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20 Catholic-Christian identity and modern Irish poetry Bernard O’Donoghue Modern Irish poetry in English has been dominated by two major figures: both Nobel Prize winners, recognised as the leading practitioners of their time. The first, W. B. Yeats, was a southern Irish Protestant (though for much of his lifetime the northern–southern divide was not such a stark one: he was nearly 60 when the Irish Free State was declared); the second, Seamus Heaney, is a Northern Irish Catholic. So the first notable reflection is that each of them belonged to the ideological
9780719075636_4_007.qxd 16/2/09 9:25 AM Page 121 7 Scattered and diverse: Irish poetry since 1990 Jerzy Jarniewicz and John McDonagh I In the introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, first published in 1990, editors Peter Fallon and Derek Mahon note that Irish poetry ‘speaks for itself in one or another of the many voices which have evolved over the years’1 and this crucial acknowldgement in an important and popular anthology points clearly to the disparate, polyvocal and chimerical nature of a good deal of contemporary Irish poetry up
This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
11 ‘Like a foreigner / in my native land’: transculturality and Otherness in twenty-first-century Irish poetry Michaela Schrage-Früh Ireland in the Celtic Tiger years saw an unprecedented influx of ethnically diverse migrants to a nation formerly perceived as comparatively monocultural. Sketching the two dominant representations of post-Celtic Tiger multiculturalism, Amanda Tucker notes that the first of these ‘emphasizes that fear and hostility continue to characterize Irish responses to inward migration since the Gaelic Catholic monolith remains’ at the heart
14 Hospitality and hauteur: tourism, cross-cultural space, and ethics in Irish poetry Charles I. Armstrong Tourism tends to be observed as an indispensable but regrettable epiphenomenon. For many states it provides a major source of income, facilitating commerce and jobs that make up an important part of the national economy. At the same time, there is a tendency to see tourism as involving a pernicious commodification of space, culture, and people’s lives in general. Common conceptions of tourism tend to circle around cliché and stereotype. In an increasingly
4 ‘A nation of Others’: the immigrant in contemporary Irish poetry Pilar Villar-Argáiz The changing face of Irish society and the new influx of immigration during the economic boom of the country have compelled Irish poets to rethink nationhood intersectionally, as modulated by race and ethnicity. Depictions of ethnic migrant communities in Ireland have appeared in the work of poets since the early 1990s. Eithne Strong, for instance, dealt with this topic in her poems ‘Let Live’, about the emotional impact the Indian community has on the native Irish population
that I admired, Fallon and Mahon’s Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1990), and Donny O’Rourke’s Dream State (1994). When I looked at the two together I was astonished at the difference. While the Scottish anthology offered poetry in all the languages and dialects of Scotland, and displayed a richness and diversity of voice that I had come to expect, the Irish volume, by contrast, was much more monologic, full of the samey and the sonorous, with very few exceptions. There was a tendency, to quote Beckett’s Winnie in Happy Days, ‘to speak in the old style
since 1922’ (2009: 159). Consequently, Quinn conceives of the current immigration phenomenon as fertile in terms of the new opportunities for the development of Irish poetry. He envisages ‘the hope of new engagements and collisions’ between the old and the new Irish that will create new subjects and new perspectives in the contemporary Irish poetic landscape (ibid.). Moreover, the encounters with the polyphonic ethnic 133 Katarzyna Poloczek migrants result in ‘awareness of the borders of English as a means of expression, inducing gold-leaf shifts of awareness and
still holds considerable currency, as acknowledged by the American poet and critic Ben Howard in an essay of 1986. Howard noted that despite having ‘no Irish heritage’, he still felt ‘drawn’ to Irish poetry, persuaded as he was by the ‘natural eloquence of Irish writers’, their ‘gift of fluency’, and ‘the historical capaciousness of Irish poetry, its power to contain and transform its melancholy past’.31 Who wouldn’t want to ‘draw’ on a culture that promised so much? 001-016 AmericanLiterature Introduction.indd 8 18/06/2013 17:10 9 ‘Why do we like being Irish
literati.55 In spite of this, Irish Jacobite poetry, particularly the aisling (allegorical vision poem) has often been dismissed as lacking substantive political content, the stylised output of a literary caste. However, careful re-examination and contextualisation shows that it did not flourish in a political vacuum. Compared thematically and ideologically with ScotsGaelic and English Jacobite writings, and with contemporary Whig and anti-Jacobite rhetoric, Irish poetry showed an astute awareness of the workings of local, British and European politics and their possible