure of Translation Effects,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 43. Qtd. in Venuti, 146.

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86. James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 31. 87. Wystan Hugh Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 179.

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “The Translator’s Task.” Translated by Steven Rendall. TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10.2 (1997): 151–65. Bloom, Harold, ed. William Wordsworth. Bloom’s Biocritiques BBC Series. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2003. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Collins, Lucy. Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. ———. “Northeast of Nowhere: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey & PostFeminist Spaces.” In Irish Poetry After Feminism, edited by Justin Quinn, 62–8. Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008. Darcy, Ailbhe. “Dorothy Molloy: Dual Citizenship in the Kingdom of the Sick.” In Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair, 97–114. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2017. ———. Imaginary Menagerie. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2011. Eagleton, Terry. “Tennyson: Politics and Sexuality in The Princess and In Memoriam.” In Tennyson, edited by Rebecca Stott, 76–86. London: Longman, 1996. Fallon, Peter, and Derek Mahon, eds. “Introduction.” In The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, xvi–xxii. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Frank, Katherine, and Steve Dillon. “Descriptions of Darkness: Control and SelfControl in Tennyson’s Princess.” Victorian Poetry 33 (1995): 233–55. Hall, Donald E. “The Anti-feminist Ideology of Tennyson’s The Princess.” Modern Language Studies 21.4 (1991): 49–62. Heffernan, James A. W. “Ekphrasis and Representation.” New Literary History 22 (1991): 297–316. Ingersoll, Earl G. and Stan Sanvel Rubin. “The Invention of the I: A Conversation with Paul Muldoon.” Michigan Quarterly Review 37.1 (Winter 1998): 63–73. Accessed 15 May 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080. 0037.106.

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Kahn, Louis. Louis Kahn Essential Texts. Edited by Robert Twombly. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Lewis, Philip E. “The Measure of Translation Effects.” In Difference in Translation, edited by Joseph Graham, 31–62. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Longenbach, James. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Longley, Edna. “Irish Poetry and ‘Internationalism’: Variations on a Critical Theme.” The Irish Review 30.1 (Spring/Summer 2003): 48–61. ———. Yeats and Modern Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Mac Aodha, Aifric. “A Talkative Corpse: The Joys of Writing Poetry in Irish.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art (25 October 2011). Accessed 11 November 2011. http://columbiajournal.org/a-talkative-corpse-the-joysof-writing-poetry-in-irish-3/. Mahon, Derek. Collected Poems. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1999. Morrissey, Sinéad. Between Here and There. Manchester: Carcanet, 2002. ———. On Balance. Manchester: Carcanet, 2017. ———. Parallax. Manchester: Carcanet, 2013. ———. There Was Fire in Vancouver. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996. O’Callaghan, Conor. ed. The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry. Vol. 3. WinstonSalem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2013. Pound, Ezra. “Affirmations VI: Analysis of this Decade.” New Age 16.15 (11 February 1915): 409–11. ———. Personæ: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. Edited by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. Rev. ed. New York: New Directions Books, 1990. ———. “Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited and introduced by T. S. Eliot, 3–14. New York: New Directions Books, 1935. Quinn, Justin. “The Irish Efflorescence.” Poetry Review 91.3 (Autumn 2001): 45–50. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking, 1990. Smyth, Gerard. “When Not to Listen.” Dublin Review of Books 67 (May 2015). Accessed 4 June 2015. www.drb.ie/contributors-articles/when-not-to-listen. Venuti, Lawrence. “Ekphrasis, Translation, Critique.” Art in Translation 2.2 (2010): 131–52. Welty, Eudora. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace, 1982. Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. Edited by Pamela Woof. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: Feminism After Poetry

Browsing the shelves of New York’s Strand Bookstore in 2000, I came across the Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, 1967 –2000, edited by Peggy O’Brien. Published the previous year, the copy had obviously been frequently used, and it came in very handy as I was about to prepare an anthology of Irish women poets in Czech translation. Praised as “beautifully produced [and] now the single best introduction to the kind of writing that is shaping, and being shaped by, the new Ireland,”1 O’Brien’s book was more the outcome of the renaissance of Irish women’s writing that got off the ground in the early 1970s and culminated in the last decade of the century. In 2002, after I returned to Prague, Vona Groarke’s third collection, Flight , arrived in the mail hot off the press, with a request for a translation of selected poems. Accepting this assignment, I inadvertently acknowledged my role as women’s translator. Of course, Groarke, who began publishing a decade earlier, has from the outset defined herself as being against any labelling of this type. Introducing an issue of Verse dedicated to Irish women poets in 1999, she expressed hope that such features and special issues would “eventually [become] redundant.” Insisting on the variedness of the material submitted, she refused to “typify” the Irish woman poet according to her occupation, subject matter, prevailing tone or form. What she most welcomed as the issue’s editor was that “the best of Irish women poets [were] not writing ‘Irish Women’s Poetry.’”2 © The Author(s) 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0_9

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Even if she had uttered no such explicit disclaimer of literary feminism, Groarke’s poetry could hardly have been described as “feminist” or “feminine.” While many of her poems are set within and around the house, and often around the issues of motherhood, the domestic is never a mere setting, nor a backdrop for playing out “woman’s experience.” While they stand witnesses to the lives that take place within their walls, the many houses in her poems have a formative and defining role in those lives. A children’s perspective, undiscriminating in scope and unrestricted by habit or a sense of finality, is frequently applied to express Groarke’s main theme: the paradox between the will to render the encounter with the strange world and the insufficiency of language to serve that end. Groarke is consistent about her attitude to literary feminism in her polemical as well as her poetic writing. So is Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill who has drawn on pagan orality and the “creative unconscious”3 in her poetry and referred to French feminist theory in essays and interviews. Yet—like Medbh McGuckian, who relies substantially on the perceiving body wherever her method approaches representation but whose organic, dream-like narratives can hardly be tagged as écriture féminine—Ní Dhomhnaill refuses to be “trivialized” as one of the “‘begonia poets’ or ‘wallpaper writers’ or, heaven help us, ‘Earth Goddesses.’”4 Of course, none of the poets I list under the heading of feminism write what Ní Dhomhnaill, with her penchant for compounds, calls the “[h]ere-I-am-looking-at-peasfalling-off-the-plate” type of verse, or represent “the domestic, per se.”5 But they all belong to a generation that had to deal with practical issues of publication and acceptance, and the lack of role models and predecessors. Moreover, by focussing on themes related to female sexuality and women’s experience, they contributed to the overall transformation of Irish poetry. Nevertheless, while I point out and discuss motifs and motivations that are feminist, my key critical interest is in the value and effect of the works as poems. If I have attempted to place these poems in a context, it is not the selective context of women’s writing but that of Irish poetic traditions and the current poetic scene characterised by a broadening of concerns and change. Feminism, I argue, was one of the points that Irish poetry had to reach and one of the limits it had to overcome in order to become the lively, open and undogmatic force it is today. Although still in the grip of “moral outrage at the way women poets were being treated in Ireland” and at what she perceived as an uneven “playing field,” Ní Dhomhnaill admitted in the early 1990s that women’s

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poetry was “in a state of flux,” pointing out that it was only the start of a new phenomenon.6 Towards the end of the decade, however, she conceded that the situation had changed at last, so that, looking back, she was able to speak about “the relative neglect” of poetry by women that existed in Ireland “until quite recently.”7 However suspiciously sleek it might appear, the years around the turn of the millennium do provide a plausible turning point in Irish—particularly women’s—poetry. For example, 2002 saw the publication of volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing dedicated to Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, which has been perceived as an important achievement in a long-drawn-out battle as much as the mark of new beginnings and a useful map of a new poetry and critical scene. It was a period of change, as that change was confirmed and recorded in the contemporary poetic output by men and women alike. Matthew Campbell, as editor of the The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003), describes the preceding decade and the years around 1999 as a period when poetry witnessed “a changing Ireland.”8 He suggests, nevertheless, that—despite all these conspicuous changes—we should not be oblivious to continuities in some of the key features of Irish literature: Exile and change . . . did engage the Irish poet and his or her characteristic mode of elegy, still preoccupied with the sense that change may also mean loss, the loss of the traditions and certainties of a recognisable national identity. As the Irish poem was written in a world facing environmental as well as economic and social change, so it adapted its traditional concerns with elegy or nature, to these new conditions.9

A similar nostalgia, following from the impossible and hollowed-out concept of national identity that is forked between the dead past and the vulnerable present, is evident in the poems I discuss in this book. The idea of imminent loss follows from the preoccupation with the literary past and the ambiguous relationship to the present, marked in the 1970s to 1990s by continuing discrimination. It also comes from a sense that, together with the rejection of the masculine tradition and gendered nationalism, a connection is being severed with Ireland as a supposed albeit problematic locale of national identity—a perplexity epitomised, among other things, by the language issue. This paradox, however, does not take away from the fact that literary feminism has substantially contributed to the wane of the nationalist tone in poetry and criticism and that it also helped to

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deconstruct the pervasive notion of “nationness,”10 as Ailbhe Smyth has it, that was at the foundation of the Irish state and the concept of Irish as the national language. The disengagement from or critical and creative assimilation of the “language issue,” together with a broadened focus of political engagement are characteristic of post-feminist writing. Throughout the book, post-feminism applies to poetry that distances itself from feminism while it is based on its achievements. The term thus indicates how the poets who first published in the last fifteen or twenty years have grown past but also out of feminism. In my view, post-feminism complements feminism by including subject matter and motifs introduced by the feminists, while being even less reducible to “women’s writing.” Contemporary Czech poetry periodically generates debates on whether engaged writing has its place in a postmodern and mainly post-communist society. The dilemma between post-feminism and feminism, however, has virtually no bearing on the discussion. Perhaps because men and women had to delimit themselves against a shared “oppressor”—the communist regime which (on the pretence of promoting equality between sexes) claimed them en masse as its labour force—and because the regime denied opportunities for publication to all (men and women) who failed to prove a sufficient level of commitment, there was no space for feminist poetry. Perhaps there was also no real need for it; the revolution against the totalitarian state was fought on other fronts. The end result is that while women have been published on an equal basis with men, Czech poetry had for a long time lacked major female figures such as the feminist poets in Ireland. As Petr Borkovec, one of the foremost Czech poets of the last twenty-five years, remarked in 2013, what he missed most in Czech poetry of the immediately preceding decades were “women authors like Vona Groarke from Ireland.”11 In the light of this comparison, it is no exaggeration to speak of revolutionary laughter in Irish feminist poetry as it focused on undermining the concept of the gendered nation state, as much as it is appropriate to speak of post-feminism in relation to the current poetry scene. Although there are critics in Ireland who refuse to assign feminism to the past, arguing that women still have issues to tackle in the society at large and in the cultural mindset of the majority, I propose that, in poetry at least, it was no longer the main determining factor and driving force shortly after it had become possible and common for women to function as poets. If poems by poets such as Caitríona O’Reilly, Sinéad Morrissey,

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Aifric Mac Aodha or Ailbhe Darcy are still marked by the balancing of tone and search for the lyric “I,” it is a search they carry out primarily as poets, not as women. Nowhere in their poetry do we find the foregrounding of the feminine ego and the schematically ironic obsession with the ideal masculine that inform the so-called post-feminist media products of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It must have been this standard media image of post-feminism in phenomena like Bridget Jones’ Diary or Sex and the City that provoked Moynagh Sullivan and Wanda Balzano in their editorial for the 2007 special issue of the Irish Review to put postfeminism on a par with “consumerism” and to impute it with business-like motivations: If the use of the term “post-feminism” reveals in its “consumers” a desire to be at all costs modern, and post-modern, in other words progressive and trendy . . . then this dangerously mirrors the more alarming aspects of a winning Celtic-Tiger mentality. One cannot but remain unconvinced of this kind of entrepreneurial, self-congratulatory, à la mode feminism that follows the capitalistic model closely and is an indulgent form of bourgeois individualism.

The editors are keen to take upon themselves the responsibility of “educational analysts” to extend and revitalise the genuine, die-hard feminist issues that are “at risk of being hijacked by conservative political forces.”12 Such an outpouring of social activism and spurring for an organised “resistance to conformism” might perhaps be accepted as a reaction against the ostentatiously unromantic, yet in fact strangely romantic chick-lit (or dicklit) elements in the fast-growing branch of contemporary women’s fiction that has also been referred to as post-feminist. It seems garishly out of place, however, with reference to poetry written in Ireland today. Uncomfortable with the idea of Ireland or “Irish Poetry after Feminism,”13 the editors focus on the reverse concept of “Irish feminism after poetry.”14 Catriona Clutterbuck who coined this anagrammatic phrase argues, nevertheless, that “Feminism and Irish poetry . . . are natural allies, not antagonists; to posit them otherwise is to declare the redundancy of art in its capacity to change lives on its own terms.” Consequently, she calls for “an investigation of Irish feminism after poetry, in confidence that relations of hospitality and exchange, rather than those of absolutism and hierarchy, can be expected to prevail between the art form and the intellectual, social and political tradition concerned.”15

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The issues of transition, as well as those of hospitality and exchange, are relevant to the phenomenon of poetic translation that is an important and much-debated aspect of Irish and, above all, Irish-language poetry. As the latter has experienced a transformation after feminism, a shift has been forming in the attitude to translating poetry from Irish to English and the related criticism that had previously been to a large extent controlled by the dichotomy between dominant and translated cultures. Ní Dhomhnaill’s accepting, unconcerned stance to translation, Mac Aodha’s original approach to writing in Irish, McGuckian’s unorthodox practice and use of translation in her own work, as well as Morrissey’s and Darcy’s more generalised understanding of transitions between cultures, genres and languages, all show that poetry and translation can be allies. Their essence, as we have noted, is based on something other than the ambition to transmit paraphrasable meaning which, in terms of both, is secondary. If translation is congruent with poetry writing and if they can often be regarded as two sides of the same coin, then translation and criticism can be viewed as compatible. As a translator and critic, I believe that there is no closer way of reading a poem than that of a translator. Yet I do not propose this usefulness of the translator’s experience to the critic only on the level of the attention paid to the language and the creative force of the individual words. The same experience indicates that just as there is no single theory or set of rules that would tell us how best to approach a text as a translator, there are none that would help us to evaluate a poem critically. Both the translator and the critic set about their task aware how varied their material is and resigned to the idea of inevitable limits and loss. The way some of these poets embrace the translation mode is motivated by their belief that everything is translation, which is curbed by a realisation that all such “translations” (including that of an image, idea or a feeling into poetic language) entail a flattening of the original and the loss of some of its dimensions. Thus, they underline the limits of language and representation. The critical and meta-poetic confrontation of those limits is, indeed, one of the important continuities in contemporary women’s poetry. Through the acceptance of these limits and by foregrounding elements of silence and secrecy, authors like Medbh McGuckian, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly and Ailbhe Darcy all come close to creating poems that match experience in its multifaceted immensity.

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Notes 1. Kieran Quinlan, “Book Review,” World Literature Today 75.1 (Winter 2001): 124. 2. Vona Groarke, “Editorial,” Verse 16.2 (1999): 7, 8. 3. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “The Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing, Introduction: Contemporary Poetry,” Selected Essays (Dublin: New Island, 2005), 173. 4. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Introduction,” 175. 5. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Introduction,” 178. 6. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Introduction,” 184. 7. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Introduction,” 184. 8. Matthew Campbell, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 9. Campbell, 3. 10. Ailbhe Smyth, “Paying Our Disrespects to the Bloody States We’re In: Women, Violence, Culture, and the State,” in Stirring It: Challenges for Feminism, eds. G. Griffin, M. Hester, S. Rai and S. Roseneil (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 13–39. I quote from the essay as reprinted in an abridged form in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing : Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, eds. Angela Bourke et al., vol. 5 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 407. 11. Borkovec in Adam Borziˇc, “Básník je ten, kdo za všechny a pro všechny udržuje pˇrátelství s jazykem” (Poet is the One Who, on Behalf of Others and for their Benefit, Maintains a Friendship with Language), an interview with Petr Borkovec, Tvar 6 (March 2013): 38. 12. Moynagh Sullivan and Wanda Balzano, eds., “The Contemporary Ballroom of Romance,” Irish Feminisms: Special Issue of The Irish Review 35 (2007): 1. 13. Irish Poetry After Feminism is the title of the proceedings from a 2006 conference held at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco. The phrase is repeated in the title of Sullivan’s contribution to the volume. See Moynagh Sullivan, “Irish Poetry After Feminism: In Search of ‘Male Poets,’” in Irish Poetry After Feminism, ed. Justin Quinn (Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008), 14–34. 14. Catriona Clutterbuck, “An Unapproved Alliance: Feminism & Form in the Irish Poetry Debate,” in Irish Poetry After Feminism, 54. 15. Clutterbuck, “Alliance,” 54.

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Works Cited Borziˇc, Adam. “Básník je ten, kdo za všechny a pro všechny udržuje pˇrátelství s jazykem” (A Poet Is the Person Who Stays Friendly with the Language, on Behalf of and for Everyone). Interview with Petr Borkovec. Tvar 6 (March 2013): 35–40. Campbell, Matthew. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Clutterbuck, Caitriona. “An Unapproved Alliance: Feminism and Form in the Irish Poetry Debate.” In Irish Poetry after Feminism, edited by Justin Quinn, 45–54. Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008. Groarke, Vona. “Editorial.” Verse 16.2 (1999): 7–8. Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. Selected Essays. Dublin: New Island, 2005. Quinlan, Kieran. “Book Review.” World Literature Today 75.1 (Winter 2001): 124–5. Smyth, Ailbhe. “Paying Our Disrespects to the Bloody States We’re In: Women, Violence, Culture, and the State.” In Stirring It: Challenges for Feminism, edited by G. Griffin, M. Hester, S. Rai and S. Roseneil, 13–39. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994. Reprinted in an abridged form in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, edited by Angela Bourke et al., vol. 5, 405–7. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. Sullivan, Moynagh. “Irish Poetry After Feminism: in Search of ‘Male Poets.’” In Irish Poetry After Feminism, edited by Justin Quinn, 14–34. Monaco: Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures, 2008. Sullivan, Moynagh and Wanda Balzano. “The Contemporary Ballroom of Romance.” Irish Feminisms: Special Issue of The Irish Review 35. Edited by Moynagh Sullivan and Wanda Balzano (2007): 1–6.

Selected Bibliography

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Index

A aisling , 32, 35, 43, 44, 53, 54, 56, 57, 65, 66, 90 Alcobia-Murphy, Shane, 83, 119, 131 Allen, Nicholas, 207 Allen Randolph, Jody, 21, 63, 154 alterity, 36, 92, 210 anglophone poetic tradition, 15, 17, 55, 120 anglophone poets and poetry, 3, 8, 14, 33, 35, 42, 199, 202 anglophone readers, 35, 192, 200 Aristotle, 236, 244

B Bachelard, Gaston, 144, 146, 147, 180, 230, 243 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 33, 60, 61, 67 Balzano, Wanda, 65, 251 banais rígi (royal wedding) ritual, 56, 66 Barthes, Roland, 19, 61, 166, 183

Batten, Guinn, 170 béaloideas . See Gaelic oral tradition Beckett, Samuel, 59, 141, 142 Belfast, 79–83, 95, 96, 123, 220, 223–225, 228, 230, 240 Bhabha, Homi K., 102, 185 Bishop, Elizabeth, 6, 143, 157, 178, 185 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 60, 182, 189, 209–210 Bloom, Harold, 102, 243 body, 48, 53, 57, 60, 61, 75, 76, 112, 120, 121, 149, 153, 166, 174, 175–177, 236, 248 female body, 18, 59, 61, 75, 80, 85, 107, 112. See also landscape as human body; language of the body (feminist concept) Boland, Eavan, 6–11, 12, 13, 15, 21, 22, 33, 42, 44–49, 58, 63, 64, 74, 88, 90, 91, 154–156, 165–169, 170, 208–210, 236 and feminism, 13, 19, 47, 74

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Theinová, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55954-0

271

272

INDEX

and silence, 49, 90, 168–170 and the Irish language, 47, 48, 64, 74, 88, 169, 208, 209 and the muse, 166–169 and the national past, 63, 87 and translation, 17, 209 “Envoi,” 168 “Fond Memory,” 49 In Her Own Image, 63 “An Irish Childhood in England 1951,” 48 The Journey, 44, 48, 49, 168 The Lost Land, 48, 89 “Mise Eire,” 44–47, 49, 208 “Mother Ireland,” 89, 90 “The Mother Tongue,” 87–89, 97 “The Muse Mother,” 166–169, 171, 208 New Territory, 22 Night Feed, 166 “The Scar,” 48 “Suburban Woman,” 88, 166, 168 “Witness,” 48, 58 Borkovec, Petr, 250 Braidotti, Rosi, 221, 241 Bridget Jones’ Diary, 251 Brown, Terence, 194, 212 C Cage, John, 143 caint na ndaoine (speech of the people), 193, 211 Campbell, Matthew, 214, 249 canon, the (Irish literary), 6, 8, 9, 33, 44, 47, 49, 55, 63, 75, 85, 102, 120, 171 Irish-language literary canon, 11, 12, 34, 35, 42, 102, 124, 127, 201, 207, 215 masculine canon, 18, 56, 85, 92, 101, 102, 112, 113, 155, 163, 164, 168, 171, 219

Carson, Ciaran, 79, 83, 199, 232 Cartesian dualism, 121, 179 Cavell, Stanley, 127 ceasefire process in Northern Ireland, 81, 123 Celtic Ireland, 6, 32, 44, 81 Clutterbuck, Catriona, 86, 251 Collins, Lucy, 8, 9, 21, 220 colonisation of Ireland and the Irish language, 32, 58, 62, 81–83 Connolly, Claire, 126 Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League), 35, 58 Corca Dhuibhne (Dingle Peninsula), Co. Kerry, 77 Coughlan, Patricia, 65, 91, 97 Critchley, Simon, 92 Cronin, Michael, 34, 200, 212, 213 Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court), 52, 65 Czech Poetry, 250

D Darcy, Ailbhe, 5, 10, 101, 220, 232–241 and ekphrasis, 238–240 and translation, 220, 237, 238, 240, 252 “Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit,” 237, 238 Imaginary Menagerie, 233 “Shoes,” 238 “Unheimlich,” 234, 235, 240 de Beauvoir, Simone, 60 de Búrca, Máire, 55, 65, 133 Deleuze, Gilles, 114 de Man, Paul, 204 de Paor, Pádraig, 21, 214 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 5, 14–16, 141 Descartes, René, 185 Dickinson, Emily, 6, 144–147

INDEX

dinnseanchas (dinnsheanchas), 78, 82, 83, 140 domesticity, 50, 52, 81, 83, 107, 122, 150, 166, 167, 230, 248. See also private and public space dreams, 31, 57, 75, 76, 87, 116, 144–146, 148, 149, 153, 176, 179, 180, 203, 248 Dublin, 3, 44, 51, 52, 88, 115, 132, 141, 150, 190, 215, 220, 233, 234, 236, 240 Dún Chaoin, Co. Kerry, 77 E Easter Rising (1916), 42, 50, 57 écriture féminine, 47, 60, 248. See also new language (feminist search for) ekphrasis, 104, 117, 150, 227, 238 English language, 12, 14–16, 35, 57, 59, 62, 77, 81, 82, 87, 88, 153, 168, 175, 194, 201, 202, 208, 214, 215, 236 as poetic medium, 82–84, 87, 153, 154, 168 associated with alienation, 15, 84, 202, 203. See also anglophone poetic tradition; anglophone poets and poetry; anglophone readers; mother tongue exile, 7, 15, 22, 47, 48, 154, 201, 214, 233, 249 Export, Valie, 237 F Falci, Eric, 110, 123, 140, 185 Fallon, Peter, 232 Faulkner, William, 102 feimineachas (feminism), 12, 24 Feiritéar, Piaras, 124, 132 Felski, Rita, 4

273

feminism, 4, 9, 10, 33, 36, 43, 49, 59, 65, 84, 104, 171, 183, 185, 194, 221, 222, 248, 250–253 literary feminism, 4, 5, 10, 13, 18, 33, 41, 73, 91, 156, 248, 249 feminist poetry, 16, 33, 34, 43, 46, 47, 49, 59, 84. See also Boland, Eavan; Groarke, Vona; Mac Aodha, Aifric; McGuckian, Medbh; Morrissey, Sinéad; Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan; Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, and feminism The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , 8, 12, 16, 64 filí (Celtic poets), 129 folk tradition, 32, 76, 78, 79, 84, 85, 94, 95, 140, 191, 201 Foucault, Michel, 138 Frawley, Oona, 78 fringe, the, 3, 7, 23. See also pale (the English) G Gaelic League, The. See Conradh na Gaeilge Gaelic oral tradition, 13, 23, 54, 59, 116, 128, 137, 140, 156, 191, 200, 201 Gaeltacht , 3, 37, 58, 77, 153, 199 Corca Dhuibhne (Kerry Gaeltacht), 77 Gallery Press, 22, 23, 129, 212 gender, 36, 65, 74, 137 gender divisions, 5, 17, 104, 126 gendered scenarios, 24, 54, 103 gendered stereotypes, 55, 66, 91, 115, 123, 130, 138 gender identities, 5, 75, 107, 122, 131, 143, 155, 156, 181 gender politics, 35, 125, 132, 165, 249, 251 grammatical gender, 94, 173, 206

274

INDEX

ghosts, 54, 146, 179–182, 235 Gillis, Alan, 91 Glazener, Nancy, 60 global perspectives, 10, 20, 104, 141, 198, 223, 233, 240 Graves, Robert, 109, 122 Greek myth, 108, 148, 194 Groarke, Vona, 9, 10, 42, 49–52, 91, 101, 138, 150–155, 156, 163, 169, 177–181, 210, 232, 250, 252 and ekphrasis, 151 and exile, 154 and literary feminism, 9, 247, 248 and silence, 19, 153, 180–182 and the Irish language, 42, 139, 153, 155 and the muse, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155, 163, 182 “Annotated House,” 178 “Aubade, Winter Solstice,” 185 “Away,” 154 “The Dream House,” 159 Flight , 50, 247 “The Front Door,” 180 “The Ghost on the Road,” 185 “Imperial Measure,” 50, 51 “Interval,” 185 Juniper Street , 153, 177 “Midsummer,” 180 “Orchard with Lovers,” 150–152 Other People’s Houses , 150 “A Pocket Mirror,” 179 “The Return,” 153, 159 Spindrift , 150, 153, 154, 178 “An Teach Tuí,” 152, 153 “Windmill Hymns,” 153 X , 178–180, 185–186 gulls. See seagulls

H Heaney, Seamus, 65, 79, 83, 86, 91, 95, 97, 130, 191 Heffernan, James A.W., 237 heteroglossia, 17, 35, 43, 60, 61. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Hiberno-English, 82, 102, 206 historical silence (of women), 18, 74, 111, 137, 165 home, 14, 16, 49, 82, 83, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 208, 209, 220–224, 228, 230, 234, 236, 237, 240 language as a home, 14, 16, 77, 194, 208, 209 Horace, 142, 221 houses, 81–83, 150, 153, 154, 248 humour, irony and satire, 17, 18, 33, 34, 36, 41, 52, 53, 56–61, 78, 82, 86, 87, 90, 92, 93, 101, 104, 122, 127, 132, 150, 151, 155, 174, 205, 210, 235, 237 self-irony, 17, 19, 82, 107, 122, 131, 174, 201, 208, 238 I identity, 1, 3, 7, 15, 20, 49, 77, 149, 164, 196 cultural identity, 2, 3, 20, 41, 176, 203, 205 geographic and regional identity, 16, 75, 223 linguistic identity, 4, 7, 10, 16, 18, 34, 42, 47, 49, 80, 82, 83, 87, 104, 112, 189, 240 national identity, 32, 35, 41, 43, 45–47, 50, 240, 249 poetic identity, 5, 19, 41, 103, 163, 166, 202. See also gender identities influence. See poetic influence Innti generation, 126, 133

INDEX

inspiration. See poetic inspiration Ireland as a feminised icon and female figure, 18, 31–33, 35, 42, 50, 52, 53, 56, 73, 78, 82, 84, 85, 93, 113, 114. See also Mother Ireland; motherland Cailleach, 2, 44, 56, 57 Cathleen (Kathleen) Ni Houlihan, 31, 56, 57 Chailleach Bhéarra, An (Old Woman of Beare), 44, 46 Seanbhean Bhocht (Poor Old Woman), 31, 32, 56 sovereignty myth, 31, 32, 42, 44, 56, 76 Spéirbhean, 2, 32, 44, 53, 54, 56, 90 Irish history, 3, 5, 50, 52, 81, 91, 123, 166, 168, 170, 208 Irish language and its decline, 16, 20, 55, 259 and its future, 34, 88 as a minority language, 35, 59, 127, 192, 198, 210 as national language, 5, 22, 34, 209, 250 as poetic medium, 13, 14, 34, 42, 56, 58, 59, 68, 84, 141, 168, 189, 198, 199, 202 as silenced, 48, 85, 175, 203, 208 associated with nostalgia, 13, 15, 16 in Northern Ireland, 9, 15, 35, 37 number of speakers and education, 35. See also Gaeltacht; national language; native speakers of the Irish language Irish-language poetry, 12, 19, 49, 52, 54, 55, 85, 124, 126, 213, 252 Irish-language poets, 4, 13, 14, 16, 36, 53, 77, 127, 198, 199, 210

275

Irish mythology, 44, 46, 82, 83, 128, 129, 214. See also sovereignty myth irony. See humour, irony and satire J Jacobite verse, 32 Jenkinson, Biddy, 7, 11–15, 19, 22, 23, 24, 53–55, 66, 123–127, 149, 155 and feminism, 5, 12, 13, 54, 132 and the muse, 53, 107, 110, 123–126, 155 and translation, 17, 133, 192 “‘Ait liom . . .’ agus rl.”, 124, 127 Amhras Neimhe, 124 Baisteadh Gintlí , 53, 124, 125, 132 “Mo Scéal Féin – Á Insint ag Aisling,” 53, 124 on the Irish language and tradition, 11–13, 17, 55, 125, 126 jouissance, 61, 68, 222. See also Kristeva, Julia Joyce, James, 1, 3, 5, 14, 20, 59 K Kahn, Louis, 231 Kavanagh, Patrick, 113 Kelleher, Margaret, 9, 21 Kinsella, Thomas, 82, 96, 132 Kristeva, Julia, 60, 61, 68, 172, 181 L landscape, 17, 18, 32, 73–76, 79, 85, 87, 90, 113, 140, 166, 226 landscape as human body, 18, 32, 59, 75, 76, 87, 89, 90 language language issue, 7, 10, 12, 34, 58, 74, 84, 103, 190, 205, 210, 213, 214, 249, 250

276

INDEX

language of the body (feminist concept), 57, 60 linguistic divisions, 4, 10, 12, 14, 17, 23, 34, 42, 47, 58, 60, 84, 154, 168, 182, 189, 210. See also English language; Irish language; national language; poetic language Lewis, Philip, 239 liminality, 22, 103, 104, 112, 174, 184 limits and languages, 17, 33, 220 Locke, John, 108 Longenbach, James, 156, 210, 241 Longley, Edna, 33, 37, 225, 237 Longley, Michael, 79, 199, 233 lyric subject, 4, 18, 111, 115, 165, 166, 171, 181, 210 lyric “I,” 16, 19, 154, 189, 192, 196, 209, 210 M Mac Aodha, Aifric, 5, 10, 14, 15, 101, 190–199, 201–203, 209, 210, 212, 251 and feminism, 5, 10, 194, 251, 252 and the Irish language, 14, 15, 190–198, 201, 210 and the muse, 101, 194, 196, 210 and translation, 17, 191–194, 196–199, 201, 202, 210, 212, 228, 252 “Buaine,” 196 “File,” 191 “Focal Faoisimh,” 197 Foreign News , 198, 212 Gabháil Syrinx, 190, 198, 211, 212 “Scéal Syrinx,” 194–196, 202, 203 “La Tricoteuse,” 192 Mac Craith, Mícheál, 65, 132 Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín, 140, 214 MacNeice, Louis, 31, 34, 56

Magdalene laundries, 96 Mahon, Derek, 232, 233, 235 marginality, 6, 7, 11, 17, 36, 92, 103, 156, 163, 164, 202, 209 masculine tradition, 8, 34, 49, 55, 73, 74, 102, 124, 156, 249 masculinity, 4, 31, 57–59, 65, 75, 120, 125, 127, 209 Maude, Caitlín, 11, 12 McCrea, Barry, 20, 38, 77 McGuckian, Medbh, 5, 15, 17, 21, 22, 35, 79–84, 95, 101, 110, 119–123, 126, 127, 131, 149, 156, 163, 175, 176, 177, 185, 190, 199, 202–204, 209, 210, 211, 248, 252 and feminism, 33, 84, 92, 248 and Northern Irish Conflict, 74, 79, 83, 84, 123 and Northern Irish poetry, 7, 79, 84 and silence, 19, 119, 139, 169 and the English language, 15, 82–84 and the Irish language, 82, 96, 155, 202, 203, 215 and the muse, 107, 122, 123, 131, 155, 163, 176–177, 181 as translator, 139, 172–175, 184, 190, 193, 200, 202, 214, 252 Captain Lavender, 80, 123 “Cathal’s Voice,” 184 Drawing Ballerinas , 123 “The Dream in Three Colours,” 203, 215 “The Dream Language of Fergus,” 203, 215 The Face of the Earth, 123 The Flower Master and Other Poems , 80 Had I a Thousand Lives , 123 “Ode to a Poetess,” 184

INDEX

On Ballycastle Beach, 203 “On Not Being Your Lover,” 185 “The Rising Out,” 176, 177, 202, 203 Shelmalier, 123 “The Soil-Map,” 80, 83, 95 Venus and the Rain, 120, 215 “The Villain,” 120–122 McKibben, Sarah E., 94, 95 McRobbie, Angela, 10 Meaney, Gerardine, 21, 31, 41 Medbh of Connacht, queen, 82, 83, 96 Meehan, Paula, 5, 7, 9, 19, 21, 22, 108, 115–119, 122, 127, 163 and silence and reticence, 110, 116–118, 123, 128 and the muse, 116, 117, 122, 126, 155, 172 Dharmakaya, 118 “In Memory, Joanne Breen,” 130 “Liminal,” 130 The Man Who Was Marked by Winter, 116 “Molly Malone,” 118 “Not Your Muse,” 117, 122 Painting Rain, 118 “Peter, Uncle,” 130 Pillow Talk, 117 “Six Sycamores,” 130 “Snowdrops,” 118 “Them Ducks Died for Ireland,” 130 “Zugzwang,” 116, 117 Merriman, Brian, 52, 65. See also Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court) Mhac an tSaoi, Máire, 11–13, 22, 24, 54, 55, 126, 127, 133, 199, 201, 211, 213, 214 modern poetry in Irish, 12, 42, 46, 49, 54, 199, 211

277

Montague, John, 15, 91, 97, 174 Moore, Marianne, 6, 144, 151 Morrissey, Sinéad, 5, 10, 101, 220–232, 243, 250, 252, 231, 240 “1801,” 243 and Belfast, 220–222, 240 and feminism, 221, 222, 229, 250 and silence, 224, 228, 231, 232 and translation and cultural/genre transposition, 221, 223–225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 235, 236, 241 Between Here and There, 223, 225 “The Coal Jetty,” 228 “Darwin Man,” 242 “Das Ding an Sich,” 227 “Daughter,” 230 “Double Vision,” 222 “Gull Song,” 222 “If Words,” 227 “To Imagine an Alphabet,” 225 “In Belfast,” 223 “The Juggler,” 227 “Juist, 1991,” 232 “‘Ladies in Spring’ by Eudora Welty,” 231, 240 “Lighthouse,” 230 “My Voice Slipped Overboard,” 242 “Nomad,” 221, 222 “No Need to Travel,” 223 On Balance, 227 Parallax, 228, 230 “Rock Pools,” 242 There was Fire in Vancouver, 221, 222, 224, 227 “Wish,” 224, 225, 235 Mother Ireland, 42, 52, 56, 88, 89, 90. See also Boland, Eavan, “Mother Ireland”

278

INDEX

motherland, 2, 18, 35, 41–43, 50, 56, 59, 73, 86, 102, 103 mother tongue, 15, 16, 18, 42, 47, 59, 82, 84, 87, 90, 168, 182, 189, 201, 208–210. See also colonisation of Ireland and the Irish language Mourne Mountains (Co. Down), 224 Muldoon, Paul, 4, 6, 8, 79, 152, 193, 199, 200, 213, 219, 220, 232 Murray, Les, 221 muse (the poetic), 101–103, 107–110, 126, 128, 138, 156, 163–165, 169, 174. See also Boland, Eavan; Groarke, Vona; Mac Aodha, Aifric; McGuckian, Medbh; Meehan, Paula; Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala; O’Reilly, Caitríona, and the muse; poetic inspiration mythology. See Greek myth; Irish mythology N Nandy, Ashis, 31 nationalism, 1, 32, 34–36, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 58, 63, 75, 78, 91, 123, 249 national language, 5, 22, 34, 42, 47, 189 native speakers of the Irish language, 14, 35, 193 new language (feminist search for), 49, 60, 80, 85, 167–169, 208. See also écriture féminine Ní Annracháin, Máire, 54, 66, 74, 75, 132 Nic Dhiarmada, Bríona, 21, 68 Nic Eoin, Máirín, 16, 21, 22, 24, 25, 36, 41, 61, 76, 94, 132 Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, 5, 7, 9, 15, 17–19, 21, 22, 25, 36, 60, 67,

73, 74, 84–87, 90–92, 96, 97, 101, 108, 110–115, 118, 119, 123, 127, 129, 138–140, 143, 147, 155, 156, 163, 169–172, 177, 181–183, 185, 190, 199, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 215 “The Absent Girl,” 169–172, 205 Acts and Monuments , 22 and feminism, 84, 112, 171 and silence, 19, 86, 96, 111–113, 115, 129 and the Irish language, 87, 205–208 and translation, 190, 205–208 The Brazen Serpent , 111 The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, 97, 206 “Gloss/Clós/Glas,” 206, 207 The Magdalene Sermon, 85, 86, 96 “Passing Over in Silence,” 111, 112 “Permafrost Woman,” 85, 86, 110 “Pygmalion’s Image,” 85, 90, 113, 114, 139, 140 “St Margaret of Cortona,” 112, 185 Site of Ambush, 169 “A Voice,” 85–87, 110, 143 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 21, 23, 24, 25, 42, 46, 56–59, 66, 74–79, 92, 94, 95, 138–141, 172–175, 181, 184, 190, 199–202, 248 “Ag Tiomáint Siar,” 76–78, 83, 94, 140 and dinnseanchas , 78, 83, 140 and the English language, 15, 153, 194, 199–201, 214 and feminism, 9, 12, 13, 18, 19, 58, 59, 68, 73, 84, 248 and the Gaelic oral tradition, 23, 56, 59, 78, 83, 94, 140, 248

INDEX

and the Irish language, 11, 12, 14, 15, 58, 59, 67, 74, 77, 94, 139, 140, 211, 214 and the muse, 75, 101, 107, 163, 172–175, 181, 200 and silence, 14, 139, 140, 156 and translation, 19, 175, 193, 194, 198–202, 213, 214, 252 “Cailleach,” 56, 57 “Caitlín,” 56, 57 “Filleadh na Béithe,” 172, 182 “Masculus Giganticus Hibernicus,” 57, 58, 94 “Oileán,” 75 Pharaoh’s Daughter, 139, 200, 214 Spíonáin is Róiseanna, 172 “Toircheas 1,” 139, 140 The Water Horse, 214 Ní Fhoghlú, Siobhán, 12, 24, 53 Ní Fhrighil, Rióna, 13, 22, 46, 48, 64, 66, 93, 184, 215 Ní Shíocháin, Tríona, 184 nomadism, 114, 221, 222, 235, 236, 241, 244 Northern Ireland, 7, 15, 35, 57, 220, 225 Northern Irish Conflict. See sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland Northern Irish poetry, 34, 79, 83, 84, 97 O O’Brien, Peggy, 21, 115, 247 O’Callaghan, Conor, 91, 232, 233 O’Connor, Laura, 7, 23, 96, 129 O’Connor, Mary, 67, 174 Ó Crualaoich, Gearóid, 13 Ó Direáin, Máirtín, 12, 42, 52–54, 65 Old Irish poetry, 44, 129, 191, 207, 215 oral tradition, the. See Gaelic oral tradition

279

Ó Rathaille, Aodhagán, 43, 56, 62, 65, 66 O’Reilly, Caitríona, 5, 9, 10, 19, 91, 101, 138, 141–151, 155–157, 163, 210, 211, 232, 250, 252 and silence, 19, 138, 141–143, 156, 252 and the muse, 148, 150, 155, 163, 182 “Electrical Storm,” 148, 149 Geis , 158 “Heliotrope,” 147–149 “Hide,” 158 The Nowhere Birds , 141 “Persona,” 145, 146, 148 The Sea Cabinet , 145, 147 “Statuary,” 141, 142, 146, 148 “To the Muse,” 147 Ó Ríordáin, Seán, 12, 54, 77, 78, 125, 126, 132 Ó Searcaigh, Cathal, 75, 76 Ó Súilleabháin, Eoghan Rua, 54, 56 Ó Tuama, Seán, 62, 132 Ovid, 114, 128, 140, 148

P pale (the English), 3, 7, 11, 23, 87, 88. See also fringe, the “Pangur Bán,” 191, 207, 211, 215 paralipsis , 111, 170, 239 patriarchal discourse, 60, 120, 155 patriarchal model of affiliation, 85, 120 Pearse, Patrick, 42–47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 62–65, 208 place names, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83 Plato, 108, 114, 129, 130, 142 poetic affiliation, 16–18, 163 poetic influence, 101, 102, 109 poetic inspiration, 109, 125, 126, 152, 163, 164, 191, 204, 207

280

INDEX

poetic language, 24, 50, 60, 122, 182, 192, 201, 204, 205, 208–210, 252 poetic silence, 137, 138, 156. See also Boland, Eavan; Groarke, Vona; Jenkinson, Biddy; McGuckian, Medbh; Meehan, Paula; Morrissey, Sinéad; Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan; Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala; O’Reilly, Caitríona, and silence poetic subject. See lyric subject poetic translation from Irish to English. See Boland, Eavan; Darcy, Ailbhe; Jenkinson, Biddy; McGuckian, Medbh; Morrissey, Sinéad; Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan; Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, and translation postcolonialism, 18, 34, 102, 177 post-feminism, 5, 10, 19, 104, 138, 155, 209, 250, 251 postmodernism, 165, 177, 183, 222, 223 post-nationalism, 41, 43, 101, 233 Pound, Ezra, 225, 226 praeteritio, 111, 225 private and public space, 18, 36, 50, 59, 80, 83, 92, 103, 165. See also domesticity private experience, 9, 92, 107, 110, 149 coded expression of, 110, 112, 123 Pygmalion (myth), 118, 128, 130. See also Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, “Pygmalion’s Image”

Q Quinn, Justin, 21, 46, 131, 171, 204, 212, 213, 232

R Republic of Ireland, 7 revisionism (in Irish poetry and criticism), 18, 33, 34, 59, 91, 128 S satire. See humour, irony and satire Scarry, Elaine, 149 seagulls, 222, 223, 225, 234 secret writing, 18, 85, 103, 110, 120, 128. See also McGuckian, Medbh; Meehan, Paula; Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan; O’Reilly, Caitríona, and silence sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, 33, 57, 123, 220, 224. See also McGuckian, Medbh; Northern Irish Conflict Sewell, Frank, 62, 94, 184, 214 Sex and the City, 251 Shakespeare, William, 127 Sharrock, Alison R., 118, 130 silence, 3, 18, 19, 33, 45, 48, 55, 83, 85, 87, 89, 97, 103, 104, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118, 119, 127, 128, 137–143, 156, 157, 164, 165, 169–172, 180–182, 202, 205, 207–209, 214, 224, 232, 252. See also poetic silence; historical silence (of women) silence as strategic device, 85 simulacrum, 114, 115 Sirr, Peter, 36 Smyth, Ailbhe, 21, 250, 253 Socrates, 108, 141, 151 Sontag, Susan, 138, 142 sovereignty myth. See Ireland as a feminised icon and female figure Steiner, George, 182 Sullivan, Moynagh, 64, 119, 120, 125, 251

INDEX

T Táin Bó Cúailnge, 82 Tennyson, Alfred, 228–230, 243 Thomas, R.S., 221 tradition. See Gaelic oral tradition; folk tradition; masculine tradition translation, 212. See also poetic translation from Irish to English “Troubles,” the. See sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland Turner, Victor, 7, 22 U urban setting, 79, 88, 115, 166, 214, 222–224, 234, 236 V Venuti, Lawrence, 238

281

vernacular, the, 32, 88, 90

W Welty, Eudora, 231, 240, 243 Wheatley, David, 168, 198, 212, 232 Wills, Clair, 21, 34, 50, 59, 80, 82, 107, 119, 123 windows, 3, 149, 164, 167, 169, 172, 177, 178, 203, 241 women’s writing, 4, 5, 18, 68, 156, 247, 248, 250 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 228–230, 243 Wordsworth, William, 229, 243

Y Yeats, William Butler, 31, 51–53, 56, 63–65, 126, 133