Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry

Jefferson Holdridge, Brian Ó Conchubhair

• Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781943666294
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Irish poetry presents various routes into which readers can delve: some depend on gender and questions of the place of women, while others use myth, folklore, and religion; landscape eco-criticism and etymologies of place; and concerns of nation-states, regions, and empire. The work of certain members of the younger generation of Irish poets contains what might be termed a post-national, trans-historical urge, or at least a post-Ireland one. The essays in  After Ireland, written by established and emerging scholars, recognize both the perpetual search for a sustaining national concept of Ireland, as well as a sense that long-established definitions no longer necessarily apply. The poets discussed herein include those who write in the shadow of Irish history cast by the Northern Troubles and those who feel that connections to a wider culture (poetic and political) are equally, or more, significant. Migration (immigration and emigration, internal and external) continues to be an issue. If Ireland is post-nation, does it look toward Europe? America? Boston or Belgium? As Irish society has changed and continues to change, so too has Irish poetry entered into a time of transition. This volume of essays charts these transitions and sets coordinates for future critical endeavors.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Matthew Campbell, "The Irish Longing for Rhyme"
• Eric Falci, "Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Problem of the Subject"
• Kelly Sullivan, "Derek Mahon: Letters to Iceland"
• Ailbhe Darcy, "Dorothy Molloy: Dual Citizenship in the Kingdom of the Sick"
• Declan Kiberd, "Seamus Heaney: The Death of Ritual and the Ritual of Death"
• John Dillon, "Writing by Night: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's Dream Notebooks"
• Ailbhe McDaid, "Reconfigurations in Colette Bryce's Poetry"
• Brian Ó Conchubhair, "Contemporary Irish-Language Poetry: After Innti"
• Daniela Theinová, "Original in Translation: The Poetry of Aifric Mac Aodha"
• Nathaniel Myers, "End Rhymes and End-Rhymes: Paul Muldoon's Echoic Elegies"
• Florence Impens, "Writing Ireland: Seamus Heaney, Classics, and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature"
• Jefferson Holdridge, "The Autonomous Tear: Caitríona O'Reilly's Geis and Conor O'Callaghan's The Sun King"
• Theo Dorgan, "Southern Wind"
• James Chandler, "Three Contemporary Irish-American Poets: Michael Donaghy, Campbell McGrath, and Maureen McLane"
• Omaar Hena, "Ireland's Afterlives in Global Anglophone Poetry"
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors