NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

THE POETICS OF MIGRATION

IN CONTEMPORARY
IRISH POETRY

Ailbhe McDaid
 New Directions in Irish
and Irish American Literature

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 Ailbhe McDaid

The Poetics
of Migration
in Contemporary
Irish Poetry
Ailbhe McDaid
The Institute of Irish Studies
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, UK

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-63804-1 ISBN 978-3-319-63805-8  (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63805-8

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For John
 Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the support of many people over the years
since its inception as a doctoral project. I am very grateful to the team at
Palgrave Macmillan for their advice in bringing this book to publication,
especially to Tomas René and Vicky Bates. I also wish to express my grat-
itude to Martina Galvin for permission to reproduce her painting Hidden
Spaces no.2 for the cover image and to Anne Boddaert at the Crawford
Art Gallery, Cork for her assistance.
The research underpinning this book was conducted at the Centre for
Scottish and Irish Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand. I received
generous and thoughtful mentorship from Professor Peter Kuch and
Professor Liam McIlvanney at the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies
and I wish to sincerely thank them both for their guidance and encour-
agement throughout. I am grateful to the University of Otago for fund-
ing the research, and to the Department of English and Linguistics, the
Division of Humanities and the American Otago Alumni Association for
financial support.
This book was completed during a Moore Institute Visiting Research
Fellowship at National University of Ireland, Galway and I wish to thank
Professor Dan Carey and Dr. Louis de Paor for the opportunity. The
Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and O’Connell House
Dublin, University of Notre Dame also supported this project in various
ways, not least for the intellectual stimulation and companionship of the
Irish Seminar 2013 on Contemporary Irish Poetry. I am especially grateful
to Professor Brian Ó Conchubhair and to Nathaniel Myers, Ailbhe Darcy,

vii
viii  Acknowledgements

Kelly Sullivan, Lisa McGonigle and many others for the multiple ways
their insightful friendships assisted me in writing this book. I received
invaluable encouragement from the History and English Departments at
Liverpool John Moores University, especially from Professor Nick White
and Dr. Nadine Muller. I also wish to thank my colleagues at the Institute
of Irish Studies at University of Liverpool for their warm and wise support.
I am extremely grateful to my family who have supported me over the
years in many different places and in many different ways: the Morrisseys,
Caoimhe, Colin, Iseult, Róisín, Liam, Bríd and Niamh, and my parents
Fergus and Bridie. Finally, my overwhelming debt of gratitude is to
John, to whom this book is dedicated.
 Contents

1 American Highways 1
‘the busy work of forgetting’: Memory and Community
in Eamonn Wall’s America 3
‘Half and halfed’: Greg Delanty’s Modes of Belonging 19
‘merely a brown trout / with wanderlust’: Migrant Identity
in Paul Muldoon’s Poetry 33

2 Alternative Cartographies 55
‘I mean it as no ordinary return’: Vona Groarke in America 57
‘laying holy miles between myself and home’: Sara
Berkeley’s Ecopoetics 71

3 Memory Spaces 89
‘Neither here nor there, and therefore home’: Memory
and Myth in Bernard O’Donoghue’s Poetry 91
‘Listen to that for twisting’: Martina Evans and
Manipulations of the Past 107
‘Imagine a tilt and the consequence’: Colette Bryce’s
Strategies of Escape 122

ix
x  Contents

4 Wandering Songs 147

‘No need to mention where all this was’: Harry Clifton’s
Cultivated Marginality 149
‘As at home here as I’ll ever be’: Sinéad Morrissey
and the Poetry of Parallax 170

5 Technologies of Distance 197

‘personal history irrelevant’: Justin Quinn’s Fuselage 198
‘Refresh: There’s nothing left to send/receive.’:
Migration, Technology and Poetic Innovation
in Conor O’Callaghan’s Poetry 215

Conclusion 237

Bibliography 241

Index 261
 Introduction

In placing a candle-shaped lamp in the window of Áras an Uachtarán as

a symbol of national solidarity with the Irish diaspora, President Mary
Robinson signified a broader reconsideration of emigration underway in
Irish society towards the end of the 20th century.1 As Breda Gray notes,
this shift was occurring elsewhere: ‘Like many other emigrant nations in
the 1990s (e.g. India, Mexico, El Salvador and Haiti), the Republic of
Ireland was reclaiming its diaspora as a means of refiguring the national
as global’.2 This reconfiguration of emigration and diaspora precipitated
changes in individual, collective and cultural conceptions of the migrant
experience moving into a new century; specifically, in the ways migration
is remembered and recreated. The poetics of migration in contemporary
Irish poetry is composed of memory and ethical reinvention, as dem-
onstrated by the varieties of approaches of the poets considered here.
Engaging theoretical frameworks of cultural, social and individual mem-
ory, this analytic approach is merged with critical discourses of migra-
tion and argues that, through consciously ethical gestures of reinvention,
recent Irish poetry invokes new, dynamic interactions between these
established paradigms. Through a series of close readings that are in dia-
logue with these theoretical approaches, this study asserts that memory
and ethics are crucial elements of the poetics of migration in Irish poetry
since the 1980s.
As ‘a nomadic art of many voices’, contemporary poetry exposes the
limitations of a place-privileging critical approach that prioritises roots
over routes.3 Questions of influence and affiliation, and of identity and

xi
xii  Introduction

belonging, apply anew to the generation who—having fled the ‘inherited

boundaries’ of Irish literature—inhabit a hybrid, globalised world.4 The
well-recognised synchronicity between place and poet has often provided
the dominant critical paradigm of interpreting Irish poetry in the 20th
century.5 With its origins in dinnseanchas and bardic poetry, the poet’s
responsibility has traditionally been to the tribe, to the landscape and
to the nation, as espoused in various ways by W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory,
Daniel Corkery, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. In his 1997 essay
‘The Sense of Place’, Heaney defines ‘Irishness as a spiritual, mythical
and psychic link to the land and to a place … a marriage between the
geographical country and the country of the mind’.6 Yet, the significant
social and cultural developments in Ireland towards the end of the cen-
tury pose serious challenges to established definitions of national identity,
thereby complicating the representative role of the poet.
Accelerated by Ireland’s accession to the EEC, the Troubles in
Northern Ireland, the emergence of a burgeoning Celtic Tiger econ-
omy and an increasingly educated, urbanised and mobile population,
Ireland had changed dramatically by the end of the 20th century. The
profundity of societal change, as recognised by Patricia Coughlan,
‘caused questioning of the hitherto dominant image (and self-image)
of Irishness as essentially rooted in the land, the West, and traditional
ways of the life’.7 To some younger poets, these debates appeared jaded
and dated; as poet Michael O’Loughlin explains ‘[w]hen academic argu-
ments about identity, nationality and so on were raised, this generation
preferred to quietly leave the room’.8 Not merely leaving the room,
many of O’Loughlin’s generation also left the country during the emi-
gration surge of the 1980s, leading to an ideological and actual detach-
ment from the idea and the island of Ireland. This trend continues even
after economic recovery and the birth of the Celtic Tiger with the result
that, by the turn of the millennium, the migration impulse is argu-
ably the single shared characteristic of contemporary Irish poetry. Poets
choose to leave Ireland and relocate, for temporary or prolonged peri-
ods, to other countries, and this brings geographical and creative mobil-
ity to their work.
The critical and cultural issues outlined here are familiar as being inte-
gral, if troublesome, within contemporary Irish poetry. Difficult and
contested concepts of emigration and diaspora are continually subject to
scrutiny, and the various ways in which these terms are defined and delin-
eated also warrant reflection.9 Modern experiences of migration are often
 Introduction  xiii

voluntary, emancipatory and temporary as contrasted with the forced,

traumatic and permanent nature of historical emigration. This is not to
suggest that these categories are binding, nor to imply that contempo-
rary migration is less psychically disruptive, but to acknowledge certain
essential distinctions between (e)migration, past and present. How then
to discuss ‘Irish’ poetry written elsewhere, by poets living elsewhere, that
takes, for its subject or backdrop, the stuff of elsewhere? The provocative
implications of the vocabulary of living abroad are problematic and, as
Longley notes, ‘owing to restrictive and coercive categories like “exile”,
“emigration” and “colonialism”, the question of Abroad in Irish litera-
ture has been only patchily explored’.10 In order to navigate this loaded
lexicon, this analysis employs the term- ‘migration’- throughout to
describe the late 20th century experience under discussion. -‘Migration’-
is taken to describe the act of departure from one’s home country and of
relocating in another country. Repeat migration and return migration are
further features of contemporary migration, which are also addressed.

Irish Emigration History

The historical facts of Irish emigration have been widely disseminated in
cultural, political and social histories, with particular emphasis on Irish
emigration to the United States.11 In order to understand the context
in which the poets under discussion are writing, it is necessary to spend
some time outlining the existing critical perspectives on emigration and
emigration literature. Kerby A. Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland
and the Irish Exodus to North America (1988) is widely considered the
definitive exposition of the causes and consequences of the many waves
of transatlantic emigration spanning the 17th to the early 20th centuries.
Miller’s study draws a number of conclusions: ‘[f]irst, both collectively
and individually the Irish—particularly Irish Catholics—often regarded
emigration as involuntary exile, although they expressed that attitude
with varying degrees of consistency, intensity and sincerity. Second, this
outlook reflected a distinctive Irish worldview—the impact of a series of
interactions among culture, class, and historical circumstance upon Irish
character. Finally, both the exile motif and its underlying causes led Irish
emigrants to interpret experience and adapt to American life in ways
which were often alienating and sometimes dysfunctional, albeit tradi-
tional, expedient, and conducive to the survival of Irish identity and the
success of Irish-American nationalism.’12
xiv  Introduction

Miller’s study fully interrogates and ultimately supports the perception

of Irish, and Irish-American, cultural memory of emigration as trauma.
However, due to ensuing challenges to those well-established tropes of
emigration discourse, popular perceptions of emigration stall around
the early 20th century, the point at which Miller’s analysis concludes.
Central to what is termed ‘traditional emigration’ (referring to the type
of emigration represented as forced, tragic, and irreversible, precisely
the experiences relayed in Miller’s study) lies the conviction that the
Irish of Ireland under British rule would be fated to suffer mass emigra-
tion.13 This intertwining of nationalism and emigration reaches back to
the Flight of the Earls but finds popular expression in the 19th century
through Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. Independence in
1922 brought changed political conditions in Ireland, thereby disrupt-
ing the continuity of the emigration narrative, but not the flow of emi-
gration itself. Timothy Guinnane suggests that ‘[t]hriving overseas Irish
communities could finance emigration to a degree otherwise impossible
in such a poor society. Once started, this emigration process meant that
Ireland would remain a country of emigrants, as it has, and that virtually
any economic crisis would lead to a heightened outflow’.14 Furthermore,
the particular typology of ‘chain migrations’ in Irish migration history
facilitated and even normalised emigration from individual rural villages
to pre-existing diaspora communities, in particular cities and established
Irish communities in the United States and Australia.15
The numerous economic and social challenges facing the new Free
State during its early years maintained the country in a state of pov-
erty, deprivation and unemployment throughout most of the 20th cen-
tury.16 Indeed, the shifting fortunes of the Irish nation during the latter
half of that century can be apprehended through the prism of emigra-
tion statistics, as with Enda Delaney’s analysis of emigration during the
mid-decades in his article ‘State, politics and demography: The case of
Irish emigration 1921–1971’.17 The initial decades of independence
maintained the trend of population decline while emigration continued,
spiking during the 1950s with almost half a million departures, amount-
ing to approximately 16% of the population. The economic stability of
the 1960s and membership of the European Union engineered massive
reductions in emigration figures, leading to a total reversal of migration
trends during the 70s, but by the 80s, record numbers were once more
emigrating; 1988 saw 46,000 departures, a near ten-fold increase on
figures for a decade earlier.18 On various levels, this recession marked a
 Introduction  xv

symbolic regression to the well-established paradigm of emigration as a

necessary, inevitable aspect of Irish life. Political rhetoric at the time rein-
forced the inexorability of emigration, with Brian Lenihan Snr in 1987
dousing those daring to dream with the cold hard fact, as he saw it, that
‘after all we can’t all live on a small island’.19 Cultural discourse also dis-
seminated emigration as part of everyday life; contemporaneous advertis-
ing campaigns, such as Aer Lingus’ You’re Home and ESB’s Going Back
deployed traditional and familiar tropes of parting and reuniting, familial
bonds, and comforting images of home, reiterating entrenched attitudes
to emigration as it remerged toward the end of the 1980s.20
Some cultural commentators refute this reassertion of traumatic emi-
gration, pointing out the changed demographic of highly educated,
highly skilled emigrants as just one feature of the altered reality of emi-
gration from 1980s Ireland.21 Perceiving the dominance of cultural
sentimentality over contemporary truths, Fintan O’Toole strikes at the
heart of the conflict between those opposing positions in his article enti-
tled ‘Some of our emigrants are happy to go’: ‘We want our friends and
our brothers, our sisters and our children to feel unhappy about leaving
Ireland … we want them crying on the phone, feeling alien, disoriented,
ill-at-ease … we still want to think of our emigrants in a continuous line
with all those who have left since the Famine.’22 The increased availa-
bility and affordability of air-travel, as well as improved telecommunica-
tions, are also cited as evidence of the transformation of the emigration
experience. Other academics and sociologists, however, caution against
representing emigrants as homogenously successful, noting particularly
the numbers of illegal Irish immigrants in the United States for whom
social mobility and economic prosperity proved elusive, and against the
‘sanitisation and voluntarisation’ of contemporary migration.23 The
‘various and contradictory invocations of the diaspora in the Republic
of Ireland’ as analysed by Gray in Women and the Irish Diaspora (2003)
testify to the continuing debates over representation and memory with
regard to historical and contemporary migration.24
This study argues that the realities struggles over how to receive and
represent the new realities of emigration mark a key moment in the rein-
vention of cultural memory surrounding diaspora. Taking its cue from the
existing debates, this project explores how migration is interrogated and
reinvented through ethical stances of engagement, rejection and/or dis-
missal of tropes of migration and memory in contemporary Irish poetry.
The shift from ‘traditional’ emigration to ‘contemporary’ migration can be
xvi  Introduction

seen to take place during the resurgence of diaspora studies in the 1980s,
a period of ‘resuscitated debate about “Irishness”’, according to Michael
Boss and Irene Gilsenan Nordin.25 Dianne Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm
expertly delineate the historiography of migration studies in their article
‘Diaspora, Gender and the Irish’, linking usage of the term diaspora as
an analytic and theoretical signifier to the popularisation of Irish migra-
tion discourse.26 Wider international developments in diaspora theory saw
a flourish of important publications in the nineties—amongst them Stuart
Hall’s ‘Identity and Diaspora’, Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture, Arjun
Appadurai’s Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation,
Caren Kaplan’s Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement,
James Clifford Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century and Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora. These studies posited
new formulations of diasporic and migratory experience, asking key ques-
tions around concepts of nationhood and ideologies of home, and interro-
gating identity, affiliation and aspiration in conditions of exile, emigration,
transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and/or globalisation.
Within the waves of historical immigration to the United States, female
voices from any country are rarely heard or else superficially represented.27
The figure of the Irish domestic servant, ‘Biddy’, has been explored
by Maureen Murphy,28 and Margaret Lynch-Brennan expands upon
Murphy’s work in her 2009 book;29 both these works build on Diner’s
comprehensive study of 19th century female immigration from Ireland.30
Literary self-representation by women emigrants, aside from letters, has not
survived.31 The silence of female narratives is troubling, but it has offered
a certain freedom to contemporary women (e)migrant poets. The fluid-
ity and flexibility of migrant poetry reflects the contemporary reality that,
for female poets, the ‘relationship to place and community, both past and
present, is a complex and contingent one’, continually evolving both in
Ireland and beyond.32 The poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,
Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has been analysed in terms
of their individual engagements with irrelevant, limiting, or proscriptionist
constructions of nationalist feminine ideals.33 Boland describes the synthe-
sis of woman and nation as ‘a corrupt transaction between nationalism and
literature which feminized the national and nationalized the feminine …
their place in the poem was prescribed; it was both silent and passive.’34 As
highlighted in this analysis, migration can offer an alternative avenue for
female poets whose work demonstrates the possibilities of an identity that is
not inhibited by national or diasporic narratives.
 Introduction  xvii

If contemporary migration, with its ambiguous relationship to national

identity, necessarily challenges the established parameters of diasporic
discourse, contemporary female migrant experience complicates the dis-
cussion even further. Gerardine Meaney reminds us that ‘Irish (literary)
history offers Irish women little except a record of exclusion and denial. It
is therefore unsurprising that Irish women writers should show a marked
preference for forms and material which appear to offer a way out of
that history’.35 As Gerardine Meaney, Anne Fogarty, Patricia Coughlan,
Sarah Fulford and Ellen McWilliams, amongst others, have depicted in
their scholarly work, the relationship between female writers, identity,
and nationalism is complex, shifting and problematic.36 The gendered
nature of diasporic discourse posts another barrier for female migrant
poets to negotiate, especially given that the writer-in-exile is, almost
without exception, male. While female emigrant characters, written by
men, have featured in literature—Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ (1914); ‘The Letter’
(1966) by Liam O’Flaherty; William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey (1994);
Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009)—the work of female migrant writers is
far less recognised.37 Aside from Edna O’Brien, the canonical invisibility
of female emigrant writers is almost absolute, the astonishing neglect of
Maeve Brennan instantiating the fact.38 Ellen McWilliams, in her compre-
hensive 2013 book Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, goes
a great distance towards redressing the imbalance in critical discourse of
that genre.39 Tina O’Toole’s article ‘Cé Leis Tú? Queering Irish Migrant
Literature’ opens another window onto the diversity of migration expe-
rience which has historically, as well as critically, been interpreted and
represented as a male heterosexual endeavour.40 The data of 19th- and
20th-century trans-Atlantic movements challenge this misperception
with regard to gender, with at least as many women as men making the
journey from Ireland, while emerging research on queer migration is
beginning to uncover the narratives of LGBT migrants.41 The enshrined
relationship between Mother Ireland and her exiled sons figures not
only in fiction but in the ballad tradition, in drama, and in poetry, fol-
lowing the paradigm that configures (e)migration as a kind of secondary
birth-separation trauma between mother and (male) child. Expressions of
romantic fidelity and devotion permeating established tropes of emigra-
tion reinforce an embedded gendered discourse that problematises the
ways female migration is read, reproduced and understood.
While it is not the purpose here to undertake an investigation into
the gendered and heteronormative biases of historical emigration, it is
xviii  Introduction

necessary to recognise how the situation in which contemporary female

poets write differs from that of their male peers, and to highlight some
of the issues embedded in the gender divide. Likewise, the intersections
of sexuality and migration also require particular consideration. Treating
emigration as an homogenous shared experience threatens to elide the
idiosyncrasy of each migration by absorbing it into an overarching nar-
rative of departure. By recognising the specific conditions of each poet’s
work, the individual poetry can be situated without being subsumed
within an engaged critical analysis of the poetics of migration. Through
the modes of memory and reinvention, this study contends that con-
temporary poetry of migration diverges from historical migration litera-
ture and requires new interpretative paradigms that accommodate these
changed realities.

Migration, Memory and Ethics

In pushing beyond what Sebastian Barry calls the ‘inherited boundaries’,
migrant poets confront a troubling tension between artistic innovation
and a perception of ethical obligation. This tension is identified by Derek
Attridge in his essay ‘Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the
Other’ as ‘the obligation to be inventive in one’s responses to cultural
productions’. Attridge asks ‘[w]hat is the relation between [this obli-
gation] and the obligation to respond to cultural artefacts with fidelity
and justness’?42 The question of ethics—relating to the codes of creative
responsibility by which an artist is bound—is simultaneously a question
of memory, tied up in decision-making processes of active remembering
and forgetting. The existing emigration narrative, as unspooled above,
exerts a claim (whether consciously acknowledged or not) on every
migrant writer. The writer must decide how to respond to that claim,
whether by recognising, rejecting, modifying or forgetting the conferred
ethical responsibility. Phillip Wolf outlines the central crux that ‘lies at
the very heart of the idea of cultural memory: Humans are always born
into a pre-existent situation, towards which they have to take a symbolic
and moral stand.’43 Crucially, moral and symbolic positioning is related
to memory and to the way memory is continually subject to revision
contingent on subject and context.
The concept of an ‘ethic of reinvention’ is invoked throughout this
critical analysis. Ethics is understood as a guiding principle of poetic
action, which includes structural, formal and thematic decisions as well
 Introduction  xix

as how a poet stages him/herself within a poem. The aesthetic assertions

of a poet are related to his/her ethical positionings, particularly with
regard to the symbols and allusions engaged in their poetry. The term
ethical denotes a deliberate poetic response to an existing value system,
whether environmental, political, aesthetic, nationalist or commemora-
tive. In asking what constitutes an ethical action in poetry, it is necessary
to consider the distinction between the autonomy of the individual poet
and the responsibility of the artist as a poet. The term reinvention is used
to denote the nuances of engagement with pre-existing generic expecta-
tions of Irish poetry: as such, transformation, modification and rejection
are all recognised as versions of reinvention. Migration itself is an act of
reinvention, in the spatial and psychological reconfiguration of the self
inherent in the acts of departure and return. Memory, too, is premised
on reinvention—it recreates the past and is charged with essential ethical
decisions concerning active remembering and forgetting.
Maurice Halbwachs introduced the term mémoire collective in the
1950s, defined as memory that ‘does not preserve the past but recon-
structs it’.44 Relatively speaking, cultural memory studies is ‘a recent
phenomenon’, and yet has garnered rapid interdisciplinary momentum
since it ‘developed fully in the 1990s’.45 In an Irish context, the theo-
risation of memory has been recently and convincingly applied. Oona
Frawley’s series Memory Ireland opens a door onto the theory of mem-
ory in multiple disciplines in her edited volumes that include Memory
and Identity in Irish History (2011), Diaspora and Memory Practices
(2012), The Famine and The Troubles (2014), James Joyce and Cultural
Memory (2014).46 Frawley’s collection explores the continual battles over
what constitutes the past at various moments in the story of a nation
obsessed with its history. Barbara Misztal sees the ‘cultural turn in his-
tory’ as instigating a wider regard of the discipline ‘as another form of
narration’.47 In Ireland, the revisionist debates of the 1980s and 1990s,
the recovery of supressed narratives associated with religious and institu-
tional organisations, the ongoing Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the
reinterrogation of inherited political and cultural beliefs, in particular for
the purposes of this discussion around migration and identity, contribute
to the fluidity of Irish history. As Pine observes in The Politics of Irish
Memory, ‘Over the last 30 years, Irish remembrance culture has opened
up our recent history’; consequently ‘[w]e are not who we thought we
were, or put another way, we remember ourselves differently now’.48
Discourses of history and identity that were once fixed are now subject
xx  Introduction

to scrutiny and deconstruction from a variety of positions, as explored by

Guy Beiner, Emilie Pine and Frawley, amongst others.49
As ‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’, cul-
tural memory studies underpins the theoretical approach undertaken
here.50 Paul Connerton offers ‘personal, cognitive and habit-memory’
as a mode of classifying memory,51 but Aleida Assmann’s theorisation
of the ‘complex networks of memories’ is preferred for the way it can
accommodate shifting intersections across personal and collective experi-
ences of migration.52 Her analysis yields four formats of memory that are
invoked throughout: individual, social, political and cultural memory.53
In addition to Assmann’s classifications, intertextual memory—that is,
the ways in which poems speak to, with, from and about other literary
works—is another essential aspect of how memory functions in poetry.
Intertextual memory also functions on the level of genre, as defined by
Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning in their key essay ‘Where Literature and
Memory Meet’, in which they define genres as ‘conventionalized reposi-
tories of memory’.54 Remembering and forgetting takes on particular
significance in the context of paradigmatic shifts in Irish literature of the
period, especially given the established and problematic genre of emigra-
tion narratives.
The intersection of poetry and memory is where this analysis rests,
following Renate Lachmann’s formulation that literature is a ‘mnemonic
art par excellence. It supplies the memory for a culture and records such
a memory. It is in itself an act of memory’.55 As such, literary memory
both resides in cultural memory and forms cultural memory, and these
exchanges enact intriguing negotiations on textual and extra-textual
levels. As the poetry of migration transmits memories, it also mutates
those memories. In her essay ‘The Literary Representation of Memory’,
Birgit Neumann defines ‘mimesis of memory’ as ‘the ensemble of nar-
rative forms and aesthetic techniques through which literary texts stage
and reflect the workings of memory’.56 The mimesis, or poetics, of mem-
ory in contemporary Irish poetry is read through the ways memory is
invested and troubled in the poem’s formal and stylistic acts, and is criti-
cally intertwined with existing literary theoretical formations including
Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Michel Foucault’s heterotopias.57
As the transformation and mediation of memory in the late-capitalist,
digital interconnectivity of the 21st-century requires new currencies
of interpretation, the most recent poetry here is considered via Jean
Baudrillard, N. Katherine Hayles and Brian Massumi. The mutations of
 Introduction  xxi

memory in an increasingly post-human society invoke a range of changed

debates about the ways and means of memory into the future.
These varieties of socio-cultural, psychoanalytic, historical, digital, tex-
tual, and semantic memory theory are applied to the range of migrant
poets in this analysis. This multitude of approaches is deliberate, in order
to demonstrate the diversity of migration experiences amongst contem-
porary poets. Both memory and migration are products of distance,
whether temporal or physical. Paul Ricoeur’s declaration that remember-
ing is distinguished from other cognitive acts because of its ‘relation …
to time and … the dialectic of presence, absence, and distance’ invokes
this essential interaction between memory and migration.58 The remove
at which memory necessarily operates is multiplied in a migratory con-
text; in her introduction to Memory and the Irish Diaspora, Frawley
writes of ‘the production of a new kind of memory of ‘home’, one that
involves the reconstruction of a place—Ireland, in this case—through
an alchemy of memory and imagination, one that no longer relies upon
daily physical interaction with a landscape and a people’.59 As memory
theorists repeatedly point out, however, integral to remembering is for-
getting, and in a contemporary context of migration, the reconstruction
of Ireland is a complex undertaking. Indeed, active and passive remem-
berings and forgettings play a significant role in these migrant poets’
interactions with the past.60 As Andreas Huyssen observes, ‘The past is
not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become mem-
ory’.61 In the process of articulation, remembering and forgetting are
conscious and ethical actions. The poetics of migration is crucially con-
cerned with memory and its reinventions, which are decisive elements
that resettle differently in each poet’s work. In appreciating these varie-
ties, the latitudes of contemporary Irish poetry are expanded through the
critical lens proposed here.

Migration and Contemporary Irish Poets

This analysis foregrounds migration as the definitive criterion for inclu-
sion in this study—all the poets under discussion here are migrants at
present, or have spent prolonged periods living outside Ireland, or
have configured a migration experience as poetically significant to
their work.62 This is by no means a comprehensive account of all Irish
migrant poets—indeed there are many other poets who might have been
included—but rather, this discussion proposes a poetics of migration that
xxii  Introduction

is applied in depth to a selected cross-section of contemporary migrant

poets. Specifically, this study takes care to include poets who represent
diverse genders, ages, sexualities, migration longevities and locations as
well as demonstrating how broadly migration can feature or recede as a
subject for migrant poets. Significantly, this analysis argues not for a tra-
jectory, but rather for a spectrum of migration poetry, across which het-
erogeneous responses to inherited and individual memory practices are
positioned.
The poets are included for their own experiences of migration as
well as for the ways their work relays the migration experience. One
remarkable feature of contemporary Irish poetry is the impulse towards
migration—as Rosita Boland’s feature in The Irish Times recognised, a
significant portion of Ireland’s poets currently reside outside the coun-
try.63 Inevitably, then, decisions on who should be included means the
exclusion of other, equally relevant, poets. In prioritising diverse, alterna-
tive and less well-represented migration experiences, the study concen-
trates on poets whose work has not been read through a migration lens
(such as Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Conor O’Callaghan) or whose
work, while critically regarded, has received less than its share of schol-
arly attention (Bernard O’Donoghue, Harry Clifton, Colette Bryce).
This discussion could have easily swung in different directions on the
wide compass of migration poetry; to America and James Liddy, Eavan
Boland and Eamon Grennan; to the European sensibilities of Pearse
Hutchinson, Desmond O’Grady and Derek Mahon; to the intersections
of language and migration for Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Derry O’Sullivan
and Louis de Paor. Furthermore, the poetry of migration to Ireland, as
opposed to migration from Ireland, is a topic in need of sustained atten-
tion in its own right and is the subject of publications by Borbála Faragó,
Eva Bourke and Pilar Villar-Argáiz.64
The question of audience takes on greater relevance when a poet is
between locales and the significance of publishing practices is an impor-
tant practical dimension of migrant poetry. The implications of a migrant
poet publishing exclusively with an Irish publisher (such as Eamonn Wall
with Salmon Poetry or Sara Berkeley, Vona Groarke and Justin Quinn
with The Gallery Press) differ in kind from the implications of publish-
ing with non-Irish publishers (as Bernard O’Donoghue with Faber &
Faber, Martina Evans with Anvil Press Poetry and Sinéad Morrissey with
Carcanet Press), in terms of audience, reception, and motivation. These
issues are further complicated by dual publishing (for instance, Harry
 Introduction  xxiii

Clifton with Wake Forest University Press and The Gallery Press, or
Conor O’Callaghan’s initial publication of ‘The Pearl Works’ as a chap-
book from New Fire Tree Press and its later inclusion as part of The Sun
King from The Gallery Press) and by publishing practices involving sin-
gle poems in journals and newspapers (Greg Delanty occasionally pub-
lishes stand-alone poems in the Irish Times but has no collection from an
Irish publisher). Issues of imagined and actual audiences are addressed
in the following analysis, bound up with cultural memory practices.
The range and diversity of contemporary migration poetry and the con-
straints of this project mean that this analysis must necessarily leave cer-
tain avenues unexplored. The restrictions imposed here are the necessary
product of exigency rather than deliberate acts of omission, made with
due respect to the depth and breadth of the field of migration poetry.
Through its focus on carefully chosen poets, this study explores how
recent poetry diverges from established paradigms of emigration litera-
ture, arguing against ‘myths of totality’ in favour of advocating an alter-
native interpretative model for the poetics of migration in contemporary
Irish poetry.65

Notes
1. President Mary Robinson placed a candle in the window of her resi-
dence at Christmastime every year during her presidency, 1990–1997.
See Fergus Finlay, Mary Robinson: A President with a Purpose (Dublin:
O’Brien Press, 1990).
2. Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2003):
p. 157.
3. Jerzy Jarniewicz and John MacDonagh, ‘Scattered and Diverse: Irish
Poetry Since 1990,’ in Brewster, Scott & Parker, Michael (eds.), Irish
Literature Since 1990, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009):
p. 139.
4. Sebastian Barry (ed.), The Inherited Boundaries: Younger Poets of the
Republic of Ireland, (Mountrath: Dolmen Press, 1986). See also Dermot
Bolger (ed.), Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad, (Dublin: New Island
Books, 1993).
5. Terence Brown describes the ‘consolations’ of ‘a poetry of place custom-
arily involve[d] in Irish cultural tradition, with its suggestions of belong-
ing, of familial and tribal continuities’ in ‘Mahon and Longley: Place
and Placelessness,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish
Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
xxiv  Introduction

Press, 2003): p. 135. It would be impossible to give a complete bibliog-

raphy of critical studies of the relationship between place and poetry, and
its origins in the dinnseanchas tradition; significant publications include:
Terence Brown and Nicholas Grene (eds.) Tradition and Influence in
Anglo-Irish Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1989); John Goodby, Irish
Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000); Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry
and Place in Northern Ireland 1968–2008 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
2008); Ray Ryan (ed.) Writing in the Irish Republic : Literature, Culture,
Politics 1949–1999 (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), amongst others.
6. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978. (London:
Faber and Faber, 1980): p. 132.
7. Patricia Coughlan, ‘Irish Literature and Feminism in Postmodernity’,
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 10 (1–2),
2005, p. 179.
8. Michael O'Loughlin, ‘MISSING: Have you seen these poets?’ in The
Irish Times, 10 October 2010.
9. Dianne Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Diaspora, Gender and the Irish,’
Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 8, 2008/2009: pp. 1–29. Hall
and Malcolm reflect on the history and controversy of the term diaspora
in Irish Studies, while their essay offers wider-ranging observations on the
existent research on women in emigration historiography.
10. Edna Longley, ‘Irish Poetry and “Internationalism”: Variations on a
Critical Theme,’ The Irish Review, vol. 30 (Spring-Summer), 2003:
pp. 48–61.
11. Most of these studies tend to concentrate on Irish emigration to the
United States: Donald Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto:
P.D. Meany, 1996); Andy Bielenberg, ed. The Irish Diaspora (Harlow,
England: Longman, 2000); Tim-Pat Coogan, Wherever the Green is
Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora (New York: Hutchinson, 2001);
Charles Fanning, The Irish Voice in America (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 1998); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and
the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988); Patrick O’Sullivan, ed. The Irish World Wide Series (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1992–1997). For Australasian studies, see
David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish
Migration to Australia (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994);
Malcolm Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics and
Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008); Angela McCarthy, Irish Migrants
in New Zealand 1840–1937: The Desired Haven (Woodbridge: Boydell
and Brewer, 2005).
 Introduction  xxv

12. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America: pp. 3–4.
13. Ibid.: p. 244.
14. Timothy Guinnane, ‘The Vanishing Irish: Ireland’s population from the
Great Famine to the Great War,’ History Ireland 5 (2) 1997.
15. David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish
Migration to Australia (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994).
16. Joseph J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social
and Cultural History 1922–2002 (London: Harper Perennial, 2004);
Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London:
Profile Books, 2004).
17. Enda Delaney, ‘State, politics and demography: The Case of Irish
Emigration, 1921–1971,’ Irish Political Studies 13, no. 1 (1998).
18. Irial Glynn, ‘Irish Emigration History,’ UCC, http://www.ucc.ie/en/
emigre/history; See also Bronwen Walter et al., ‘A study of the existing
sources of information and analysis about Irish emigrants and Irish com-
munities abroad,’ (Department of Foreign Affairs, 2002).
19. Qtd. in Piaras Mac Éinrí, ‘Emigration: we still can’t all live on a small
island,’ Politico, 21 January 2011.
20. Ailbhe McDaid, ‘“Sure we export all our best stuff”: changing representa-
tions of emigration in Irish television advertising,’ Journal of Nordic
Irish Studies, Special Issue on Cultural Memory and the Remediation of
Narratives of Irishness (Volume 13), 2014.
21. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Some of our emigrants are happy to go,’ The Irish
Times, 14 September 1989; Linda Dowling Almeida, ‘“And They Still
Haven’t Found What They’re Looking For”: A Survey of the New
Irish in New York City,’ in The Irish World Wide ed. Patrick O’Sullivan
(Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1992); Russell King and Ian
Shuttleworth, ‘The Emigration and Employment of Irish Graduates
: The Export of High-Quality Labour From the Periphery of Europe,’
European Urban and Regional Studies 2, no. 21 (1995).
22. O’Toole, ‘Some of our emigrants are happy to go.’
23. Jim Mac Laughlin, ed. Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish
Society: Emigration and Irish Identities (Cork: Cork University Press,
1997): p. 136.
24. Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2003):
p. 30.
25. Michael Boss and Irene Gilsenan Nordin, ‘Introduction: Remapping
Exile,’ in Re-mapping Exile: Realities and Metaphors in Irish Literature
and History, ed. Michael Boss, Irene Gilsenan Nordin, and Britta Olinder
(Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2006): p. 7.
xxvi  Introduction

26. O’Toole, ‘Some of our emigrants are happy to go.’; Hall and Malcolm,
‘Diaspora, Gender and the Irish.’
27.  Patrick O’Sullivan, ed. Irish Women and Irish Migration (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1995); Dorothea Schneider, ‘The Literature
on Women Immigrants to the United States,’ Actes de l’histoire de
l’immigration 3 (2003). The phenomenon of the silenced female is
a common issue in classic histories of American immigration, which
Schneider (2003) argues are ‘incomplete accounts because throughout
women are almost entirely absent from the story.’
28. Maureen Murphy, ‘Bridget and Biddy: Images of the Irish Servant Girl
in Puck Cartoons, 1880–1890,’ in New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora,
ed. Charles Fanning (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2000).
29. Margaret Lynch-Brennan, Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in
America 1840–1930, (New York: Syracuse, 2009).
30. Hasla Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the
Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1986).
31. It is important to mention here the prolific output of Mary-Anne Sadlier,
who emigrated from Cavan in 1844, and published some sixty vol-
umes of novels, translations, short stories and plays. Although her work
is often dismissed as sentimental, Sadlier’s fictional representations of
the Irishwoman in America remain both pioneering and enlightening.
See the Mary-Anne Sadlier Archive online at University of Virginia for
an in-depth account of her life and critical reputation American Studies
at the University of Virginia, ‘The Mary-Anne Sadlier Archive,’ http://
xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/SADLIER/Sadlier.htm; also Kevin Molloy,
‘Literature for Irish Colonials: The Example of Nineteenth-Century New
Zealand,’ LISA E-Journal III, no. 1 (2005) for more on Sadlier’s trans-
mission to a global diaspora.
32. Lucy Collins, ‘Northeast of Nowhere: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey
and Post-Feminist Spaces,’ in Irish Poetry After Feminism, ed. Justin
Quinn (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 2008).
33. There have been innumerable critical studies on these poets, particularly
with regard to gender, myth and national identity. Prominent intersec-
tional works include (but are by no means limited to): 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); Michaela
Schrage-Fruh, Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and Gender in the
Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian
(Trier: WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004); Irene Gilsenan
Nordin, ‘Beyond the Borders of Home: The Subject-in-Exile in the Work
 Introduction  xxvii

of Two Contemporary Irish Women Poets, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,’ in Proceedings from the 8th Nordic Conference on
English Studies, ed. Karin Ajimer and Britta Olinder (Gotenborg: Acta
Universitatis Gothorburgensis, 2003).
34. Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our
Time (New York: Norton, 1995): p. 7.
35. Gerardine Meaney, ‘History Gasps: Myth in Contemporary Irish
Women’s Poetry,’ in Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, ed. Michael
Kenneally (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1995): p. 100.
36. Patricia Coughlan, ‘Irish Literature and Feminism in Postmodernity,’
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 10, no. 1–2
(2004); Gerardine Meaney, ‘History Gasps: Myth in Contemporary
Irish Women’s Poetry,’; Sarah Fulford, Gendered Spaces in Contemporary
Irish Poetry (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002); Anne Fogarty, ‘“The Influence
of Absences”: Eavan Boland and the Silenced History of Irish Women’s
Poetry,’ Colby Quarterly 35, no. 4, December (1999): pp. 256–274;
Ellen McWilliams, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
37. James Joyce, ‘Eveline,’ in Dubliners (London: Penguin Classics, 2014
[1914]); Liam O’Flaherty, ‘The Letter,’ in The Short Stories of Liam
O’Flaherty (London: Four Square, 1966); William Trevor, Felicia’s
Journey (London: Penguin, 1996); Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn (London:
Penguin, 2009).
38. In Coughlan’s (2004) review of Angela Bourke, Maeve Brennan:
Homesick at the New Yorker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), Brennan
is described as ‘an anatomist of deracination’ whose writing is considered
alongside Elizabeth Bishop, Alice Munro and James Joyce. During her
lifetime, she received little critical attention, but posthumously, in addi-
tion to Bourke’s biography, two collections of short stories and a novel
have been published; Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection: Stories
of Dublin (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997); The Rose Garden
(Washington: Counterpoint, 2000); The Visitor (Dublin: New Island
Books, 2001).
39. Ellen McWilliams, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
40. Tina O’Toole, ‘Cé Leis Tú? Queering Irish Migrant Literature Women
and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction,’ Irish University Review 43,
no. 1 (2013).
41. Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora; Margaret Lynch-Brennan,
Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America 1840–1930
(New York: Syracuse, 2009). Given the conservative Catholicism and
the status of homosexuality in Ireland until recently, historical data
xxviii  Introduction

pertaining to queer migrations is difficult to ascertain; there is, however,

increasing impetus to recognise queer migration as an important part
of the diasporic story. See Tina O’Toole ‘Editors’ Introduction: New
Approaches to Irish Migration,’ Éire-Ireland 47, no. 1&2, Earrach/
Samhradh/Spring/Summer (2012): pp. 5–18; for a sociological angle,
see Hickman (2002; 2005) and also Róisín Ryan-Flood ‘Sexuality,
Citizenship and Migration: the Irish Queer Diaspora in London,’ ESRC
Full Research Report, RES-000-22-2612. Swindon: ESRC; for a per-
spective beyond the Irish context, see Eithne Luibhéid, and Lionel
Cantú Jr, Queer migrations: Sexuality, US citizenship, and border crossings
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
42. Derek Attridge, ‘Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,’
PMLA 114, no. 1, January (1999): p. 20.
43. Phillip Wolf, ‘The Anachronism of Modern Cultural Memories and an
Ethics of Literary Memory,’ in Literature, Literary History, and Cultural
Memory, ed. Herbert Grabes (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag,
2005): p. 339.
44. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): p. 119.
45. Aleida Assmann, ‘Memory, Individual and Collective,’ in The Oxford
Handbook of Political Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006):
p. 210.
46. Oona Frawley, ed. Memory Ireland, Volume 1: History and Modernity
(New York: Syracuse University Press, 2011); Oona Frawley, ed. Memory
Ireland, Volume 2: Diaspora and Memory Practices (New York: Syracuse
University Press, 2012); Memory Ireland, Volume 3: The Famine and the
Troubles (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014); co-edited with
Katherine O’Callaghan, Memory Ireland, Volume 4: James Joyce and
Cultural Memory (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
47. Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Berkshire: Open
University Press, 2003): p. 107.
48. Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010): p. 3.
49. Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory; Guy Beiner, ‘Probing the
boundaries of Irish memory: from postmemory to prememory and back,’
Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 39, Iss. 154, November 2014: pp. 296–307.
50. Astrid Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction,’ in A
Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar
Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010): p. 2.
51. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989): p. 35.
52. Assmann, ‘Memory, Individual and Collective.’
 Introduction  xxix

53. Ibid.
54. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, ‘Where Literature and Memory Meet,’
in Literature, Literary History, and Cultural Memory, ed. Herbert Grabes
(Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2005): p. 273.
55.  Renate Lachmann, ‘Mnemonic and Intertextual aspects of Literature,’
in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary
Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyster, 2008): p. 15.
56. Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representations of Memory,’ in Cultural
Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and
Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): p. 334.
57. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964); Michel
Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,’ Architecture /
Mouvement/ Continuité October (1984): pp. 46–49; Brian Massumi, Parables
for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2002).
58. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004): p. 426.
59.  Oona Frawley, ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Memory in an Irish
Postcolonial Context,’ in Memory Ireland Volume 1: History and
Modernity, ed. Oona Frawley (New York: Syracuse University Press,
2011): p. 4.
60.  Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive,’ in A Companion to Cultural
Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2010): p. 99.
61. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of
Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995): p. 2.
62. I have chosen to include poets from both Northern Ireland and the
Republic of Ireland in this study.
63. Rosita Boland, ‘What Daffodils Were to Wordsworth, Drains and
Backstreet Pubs Are to Me.’ The Irish Times, 12 March 2011.
64. Eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó (eds.) Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in
Ireland. (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2010); Borbála Faragó, ‘“I am the Place
in Which Things Happen”: Invisible Immigrant Women Poets of Ireland,’
in Tina O’Toole and Patricia Coughlan, eds., Irish Literatures: Feminist
Perspectives. (Dublin, Carysfort Press: 2008): pp. 145–167; Villar-Argáiz,
Pilar, editor. Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in
Contemporary Irish Literature. (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2015).
65. Ihab Hassan, The Right Promethean Fire, qtd in Linda Hutcheon, A
Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge,
1995): p. 20.
 CHAPTER 1

American Highways

The tension between representative responsibility to an existing emi-

grant community and the imperative of poetic integrity is an obliga-
tion to which the migrant poet must attend. The particular contexts of
Irish migration to the United States inevitably call upon the Irish poet-
migrant to respond in some way, whether by full engagement, by rein-
vention or by alternative poetics. The range of poetic responses to the
experience of being an Irish-American migrant is highlighted through
analyses of the work of Eamonn Wall, Greg Delanty and Paul Muldoon.
In grappling with inherited emigration narratives, lived migrant experi-
ences and competing poetic responsibilities, Wall, Delanty and Muldoon
each engage cultural and personal memory practices to barrack their vul-
nerable identities in migration.
In reference to one of Irish-America’s most well-known literary fig-
ures, Frank McCourt, Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh comments on ‘the pro-
found contradictions that characterise a diaspora identity, caught as it is
between new and potentially liberating narratives of identity on the one
hand, and a rigid, codified obligation to the homeland on the other’.1
Ní Éigeartaigh notes how McCourt ‘ultimately cedes control of his own
memories to his target American audience and their expectations …
illustrat[ing] only his wholesale subsumation into the narratives of the
dominant culture’.2 One of the key conditions of migration is the sense
of being ‘in between’—between countries, between cultures, between
homes and between languages.3 Diasporic memory theory posits being
between as key in the difficult negotiation of home and belonging,

© The Author(s) 2017 1

A. McDaid, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63805-8_1
2  A. McDAID

leading to a fragmentation and/or pluralisation of identity. The intersec-

tions between cultural and personal memory, and the types of memory
structures configured by each poet offer an insight into the varieties of
poetic opportunity afforded by migration. The established cultural mem-
ory of emigration to America features to varying degrees for each poet,
from effectively dominating Delanty’s poetry to an embedded but per-
ceptible trace in Muldoon’s work.
Wall and Delanty explicitly configure their work within a group
identity, thereby shouldering a measure of public responsibility that
the other migrant poets under discussion here mostly avoid. Muldoon
swerves explicit engagement with Irish-American migration narratives
but he is nevertheless preoccupied by migration as personally and col-
lectively transformative, and close reading of his work reveals an imagi-
native affiliation with multiple migrant experiences. The weighty store
of emigration history is as often a burden as an opportunity for all three
poets and the distinct poetic engagements with migration on individ-
ual, literary, cultural and social levels in the poetry of Wall, Delanty
and Muldoon highlight the plurality of the poetics of migration. While
historical Irish-American literature is characterised by a ‘self-indulgent
communal morbidity’, the evolution of the migration experience and
the resultant literary responses deserve nuanced and open critical analy-
ses.4 The processes of cultural memory evolve through individual and
collective functions before eventually transferring into cultural stores
of remembering, and ultimately becoming embedded in literature, art
and memorialisation. The poetic negotiations undertaken by Wall and
Delanty are examples of these processes in action—the transformation
of individual and social memory into the larger, more nebulous but
nonetheless powerful, forms of cultural memory. Muldoon’s interac-
tions demonstrate a more complex engagement with memory as a tool
of individual and collective identity-making. The weight of the emigra-
tion narrative to America—itself a mythic construct with its own asso-
ciated cultural memory—bears heavily on the poetry of Greg Delanty,
is accepted and reconstructed by Eamonn Wall, and is resisted and
reinvented by Paul Muldoon. Locating these poets within their histori-
cal context, the poetry explored here demonstrates the reinvention—
whether through reproduction, rejection and/or renewal—of inherited
cultural memory.
Eamonn Wall has reflected on his ethic of reinvention in his prose
writing. ‘To be able to write convincingly about America, contemporary
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  3

Irish poets must be able to partly unlearn what they have picked up in
Ireland, and produce newer hybrid forms which are part-Irish and part-
American. For the new Irish who have sought their artistic voices in the
United States, their facility at being able to absorb American influences
and styles has been crucial to their success [….] That such themes as
exile and loss are being recorded using new forms represents an impor-
tant development in Irish writing.’5 The uncertain distinction between
‘newer hybrid forms’ and ‘new forms’ indicates Wall’s awareness of pre-
existing codes of poetic conduct to which his generation of poets must
respond. How then do migrant poets adapt to the changed parameters
of belonging? How do they relate to their new environments and how
does that influence their relationship to Ireland? To what extent do they
engage vocabularies of migration? How do memories of the past inter-
fere with and inform interpretations of the present? The poetry of Wall,
Delanty and Muldoon, when considered in conjunction with each other
and through the lens of migration to the United States, highlights the
consequences for poetry of locating oneself within, or indeed beyond, an
established emigration narrative.6

‘the busy work of forgetting’: Memory

and Community in Eamonn Wall’s America

‘Diaspora identities are those constantly producing and reproduc-

ing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.’7 Stuart
Hall’s notion of transformation and difference as a form of reinvention
is instructive when considering the transactional aspects of identity and
memory in migration, particularly in the work of poets writing in the
United States. In Eamonn Wall’s poetry, which documents the processes
of his migration from Co. Wexford and his resettlement in the United
States, there is a profound sensitivity not only to the dual pillars of Irish
and Irish-American cultural memory, but also to the weight of the vast
immigration memory shared with contemporaneous and historical com-
munities. Furthermore, Wall is confronted with indigenous memory
and is obliged, by his own sense of ethical responsibility, to reconfigure
his perception of an emigrant/immigrant/migration identity in light of
the trauma and displacement of native communities. As such, his iden-
tity is ‘constantly producing and reproducing’ itself within his poetry in
response to his connection to and marginalisation from the masses of
memory he encounters.
4  A. McDAID

As for many of the poets in this study, Wall’s experience of peripherality

is the fruitful source of creative friction that allows the poet to perceive pat-
terns across migrant experiences and to connect his personal, individual, and
national modes of migration memory in America with diverse ethnic and
historical groups. Miller’s identification of the key experiential difference in
historical migration through his title Emigrants and Exiles (1988) considers
the act of emigration as voluntary and positive, in contrast to exile as an out-
come of coercion and compulsion.8 While these categories remain relevant
in particular cases, contemporary migration requires a new set of typolo-
gies to accommodate the range of political, social, economic, religious, and
environmental factors affecting the movement of people across the globe.
This interpretation of the poetics of migration addresses the necessity of
fluid definitions of migration, and places experiences of postnationalism,
globalisation, and cosmopolitanism as part of the spectrum of migration in
contemporary Irish poetry. Migration is the suspension between cultures as
well as the perception of belonging/not-belonging; migration inheres not
merely in the act of departure but also in the ongoing processes of arriving
that are instigated by the initial act. In Eamonn Wall’s poetry, the simple but
distinct duality of emigrant and immigrant experience is the formative and
dominant conceptualisation.
Wall initially responds to his migration to New York in 1982 by
engaging the traditional emigration narrative. As he settles into life in
the United States, he begins to move away from an idea of being an
Irish emigrant, choosing instead to configure himself as an immigrant in
America and he embraces this crucial distinction in his emerging poetic
identity. Wall is eager to locate himself as an immigrant in his new host
country, rather than as an emigrant in terms of the Ireland he has left
behind. The poetic possibilities of a new orientation that turns towards
the newly-discovered place are infinitely more liberating for Wall than the
perpetual state of departure that defines an emigrant mentality. The ety-
mology of the words illuminates the conceptual difference between the
two conditions: emigrare meaning to move away, to depart from a place,
imigrare to go into, to move. In considering his position as a newcomer
to American society, Wall imaginatively connects with other migrant
groups in the United States, and later with immigrants to Ireland,
through shared experiences of assimilation and isolation. While Ireland
remains one of his referential landscapes, his poetry is less of departure
than of arrival; it is, above all, a poetry of ethical reinvention that locates
the new rather than looking for what has been lost, based on what Wall
describes as a blend of ‘alienation and excitement’.9
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  5

The dissemination, repudiation and reformation of cultural memory

in Wall’s volumes Dyckman–200th Street (1994) and Iron Mountain Road
(1997) documents the poet coming to terms with his migrant identity.10
In these collections, the refashioning of Wall’s ideological self-position-
ing is punctuated by poems that testify to the transformative moments
in his perception of cultural narratives and migrant commonalities.
Wall has written extensively in prose about the ‘New Irish’ generation
and about his own experience as a migrant in the 1980s and 1990s in
his collection of essays From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on
the New Irish (1999).11 He reflects that ‘[t]hese recent exiles have not
bought into the ancient culture of emigration, but have fallen backward
into it, updating it and transforming it in the process’.12 Indeed, Wall’s
first collection, Dyckman-200th Street (1994) sees his initial engagement
with that ‘ancient culture’ of emigration, with ‘Potato Poem: 1845’ and
‘The Class of 1845’ offering familiar imagery, as these lines from the lat-
ter poem demonstrate:

Those who were broken

crawled by brown ditches
into coffin ships

In the new world

they were known as
filth, disease, and silence[.]
Dyckman-200th Street, 34.

Wall reworks rather than reinvents inherited references of famine and

suffering as he seeks to anchor his initial migration experiences in a
larger cultural narrative. This kind of allusion is rare in his poetry, fea-
turing in only a handful of poems in Dyckman-200th Street and hardly
figuring at all in his later collections. As his poetry matures, Wall begins
imaginatively to affiliate himself with his contemporary community of
immigrants to the United States and sets about consolidating shared
experience to construct a set of memories specific to this group. The par-
ticular processes of modern migration provide the focus of Wall’s con-
figuration of commonality, as he expounds the inherently demeaning
nature of legitimising one’s presence within a dehumanising bureaucratic
system.
‘Below the Border’ mobilises the poetic self as ‘one of the shrapnel of
the world’, calling out to the massive community of Latino immigrants
6  A. McDAID

with whom he queues in the immigration offices. Wall manipulates

poetic form as a means of undermining the homogenising regulations
that treat all immigrants with equal and pronounced disdain. Composed
of couplets which invoke a standardising rigidity, the subversive lines vary
and run on, spilling across stanzas in some cases and stopping abruptly
elsewhere. The form here approximates the authorities, while the line
invests in the idiosyncrasy of each immigrant’s experience.

Guardians of the Realm in Federal

Plaza carrying guns, and the elevator to take us

all upstairs with the insane facts of our lives

shamefully in our hands. Born: in another place.

Parents wanted the best for us. Etc. And so on.
Dyckman-200th Street, 9.

The offices of the Immigration Naturalization Service (INS) loom large

in the poet’s early poetry, providing a microcosm of the society of immi-
grants amongst whom he locates himself. In the essay ‘Irish Voices,
American Writing, and Green Cards’, Wall reflects ‘that by becoming an
immigrant I was joining a larger movement of people…that I shared a
common bond—excitement mixed with loss—with all the other people
living in America but born outside its borders’.13
The poem ‘Outside the Tall Blue Building: Federal Plaza’ crystallises
that realisation by reconfiguring the familiar offices as a modern-day Ellis
Island through which all immigrants must pass. Through the symbol of
Richard Serra’s dismantled sculpture Tilted Arc, Wall enacts a thought-
provoking meditation on values of memory, materiality and cultural cur-
rency using the prism of migration. Tilted Arc, a commission installation
piece, is cast not just as an artwork but also as a lieu de memoire, a reposi-
tory of migrant aspiration and identification. The massive curving steel
wall sculpture was installed in the central plaza in 1981. The interactional
aesthetic of the sculpture is key to the artist’s conception of the work:

The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the
plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of
the sculpture result from the viewer’s movement. Step by step the percep-
tion not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.14
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  7

In Wall’s poem, the ‘rusted metal structure’ is a recognisable feature—

a reference point for migrants newly-arrived to this unfamiliar environ-
ment. Quickly absorbed into the migrant cartography, Wall navigates his
way via Serra’s sculpture: ‘when I came downtown to Federal Plaza it
was this / eyesore which told me where I was.’
In addition to its appropriation to the migrant memory narrative, the
sculpture, and its dismantling, becomes a symbol for the immigrants
inside Federal Plaza.

How will they take this sculpture away?

You can’t strip metal limb from limb
apportioning moments spent by a river in another place
to section ten, line four, please print or type:
once I stared at your uncovered breasts,
often they dried me in huge towels to have me clean
for Sunday mass.
Dyckman-200th Street, 12.

This meditation on art, value and cultural currency, as well as on criti-

cism and authorisation, reinvents the processes of approval entrenched in
immigration, and the impossibility of breaking down a life into answers
required by each section of an application form. Just as Serra’s installa-
tion art relies on a conceptual relationship with its specific environment,
experiences cannot be reconfigured into an official document.
Serra’s sculpture symbolises the combative relationship between offi-
cial and alternative memory frameworks, in the sense that public art
operates at social and ideological levels that are often contested and con-
troversial. Robert Lowell’s invocation of Boston’s Shaw monument in
‘For The Union Dead’ describes how the sculpture ‘sticks like a fishbone
/ in the city’s throat’, a symbol of the ‘catalog of losses’ Lowell per-
ceived in American culture.15 For Wall, the proposed removal of Serra’s
installation (eventually carried out in 1989) operates as a synecdoche
for official attitudes to immigrants. Tilted Arc, with its titular insinua-
tions of parallax and peripherality and its material representation of the
laborious passage to American citizenship, is invested with meaning for
the immigrant community; yet for ‘the federal employees [who] do not
like to look at it’, the sculpture is ‘an eyesore’ that obstructs the plaza.
The post-structuralist destabilisation of the props of communal memory
is an affront to the democratic processes of memory. Sanctioned by the
8  A. McDAID

subterfugal dismantling of the sculpture, hierarchical memory reigns; the

wide-open space of the city square is restored, the myth of the American
dream persists.
Wall’s resentment on behalf of his adopted immigrant community
against the official channels originates in his experience at the INS offices
and is expressed in poems including ‘New Words’, ‘Immigrants’ and ‘At
the Edges of the Nerve: Song for the Americas’. The occasional bitter-
ness borne of that resentment is perceptible as Wall attempts to render
in poetry the experience of becoming an immigrant. In his ‘Irish Voices’
essay, he describes the process of losing one’s innocence in the change
from being a ‘mere foreign graduate student or cultural tourist’ to ‘prov-
ing [himself] worthy’ of permanent residence in the United States: ‘[t]
hat morning in Federal Plaza I felt some small part of me was dying,
being lost, evaporating; it was hard to explain. And I felt my love of
the novelty of America wear off and be replaced by a stunned ambiva-
lence.’16 Wall’s ethical honesty obliges him to poetically reinvent his
position, and that ambivalence shifts towards a critical interrogation, as
in ‘New Words’:

We hear our words transformed

to sidewalks, buoys, nickels and dimes,

but have we given up our right to name

by walking through the electric doors

into the gasoline air of Logan Airport?

Dyckman-200th Street, 32.

Part of the initial ‘novelty’ of the United States for Wall is surely, and
perhaps paradoxically, its familiarity. The cultural exchange between
Ireland and the United States is not restricted solely to emigration jour-
neys. Indeed, for a particular generation, the ‘memory’ of ‘America’
is as formative as any Irish cultural memory. Inherited and transferred
through cultural media of music, film, literature and television, the coun-
try is, in some senses, already known for Wall: ‘Before coming to live in
the United States, I lived in that vast country through books, music, and
the rich visual images presented in the movies I watched in Dublin cin-
emas’, the poet recollects.17
‘America’ is a construct, a mythic place evoked and generated through
literary and cultural memory. Having set out to expect ‘America’,
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  9

Wall’s ‘stunned ambivalence’ is the result instead of his encounter with

‘the United States’. The myth of America is revealed as a façade for
those immigrants with ‘dreams fastened to no promised land’. In ‘Hart
Crane’s Bridge’ he asks ‘[w]hat does Whitman mean?’ and later in the
same poem ‘[w]here in the forest grows / the Green Card?’, calling his
cultural influence to account for the realities of the immigrant experi-
ence. In his poetic acknowledgements of the nuance and hybridity of
the country he encounters, Wall recognises the fallibility of his expecta-
tions borne out of the inherited Irish cultural memory of ‘America’ and
is thereby enabled to move forward into a more profound engagement
with his newly-discovered home.
In ‘Blair, Nebraska’, the busy hum of an urban setting stirs a mem-
ory of his preconceptions of that mythic place—‘the final / grand shriek
of the whistle bringing me back / to the imagined America the years
have stripped away’—and his poetry now turns to address an actual,
complex truth of the United States. Grappling to come to terms with
the place behind the construct, Wall addresses what poet and novelist
Robert Kroetsch calls ‘the astounding here’, in his essay ‘The Moment
of the Discovery of America Continues’.18 Like Kroetsch, Wall is trans-
fixed by the prairie landscape, which the Wexford poet an avenue for a
more meaningful and invested engagement with his adoptive home.
Where Dyckman-200th Street (1994) is primarily urban, situated in New
York, Wall’s second collection, Iron Mountain Road (1997), takes him
through the gateway and into the heartland of the United States. As Mr.
Pedro, the Galician shopkeeper on Dyckman Street, sombrely informs
him: “‘[y]ou are leaving New York / to live in America’”; and the epon-
ymous ‘westward journey’ is reinvented as another migration. Every
departure demands ‘the busy work of forgetting’ as memory ebbs and
flows in response. The poet’s memories of his own childhood recede and
yet merge with the newly-forming memory of New York:

My own childhood
unimaginable without the Slaney humming
‘Son, you breathe’ as I read the clock
each morning about Louis Kerr’s shop.
Impossible that there was another life.
Iron Mountain Road, 26.

Mr. Pedro and Louis Kerr provide the link between location and gen-
eration, and Wall is responsible for ensuring intergenerational memories
10  A. McDAID

for his children similar to those his own childhood allowed. Reflecting
on this second migration, Wall says of his children: ‘I felt I’d pulled
them out of childhood violently, and I feared, or even knew, that they
would never have that strong sense of place I so deeply profess, that
they had begun this impossible process of forgetting much sooner that I
had’.19 The final lines of ‘The Westward Journey’ function as a gesture
of defiance, futile as it may be, against the inevitable acts of forgetting;
his role as father and as poet clarified against the maelstrom of migra-
tion: ‘but someone must remember, / there must be someone to write
this down.’
This ethic of responsibility weaves through Wall’s work, bring-
ing him to address political, social, and cultural issues in Ireland and
America throughout his many volumes. In Iron Mountain Road his
journey westward pushes the old frontier, entering into the prairie lands
of the American dream. Once again, his original myth of this part of
America—‘[a]s a child growing up in Ireland, I understood it to be sim-
pler than Ireland’—is confronted and challenged by his actual immersion
in these landscapes. Moving through the Black Hills of South Dakota,
Iron Mountain Road comes to realise that the ‘undiscovered’ lands of
the American frontier are repositories of human and natural history.
Moreover, like the struggle of competing memory narratives conducted
through Serra’s Tilted Arc, the prairies have their own contested and
occluded stories to tell. Wall takes a cultural geographical approach that
has its roots in the dinnseanchas tradition and is inspired by the ‘gen-
erative’ quality of land and of locations.20 Indeed, Wall’s approach
to the prairie landscapes might be seen as ideologically related to Tim
Robinson’s ‘new type of cartography’, about which Wall has written
extensively.21 Of Robinson’s work, Wall notes that it ‘includes not just
intersecting lines and discrete shadings we are so familiar with from
school and road volumes, but [also] includes or at least makes gestures
toward, all of lived/living experience—from the most ancient past to
the present’.22 In his prairie poetry, Wall recognises and tries to excavate
some of those ‘past processes whose traces are not always evident on the
landscape’, in Henri Lefebvre’s phrase.23
The politics of space and the troubled and multiple histories laid
down in the dusty earth of the American West are rich material for the
migrant poet. Wall is drawn to this repository of history for the ways
it refracts imaginings of the Irish landscape that permit him to remain
ethically responsible to America’s past. Heaney’s longing for the bog
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  11

when faced with the prairie in ‘Bogland’ voids the American plains by
­insinuation—the bog is constructed in contrast to the wide open spaces.

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening—
Everywhere the eye concedes to
encroaching horizon
…

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.24

For Wall, the journey through the plains is ‘a slow mid-morning pil-
grimage’ through ‘the holy ground of the Lakota nation’, the religious
vocabulary signalling a reverence for the spaces dismissed in Heaney’s
poem. He finds ‘ancient spirits within these hills’ (‘Reverie: The
Dublin—Rosslare Train’) and realises that ‘to lie on high plains, / prairie
grasses, and Black Hills is to be blown into their stories’ (‘Four Stern
Faces / South Dakota’).
The haunted landscapes of the American West are peopled by the
ghosts of the land’s layered history: displaced natives, plucky pioneers and
aimless wanderers all linger here, and Wall perceives a version of the self in
each of these figures. He identifies an uneasy ancestry in the pioneers who
pushed west across the plains, a discomfort signalled by the repeated use
of the word ‘trespass’ to describe his own forays. ‘Iron Mountain Road’
depicts ‘tyres crushing bones’ as the poet addresses individual and collec-
tive responsibility in the shameful destruction of the sacred lands belong-
ing to Native Americans. The role of the immigrant Irish in building the
railways and their contribution to the expulsion of Native Americans for
their lands and onto the Trail of Tears is acknowledged:

we Irish know these bitter

woes and we sent our bitter
hardened hands to
build the railroad but
little did we know and
little did we care
our own despair enormous[.]
Iron Mountain Road, 54.
12  A. McDAID

The residual scarring of the landscape is caused by the violence of

the past, and this trauma is manifested in the ‘great spirits frightened’
whom Wall encounters. Contextualising the Irish experience within a
larger view of American history, Wall moves beyond the accepted sen-
timental emigrant narrative to acknowledge the reprehensible complic-
ity of the newly-arrived Irish in racist and destructive practices. Identity
formation is a process, a ‘matter of “becoming” as well as “being”’ in
Stuart Hall’s phrase, and it responds and evolves in relation to new
and acquired memories.25 The timbre of victimhood associated with
the Irish emigration narrative, as engaged by Delanty’s early poetry, is
challenged by the evidence of abuses by Irish immigrants against other
racialised communities in the United States.26 Indeed the ‘interpretative
nature of cultural memory’ means that ‘acts of the past have always been
selectively and necessarily falsely interpreted to suit present identity pur-
poses’.27 The contingent and differential quality of identity is contained
at the micro-level in the evident ambiguity in Wall’s poetry around his
own personal and collective identity. Moving from a sense of collective
migrant victimhood, Wall makes the conscious decision to reconsider his
self- and collective-conception in the light of unsavoury historical facts.
The westerly impulse in his poetry is complicated by Wall’s empathy for
the indigenous peoples of these regions and his feelings of guilt about
being complicit, both as a descendent and as a contemporaneous tourist,
in the steady annihilation of indigenous spaces.
A similar challenge to his conception of Ireland is the subject of ‘The
Wexford Container Tragedy’, a later sequence of nine poems that link
historical emigration with contemporary racism in Ireland. The circum-
stances of the suffocation of eight refugees in a cargo container in 2001
spurs Wall towards a wider consideration of his own position as a migrant
and of the changed nature of Ireland, causing him to question ‘his easy
acceptance of the signifiers and mythologies of his homeland’.28 Finding
historical parallels in Irish experience landing at Ellis Island ‘[l]ike thin
battered barrels rolled to the ground’, he struggles to find adequate
poetic language to address the deaths of the ‘eight swallows’ whom he
posthumously claims as ‘our Wexford people’. Reverting to reportage in
‘Photo & Caption’, the poet is stunned into silence by the tragedy and
can only echo the words of the Enniscorthy Echo with the bare facts of
the event.29 Likewise in ‘Reader’, Wall adopts the tone and diction of a
folk-tale, drawing his audience towards him as he recites the story:
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  13

Gather close, dear reader, my tidy narrative goes like this.

Eight stowaways in the hold of the Dutch Navigator died.

Lack of oxygen the cause.

On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Refuge at DeSoto Bend, 24.

Irish hostility towards immigration perplexes and troubles the poet in

‘Céad Mile Fáilte’. In the face of collective amnesia around the national
history of emigration, the poem reminds protesting residents of how ‘we
once / wept’ at the very site of the proposed refugee centre.
The unsustainability of the original inherited narratives of America
and of Irish emigration thus revealed, Wall finds himself lacking a mem-
ory or identity framework to which he can cleave. The fluctuating con-
nections and distances that characterise his sense of America and Ireland,
although continuing to provide poetic material, find a resolution of sorts
through his American family—his native-born wife and children, whose
natural affinity with their birthplace anchors the immigrant poet in the
landscape. In particular, the female figures of his wife and daughter are
constructed as connected to the land and it is through his relationship
with them that the poet can develop his own personal rapport with
nature. In ‘Father and Daughter: Nebraska’, Wall constructs a paradigm
of belonging/not-belonging through his daughter, who is of the earth,
essential and elemental:

My daughter’s dancing at the

back door to the falling snow
picking up her rhythm I sway
from too tight-fitted western
boots and feel a sharp new
loneliness under high clouds
frosted tree branches in
Nebraska. Take it all away and
left will be shadows of trees,
ice & snow, birdseed,
a dancing child.
Iron Mountain Road, 31.
14  A. McDAID

She is, in various poems, salmon-like, a coyote-child who ‘belongs to the

woods’. This connection between his local-born family and the land is a
‘fantastic language’ which he cannot speak, yet he is captivated by the ‘wild
flowers with names so gorgeous / I cannot bear to hear you say them’.
Just as his daughter binds him to the land, likewise his American-born
wife enables the poet to navigate the geography of his new found coun-
try in ‘Freewheeling by the Platte River: A Song’:

I trace from the

backs of your knees to your highest
vertebrae the cities of this state
from Omaha all the way to Chadron.
Iron Mountain Road, 5.

The journey takes a westerly direction once again, the pioneer travers-
ing unfamiliar ground led by his wife, with the synchronicity between
land and local intimately inscribed as the curves of the female body. This
poem engages in conversation with ‘Courtown Strand’ from Dyckman-
200th Street; the earlier poem being an expression of the frustration of
cultural confusion that ensues from a life divided across countries. In that
poem he had taken his wife back to Ireland but, once there, finds himself
muted and debilitated.

In this unnatural place.

which I wanted to show you,
there was nothing to compare you to.
I even tried hard to build your cheekbones
from the debris of an old boat.
Dyckman-200th Street, 37.

Wall finds his frame of reference in the later poem, discovering an

appropriate simile in a feature familiar to the settlers who travelled west
across Nebraska.

When I woke this Wednesday your hair

was spread on the pillow like the
many channels of the Platte River.
Iron Mountain Road, 5.
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  15

Following the maps laid out for him by his family, Wall conducts a
conversation of his own with the landscape of the American West that
is eased by his new willingness to bilocate within his poetry. ‘Driving to
Kearney, Nebraska’ depicts the collision of two worlds in the interrup-
tion of the experienced event by the recollected reference, in this case
placenames that sprawl typographically across the lines of the poem.
The location of the poem is characteristically definite from the outset,
yet the imaginative terrain returns the poet to Ireland, where ‘the past is
as / bright as wounds opened by Hank / / Williams’ songs’. ‘Kearney,
Nebraska’ recalls ‘Rostrevor, Co. / / Down’ and ‘Athenry, / County
Galway’ in an impressionistic, fractured fashion, while ‘Reverie: The
Dublin–Rosslare Train’ also employs a similar technique of intertwin-
ing past with present, memory with impression, and the actual with the
induced.

And I
remember last year driving from Omaha, Nebraska, to
Custer, South Dakota,
thinking as I saw the Nebraska Sandhills for the first time
that I was once
again in Ireland. Low hills, tufts of grass and if
I keep on
driving I’ll hit the sea somewhere between Courtown and
Cahore.
Iron Mountain Road, 14.

‘Friends, Landscapes, & Life Stories’ sets the poet in his local Nebraska
supermarket while locating his imagination ‘on the top of Ardamine cliff’
back in Courtown, contemplating the sea whose literal absence is per-
petually evoked in these prairie poems. The preoccupation with the sea
and the construction of the prairie as oceanic is a long tradition in prairie
poetry—Henry Kreisel details ‘the prairie as sea [as] one of the control-
ling patterns shaping the imagination of the observer’, demonstrating the
extent to which Wall’s poetic consciousness is influenced by American as
well as Irish literary traditions.30 The sea is a symbol of home for Wall,
and the distance of the prairie from the sea, both literally and philo-
sophically, is psychically challenging. Finding the ocean in the wide-open
plains is a liberation, another mode of connection to this strange place
where ‘when you drive west the prairie sky / becomes the sea’.
16  A. McDAID

In an abstract image of the prairie painted by fellow-immigrant

Rothko, Wall finds what he ‘had been searching for since County
Wexford had given/ me no language to describe this unfixed loneliness
out- / side my door.’ ‘Yellow Band’ permits the kinds of reinventions
to which his poetry aspires while the painting embodies Wall’s need to
make artistic sense of his relationship to the United States and, indeed,
to Ireland. Through the stability of home and family, he finds himself
released into the ‘hard air of the prairie’, a testimony to the difficulties
of forming an identity when the coordinates of memory are continually
shifting.

I have come from damp grass to

dry air to scrape film from formica, freed by exile to walk
out into the fresh renewing rectangle of a winter storm.
Who can say to me you don’t belong—pictures hung,
boxes folded in the basement.
Iron Mountain Road, 60.

The final lines of ‘Yellow Band’ seek to assert that, by his very pres-
ence, he is validated in America, and that his familial, personal, and artis-
tic investment in his acquired homeland should neutralise his anxieties
around belonging. Engaged as he is by this environment, a subversive
voice remains, as in ‘A Prairie Poet!’ which addresses the poet’s insecu-
rity surrounding his literary pedigree. Adrift from an Irish poetic tradi-
tion, a strongly-accented Muse heckles the writer: ‘An’ ya go home to /
Wexford whenever / ya get the chance’, forcing the poet’s confession: ‘I
don’t feel comfortable: / I just blew in from the East / four years ago’.
Vernacular language becomes a means of affirming affinity, although the
remove at which Wall stages the accent again implies his uncertainty and
the mimicry here is a form of satire that excoriates both the original and
the aspirational selves. The Muse casts doubt over his aspirations to be ‘a
prairie poet’, but significantly, the speaker’s unease is associated with his
recent internal migration from New York rather than his original immi-
gration from Ireland.
A later poem, ‘Election Day’, from the volume The Crosses, demon-
strates the enduring nature of immigrant insecurity in a meditation
about his role in the United States. The claim ‘I don’t feel cynical about
America / today’ is perhaps a little disingenuous, but the poem simulta-
neously acknowledges the possibilities an immigrant life offers: ‘a better
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  17

house on a / better street in a better world / under the sun.’ Yet, when
American citizens head for the polls, he and, by extension, the wider
migrant community, are excluded:

It’s
election day and if I could enter
the polling place, I’d vote for
Democrats, Republicans,
Independents[.]
The Crosses, 21.

Instead, he undertakes some necessary domestic maintenance, an alle-

gory of the unseen migrant labour upon which America relies: ‘[b]ut I
can’t vote so I gotta paint’. The jokey slang adopts the technique used
to similar effect in ‘A Prairie Poet!’, feigning nonchalance through the
vernacular style. This belies the emotional weight of both poems, which
consider the heavy topics of the poet’s legitimacy and value in the society
in which he has recently settled. Wall has spoken of his ‘critical landscape’
as ‘regional and international rather than national’,31 while elsewhere
explicitly articulating his doubly conflicted attitude to his homes:

As an immigrant in the US and an emigrant from Ireland, I have always

felt separated from the larger narratives of both. I have citizenship in both
countries though, at some level, I belong to neither. My loyalties as a
writer are to smaller units, to the parts rather than the whole.32

Those ‘smaller units’ include his family, the prairie landscape, and indeed
his birthplace, Enniscorthy Co. Wexford, where the local detail maintains
its hold over his imagination. As previously noted, Wall’s poems increas-
ingly bi-locate between his native and adopted homes, a symptom of the
fluidity of memory-practices that dart and shift between places as well as
between pasts and presents. These fluctuating allegiances and anxieties
of immigrant life demand to be constantly (re)negotiated. The result is
that Wall’s poetry can be read as a dialogue of the mutability of iden-
tity which affects how the poet gauges the past as well as the present.
‘Finding a Way Home’ demonstrates the impermanence of the ongoing
quest for certainty—the title conceding the impossibility of any definite
route in its choice of ‘a’ rather than ‘the’. The poem dissolves the bor-
ders between his Irish and American consciousness:
18  A. McDAID

as the road you travel

and the road you dream merge like
the numbers of the interstate
so all share one way home
like fresh meringue inhaled on a city street
an ocean away
from the bakery you’d through wandered as a child.
The Crosses, 31.

The metaphor of the highway calls on Kerouac, thereby aligning Wall’s

cultural memory with the definitive wordsmith of the American road.
‘Finding a Way Home’ traces the imaginative routes that can lead the
poet to familiar ground through sensory memory prompts as well as cul-
tural references—flashes of light and wafts of baking call up the past in an
evocative recreation of the processes of recollection.
Wall knows that remembering is an act of creation and manipulation,
admitting the process as integral to poetry as well as to memory in ‘Till
Edges Curve’: ‘I have filled these spaces / till edges curve’. The mallea-
bility of the curved edge symbolises memory’s crucial characteristic—the
ability to transfer across time and distance. ‘Men Sitting on the Bridge’
realises the redundancy of inherited memory that cannot ‘curve’ or adapt
to changing experiences, especially the volatile nature of a migrant life.

[T]he great mythology these

men present the walker with is useless, but I carry their
dumbness in my bag. Across the vacant sea.

Exile is death, Octavio Paz has said, but so too is this.

Dyckman-200th Street, 51.

Paraphrasing Mexican writer Paz, the poem allows the devastating con-
sequences of exile but it also suggests that stasis destroys. The useless-
ness of the ‘great mythology’ is borne out of its inability to translate into
the walker’s life ‘in another world’—rather than an enabling structure, it
becomes mute, a shell emptied of meaning. Instead, the poet reaches out
to his family, just as he reaches out to the prairie, to create a new frame
of belonging within which to compose new codes of memory that can
contain his changed and changing relationship to Ireland and America.
‘[M]y children call me to the swings restoring the roots of life. / Now.
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  19

Now. Now. Now ….’ The reiteration of the child’s call is also a gesture
of deference to the immediacy of constructs of identity and how they
persistently demand to be readdressed. Realising the unyielding nature of
inherited narratives, Wall creates a personalised vocabulary that can more
fully accommodate his migration experience, echoing the route of the
migratory bird in ‘The Night Heron’:

eschews
migration path and famine road
to record
a route peripherique
…
in lines traversing
ancient streams
and ponds of prayer of plenty.
A Tour of Your Country, 30.

‘Half and halfed’: Greg Delanty’s Modes

of Belonging

In their crucial work on the modes of memory, Jan and Aleida Assmann
identify three distinct levels on which memory operates.33 The first level
is individual, denoting personal recollections of the past. The second
level, communicative, is defined as social memory that passes between
families and intimate communities, and also functions on an intergenera-
tional level within near-living memory. The third and final level is cul-
tural memory, an institutional mnemonic mode of remembering that
is embedded in literature, monuments, and in official gestures and dis-
course. These differential modes are discrete, yet they are continually
interwoven in acts of memory, particularly in literary texts, which present
themselves as simultaneously operating on and through each of the three
levels. Literature can be understood as both a medium of memory and a
repository of memory and Greg Delanty’s poetry engages wider modes
of collective and cultural memory as a means of anchoring his individual
migration experience. Delanty’s highly self-conscious memory practices
across these various modes work to varying successes in his migration
poetry but whether to differentiate, legitimise or participate, memory
functions integrally in his writing.
20  A. McDAID

An early example of the interplay of these levels is staged in Delanty’s

‘The Yank’, from American Wake (1995), in which anxiety about iden-
tity formation is played out through layers of memories.34 The poem
posits personal recollection of an event in which social codes are trans-
mitted through language that echoes cultural perceptions of emigrants.
The poet recalls his childhood impressions of, and reaction to, visiting
Irish-Americans:

How were any of us wiseguy kids to know

when we mocked busloads of rotund Yanks
bleating WOW along every hedgerow
from Malin Head down to the Lee banks[.]
Collected Poems, 42.

The returned Yank is a familiar trope in Irish literature and film, featur-
ing in canonical works from as early as George Moore’s ‘Homesickness’
(1903) and Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). Numerous mid-century plays,
including Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) and Tom
Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), maintain the fig-
ure in popular drama. Latterly Jim Sheridan’s 1990 film version of J.B.
Keane’s The Field (1965) recasts the land rival as from America rather
than England, while Julia O’Faolain revisits the figure of the returned
Yank in her novel No Country for Young Men (1986). Ann Schofield sug-
gests that the figure of the returned Yank in popular culture functions
as a lieu de mémoire (site of memory), as per Pierre Nora’s definition as
‘any significant entity, material or non-material in nature, which by dint
of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the
memory of any community’.35 The symbolic significance of the returned
Yank figure, particularly the hostile, if hidden, reception received in
Ireland, carries the weight of cultural allusion that Nora’s observation
suggests. Delanty’s poem invokes the figure as a personal memory and
as an explicitly collective memory shared by ‘us wiseguy kids’, the phrase
‘wiseguy’ itself an Americanism. Less directly, the poem draws on the
cultural store of memory that appeals to a shared understanding of the
returned Yank trope. Indeed, the memory staged in the poem’s recount-
ing bears close resemblance to answers in the Folklore Commission’s
survey during the 1950s: ‘Returned Americans who wore any ‘loud’
clothes and had a pronounced accent were not favourably regarded and
were made fun of behind their backs’.36
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  21

Whether anticipated, appropriated or experienced, Delanty’s posses-

sion of cultural memory as personal memory highlights the fragility and
mutability of memory on all levels. The specificity of the personal mem-
ory suggests a mnemonic technique of remembering that reinvents cul-
tural memory as personal, as means of denoting significance.37 Delanty
attempts to give the experience authority through its cultural familiarity
and, by representing cultural memory as intertwined with personal mem-
ory, the poem functions interchangeably between narratives. This fluid-
ity signals the poet’s self-positioning as on (and yet outside) both sides
of the Irish-American emigration conversation. The insider/outsider
dynamic is reflected in the poem’s structure—two verses hinged together
on a single sentence, broken halfway. This poetic fissure reflects the crack
in Delanty’s own identity resulting from his emigration:

searching for the needle in the haystack

of ancestors with names like Muh-hone-ey
or Don-a-hue,
that I’d one day come back,
a returned Yank myself, and you’d mock me
when I let slip restroom or gas station.
Collected Poems, 42.

While poetically unsophisticated, ‘The Yank’ showcases one of the primary

concerns of Delanty’s work: the formation and performance of identity
on poetic, linguistic, thematic and narrative stages. Memory intervenes in
the making of identity, by challenging, undermining or affirming the per-
ception of self. In ‘The Yank’, all three of Assmann’s levels of memory
critique the narrator’s changed identity, by reminding him of a previous,
now-defunct, self. The remembered self (and remembered community)
disapprove of the newly-formulated identity and keep it in check in the
poem’s final line, depicting ‘the scales of your eyes reading my weight’.
Like the changing scales of that final image, Delanty recognises that
identity is likewise never stable. Diasporic constructions of the self are
particularly prone to ongoing negotiation, given ‘the performative
nature of differential identities’ as Homi Bhabha suggests.38 Evolving
as necessary, identity is continually remoulded by the societal, cultural
and personal circumstances to which the migrant subject is exposed. A
reconfiguration of the terms of identity—length of time in host vs home
country; changes in status (illegal, resident, green card holder, citizen);
22  A. McDAID

changes in relationship to the host country (marriage, local-born chil-

dren); change in relationship to the home country (death of parents/rela-
tives, sale of ancestral home)—requires a recalibration of self-conception
for the migrant. As such, identity formation is a process rather than an
event; as Stuart Hall reflects ‘[d]iaspora identities are those constantly
producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and
difference’.39 As Delanty strives to respond to his emerging diaspora iden-
tity, his poetry conducts a tense confrontation with inherited emigration
motifs that struggles to resolve itself in any sustainable way. Language
embodies belonging in Delanty’s poetry, as intimated in ‘The Yank’, and
cues of authenticity reside most prominently in linguistic forms. The
poet’s perception of estrangement from his native community is con-
veyed through linguistic dissonance; the speaker’s new register reveals his
altered identity in words like ‘restroom or gas station’. The immigrant’s
strategy of belonging necessitates adopting the lexicon of the host-coun-
try, but doing so results in alienation from his original identity.
Delanty deploys two distinct strategies to try to manage his unstable
identity, and to keep afloat both sides of his hyphenated existence. Firstly,
he engages a cultural memory of emigration to assert himself within the
traditional narrative. He does this by utilising inherited tropes, through
lieu de mémoire like paintings and songs, and by inhabiting famil-
iar scenes, thereby inveigling himself into collective memory. His sec-
ond strategy is through language, an approach that can be described as
aggressive vernacularisation, a kind of bravado that masks a deep-seated
insecurity about his identity. This impulse to reinvent poetic language by
retrieving the vernacular of his home community is rooted in a height-
ened migrant awareness of being an outsider. His ethical stance values
his origins as a functional means of identity assertion and, in reaching
back to modes of local, regional and familial communication, language
becomes both subject and medium. These devices of cultural memory
and aggressive vernacularisation are deployed with a kind of bombastic
performativity that alerts the reader to the fact that these modes come
with a self-conscious artificiality.
The tropes and motifs of Irish emigration are embedded in collective
and cultural memory, whether in Famine memorials and local droichead
na ndeor, through song and literature, or through stories and folklore.
Popular perception of emigration has altered in recent years, but the
entrenched impressions of emigration persist and resurface along with
rising statistics.40 While migration from Ireland in the 1980s was con-
temporaneously (and somewhat controversially) represented as distinct
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  23

from historical modes of emigration, Delanty derives the cues for his
poetry from within the traditional discourse. David Lloyd points out the
invocative power of terms such as emigration and diaspora, and argues
that ‘rather than assuming a descriptive and categorical relation’, the lan-
guage has the ‘effect of disavowing or activating the memory of pain-
ful displacements’.41 For Delanty, employing the rhetoric of emigration
involves a self-conscious effort to stabilise his poetry within a recognis-
able framework. By signaling the codes of his literary allusions, Delanty
ensures his poetry is inserted into that context even while he avows his
reservations about its validity. Renate Lachmann’s theory on memory in
literature situates text and context as inextricably interwoven; by stating
a work in terms of a larger cultural utterance, those dynamics become
its key referentials. In Lachmann’s words, ‘[i]nvolvement with the extant
texts of a culture, which every new text reflects, (whether as convergence
or divergence, assimilation or repulsion), stands in a reciprocal relation to
the conception of memory that this culture implies’.42
As such, when Delanty adopts traditional emigration imagery, his poetry
becomes part of that narrative. ‘The Emigrant’s Apology’, addressed ‘to
my mother’, offers an image of Mother Ireland bereft in her son’s absence:
‘wearing a black scarf alone in a front pew.’ While the poem resonates with
Synge’s Maurya from Riders to the Sea, inevitably son-less, another poem
from the same volume, ‘Economic Pressure,’ restages a similar scene from
Seán Keating’s painting.43 Like ‘The Yank’, ‘Economic Pressure’ pre-
sents two selves within the poem’s narrative—the remembered child and
the personal narrator. The poem presents the schoolchild as he ‘traipsed
beneath pictures’, impervious to the weight of cultural memory which he
will shortly assume: ‘I never bothered much / with that emigration can-
vas. / I may even have ignored it’. The spatio-temporal disruption enacted
here—‘[b]ut today at the departure / gate of the airport / it caught up
with me’—alludes to the continuing instability of identity; the contem-
poraneous self is vulnerable to insidious personal and cultural memories.
‘Economic Pressure’ segues from the airport to an exercise in ekphrasis, as
Delanty merges both timeframes in the singular observed embrace:

I saw again the woman

with her head buried
in the near shoulder
of her black-coated
son or husband.
Collected Poems, 43.
24  A. McDAID

Delanty’s strategies of ‘remembering’ here are simultaneously the

simple act of recollection and a more complex possession of cultural
memory in order to create meaning. Transfiguring his individual expe-
rience into an event of participatory significance, he reinvents his per-
sonal past and elevates an unremarkable farewell in an airport lounge to a
subject worthy of cultural preservation. Indeed the airport scene retains
none of its precise details, transforming the image swiftly and wholly into
Keating’s painting; cultural memory displaces individual memory here,
a strategy that is symptomatic of Delanty’s early poetry in general, and
serving to bleach the poetry of its potency.
The disjointed timeframes in ‘Economic Pressure’ and ‘The Yank’ tes-
tify to troublesome memory processes whereby ‘the time line becomes
tangled and folds back on itself’.44 Unsettled temporality also causes
ontological uncertainty in ‘The Heritage Centre, Cobh 1993’, taking the
narrator, and the reader, on a train ‘like a time machine / transporting
us from the smog shrouded city’ back to a Famine ship in Queenstown.
Spatial certitude is equally precarious, as Delanty enlists his fellow emi-
grant poet Louis de Paor in ‘Tracks of the Ancestors’ in an effort to cre-
ate a community of dislocation: ‘We can’t identify where / exactly we are
from day to day / but if we hold to songlines / we shouldn’t go astray’.
The ‘songlines’ of Australian Aboriginal dreaming are appropriated here
as another potential mode of self-comprehension, but, like the emigra-
tion imagery, the allusion sits superficially within the poem, unexplored,
culturally dislocated and ultimately unsatisfactory.
At times, Delanty’s voice buckles under the weight of its borrowed
cultural memory burden and the forced quality of much of his emigra-
tion imagery mean the poems of American Wake struggle to articulate
an authentic voice. Delanty’s inclination to express himself as part of
the existing paradigm of exile and diaspora leaves him trapped within a
self-fulfilling narrative. His efforts to engage historical emigration fall
back on cliché, particularly in ‘On the Renovation of Ellis Island’, which
exhausts the retinue of emigrant personae of ‘mothers clutching tat-
tered shawls’, ‘petticoated women’, ‘limp, bedraggled’ men and ‘chalk-
branded’ boys. When he tries to articulate contemporary migration
experience in this volume, he is similarly tongue-tied by the ‘staggering
Irishness’ of ‘legals/ and illegals longing to go back’. In declaring he is
‘buffaloed’ in the poem ‘America’, he blames the host-country, but his
accusation might more accurately be levelled at the huge and looming
cultural memory dominating his poetic imagination.
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  25

I’m buffaloed
by this landscape
without voice
or memory.
Collected Poems, 47.

The phrasing here leaves just enough ambiguity around the voiceless,
memory-less subject to imply the poet’s own dissatisfaction, and the
theme of voicelessness is taken to extreme lengths in the final poem of
American Wake, the sequence poem, ‘The Splinters’. Encapsulating pre-
cisely Delanty’s hesitancy around his sense of poetic self, ‘The Splinters’
ventriloquises key voices of the poet’s literary heritage and Ireland’s liter-
ary history. ‘I’m flummoxed when you ask what poetry is’, the opening
first-person narrative declares, and the ensuing vignettes from ‘Amergin’,
‘The Old Woman of Beare’, ‘Edmund Spenser’, ‘Aodhagán Ó Rathaille’,
‘Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’, ‘Patrick Kavanagh’ and ‘Louis MacNeice,
Dylan Thomas and other voices’ testify that while the poet might in fact
‘know what poetry is’, he is less confident about how to write it in his
own voice.
American Wake is distinguished by its insistence in asserting (and
inserting) itself as part of the cultural performance of the Irish-American
emigration narrative, but the restrictions of this self-imposed code of
engagement are evident from the poems themselves. The poet teases
out the limitations of the lexicon but admits in ‘Film Directions for the
Underworld’ that ‘[t]o go on with this malarkey’s too easy’ and his next
collection, The Hellbox (1998) marks a major departure, both stylistically
and thematically, from American Wake. In ‘The Fifth Province’, the poet
jokes about being ‘half and half-ed’ but, by the time The Hellbox is pub-
lished, he recognises he is truly ‘cross-fertilising’ his Irish and American
existence. The increasing length of his poems signals a deliberate effort
at American inflation, the poet’s self-awareness undermining any pos-
sibility of organic engagement: ‘Look, / even me own poems are get-
ting blasted bigger’. The conversational intimacy emerging here is less
strained, however, and implies a poet increasingly settling into an identity
of sorts. In a number of poems, Delanty still utilises familiar tropes of
emigration, but there is a definite, identifiable and confident ‘I’ within
these poems, unlike the wavering narrative style of the earlier works.
‘We Will Not Play the Harp Backward Now, No’ demonstrates the
poet’s evolving relationship with symbols of cultural memory. The title
26  A. McDAID

is a rebuke to Marianne Moore’s ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, as per the epi-

graph’s attribution, a poem that concludes with the line ‘I am troubled,
I’m dissatisfied, I’m Irish’.45 Delanty’s poem criticises Moore’s poem,
seen as representative of an un-interrogated Irish-American identity and
explicitly dismisses the very discourse that sustained his own poetry in
American Wake.

But we’ll not play

the harp backward now, harping on
about those Micks who fashioned
this American wind lyre
and about the scores
who landed on Ellis Island
or, like us, at Kennedy and dispersed
through this open sesame land[.]
Collected Poems, 109.

Notwithstanding Delanty’s amnesia about his own poetry here, ‘We

Will Not Play the Harp Backward Now, No’ shows the poet with a new
self-assurance to speak on behalf of his generation—‘[w]e, a bunch of
greencard Irish’—and empowered to challenge the validity of inher-
ited modes of cultural identity. Declaring ‘we’ll reveal another side of
the story’, the poem signals a deliberate shift away from the emigration
narrative, and away from the symbolic power, in Stuart Hall’s phrase,
of labeling oneself or being labeled, in Delanty’s case as an emigrant.
Robin Cohen suggests that ‘a member’s adherence to a diasporic com-
munity is demonstrated by an acceptance of an inescapable link with
their past migration history and a sense of co-ethnicity with others of
a similar background’.46 While at a narratological level within certain
poems, Delanty retains a sense of himself as an emigrant, the semiotic
possibilities offered by maintaining a diasporic stance are too limiting for
Delanty’s poetic ambition.
Having tried out a diasporic persona through the assumption of a par-
ticular set of cultural memories, Delanty proceeds to reinvent his struc-
tures of belonging and to develop alternative scaffolding upon which
to balance his evolving identity. The mutability of identity is a crucial
component of migration theory, and the absence of fixed referentials is
one of the key impediments to constructing a stable identity. An ethic
of reinvention enables the migrant poet to organically react within their
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  27

poetry, as a functioning migrant identity demands the ability to adapt

and adjust to constantly changing coordinates. Delanty requires a code
that can accommodate his status as an emigrant while not constricting
his poetic voice within a strictly delineated register. The ethical dilemmas
of origin and audience are simplified by his decision in The Hellbox to
speak out of a personally familiar language rather than into an inherited
discourse.
The Hellbox gathers the curiously evocative jargon used in the printing
trade and resets it to the poet’s purpose. Commanding the patois of the
trade empowers the poet on multiple levels, as it immediately decrees his
membership of a distinctive ancestral community by rehearsing the ritu-
als and lexicon exclusive to printers. Delanty’s father was a printer and
so the language itself unlocks a host of personal and social memories.
For Delanty, the anxieties around belonging and identity that trouble his
earlier work are pacified, to some degree, by his incontrovertible kinship
of this group. The exclusive vocabulary also gives the poet a personal set
of original concepts and conceits to develop, something Delanty found
impossible within his perception of an emigration/diasporic mise-en-
scéne. The title of The Hellbox illustrates the richly allusive quality of the
vocabulary—a ‘hellbox’ stores the detritus of the printing workshop, the
broken or damaged metal parts no longer in use and ready to be melted
down and reformed as new working pieces: an appropriate analogy, as
Delanty develops in ‘Ligature’, for the emigrant experience and for the
creative process. Delanty’s poem addresses Walt Whitman, finding a
common tongue in Whitman’s ‘A Font of Type’ which features as an epi-
graph to ‘Ligature’.47

all you composed in your time would be

dismantled and distributed in the composing room
of America before being finally cast aside,
melted down and recast in the likes of us[.]
Collected Poems, 102.

The title ‘Ligature’ is ambiguous here, compounded by Delanty’s

omission of the word from his glossary of printing terms appended to
Collected Poems. As a printing device, it denotes two letters or symbols as
a single glyph, thereby functioning as a neat analogy for the concept of
merging identities. The more common medical understanding of ligature
28  A. McDAID

invokes a contrary impulse however, intent on suturing or shutting off a

part of the body. The poem courts both possibilities until the final lines,
which demonstrate the open stance that Delanty is determined to locate
within this vocabulary: ‘a ligature affixing characters who’ve gone/
before to those close by now and way off in the future.’
The Hellbox fully invests in the potential of the printing imagery as
redemptive—even for ‘the broken and worn types’ in the hellbox of
America—while through ‘memory’s jumbled font’, the collection weaves
a loop through past, present and future. The technical language primar-
ily provides a linkage directly to the poet’s deceased father and a com-
munity of men whom the poet has to reach for through time and death
and distance. The banality of nostalgia in remembering ‘the good old
days’ is tempered by the startlingly emotive terminology of ‘widows and
orphans’ (‘The Compositor’), ‘chapel’, ‘galleys’, and ‘galley-slaves’ (‘The
Composing Room’). Furthermore, Delanty’s experimentation with
typesetting enacts innovation through tradition as a way of reinventing
received knowledge that succeeds in ways American Wake fails. ‘The
Printer’s Devil’ is set entirely in reverse, so that the reader requires a mir-
ror in order to read the poem, a device David Pierce sees as ‘especially
suitable for an Irish emigrant’.48
‘The Broken Type’ conducts a similar divergence from standard
graphological protocol by including odd-sized letters, ‘mackled’ (dou-
bled) words and emboldened type, serving as typological representations
of the marginalised in society including, implicitly, emigrants, who do
not fit the ‘composing stick’. Delanty revels in the allusive quality of the
key concept ‘type’, promoting again the redemptive possibilities of his
central conceit:

if only we could design a font

of irregular TypE face made up
of discarded images and declare it A nEw type.
And by setting their stories in tHis face,
we’d retrieve these chAracTers care
lessly pied with the dumping of the capital stick.49
Collected Poems, 103.

In addition to the ethical implications of this motif, Delanty is thor-

oughly concerned with modes of belonging, admitting so in ‘Bad
Impression’: ‘[n]aturally I’m anxious to fit / in naturally, / to be
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  29

considered one amongst / metal men and compositors’. Adopting and

adapting various linguistic memories works as a fruitful poetic exer-
cise, but the highly-stylised quality of the verse again contributes to the
sense of a forced poetic voice, not unlike that of the strained emigration
poems. Delanty comes to adopt a strategy of aggressive vernacularisa-
tion in the second half of The Hellbox, culminating in two long poems,
‘The Lost Way’ and ‘The Hellbox’. This results in a set of imagina-
tively and stylistically liberated poems that marry and, to some degree,
resolve, Delanty’s ongoing tensions of competing vocabularies and narra-
tives. The unnatural pose of poems in American Wake, and the printing
sequence of The Hellbox, is relaxed in these long poems. Formally, the
vernacular poems are released into long-lined, loose-limbed sentences
that stretch across stanzas. At lexical, phonological and grammatical lev-
els, Delanty uses the speech rhythms of his native country and the dia-
lect of his native city for the first time in his poetry. Jie Dong and Jan
Blommaert point out how ‘migration results in complicated sociolinguis-
tic environments, in which regional accents and dialects become salient
markers of identity, and project prestige and opportunity, or stigma and
inequality’.50 The global language of English similarly operates a ‘centre-
periphery’ value system whereby certain accents and dialects denote or
define identity. Delanty’s promotion of his native dialect is an act of pride
and an assertion against the homogenising experience of emigration.
The act also poses a reflection on the cultural capital of an Irish
identity, particularly as a poet in the United States. There is undoubt-
edly a measure of performativity in Delanty’s overt staging of his iden-
tity on the page—his poetic self is a version of a Stage-Irishman—but
it works for Delanty in these poems as the most organic expression he
has found, while allowing him space to accommodate the competing
tensions of his shifting identity. The security of a local, defined accent
roots the poetry, while his references to local landmarks in both Ireland
and the United States ground the poems (and the poet) in familiar, and
thereby emotionally safe, territory. ‘The Lost Way’ opens with references
to both aspects of the poet’s literary heritage –‘[s]now was general all
over Amerikay / as we Kerouaced back from Montreal’—and concludes
in his adopted country, while the main thrust of the poem is ‘grappling
for the life buoy’s O / of the roads, streets and life of the drowned city’
of his youth.
The rendering of the Cork accent on the page is excruciatingly unlyri-
cal—‘[o]utsiders/ especially those from da Pale look down / dare snotty
30  A. McDAID

proboscises on our corker Corkonian’—but it unleashes a loquaciousness

that balances the fact of his ‘emigrant’ / ‘immigrant’ status which leaves
his ‘tongue’s needle / stuck on its damaged record’. Indeed, he effec-
tively disavows his poetry’s earlier engagement with the discourse of exile
in ‘The Hellbox’, declaring ‘to hell with all that American waking, that
bull, / that myth-making crap that I probably also rigged’. These lines
speak to the constant self-consciousness Delanty bears throughout his
poetry which, as he sees it, is ‘mostly for the sake / of venturing to dis-
cover some new way of saying / the same old rigamarole’. ‘The Hellbox’
is packed with similar statements about the poet’s ambition to realise an
individual, personal and genuine poetic voice. ‘All I want is not to simply
parrot American voices’ he reflects, and goes on to ‘eschew such mim-
icry’ as his earlier, derivative poems.
‘The Hellbox’ itself is recognised as ‘a mumbo jumbo sandwich’
but, after seven pages of free-verse ‘rambling ravings’, the voice finally
clarifies, as though a process of purification has occurred. The emergent
voice has a clear vision of its poetic purpose:

I want to home in on the newness, strangeness, foreignness

of everything, returning to itself, its exile from itself
the perpetual simultaneous goings and comings of life
while remaining always human, open, up front.
Collected Poems, 116.

Delanty’s later collections The Blind Stitch (2001) and The Ship of Birth
(2003) focus precisely on what ‘The Hellbox’ announced: ‘birth and
death and everything / sandwiched between’. The use of dialect persists
in a number of poems—‘Cork Prothalamium’, ‘Lepers’ Walk’, and ‘The
Malayalam Box’ particularly—but the language is more considered and
less unwieldy here than in the long poems of The Hellbox. More note-
worthy again is the way Delanty develops another lexicon, this time
using needlework as a mode of stabilising his connection with his mater-
nal relatives and female in-laws, just as the printing vocabulary offered a
secure binding to his deceased father. Delanty self-effacingly dismisses his
poetry’s ‘fustian transmutations of your domestic art’, but the metaphor
of ‘the memory quilt’ is graceful in its evocation of ‘grief patched to / …
absence with that blind stitch’. In the meticulous act of threading a sew-
ing needle for his aging mother, Delanty perceives symmetry with writ-
ing poetry:
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  31

I raise the needle to the light and lick the thread

to stiffen the limp words, I
peer through the eye, focus, put everything out of my head.
I shut my right eye and thread.
Collected Poems, 162.

Thomas McCarthy points out that ‘one of the unique achievements of

Delanty [is] that he seems to find a precise language for each phase in
his life’,51 and those various languages are aligned closely with the poet’s
own ethical anxieties surrounding his evolving identity. By the time The
Ship of Birth is published, the emigrant aspect of his identity has receded;
instead of discourses of exile, Delanty is learning ‘the language of crying
/ its parent-boggling irregular grammar’. In settling permanently in the
United States and creating an indisputable connection to his new home
through the birth of his child, the early agitation dominating his writing
has eased.
Of all the poets considered in this study, Greg Delanty engages most
directly with his status as an emigrant and with the associated inherited
baggage of cultural and collective memories. His is also the poetry most
pressurised by its emigrant anxieties. As his poetry matures however,
he comes to understand that he can choose to engage or to withdraw
from the overbearing narrative of traditional emigration experiences. In
those poems when his language fully inhabits the emigration vocabulary,
the complexities of his personal experience are left at a superficial level.
Touted by fellow Irish-writer-in-America Colum McCann as ‘the laureate
of those of us who have gone’, Delanty’s poetry is commensurately more
successful once he moves beyond the restrictions of inherited tropes and
into the kinds of self-prescribed poetic codes that define his later work.52
The fact of his open struggle with cultural memory through those inher-
ited tropes insinuates a wider generational struggle with how contem-
porary migration relates to, and differs from, traditional emigration
narratives outlined by Miller. His poem ‘To President Mary Robinson’,
published in American Wake, captures the extent to which Delanty is
willing to challenge the official rhetoric of emigration.

Yes, we’re moved by the light in your window

but, returning on another brief holiday
from England, Australia or the USA,
we can’t help but feel somewhat mocked by its glow.
32  A. McDAID

For though we know full well we are no

Holy Family, we’re still turned away
to settle in the unfamiliar, cold hay.
American Wake, 12.

This poem actively participates in, and problematises, the formation of

cultural memory; President Robinson’s inaugural address and her subse-
quent inclusion of the diaspora as part of an extended Irish community
is a renegotiation of what constitutes Irish identity. By including the emi-
grant community, Robinson’s official articulation of ‘We Irish’ changes
the confines of Irish identity as limited by spatial boundaries.53 Delanty’s
poem confronts Robinson’s gesture of burning a candle for the diaspora
and, on behalf of his emigrant community, dismisses it as easy, ineffective
sentimentality. ‘We are moved’, the poem wryly declares, but not in the
repatriative way that the poem suggests emigrants desire. Nevertheless,
despite the reproof in the poet’s tone, the poem manages to confirm
the changing facts of emigration as increasingly connected with the real
prospect of ‘another short visit’ made possible by mobility, technology
and increased earning potential. ‘The unfamiliar, cold hay’ attempts to
manipulate traditional sympathies through a weak analogy with ‘the
Holy Family’, as the whole poem can be read as an intervention in cul-
tural memory formation. When dealing in emigrant clichés, Delanty’s
writing struggles under the weight of inherited paradigms.
In a review of Delanty’s poetry, Terence Brown observes the absence
of the ‘actual and psychic landscape’ of North America in contempora-
neous Irish poetry, including Delanty’s.54 There is never any question of
North America displacing Ireland as Delanty’s primary affiliation, but the
terrain of Delanty’s poetic undoubtedly shifts from the narrow delineation
of his early work to a much more ambitious and wide-ranging aesthetic.
While his ethic of reinvention enables him to shift through multiple modes
of memory as identity, Delanty never really develops a stable self within
the poetry, to the extent that his 2012 volume is written under a range
of personae including the pseudonym ‘Gregory of Corkus’. Yet his poetry
remains amongst remains the most recognisable in contemporary Irish lit-
erature, not least for his direct confrontation of concerns arising through
migration and memory. Somewhat paradoxically, in exchanging cultural
memory for social and individual memory, Delanty finds an expansiveness
in which he can accommodate both his American residency and his Irish
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  33

ancestry. His poetry demonstrates how the migrant experience complicates

and critiques forms of memory, showing how cultural, collective and indi-
vidual memory can inhibit as well as inspire.

‘merely a brown trout / with wanderlust’:

Migrant Identity in Paul Muldoon’s Poetry
Paul Muldoon is deservedly renowned as a poet of elaborate, complex and
ambitious output, and his linguistic and formal tricks have been the sub-
ject of numerous critical studies.55 His work has continually divided crit-
ics, as demonstrated by Jim McCue’s review of Horse Latitudes (2006), in
which he described the collection as the work of ‘a good poet in the dol-
drums’. Later that year, Horse Latitudes was nominated for the TS Eliot
Prize, awarded to the best collection of new verse published in the UK
or Ireland. 56 The widespread perception of Muldoon as a ‘postmodern
trickster, uncommitted to any cause and unpindownable to any “determi-
nable or paraphraseable meaning”’ is due, in no small part, to the ways
in which his capacious work resists generalisation.57 The publication of
Selected Poems 1968–2014 in 2016 points in a new direction for Muldoon
studies however, as the sixty chosen poems trace a narrative theme of
identity and belonging through his substantial body of work spanning
six decades. Like memories, anthologies are necessarily judicious in their
inclusions and exclusions, and Muldoon’s third edited volume presents an
unexpectedly personal perspective through selections that foreground his
autobiographical poems. Selected Poems highlights the centrality of migra-
tion and of cross-cultural interactions as one of Muldoon’s abiding themes
and encourages the reader to reflect in new ways on Muldoon as a poet of
migration. This section examines the ways Muldoon unpicks the theme of
migration using a variety of poetry tools, including linguistic association,
cultural implication and etymological inference.
The role of memory in Muldoon’s construction of the multiple
migrations that map his poetic journeys suggests an ingrained con-
viction in the fallibility and malleability of identity. Muldoon’s narra-
tors are regularly confronted by contradictions to their presumed or
assumed identities, forcing repeated restructuring of how the self is
presented and viewed. Muldoon’s own sense of identity as an Irish poet
is refracted through the ongoing theme of multiple and fractured line-
ages in his work. In undermining the possibility of a stable heritage,
34  A. McDAID

he presents various fantasies of history, geography and time. These

ontological challenges deny the reader a defined background against
which to set Muldoon’s work; the backdrop is continually shifting,
with new, previously unseen, elements emerging at unexpected points
in his work. Yet for all his distrust of inherited legacies, Muldoon uses
mythology as a framework within his poetry; these invocations of myth
are an appeal to a shared cultural memory that Muldoon refutes in his
linguistic wordplay, which Wills sees as ‘taking the myth out of the offi-
cial public sphere’.58 Similarly, his formal innovation balances an urge
to seek refuge in remembered poetic structures with an irrepressible
ethical responsibility to dismantle the very structures which enable him
as a poet.
Unlike Eamonn Wall or Greg Delanty, Muldoon was very much an
established poet before his permanent migration to the United States in
1987, having already published four collections of poetry.59 This is not
to say that Muldoon does not have similar struggles in coming to terms
with the idea and the actuality of what constitutes ‘America’ during
the prolonged process of working through his personal migration. The
possibilities of migration for the Northern Irish poet bring with them
the definite quality of liberation, and the United States is not the only
point of reference on his compass. In the migrations already being antici-
pated in poems in Why Brownlee Left, Quoof and The Annals of Chile,
South America features prominently, with references to Chile, Brazil,
Argentina, Venezuela and Uruguay.60 In Madoc: A Mystery (1990), he is
‘testing out ways to bring his Irish identity with him into the wider—not
merely American—world he was now entering’.61 In Muldoon’s poetry,
coming to terms with his immigration is equally bound up in renego-
tiating a relationship to the past, to Northern Ireland and to his fam-
ily heritage. He has, however, expressly rejected any suggestion of his
poetic identity as being in exile, committing his stance to print in ‘The
Prince of the Quotidian’. In contrast to Wall and Delanty, and also to
other migrant poets Harry Clifton and Bernard O’Donoghue, Muldoon
refuses to locate himself alongside the writers of exile. In many ways, his
aesthetic is closer that of Justin Quinn and Conor O’Callaghan for the
manner in which he wilfully constructs his migration as distinct from the
inherited tropes of exile of previous generations.

In the latest issue

of the TLS ‘the other Seamus’, Seamus Deane,
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  35

has me ‘in exile’ in Princeton

this term serves mostly to belittle
the likes of Brodsky and Padilla

and is not appropriate of me; certainly not

of anyone who, with ‘Louisa May’ Walcott,
is free to buy a ticket to his emerald isle

of choice.
The Prince of the Quotidian, 36.

The individual volition made clear here in the phrase ‘his emerald isle of
choice’ and elsewhere in Muldoon’s use of terms such as ‘wanderlust’,
‘successive flits’ and even the active gesture of ‘rowing towards’ indicates
the poet’s appetite for elsewhere. The geographical, temporal, historical
and imaginative opportunities of migration, both literal and figurative,
are central to Muldoon’s poetry and he sees this aesthetic as distinct from
traditional poetry of exile, as written by Brodsky and Padilla. Whether
willed or obliged, however, the cultural disorientations that define his
poetry are related to his migratory experience, and surface in the many
cross-cultural exchanges, alternative possibilities and linguistic confusions
that recur in his work. These are restaged in different ways through his
densely allusive poetry, at times pushing the reader away through the
diverse and unexpected directions in which his poems, particularly his
long poems, progress. The inability of the reader to anticipate the poem’s
trajectory is itself an act of cultural disorientation—Muldoon denies the
security of literary or generic memory by undermining those ‘remem-
bered’ conventions. He is deliberate in this objective: acknowledging the
impenetrability of his poetry, Muldoon says that his poetry is ‘meant to
be equal to the difficulties that surround us’, in this ‘era of extraordi-
nary complexity’.62 His defamilarisation of the sonnet, whereby he abides
by the 14 line structure but radically refuses all its other conventions, is
designed to push the reader further into unfamiliar territory. Instead of
meeting an established sonnet, where rhyme and form should provide
structural familiarity, the reader is confronted with a poetic reconstruc-
tion of the kinds of cultural and personal dissonance experienced in 21st
century existence, at which migration and disorientation is the heart.
Difficult disorientations can be alleviated by recitation, and in ‘The
Outlier’ from Horse Latitudes, Muldoon uses recitation as a means of
36  A. McDAID

rehearsing memory. However, the expansion of the recitation to include

new detail in each stanza renders the recitation uncertain, pointing
towards the malleability of personal memory.63 ‘The Outlier’ seeks to
create a myth of origins that draws on the Fomorions of Celtic mythol-
ogy and in doing so, Muldoon proposes a kind of heroic backstory to
illuminate all subsequent happenings, a device also embraced by Bernard
O’Donoghue as a method of handling his own personal history within
poetry. Muldoon is less easily satisfied by this device however, and his
testing of memory through embellishment signifies the unreliability of
the poetic voice. In building the myth, the recitation takes on the qual-
ity of a nursery rhyme or child’s riddle, and this further undermines the
veracity of the foundation myth for the reader. The declaratory open-
ing is immediately destablilised by the uncertainty of location, and this
uncertainty builds through the trimeter double sonnet:

In Armagh or Tyrone
I fell between two stones.

In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
I fell between two stones.

In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
in 1951
I fell between two stones.

In Armagh or Tyrone
on a morning in June
in 1951
I fell between two stones
That raised me as their own.
Horse Latitudes, 47–48.

By drawing on the legendary defeat of Balor, leader of the Fomorians,

in the second sonnet—(‘I had one eye, just one, / they prised and
propped open / like a Fomorian’s /with a fire-toughened pine’)—
Muldoon stakes a claim for himself in the Irish mythological heritage
which the reader must weigh up against the levity of the lines. Perhaps
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  37

more significantly, in constructing this persona of ‘the outlier’ that con-

flates his personal biographical details with the existent mythology,
Muldoon intimates a picture of himself as an artist committed (by his
own hand or another’s) to being an outsider.64 This cultivated marginal-
ity, (described by Muldoon as ‘the impulse not to belong, not to fit in,
and it’s one by which I live’), serves the poet-in-migration well, and it
is a technique embraced by other migrant poets in this study, notably
Harry Clifton and Colette Bryce.65
In Muldoon’s poetry, distance is created by temporal as well as geo-
graphical space, and this places memory, in various forms, at the centre
of his poetic reconstructions. For Muldoon, the memory aesthetic is
expressed through linguistic, formal, mythological and personal memory
practices. Muldoon’s elegies are an example of rememberings that merge
the personal with the poetic, although in characteristic Muldoon fashion,
the capacity of memory in elegy to satisfy the loss is questioned by the
poems’ unreliability. ‘The Wishbone’, an early sonnet from the epony-
mous 1984 volume, concludes in dashes, the typographical ellipses sig-
nalling the fade of memory through time. The elegy for his mother is
destabilised by the absence of detail, the ‘elisions on the page pointing
at the empty and unresolved space’ of Muldoon’s elegies.66 The wound
of bereavement is represented by the poem’s unfulfilled sentences—‘The
wishbone is like a rowelled spur/ on the fibula of Sir ___ or Sir ___’—
and the loss of these minor details foreshadow the more profound eras-
ure of the past that awaits the bereaved.
In ‘Ma’, an elegy for his mother, Muldoon’s attempts to fill the unre-
solved space left by personal loss are a simultaneous retrieval of the home
space left by migration. Through the lens of old photographs, the first
two stanzas of the sonnet offer an image trapped in time of the mother
as a young woman. Like Barthes’ Camera Lucida, itself a grief-fuelled
meditation on the ‘impossible science of the unique being’, Muldoon’s
‘Ma’ ruminates on the limitations and yet the possibilities of the photo-
graph as a memorialisation.

Old photographs would have her bookish, sitting

Under a willow. I take that to be a croquet
Lawn. She reads aloud, always Rupert Brooke.
The month is always May or June.
Selected Poems, 19.
38  A. McDAID

Although its title clearly indicates the poem’s subject, and the pho-
tographs focus on the woman, the figure of the mother is barely pre-
sent in the poem itself—within the 14 lines, the mother is never named
and is evoked through the feminine pronoun just twice and only in the
opening stanza.67 The duality of the photograph imposes a kind of ‘hal-
lucination’, in Barthes’ words, ‘false on the level of perception, true on
the level of time’.68 Muldoon revels in the possibilities of temporal dis-
ruptions, pursued fully in ‘Madoc: A Mystery’ and ‘Why Brownlee Left’.
In ‘Ma’, the physical stability of the photograph allows the poet the dis-
tance from his mother, evoked through narrative detachment as well as
the framing device of the photograph. This very distance then allows the
poet to scrutinise and speculate on the photograph’s subject all the more
intensely. Barthes uses the terms studium and punctum to describe the
‘co-presences of two discontinuous elements’ of the photograph69; the
studium are the immediate, obvious meanings of the photo—in ‘Ma’,
the mother figure pictured reading beneath the tree. Muldoon revels
in the punctum, the details that fill the void inevitably engendered by
the limitations of the photograph. By focusing on the book, the rest of
the photograph is imaginatively filled out: the book’s projected author is
WWI poet Rupert Brooke while the mother is occupied by the genteel
pastime of reading aloud against the backdrop of a croquet lawn on a
summer’s day. These suggestions of the mother’s personality, her hobbies
and her history are encoded in the private contingent meanings of the
punctum which are the poet’s alone.
For Barthes, punctum is a wound, a prick in the airtight container of
emotions that is the photograph. Through the small detail, the wider
sense of loss is evoked. This has been noted in Muldoon’s poetry as the
‘exiguous’ object, a remnant of something larger, and it is implied here
through the unnamed book and through the ‘polished brass buttons’
of the unnamed male in the second stanza.70 The ‘sharp shock’ of the
punctum creates a ‘blind field’, ‘a whole life external to [the] portrait’
and it turns the poem’s memory in a new direction of grief and mourn-
ing.71 The sestet is comforting and confronting at once; the communal
consolations of ‘neighbours gathering’ and ‘storytelling’ are jarred by the
solitary image of the canary ‘going into the ground’. The ‘soft flame’
that might offer solace is damaged by the troubling final pararhyme
of ‘canary’ with ‘cannery’, a denial of the anticipated closure. In clas-
sic Muldoon fashion, this is an elegy that refuses all its obligations—to
remember, to console and to preserve.
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  39

The curious conjunction of ‘cannery’ and ‘canary’ suggests the asso-

ciative workings of memory within language—the burial of the mother
evokes the wake, which brings to mind the stories of the local area,
namely those of the miners at Coalisland. The classic mining image of the
canary skips across the Atlantic to the industrial landscape of Steinbeckian
America, but the foregrounding of the ‘cannery’ at the beginning of the
stanza implies the increasing hybridization of Muldoon’s poetic imagina-
tion. Memory is tinted in the opening image of the final stanza: ‘And the
full moon / Swaying over Keenaghan, the orchards and the cannery, /
Thins to a last yellow-hammer and goes’. Allen sees this as the ‘calculated
Americanization of Irish terrain’ in Muldoon’s poetry, but it is also the vul-
nerability of memory in migration, this blending of landscapes and histo-
ries as seen in Eamonn Wall’s poems of the Midwest prairies.72 This need
to test out a merged Irish and American identity is conducted through lan-
guage by Muldoon, as he seeks to find ways to transport his Irish identity
into his new American home. It is, however, also a need to accommodate
the presence of the imagined ‘America’ in his remembered past—whether
in film as presented in ‘The Weepies’, in ‘Cuba’ which locates geopoliti-
cal instability in terms of domestic strife, or in ‘The Key’ which brings
Hollywood to the ‘Olympic Cinema, Moy’ in the form of ‘my cousin
Marina McCall’, ‘an extra in the first version’.
This shared cultural heritage with the United States complicates the
binary construct of home and away in migration, which is teased out in
‘The Key’ from Madoc: A Mystery. Genre is an act of literary memory,
and Muldoon’s impersonation of a Raymond Chandler potboiler narra-
tive speaks to the poet’s ethic of hybridity and multiplicity. By opening
Madoc: A Mystery with ‘The Key’, Muldoon once again subverts generic
expectations and challenges literary memory expectations of his reader.
With one hand, Muldoon displays the genre and then swiftly pulls it
away with the other. ‘The Key’ outlines the kinds of poetic expectations
and temptations placed on the poet, by himself and by others, in the par-
ticular circumstance of his Northern Irish background and his American
migration. The ‘key’ passage, as it were, is confessional:

I wanted to say something about Marina, something about an ‘iden-

tity parade’ in which I once took part, something about the etymol-
ogy of tuxedo, but I found myself savouring the play between ‘booth’
and ‘bathy–’, ‘quits’ and mesquite’ and began to ‘misquote’ myself[.]’
Selected Poems, 81.
40  A. McDAID

The proposed directions in which the poem might progress are telling:
‘Marina’ as a synecdoche for Irish emigration history; ‘identity parade’ as a
link back to the Troubles; ‘the etymology of tuxedo’ connecting with the
disposed Native American peoples. These disregarded possibilities indicate
Muldoon’s awareness of the Irish migration narrative and its incumbent
obligations, while his preference for the linguistic possibilities is a deliber-
ate ethical choice. It is in the embedded possibilities of words themselves
that Muldoon wants to locate his poetry, thus when he savours ‘booth’
(enclosure) and ‘bathy–’ (depth), or ‘quits’ (being discharged of liability)
and ‘mesquite’ (an indigenous shrub), the implications for migration, and
therefore his poetry, become more varied and open.
In characteristic contradictory fashion, language is simultaneously a
pressure cooker and a release valve for Muldoon’s poetry. It offers the
poet alternative avenues—through the linkage of ‘mesquite’ with ‘mis-
quote’, in this instance—to his preferred articulation, yet it somehow
winds up uncomfortably close to the very destination the detour sought
to avoid. Familial heritage, rural scenes, migration and etymology are
precisely the subjects of the (mis)quoted lines: ‘When he clicked at a
donkey carting dung / your grandfather had an African tongue. / You
seem content to ventriloquize the surf.’ In returning to what Muldoon
has Foley describe as ‘that same old patch of turf’, ‘The Key’ con-
cludes with a rueful confession of inevitability in the poetic endeavour.
The existent cultural memory of migration and the literary memory of
Northern Irish poetry linger in Muldoon’s lines here, which gracefully
capture the difficulties in finding poetic language adequate to represent
the continual exchanges undertaken during migration: ‘These past six
months I’ve sometimes / run a little ahead of myself, but mostly I lag
behind, my footfalls / already pre-empted by their echoes.’
This question of responsibility or, as the poet himself puts it in his
1998 Bateson lecture, ‘[t]he question of that cattle truck and its inev-
itable freight is one that all Irish writers have to deal with’.73 One
option for Muldoon is to discard his past to embrace his migrant pre-
sent, and at times he claims that route: ‘So it was I gave up the Oona
for the Susquehanna / the Shannon for the Shenandoah.’74 This idea
of swapping one reality for another is a concept of alternate possibilities
that recurs for migrant subjects, for whom dual lives track along parallel
paths. Muldoon revels in these possibilities, which he teases out through
linguistic tricks as well as through narratives punctuated by geographi-
cal and temporal disruption. In ‘Errata’, the litany of alternates might be
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  41

typographical (or even psychological) errors but they are also ‘invitations
to introduce as well as to remove mistakes, which consequently become
alternatives’.75 By invoking the classic migrant state of being both and
being between, the experience of being in flux and subject to change
depending on interpretation, presentation and even pronunciation, is
made implicit on the level of language rather than of theme.
The different reverberation of language when transported across cul-
tures is a recurring theme for Muldoon, especially in the poems that deal
with migration. Collective, familial and individual memory practices are
rehearsed through language, and are thus threatened when that language is
no longer understood. If there is anxiety around the difficulty in transport-
ing a lexicon out of the domestic, there is also a pleasure in the intimacy of
that private language; the poem ‘Quoof’ revels in its hidden meanings. The
innocence and ownership of ‘our family word / for the hot water bottle’ is
undermined by the unspoken rhymes for ‘half-brick’ and ‘sock’ implied by
the phallic imagery of ‘head’ and ‘sword’. It is a poem as much about sexu-
ality as language, and these confusions merge in ‘[a] hotel room in New
York City / with a girl who spoke hardly any English’. The violent intimacy
of using the private family word is itself a weapon, or perhaps more accu-
rately, a defence—if Muldoon brings his own lexicon, then he can actively
exclude rather than find himself excluded. But on one level, the speaker and
the girl are equal—neither speak conventional English, both are uninitiated
and outsiders, like the ‘shy beast / that has yet to enter the language’.
‘Quoof’ can also be read literally, as a ‘migrant object’, the term given
to items carried carefully by migrants to their new destinations and pre-
served in their new homes as a physical link to the homeland. The migrant
object is a symbol of identity, and Muldoon’s ‘quoof’ asserts his idiosyn-
cratic origins, his particular family heritage and his cultural background as
‘other’. In ‘The Soap-Pig’, a poem that anticipates Muldoon’s permanent
migration to the United States through original migrations from the fam-
ily home, from female partners and from various residences, the migrant
object (a bar of soap) is an immensely vulnerable item, destined to dis-
solve. The journey of the migrant object is also a metaphysical one, carry-
ing meaning and memory to unfamiliar places. ‘The Soap-Pig’ is an elegy
for a named lost friend, Michael Heffernan, as well as for the past and the
memories it consumes, following Appadurai’s suggestion that ‘memory,
for migrants, is almost always a memory of loss’.76 Muldoon’s choice of
migrant object merges memory and migration as an inevitable experience
of loss, the dual erosions steadily realised through the soap pig.
42  A. McDAID

the soap-pig I carried

on successive flits
from Marlborough Park (and Anne-Marie)
to the Malone Avenue flat
(Chez Moy) it was later dubbed)
to the rented house in Dub (as in Dub –

lin) Lane
until, at last, in Landseer Street
Mary unpeeled its cellophane
and it landed on its feet
among porcelain, glass and heliotrope
pigs from all parts of the globe
Selected Poems, 74.

It is carried through multiple local migrations from home to home and

relationship to relationship before finally being used in a new, undis-
closed setting that is a much a memory space as an actual physical loca-
tion. In linking the soap-pig, (‘a bar of soap, / now the soap sliver’) with
his ‘father’s wobbling-brush’ and his ‘mother’s wash-stand’s marble top’,
memory and physicality is conflated. The textural certainty of the brush
and the marble clash with the soap and ‘its pool of glop’ and these are
the disappointments of memory, which can perfectly preserve certain ele-
ments while others slip beyond grasp.
Muldoon’s poetry has many migrant objects in addition to the
‘quoof’ and the ‘soap-pig’: his infant son Asher is ‘wrapped in a shawl
of Carrickmacross / lace’ in ‘At the Sign of the Black Horse, September
1999’ and even his daughter’s body art is a migrant object of sorts,
via ‘the Anseo tattooed on her ankle’ in ‘Cuba (2)’. Madoc: A Mystery
is packed with such items—Southey clutches ‘a small, already-battered
valise’ while the ‘pearwood box’ and the ‘teeny-weeny key’ are talismanic
objects that resurface in the long poem. In Selected Poems 1968–2014,
the selection from Madoc: A Mystery emphasises material memory: the
poems included are ‘The Key’, ‘Tea’, ‘The Panther’, ‘Cauliflowers’ and
‘The Briefcase’. In ‘Tea’, a bookmark in the form of ‘a tassel / of black
watered silk’ offers a guiding principle for the narrator ‘rooting through
tea-chest after tea-chest / as they drifted in along Key West’, eventually
entreating the reader to ‘Take it. Drink.’ In ‘The Panther’, while the
mythical memory of the ‘last panther in Massachusetts’ leads the poem,
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  43

it is the quiet actions of jelly-making that approximate the migrant

experience:

She has rendered down pounds of grapes

and crab-apples
to a single jar
at once impenetrable and clear:
‘Something’s missing. This simply won’t take.
Selected Poems, 184.

The image of compounded memory is a suitable symbol for Muldoon’s

poetics of migration—its complex constituency brought about by a care-
ful balance of simplicity and specificity. The components—‘pounds’ of
fruit—are transformed in the creative process and are yet present in a
duality that Muldoon embraces, ‘at once impenetrable and clear’. The
poem’s final lines wind back to the opening stanza, in a cyclical form that
reinforces the poem’s reflexivity—‘nose’ links back to ‘meadows’, ‘quick-
ens’ to ‘kitchens’ and ‘meat-hook’ is repeated.
Guinn Batten has noted Muldoon’s cyclical forms, asking whether
they are ‘dead ends or second chances’77; these forms function as both
in Muldoon’s migration poetry that opens to ongoing alternate possibili-
ties. In ‘It Is What It Is’, this rhetoric of duality is implied in the simulta-
neity of the endless journey of migration that coexists alongside the lived
day-to-day experience of domesticity. The comforting family imagery
of the discarded wrapping of a child’s toy is initially undermined by the
vaguely gruesome term ‘bladder wrack’ and then dismantled entirely by
the arduous (and continuing) emotional ordeal suggested by the speaker:

It is what it is, the popping underfoot of the bubble wrap

in which Asher’s new toy came,
popping like bladder wrack on the foreshore
of a country toward which I’ve been rowing
for fifty years[.]
Selected Poems, 163.

‘It Is What It Is’ was first published in Muldoon’s 2006 collection Horse
Latitudes and that maritime context offers an appropriate cartographical
reference point as Muldoon increasingly embeds the breadth and depth
44  A. McDAID

of the migration experience into his poems. The ‘horse latitudes’, located
thirty degrees north and south of the equator are subtropical regions
of high pressure, where ships en route from Europe to the New World
became stranded due to lack of winds. In seeking to survive their pro-
longed journey by sparing drinking water, sailors often threw their live
cargo, mainly horses, overboard, hence the name. This suspension of
the journey is thus echoed in the speaker’s endless effort to reach the
shoreline, to understand the rules, to fit the pieces together that will
allow him to berth at last. In migrant literature, interstitial spaces can be
troubling but they can also be productive: Harry Clifton enjoys being
‘[s]afe, a bord, /Between two worlds, suspended in mid-flight’ in ‘Icy
Pandemonium’ while Justin Quinn finds ‘matchless civic freedoms / of
miles and miles of open sky’ in ‘The Onegin Sequence’. In ‘It Is What
It Is’, Muldoon’s speaker struggles to recognise the productivity of the
interstitial space, wanting only to reach the new world and discard his
migrant identity. He is willing to play the parts with the props—the ‘pan-
tomime’, the ‘inlaid cigarette box’, the ‘shamrock-painted jug’—but yet
he does not fully comprehend the ‘rules of this imperspicuous game’.
Once again, objects are troubling presences in Muldoon’s migrant
poetry, not least for the ways in which they demarcate spaces of belong-
ing and not-belonging. If the migrant object is designed to provide com-
fort in unfamiliar surroundings, in ‘It Is What It Is’, the found object
deliberately unsettles.
The migrant object is also a kind of baggage, literally as well as sym-
bolically, in multiple poems in Madoc: A Mystery. In the eponymous long
poem, a ‘valise’, ‘pearwood box’ and ‘teeny-weeny key’ recur at bizarre
moments almost as memory fragments, innately unpredictable, unre-
liable and yet irrepressible: ‘Inside the pearwood box—hold on a min-
ute— / is an exact replica / / of the valise.’78 In this instance, memory,
migration and composition are merged together, a preoccupation pur-
sued in Madoc: A Mystery, as in the way complexities of assimilation and
intertextual memory are embedded in ‘The Briefcase’, the first poem
written after Muldoon’s permanent migration to the United States.79
Like ‘The Panther’, it pursues a circular construct that brings the final
line (‘for the sea. By which I mean the ‘open’ sea.’) right back to the
poem’s opening sentence (‘I held the briefcase at arm’s length from
me’). The poem can be read as a commentary on the anxieties involved
in poetic expression, the purposeful narratological distancing at outset
and conclusion of ‘The Briefcase’ complicated by the formal circularity
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  45

that enforces an uncomfortable intimacy. Wills sees this poem as clearly

pointing ‘to a real concern about voice and about form’, which this self-
reflexivity certainly conveys, but it must also be seen as a poem about
migrant responsibilities which, in Muldoon’s case, are often merged with
formal concerns.80
If anxiety is encoded at the level of form in ‘The Briefcase’, it is also
intimated in the language. Kendall reads ‘The Briefcase’ as ‘homesick
for the North’, an accurate, if perhaps over-simplistic, assessment of
the central emotion of the poem, but the wider insecurity around loca-
tion and belonging is built into the careful linguistic identifiers within
the poem.81 The ‘cross-town / bus’, the ‘sidewalk’ and the ‘East River’
leave the reader in no doubt as to the poem’s setting but the language
is less definitive elsewhere in the poem. The poet’s descriptive capacities
falter from an early stage, stumbling over the ‘oxblood or liver / eel-
skin with which it was covered’. Likewise, the explication in the final
line reveals further anxiety around how the poetic voice is received, the
need to clarify superceding the poem’s natural ending on the first iter-
ation of ‘sea’. The poem’s tone is one of unease, compounded by the
uncontrollable natural elements of the eelskin briefcase ‘grown supple’,
the ‘almighty cloudburst’ and the ‘raging torrent’ of the sidewalk. The
briefcase is ‘held at arm’s length’ and this uncertainty permeates the lan-
guage throughout:

And though it contained only the first

inkling of this poem, I knew I daren’t
set the briefcase down
to slap my pockets for an obol –
Selected Poems, 87.

‘The Briefcase’ recreates how migration changes perspective, in the way

the briefcase is no longer merely a carrycase but rather a newly invigor-
ated, ‘live’ concern. Its changed state has wider repercussions—for the
poem contained inside, for the speaker’s proximity to the river—some-
thing that Muldoon sees as the objective of poetry itself:

[The poem] has to have efficacy at some level. But just in ways as
simple as the fact that ideally one should never be able to look at
a briefcase again after reading that poem, certainly not an eelskin
briefcase—never be able to look at it again in exactly the same light.
46  A. McDAID

Maybe, at some level, never to be able to stand at a bus stop again in

exactly the same light, never to look in a culvert again in exactly the
same light, never to think of what the open sea might mean in the
same light.82
The responsibilities of poetry are clear for Muldoon, to respond, and
bring about a response, to the changing conditions he encounters, both
physically and imaginatively. In these ‘contact zones’ of which migra-
tion is composed and of which the poetic space is one, certainties are
challenged by new perspectives.83 The ‘culvert’ leading to the East River
and eventually the sea is the route back to Ireland, something seen anew
by the poet in the immediate aftermath of his migration. The transi-
tory nature of water imagery is analysed in greater detail in relation to
female poets Sara Berkeley and Vona Groarke and their construction of
the migration experience, and Muldoon is similarly attracted to these
kinds of temporary or contingent spaces subject to continual reappraisal.
Anne Karhio identifies this tendency in Muldoon’s poetry, describing the
recurrence of a ‘crossroads or transitional space which offers a momen-
tary, fleeting attachment between place and the individual or individu-
als, before they are again flung their separate ways. Hotel rooms, colonial
settlements and boarding houses are marked by their transitional nature:
in many cases the place itself has no history for the characters, but their
personal histories and memories blend into the constantly transforming
present.’84
Despite his speaker’s expressed desire to escape the interstitial space in
‘It Is What It Is’, elsewhere Muldoon’s poetry often actively seeks out the
kinds of ‘transitional spaces’ identified by Karhio. Part of Muldoon’s crea-
tive appeal is the fact that there are always exceptions to Muldoon’s rules,
and this is the challenge for critics, seeking to identify consistent trends
in his writing. His poetry is as deft and as slippery as the eel of ‘The
Briefcase’ and critics can only offer an insight into some of the varieties
of his interactions with the key themes of his work. Migration, in multiple
guises, is an abiding preoccupation in Muldoon’s poetry and when it is
approached via transitional spaces, it enables the poet to create encounters
in which his crucial idea of the efficacy of poetry is explored. In invented
spaces rather than in his lived migration, he finds adequate leeway to
probe all manner of intercultural, historical and linguistic avenues which
can then reflect back on his own personal experiences. Thus, the imag-
ined migrations in Why Brownlee Left, The Annals of Chile and Madoc: A
Mystery are the sprawling poetic imaginings of multiple parallel realities in
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  47

which any number of contemporaneous concerns are played out through

the characters who populate the poems. This approach yields fruitful divi-
dends for Muldoon’s poetry, as Coffman notes: ‘[o]ne especial profit of
the immersion in multiple national and literary histories is an exceptional
sensitivity to the troubled relations between times past and their represen-
tation in histories, and between nations and their traditions’.85 Muldoon’s
poetry trains an expansive lens across time and space to imagine contact
zones in which he can create cultural exchanges in his inimitable style, and
these works have been analysed widely by multiple scholars. This analysis
highlights the ways in which Muldoon’s own migrant experience relates
to his significant poetic endeavours and demonstrates that, when consid-
ered in the context of fellow migrant poets, the residue of personal migra-
tion is faint but nevertheless perceptible in his writing. Muldoon’s poetry,
particularly as presented in Selected Poems 1968–2014, expresses the con-
texts and consequences of personal migration as integral to his poetic,
even given his disavowal in ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’ that ‘[a] sea trout
is, after all, merely a brown trout / with wanderlust’.

Notes
1. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, ‘Frank McCourt: From Colonized Imagination
to Diaspora,’ in Rethinking Diasporas: Hidden Narratives and Imagined
Borders, ed. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, Kevin Howard & David Getty
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007): p. 6.
2. Ní Éigeartaigh, ‘Frank McCourt: From Colonized Imagination to
Diaspora,’: p. 7.
3. David Lloyd, “What’s in a Name: The Dialectics of Diaspora and Irish
Emigration,” Breac: A Journal of Irish Studies Migration and Diaspora
(2013), https://breac.nd.edu/articles/36705-whats-in-a-name-the-dia-
lectics-of-diaspora-and-irish-emigration.
4. Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988): p. 5.
5. Eamonn Wall, From the Sin-è Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New
Irish (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999): p. 9.
6. An earlier version of the research in this chapter was published in Journal
of Franco-Irish Studies: Ailbhe McDaid, ‘“Breakfast-time back home”?:
‘New Irish’ Poets Greg Delanty and Eamonn Wall,’ Journal of Franco-
Irish Studies, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013.
7. Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural identity and difference,’ in Identity: Community,
Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathon Rutherford, (London: Lawrence
& Wishart, 1990): p. 235.
48  A. McDAID

8. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America: pp. 102–130.
9. Wall, From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish: p. 8.
10. Eamonn Wall, Dyckman-200th Street (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon
Poetry, 1994); Iron Mountain Road (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon
Poetry, 1997); The Crosses (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon Poetry,
2000); Refuge at De Soto Bend (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon
Poetry, 2001); A Tour of Your Country (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare:
Salmon Poetry, 2008); Sailing Lake Mareotis (Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare:
Salmon Poetry, 2011); Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990-2015
(Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2015).
11. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 8.
12. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 7.
13. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 70.
14. Richard Serra, ‘Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc,’ PBS, http://www.pbs.org/
wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/tiltedarc_a.html.
15. Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Berryman and
the Makeup of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Virginia: Virginia University Press,
1999): p. 254.
16. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: pp. 70–71.
17. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 30. See also Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Ex-Isle
of Erin: Emigration and Irish Culture,’ in Location and Dislocation in
Contemporary Irish Society: Emigration and Irish Identities ed. Jim Mac
Laughlin (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997) and Tom Inglis, ‘The
Global is Personal,’ in Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland
ed. Eamon Maher (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009).
18. Robert Kroetsch, ‘The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues,’
Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory Fifth Series, no.
4, Spring (1983).
19. Wall, From the Sin-é Café: p. 29.
20. Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson, Introduction to
Land & Identity: Theory, Memory and Practice eds. Christine Berberich,
Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012): p. 19.
21. Eamonn Wall, ‘Walking: Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran,’ New Hibernia
Review 12, no. 3, Fomhar/Autumn (2008): pp. 66–79; ‘Digging into
the West: Tim Robinson’s Deep Landscapes,’ in Reflective Landscapes
of the Anglophone Countries, ed. Pascale Guibert (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2011): pp. 133–145.
22. Eamonn Wall, ‘Deep Maps: Reading Tim Robinson’s Maps of Aran,’
Terrain Spring/Summer, no. 29 (2012).
23. Henri Lefebvre and Michael J. Enders, ‘Reflections on the Politics of
Space,’ Antipode 8, no. 2 (1976): p. 31.
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  49

24. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (London:

Faber & Faber, 1998).
25. Hall, ‘Cultural identity and difference’: p. 225.
26. This complex issue is the subject of a number of critical studies; see
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Oxford: Routledge, 1995);
Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd, eds., The Black and Green Atlantic:
Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
27. Phillip Wolf, ‘The Anachronism of Modern Cultural Memories and an
Ethics of Literary Memory,’ in Literature, Literary History, and Cultural
Memory, ed. Herbert Grabes (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag,
2005): p. 333.
28. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh, ‘Changing Places and Merging Spaces: the
Poetry of Eamonn Wall,’ POST: A Review of Poetry Studies I: Poets in
Space: pp. 51–52.
29. The poem attributes its words to the Enniscorthy Echo, December 8, 2001.
30. Henry Kreisel, ‘The Prairie: A State of Mind,’ Transactions of the Royal
Society of Canada VI, no. IV (1968): p. 172.
31. Eamonn Wall, ‘Dinnseanchas,’ http://www.berfrois.com/2011/03/
dinnseanchas. Wall has published a book of ecocritical essays on con-
nections between the Irish and American West entitled Writing the Irish
West: Ecologies and Traditions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2011).
32. ‘David Gardiner interviews Eamonn Wall,’ Burning Bush 2 (2014).
33. Aleida Assmann, ‘Memory, Individual and Collective,’ in The Oxford
Handbook of Political Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006); Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory,’ in
Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary
Handbook ed. Astrid and Ansgar Nünning Erll (Berlin/New York: De
Gruyter, 2008).
34. Greg Delanty, American Wake (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1995).
Delanty’s other collections include The Hellbox. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998); The Blind Stitch. (Manchester: Carcanet Press,
2002); The Ship of Birth (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2007); The
Greek Anthology Book XVII. (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012). The
quotations included here are taken from Collected Poems 1986–2006.
(Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006), except where otherwise cited.
35. Ann Schofield, ‘The Returned Yank as Site of Memory in Irish Popular
Culture,’ Journal of American Studies 47 (2013).
36. Irish Folklore Commission, MS 1441, 35–36, qtd in ibid.: p. 1182.
37. Assmann, ‘Memory, Individual and Collective’: pp. 210–224.
38. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): p. 219.
50  A. McDAID

39. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural identity and difference,’ in Identity: community, cul-

ture, difference, ed. Jonathon Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1990): p. 235.
40. For an account of shifts in popular perceptions of recent Irish emigration
see Ailbhe McDaid, ‘“Sure we export all our best stuff”: changing rep-
resentations of emigration in Irish television advertising,’ Nordic Irish
Studies 13 (2014): pp. 41–56.
41. David Lloyd, ‘What’s in a Name: The Dialectics of Diaspora and Irish
Emigration.’ Breac: A Journal of Irish Studies Migration and Diaspora
(2013): www.breac.nd.edu.
42. Renate Lachmann, ‘Mnemonic and Intertextual aspects of Literature,’
in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary
Handbook ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyster, 2008): p. 301.
43. Seán Keating, Economic Pressure, 1936, oil on board (Crawford Municipal
Art Gallery, Cork).
44. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (New
York: Cornell University Press, 1993): p. 8.
45. Marianne Moore, ‘Spenser’s Ireland,’in Daniel Tobin, ed. The Book
of Irish American Poetry: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008): p. 110.
Tobin observes that ‘while Marianne Moore’s ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ stands
as an artistically achieved moment of consciousness on the part of Irish
American poetry, it also defines the limits of that consciousness within the
poet’s sense of identity.’ Intro to ibid.: p. xxxviii.
46. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: Routledge,
2008): p. ix.
47. Whitman was trained as a printer, and typeset some of Leaves of Grass
himself. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00150.
html.
48. David Pierce, Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader (Cork:
Cork University Press, 2000): p. 1263.
49. This quotation of the lines from ‘The Broken Type’ do not exactly repro-
duce the original typesetting used in Collected Poems due to technologi-
cal restrictions but the textual characters which diverge from orthodoxy
in the original are each capitalized here, in keeping with the original’s
intention.
50. Jie Dong and Jan Blommaert, ‘Space, scale and accents: constructing
migrant identity in Beijing,’ in James Collins, Stef Slembrouck, Mike
Baynham (eds.) Globalization and Language in Contact: Scale, Migration,
and Communicative Practice (London: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2011): p. 43.
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  51

51.  Thomas McCarthy, ‘Greg Delanty.’ Poetry International. http://

www.poetr yinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/21188/30/
Greg-Delanty.
52. Colum McCann, ‘The Year in Books: Who read what in 2006?’ The Irish
Times, 2 December 2006.
53.  Brian Conway, ‘Who Do We Think We are? Immigration and the
Discursive Construction of National Identity in an Irish Daily
Mainstream Newspaper, 1996–2004,’ Translocations: Migration and
Social Change, no. 1 (2006): p. 81.
54. Terence Brown, ‘Greg Delanty and North America,’ Agenda 43/44, no.
1 (2008).
55. Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe,
1998); Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon. (Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 1996);
Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald eds., Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays
(Liverpool; Liverpool University Press, 2004); Jefferson Holdridge, The
Poetry of Paul Muldoon (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2008); Anne Karhio, ‘Slight
Return’: Paul Muldoon’s Poetics of Place (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016).
56. Jim McCue, Independent, 5 November 2006.
57.  Paul Bentley, ‘From the Horse’s Mouth: The Other Paul Muldoon,’
Critical Survey, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2009): p. 111.
58. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); p. 43.
59. New Weather (1973); Mules (1977); Why Brownlee Left (1980); Quoof
(1983). Later major volumes include Meeting the British (1987); Madoc:
A Mystery (1990); The Prince of the Quotidian (1994); The Annals of
Chile (1994); Hay (1998); New Selected Poems 1968–1998 (2001); Moy
Sand and Gravel (2002); Horse Latitudes (2006); Maggot (2010); One
Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015); Selected Poems 1964–2014
(2016).
60. See Edward Larrissey, ‘Irish Writing and Globalisation’ in Globalisation
and Its Discontents, ed. Stan Smith (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006): pp.
124–138.
61. Michael Allen, ‘Pax Hibernica/Pax Americana: Rhyme and Reconciliation
in Muldoon’ in Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald eds., Paul Muldoon:
Critical Essays (Liverpool; Liverpool University Press, 2004).
62. Muldoon, quoted in Maria Johnston, ‘Tracing the Root of Metastasis’,
Review of Horse Latitudes. Contemporary Poetry Review, 2007; http://
www.cprw.com/Johnston/muldoon.htm.
63. ‘The Outlier’ is not included in Selected Poems 1964–2014: See Horse
Latitudes (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), pp. 47–48.
64. See Helen Vendler’s review of Horse Latitudes, ‘Fanciness and Fatality’,
New Republic 235/19 (6 Nov 2006) in which she describe ‘The Outlier’
as ‘minimalist autobiography’.
52  A. McDAID

65. ‘Paul Muldoon: The Art of Poetry’, Paris Review 45.169 (2004), p. 83.
(pp. 50–91)
66.  Matthew Campbell, ‘Muldoon’s Remains’ in Tim Kendall and Peter
McDonald eds., Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool; Liverpool
University Press, 2004), p. 171.
67.  For more on the distinction between elegy and elegiac poems in
Muldoon, with specific reference to the significance of migration in ‘Ma’,
see Nathaniel Myers, ‘End Rhymes and End-Rhymes: Paul Muldoon’s
Echoic Elegies’ in Post Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry
(North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 2017): pp. 221–244.
68. Barthes, p. 115.
69. Barthes, p. 25.
70. Neil Corcoran, Clair Wills, Tim Kendall and Matthew Campbell have
identified this feature of Muldoon’s work. See Matthew Campbell,
“Muldoon’s Remains,” in Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, Tim Kendall
and Peter McDonald eds., (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004);
pp. 170–188.
71. Barthes, p. 57.
72. Allen, p. 69.
73. Paul Muldoon, “Getting Around: Notes Towards An Ars Poetica”, Essays
in Criticism, VOL. XLVIII No. 2, April 1998 107–128; p. 125.
74. Muldoon, ‘BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: The River’, from Poems 1968–1998,
(London: Faber & Faber, 2001): p. 414; see also Kendall, Paul Muldoon,
p. 153.
75.  John Kerrigan, ‘Muddling through after Madoc,’ in Paul Muldoon:
Critical Essays, Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald eds., (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2004); p. 138.
76. Arjun Appadurai, (2016) ‘Aspirational maps: On migrant narratives and
imagined future citizenship’, Eurozine, 19 February. Available at: www.
eurozine.com.
77. Guinn Batten, ‘Muldoon: Critical Judgement, Crisis and the Ethics of
Voice’, in Crisis and Contemporary Poetry edited by Anne Karhio, Seán
Crosson and Charles I. Armstrong (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
pp. 201–214. (p. 205)
78. Paul Muldoon, Madoc: A Mystery (London: Faber & Faber, 1990): p.
188.
79.  Earl G Ingersoll and Stan Sanvel Rubin, ‘The Invention of the I: A
Conversation with Paul Muldoon,’ Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume
XXXVII, Issue 1, Winter 1998: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.
act2080.0037.106.
80. Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, p. 144.
81. Kendall, Paul Muldoon, p. 153.
 1  AMERICAN HIGHWAYS  53

82. Ingersoll and Rubin, ‘The Invention of the I: A Conversation with Paul

Muldoon’.
83. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992): p. 4.
84. Anne Karhio, ‘Place, Experience and Estrangement in the Poetry of Paul
Muldoon’ in Recovering Memory, edited by Friberg, Hedda Nordin,
Irene Gilsenan Pedersen and Lene Yding (Cambridge: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2007): p. 208.
85. Christopher K. Coffman, “Tradition and critique in Paul Muldoon’s
‘Madoc: A Mystery’”, Irish Studies Review, 22:4, 2014: p. 433.
 CHAPTER 2

Alternative Cartographies

The troublesome legacy of traditional cultural memory of emigra-

tion for Irish poetic migrants to the United States brings about vari-
ous responses to the inherited narrative, as demonstrated by the ways
myths and memorials are disseminated in the poetry of Greg Delanty,
debated in the poetry of Eamonn Wall and defused by Paul Muldoon.
Contemporary female migrant poetry must also respond to that leg-
acy but as women, are these poets similarly inhibited by the weight of
diasporic history, or does the silence around women’s experience as
emigrants act as a kind of liberation? As Anne Fogarty remarks in her
insightful article, ‘The Influence of Absences: Eavan Boland and the
Silenced History of Irish Women’s Poetry’, ‘the entire absence of a
female line of influence … acts both as a bogey and as a powerful impe-
tus to question, refurbish, and invent poetic strategies of self-definition.
This trope of a voided female tradition … both petrifies and curiously
enables the contemporary woman poet’.1 As outlined in the introduc-
tion, within the sweep of historical immigration to the United States
(and elsewhere), female voices from any country are rarely heard and
superficially represented.2 The poetry of Vona Groarke and Sara Berkeley
explores the complex ways in which, as female Irish migrant poets, they
are simultaneously limited and liberated by the occlusion of women from
the narratives of migration. As female poets, their poetry does not appear
subject to the same expectations of ethical reinvention seen as pressures
for male poets, particularly Wall and Delanty.

© The Author(s) 2017 55

A. McDaid, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63805-8_2
56  A. McDAID

Vona Groarke’s experience characterises the essentially temporary

condition of the contemporary global citizen and her poetry conducts
a dialogue of complex reconfigurations of identity, affiliation and his-
tory in a post-national world. Her volumes Juniper Street (2006) and
Spindrift (2009) engage key concerns borne out of personal migrancy
while only occasionally averting to a larger frame of migrant remember-
ing. The instability underpinning her writing derives from a ‘destabilisa-
tion of temporality and territory’ inherent in the post-national condition,
and the psychic impact of migration retains its potency precisely because
of that destabilisation.3 Sara Berkeley’s permanent repositioning to the
United States ostensibly represents a more traditional mode of emigra-
tion but straightforward dichotomies of geography prove unsustainable
in her poetry. Berkeley’s reliance on a poetics of water underscores a pro-
found distrust of land-based modes of representation, leading Berkeley
to a post-pastoral aesthetic in her writing that is, itself, an act of reinven-
tion. Both Berkeley and Groarke’s careful stylistic strategies are the prod-
uct and the practice of contemporary migration.
In these poetics of migration, memory becomes associative rather than
instructive, and is seconded to formal purpose. Catríona Clutterbuck
notes in her essay ‘New Irish Women Poets’, how the generation emerg-
ing since the late nineties (including amongst others, Groarke, Sinéad
Morrissey and Colette Bryce) ‘through their recharging of Irish poet-
ry’s signature focus on the theme of fractured inheritance and belong-
ing, attend in a revitalised way to the ghostliness-cum-materiality of
history and the self’.4 Female migrant poetry shows the residue of his-
torical emigration at the same time as it reinvigorates that experience,
and the poetry of Groarke and Berkeley situates that ‘recharging’ as a
revitalisation of the migration paradigm. Ailbhe Smyth’s comment that
‘Irish poetry criticism is (still) hyper-concerned with questions of myth
and history, with national and cultural identity … poems which do not
nourish these critical concerns are considered as either not really Irish, or
not really poems’ can be read as part of the contemporaneous movement
away from restrictive codes of poetic belonging in which both Berkeley
and Groarke participate.5 For contemporary female migrant poets, the
jaded criteria identified by Smyth are not a priority, but instead themes
such as history, myth, and individual (if not national or cultural) iden-
tity are reinvented. This reinvention is undertaken not in the interroga-
tory manner of the generation of women poets of Boland, McGuckian,
Ní Chuilleanáin and Ní Dhomhnaill, but rather with subjectivity enabled
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  57

by the previous generation’s active reconfiguration of alternate modes of

myth, history and identity in Irish poetry. Groarke and Berkeley’s inher-
itance of their predecessors’ negotiations with imposed criteria is realised
in the way their poetry is released from a representative responsibility.
Balancing the complex, intensive experience of migration with sub-
jective creative values, Groarke and Berkeley demonstrate the extent to
which inherited themes have been superseded by individual aesthetics. By
engaging, and personalising, metaphors of water, both poets transmute
the physicality of migration into profound reflection on what it means
to reside as a poet, as a woman, as a mother, as a citizen and as an alien
in present-day society. The refraction cast onto older land-based tropes
by these water metaphors allows a certain empowerment through the
implied rejection of the established mode of Irish poetry. Sara Berkeley’s
post-pastoral and ecopoetic perspective is particularly subversive in its
engagement with the land, while Vona Groarke’s shifting central meta-
phor from settlement to the sea undertakes a similar act of personal and
poetic emancipation. By reconfiguring terms, such as post-national,
migrant, Irish and home, the poetry of Vona Groarke and Sara Berkeley
pursues alternative routes for contemporary Irish women’s poetry, and
for the poetry of migration.6

‘I mean it as no ordinary return’:

Vona Groarke in America
In interview in 2008, in response to a query about the transatlantic
nature of her life and writing, Vona Groarke describes how her forth-
coming collection Spindrift has ‘an introductory section of poems
[written] in Winston-Salem, mostly about the idea of being at home’.7
Spindrift, published in 2009, and its predecessor Juniper Street (2006),
emerge from a period of living and working in the United States. Since
then, Groarke has relocated to Manchester where she is currently based,
her collection X published to critical acclaim in 2014.8 Shifting centres
of gravity characterise her poetry from an early stage, however, suggest-
ing an original imprint of dislocation that is more subtle and pervasive
than immediately obvious. Groarke’s poetry illustrates how her increas-
ingly migratory personal circumstances precipitate the condition of a
destabilised self in Spindrift and Juniper Street, a self that is continually
in the process of reinvention. Erll’s critical distinction between the dual
roles of memory in literature and as literature is evident in Groarke’s
58  A. McDAID

poetry, which is possessed by the quality of residue that speaks of a reces-

sive memory not always fully retrieved but nevertheless present.9
The opening poem of Juniper Street is entitled ‘Ghosts’ (one of two
poems sharing this title in the volume). Groarke’s poetry is haunted
by an abstraction and loss that elude description. ‘Ghosts’ captures the
imprecision of something amiss that can’t be pinpointed.

Not exactly. Something like the breath on your cheek

or an aftertaste of summer, years ago[.]
Juniper Street, 11.

The hesitancy of the diction signals the poet’s impulse to reinvent and
the concomitant uncertainty of a language that shirks from committing
fully to an alternate diction. The qualifiers—‘not exactly’, ‘something
like’, ‘I don’t think so’—reject inheritance but fall short of complete
reinvention. Coupled with Groarke’s mediated and interrupted imagery,
these semantic qualifications suggest a fractured memory that, in using
reinvention to forget, also struggles to remember. The uneasy tone that
continues throughout the volume is borne out by the fact that nothing
is what it seems; moments are shadows of older experiences that have
been lost or left behind, involuntary memories that surface in sensory
snapshots.

one,
two metallic notes with the cadence of a name;
silverfish throwing your reflection off a beat.
Or a peony petal blown off your path.
Juniper Street, 11.

‘Ghosts’ also establishes an ongoing theme of (un)familiarity that domi-

nates the poet’s migrant collections—of things recognisable but not
quite known.
Related to the odd sensation of being part of, but still outside, a com-
munity, the disjunction between reality and recollection induces gothic
resonances to these poems of layered memory. The stunning final image
of the ‘ghosts’ delivered through the children’s breath in winter air aptly
evokes an ephemerality of memory:
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  59

They breathe ghosts into January

that stand for the split second it takes
to take us in, and then they’re off
as though released, like figments of the air.
Juniper Street, 11.

The narration of suburban family life forms the backbone of Juniper

Street, wherein spaces of familiar domesticity are reinvented by the
strangeness of elsewhere. The eponymous poem of the volume implies
the undesirability of the modification from its opening lines, where even
nature appears unnatural: ‘We go to sleep by artificial moonlight.’ There
is no consolation of a shared sky or of looking at the same moon in this
place where light and dark are forged by technology. The whirling inten-
sity of this strange place is borne out by the ‘wind’s plump elevated arch’
and the ‘dawn’s blindsided glaze’. Nature plays arboreal tricks by night,
performing for the family in the morning: ‘just last week, the icicle tree
at our door / was in full bloom. The breeze made a show of it.’
Changing seasons bring new rhythms to the inner life of the poem.
Out of the prolonged slowness of winter, with its aurally leisurely lexi-
con of ‘room’, ‘glaze’, ‘bloom’, ‘drooped’, March comes with action and
speed, ‘opening and closing, like a valve’. Single-syllable words accelerate
the stanza as spring deliberately marches to a fresh beat:

Snow-melt in the gutters keeps new time,

ice slurs on the lean-to, the Swiss Alps
of the swimming pool drape over our own roof line[.]
Juniper Street, 52.

The residential landscape depicted through the poem’s invocation of its

paraphernalia—‘the floodlight stadium’, ‘the swimming pool’, ‘the tick-
ing flagpole’, ‘the trash’, ‘the laburnum school bus’—creates a image of
white picket-fence America, picture-perfect in its suburban somnolence.
The layered nature of Groarke’s experience suggested here by ‘new
time’ is made explicit in ‘Northeast of Nowhere’, where a similar sub-
urban landscape is inflected with pioneers’ discomfort. Like Eamonn
Wall’s Iron Mountain Road and, in different ways, Muldoon’s Madoc: A
Mystery, Groarke’s poem remembers the indigenous heritage embedded
60  A. McDAID

in the land in which the family, as ‘new adventurers, wary’, settles. The
space is simultaneously modern (its ‘gardens abloom with / styrofoam
and ply’) and primitive (for ‘the road’s not tarred / and the dust gets
everywhere’), again alluding to the dualities that coexist in Groarke’s aes-
thetic. By drawing on the American settler tradition and calling up its
defining feature, the prairie, the poet nods to the historical heritage of
her migrations and also calls up the narrative of dispossession in which
the reinvented self participates. Outside is vaguely unsettling, and so the
family ‘keep to the house, /have time on [their] hands.’ The isolation of
elsewhere is suggested in this innocuous phrase, and again, more directly,
later, as the poet confesses:

We don’t know where we are,

though twice lately, we used the phrase
‘a life thought better of’

like flat-packed shelves

that had to be returned
on account of too many bolts,
too much daylight.
Juniper Street, 45–46.

Groarke’s careful form offers heightened detail observed with the inten-
sity of an outsider’s eye. The short lines and brief verses are arbitrated
by assiduous punctuation: in the above stanzas, minimal punctuation
opens out the statement into a musing that enacts a structural echo of
the ‘time’ the poet has on her hands. In contrast, the opening stanza is
terse and conjunctive, the caution of initial impressions captured by the
conditional atmosphere engendered by the comma, the colon, and the
semi-colon.

We’re all the same here:

new adventurers, wary,
mortgaged to the hilt;
gardens abloom with
styrofoam and ply.
Juniper Street, 45.

The silence of suburbia in the absence of children is an image that

arises in Irish poetry in the United States. Eamonn Wall portrays the
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  61

‘bright yellow buses of the future’ that spirit the life away for the dura-
tion of the school day.10 Eamon Grennan meditates on that time in his
poem ‘Pause’, describing it as:

the weird containing stillness of the neighborhood

just before the school bus brings the neighborhood kids
home in the middle of a cold afternoon: a moment
of pure waiting, anticipation, before the outbreak of anything.11

For Groarke, once her ‘children’s on the run / goodbyes settle on

the porch with [her] unplanted kiss’, she is alone, ‘queen of the morn-
ing: nothing to do but to fiddle / words’. This belittling of the poetic
act and her dissatisfaction with ‘tired metaphors’ of rain recall the limita-
tions of language of ‘Ghosts’. The responsibility of reinvention here is
more than a thematic device; rather it is mapped across the creative pro-
cess, speaking to an anxiety surrounding the impact, value and legacy of
poetry throughout Groarke’s work. She describes her craft in similarly
disparaging terms: ‘I tinker with knives and hours / / and one strand of
your hair’, the flippancy of the verb ‘to tinker’ belying the transforma-
tive potential of poetry to turn words into art. Underpinning much of
her work is a distrust of the ability of poetic form, even while retaining
its lexical and formal integrity, to render lived experience into language.
‘What do I ask?’ she ponders in ‘Beyond Me’, voicing an ethical anxiety
around the poet’s role. Her answer, ‘[t]o make something of these lines
/ extend to you’, exposes the act of creation as primarily an undertaking
of reinvention and secondarily a gesture of community. The line-break
carries the ideological weighting, conveying how the poet is immediately
occupied with the craft, and only latterly with the audience.
The poet seeks a balance between delineation and delivery, and this
preoccupation with meaning and authenticity leaves the poet exasperated
with the allusive nature of poetry. In ‘The Sunroom’ Groarke declares
‘I’m through, I think, with metaphor. The sunroom / floats nowhere,
there is no other version of this.’ Her desire to reinvent is complicated
by the jaded quality of language that serves only to restrict rather than
renew. With characteristic circumspection, the interpolation of ‘I think’
qualifies the poet’s intention to abandon allegory. Her expressed despair
at the dualities of meaning implies weariness not merely of the poetic act
but of a lifestyle predicated on a divided existence. Lamenting the loss of
a lingua franca in An Teach Tuí, she longs for cultural as well as poetic
fluency:
62  A. McDAID

If I knew how to fix in even one language

the noise of his wings in flight

I wouldn’t need another word.

Spindrift, 50.

The contradictions here are revelatory: the interconnections of memory,

creativity and reinvention meet in the seam of these lines. In its essence,
poetry is an act of re-creation that relies on memory. That the mode
of expression eluding the poet seeks to recount the sound of the bird’s
migration hints at a deeper insecurity surrounding the poet’s own ability
to address the peregrinations of her life.
‘Away’ (1) is one such attempt to make sense of her bilocation, in
which she confesses there are ‘[h]ours I’m not sure where I am’.12 In
tightly regulated unrhymed tercets, the poet reaches for structural con-
trol by prioritising the personal pronoun. In placing the self at the helm
of each statement, Groarke maintains a syntactical rigour that belies the
emotional turmoil of the narrative. The initial image moulds memory as
a form of solace, conducting a synchronicity across space and time that
dissolves the distance between past and present:

I paint woodwork the exact azure

of a wave’s flipside
out the back of Spiddal pier.
Spindrift, 14.

The specificity of the matched colour binds the speaker’s present setting
to the place of treasured memory, and the particularity of the remem-
bered detail. Like Wall’s ‘Election Day’ and Bernard O’Donoghue’s ‘Any
Last Requests’, the act of suburban DIY in ‘Away’(1) is a self-soothing
gesture that consoles while it asserts exclusion. Difference is lodged in
the most fundamental of daily actions:

My faithless heart ratchets

in time to slower vowels,
higher daylight hours.

I grow quiet. Yesterday

I answered in a class of Irish
at the checkout of Walgreen’s.
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  63

I walk through the day-to-day

as if ferrying a pint glass
filled to the brim with water

that spills into my own accent:

pewtered, dim, far-reaching,
lost for words.
Spindrift, 14.

‘Away’(1) progresses from a gentle assertion of presence in a new

­country—‘We have our own smallholding’ the opening line declares—
to a recognition of the irreconcilable sense of the dislocation and
marginalisation of migration. The specificities of language, or more pre-
cisely of accent, are flagged here as a definitive marker of exclusion, as
what Colette Bryce refers to as ‘the shibboleth / haitch’ in her poem
‘A Simple Modern Hand’.13 The ineluctable differentiation lodged in
accent cannot be easily dissolved or painted over—‘slower vowels’ are as
inextricable as the sun in the sky, and there is no opportunity for reinven-
tion here. Where Greg Delanty defiantly reaches for a local communal
diction, Groarke’s speaker is steadily silenced, and the poem’s final image
presents the speaker carrying her dislocation as an overflowing glass that
deadens language. Later, in ‘The Small Hours’, the speaker chastises her-
self for verbosity—‘I talk too much; give far too much away’—as if lan-
guage by its very volume, not to mention its content, can betray.
Form, however, can offer refuge to the poet, and formal strate-
gies are also acts of literary memory. Groarke’s generation of poets are
often ‘loosely (if not always accurately) associated with formal conserva-
tism, even with a new formalism’ in Fran Brearton’s phrase.14 Including
with Justin Quinn, David Wheatley, Caitríona O’Reilly and others,
this ‘post-national generation‘, as Quinn describes them, are ‘formalist
or experimental as the mood takes them’.15 Groarke’s poetry is always
tight and precise and, while she is not as committed to tricks of form as
perhaps Wheatley or O’Reilly, the structural choices of her poems con-
sciously sustain her themes as her themes reinforce the form. The caution
embodied by the speaker carrying an overflowing glass is reiterated by
the three-line stanzas that burst forth and then halt, each one a thrust of
overspill before the self-check of the stanza break.
In ‘An American Jay’, the exquisite 64-line terza rima is humorous
and harrowing by turns, its metrical momentum enforcing the onward
emotional march. Groarke remembers the Dantean structure and then
64  A. McDAID

reinvents it in a global capitalist setting, where ‘the pre-Thanksgiving

clear-out at K-Mart’ hooks on the satellite broadcast of ‘an Anglophile
mid-morning with the Kumars’. Rhymes such as ‘e-coli’/‘ukulele’, and
‘Drink and Dial’/‘tikka and dhal’ are amusingly lighthearted, as is the
narrative of the tribulations of teaching metrics to creative writing stu-
dents who think their tutor either ‘quaint or just plain odd’. Beneath the
comedy, however, lurks a dark disillusionment with the vacuity of living,
and of being, always, on the periphery, looking in.

I am too old for this. I feel like some hoary, washed-up hoojah
on the edge of that funfair, waiting for the carousel
to jolt into life like a wound-up hummingbird or jay[.]
Spindrift, 16.

The transience of migrant life that contributes to this peripherality

heightens Groarke’s awareness of universal impermanence and, through-
out her poetry, houses, histories, memories, relationships and identities
share a common instability. Other People’s Houses (1999) uses the house
as a cohesive trope, constructed as repositories of human history and
relationships.16 Shane Alcobia-Murphy perceives a ‘nostalgic longing for
communal identification’ in Groarke’s investment in the house, an iden-
tification which transmits and incubates memory by its very materiality.17
The symbol of the house is carried forward into later collections, but
its stability is undermined; fragile and crumbling, houses become subject
to ravages of time that even bricks and mortar cannot withstand. From
Juniper Street, ‘Windmill Hymns’ documents the slow decay of living,
using an analogy of corrosion to denote the personal damage sustained
through life.

How long before the wood

lets itself down on willowherb that finds itself at bay in shuttered
light;
before the doors give up the ghost; the floors shrug the way
windows
cannot bring themselves to do[?]
Juniper Street, 12.

The evolution of the imagining of the house in Groarke’s work con-

curs with a changing cultural conception of houses in post-Celtic Tiger
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  65

Ireland. If in 1999, the year of Other People’s Houses, houses equated to

community, by 2006 and Juniper Street, the voided character of ghost
estates is increasingly present. This altered perception of the house as
a symbol suggests the evolution of memory, and corresponds with an
emerging body of literature that reconfigures suburban domestic land-
scapes as deserted, discordant and disturbed.18
The house in ‘The Return’ is a similarly voided space, haunted not
by its incompleteness but by absence, a house once inhabited and now
abandoned. Like Mahon’s ‘A Deserted Garage in Co. Cork’, the vague
traces of life are perceptible, but in Groarke’s poem her speaker person-
ally possesses the loss. The structural change to the physical house ‘still
comes as a surprise’, but the ‘bricked-up door’ signifies more than mere
home improvements; rather it suggests the irretrievability of the past. ‘I
know this house’, the poet claims, ‘I wrote our summer here’, but like
the door and the past, her ‘words […] closed over years ago’. The poet is
herself ‘a half-hearted ruin’ in a wreckage of yesterdays.
The losses accrued through the passages of time and migration are
also losses of memory. The erosion of physical monuments intimate the
lapses of memory—the speaker’s assertion ‘I know this house’ is as much
a command to receding memory as an interjection of recognition. On
one level, the poet tries to construct the remembered past as offering a
sanctuary in unfamiliar places and times, that can be accessed as in ‘The
Undercurrent’:

[a]nywhere. So long as there’s a flicker of sea,

a far-fetched train, a lighthouse nodding off
between tea-time and that moment when
your father brightly takes you by the hand[.]
Juniper Street, 17.

The opening assertion of ‘anywhere’ is immediately contradicted by

the highly specific elements necessary to retrieve the childhood expe-
rience. Memory is flawed and unreliable, and the way back treacher-
ous. ‘You’ll need a tiller’s hand to steer this through’, Groarke admits in
‘To Smithereens’, a reverie that delivers her back to the same place, ‘as
always / one fine day. August 1979. A sunlit Spiddal beach.’ Yet the frailty
of memory as a bank of history, knowledge and experience is clear and
even ‘the sea loses memory / in midland shallows’. Key historical events
are obscured by the vagaries of personal recollection—the IRA killing of
66  A. McDAID

Mountbatten reduced to ‘words like rowboat, fishing, smithereens’—while

ways of life are lost like ‘a foxtrot or an old-time waltz / that nobody, but
nobody, / recalls’.
One of the key post-national features of Groarke’s poetry is her lack
of interest in collective national narratives. That history is not an abid-
ing concern for her refutes the perception of Irish poetry, written both
on and off the island, as obsessed with the past. In fact her work, empty
as it is of community and, by extension, history, correlates with the con-
certed disassociation of writers and poets from both the idea and the
island of Ireland since the 1980s. For this generation and this poet, it is
evident that questions of national and ideological unity have been super-
seded by universal issues of globalization and isolation. Groarke’s rare
historical poems take an ethical stand and reject the possibility of objec-
tive truth by emphasising the bias involved in any reportage. In ‘Parnell’,
the poet equates the manipulation of history with the public’s mispro-
nunciation of the politician’s name, implying that any ‘truth’, even the
truth of one’s name, is mutable. By complicating ‘fact’ with multiple nar-
ratives, Groarke splinters the myth of a national history. ‘The Game of
Tennis in Irish History’ is a suitably disingenuous title for a poem that
probes the methods and flaws of historical memorialisation. History itself
is ‘a holding game, put down to delivery, / service skills, to foot faults
or to where advantage lies’. Donald E. Pease suggests that, in the post-
national consciousness, ‘the hegemonic narrative of the nation-state has
been dismantled’, and it’s clear that, in Groarke’s work, all versions of
national history are palimpsestic and subject to the vagaries of memory
and perspective.19
Remembering, and forgetting, has its price but also its rewards, and
the collusion of memory and language as cultural currency is not unno-
ticed by Groarke. ‘It is a matter of inflection, of knowing what / to
emphasise, and what to let drift away’, a truism as pertinent to poetry as
to history. This idea is perhaps also Groarke’s reflection on the necessi-
ties (and difficulties) of assimilation. However, as Stuart Hall recognises,
‘migration is a one-way trip. There is no home to go back to. There
never was.’20 The traditional migrant dream of nostos is unrealisable, for
myriad reasons, not least because the home-society cannot accommo-
date the migrant’s peregrinations. The poet perceives how in ‘The Local
Accent’:
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  67

all the words for elsewhere

or for being there have had their edges worn off
and their meanings powdered to a consonantal darkness[.]
Juniper Street, 18.

These lines imply an intrinsic native hostility to ‘elsewhere’; a refusal to

accept or acknowledge that ‘being there’ has any role in the story of this
town. This tunes into a primal distrust of the unknown, but it also speaks
of the animosity experienced by returned migrants towards their experi-
ences abroad. While Groarke’s allusions are philosophical, they resonate
with existing research on accent and exclusion in Irish society: ‘the close
association between belonging and voice means that return migrants can
disappear into an imagined white Irish majority, through processes of
silencing and invisibility’.21 The potency of pronunciation as a signifier of
belonging and exclusion resurfaces in ‘Athlones’:

at the point where more than accent

slips between at one and alone,

washing up against the urge to be,

at last, at home, pacing over paths
that cast off as I do, in a bed of words[.]
Juniper Street, 23.

The river Shannon running through the heart of the midlands dictates
the cadence of the poem and the town. Athlone, ‘wracked on a river’, is
defined by its relationship to the water that must be ‘taken in hand’ and
‘kept in check’. Yet the river’s influence seeps into the light that’s ‘lured
away’, becoming liquid as it ‘tinkles down through Northgate Street’.
If Groarke’s early writing is preoccupied with places, houses and his-
tories, then it can be argued that her migrant collections engage with
the subject and vocabulary of water. This trend amongst female migrant
poets of engaging water as a deliberate alternate aesthetic is teased out in
more detail in relation to Sara Berkeley’s work, but Groarke’s work simi-
larly moves towards a poetics of water, demonstrating a reinvention of
her early delineated, grounded metaphors towards increasingly ephem-
eral reflections. In her careful observations of transitions—cultural,
68  A. McDAID

geographical, personal, familial and poetical—her aesthetic comes

to be located in border-spaces, on the fringes and peripheries of land
and lake, sea and sky. Poems walk on the shoreline or along the river-
bed in Juniper Street, while the very title of Spindrift places the col-
lection in the fine spray rising off the waves. Such is the nature of
post-national experience that all borders are fluid, all territories tenuous,
and Groarke’s poetry comes to rest in these sites of temporal and spatial
mutability.
Liminal physical spaces in Groarke’s poems point to the experiential
hybridity of migration, a reality heightened by technological cross-cul-
tural communication. Letters to and from America are at the centre of
the Irish narrative of emigration, and while the epistolary form might
be almost extinct in the 21st century, precious words from home are
no less valued. Theorising the dominance of digital media in interper-
sonal migration communication, Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller pro-
pose the term polymedia to encompass email, Skype, instant messaging
and text messaging.22 The polymedic modes of technological contact
in Groarke’s poetry are also seen to feature prominently in the poetry
of Justin Quinn and Conor O’Callaghan.23 The opening lines of ‘Love
Songs’ speak to the anticipation of an unopened email, and the promise
of its contents:

Your email shimmers

in my inbox.

Here are your words,

inestimable, smooth
to my fingertip,
as though, by touch,
they could be made
to open a chink more.
Spindrift, 48.

There is an erotic tone to the language, a tactile physicality that struggles

to defeat the insubstantiality of technology. As Madianou and Miller point
out, ‘Email is not simply email: it is defined relationally as also not a let-
ter, not a text message and not a conversation via webcam; which, in turn,
is not a phone call’.24 Groarke’s poetic parallels draw on sensory mem-
ory of older, more visceral modes of engagement in order to substantiate
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  69

the experience of new media. In her repeated use of possessive pronouns

to create an intimacy between sender and receiver, Groarke engages the
typed words on the screen as so intensely related to the writer that they
might be aroused to response by the poet’s touch. The possibility of
response is minimal, however, aspiring only to ‘a chink more’. Likewise,
the electronic glow of the mobile phone receiving a call is transformed
into a moment of natural joy; but again the locution undermines the aspi-
ration, the word ‘flare’ evoking danger or emergency rather than delight:

The flare of the mobile phone

in my hand
is an outcrop of sunlight[.]
Spindrift, 48.

The theme of communication runs throughout Groarke’s work, as

does a preoccupation with distance and with the limitations and possibili-
ties of polymedia. These recurrent concerns are key themes of contempo-
rary migration, for it is not the absence of communication but the mutual
limitations of that communication across time zones, countries and cul-
tures that troubles. Relations are mediated by ‘the transatlantic time lag,
five hours on pause, / silting so much of what there is to say’. Groarke’s
elemental awareness, especially her fixation with water, is borne out of
(and balanced by) a necessary reliance on, and despair with, material cul-
ture. A poetics of water and rain, via sea, river and lake, is repeatedly
invoked, despite the poet’s awareness of its limitations and deceptions.
‘Trapdoor’ challenges the ‘serenity’ of the lake’s surface, declaring ‘[i]
t fools no one’. In ‘Rain Songs’ the poet dismisses the ‘ancient rain, all
grimace and sequins’, its ‘monologue of petty grievance’ and ‘its tired
metaphors’, while in ‘Spindrift’ the ocean refuses to participate in her
simile: ‘the colour of the sea today / is nothing like the name / of any
colour / I can think of.’ Nevertheless, the physicality and immediacy of
the elements is comforting, especially in contrast with the abstraction of
‘Away’ (2), which sums up the incubated separateness of a migrant life.

I babysit by Skype
breakfast to their lunch,
lunch to their dinner.
Spindrift, 26.
70  A. McDAID

The disjunctions between home and ‘home’ compound the emotional

severance of the poet’s separation from her family, the slippages of time
speaking to the fundamental disruption of familial custom. In the fail-
ure of linear time, the poet is trapped within widening circles of imita-
tion and inauthenticity. The cold reproduction of her children’s image,
yet another counterfeit in a world of falsities, is transformed by a tactile
expression of love—‘I touch their silky faces on my screen’—an imagina-
tive leap that is the more poignant for its impossibility.
This crushing image of isolation reinforces the high price exacted by
technological communication. Unlike earlier emigrants, who reimagined
and reinvented their homeplaces, here the migrant is continually exposed
to representations of what she is missing. The consolations of memory
are unavailable as ‘reality’ is constantly refreshed. The horror of being
left out, of relying on online cameras to depict her children’s lives, is
summed up in the final stanzas of the poem:

where I Skype and Skype

and no one answers,

where I Google Earth to see

if the world namechecks
this morning

my son’s bike in the garden,

my daughter’s skirt
on the line[.]
Spindrift, 26–27.

While the substance of the migrant experience has changed utterly,

its core of isolation remains intact. Groarke’s poetry recognises the dif-
ferences, embodied in the tools at the modern migrant’s disposal—‘a
borrowed cellphone … like a spray of fireflies’, ‘the streetlamp of [her]
laptop’, ‘the flare of the mobile phone’ as it ‘baubles now and then’—that
can reach across distance. These devices have predefined limits, however:
the pool of light cast by the ‘streetlamp and the brevity of a ‘flare’ are
circumscribed rather than expansive, and certainly are unsustainable. The
fundamental isolation of migration, and its associated loss, loneliness and
estrangement, persists through the consolations of technology. Even the
grunt of the fridge motor is transformed into ‘the engine of a great ship’,
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  71

calling up the vessels that transported her emigrant ancestors across the
vast Atlantic for weeks and months at a time.
Finding herself strung between two places, Groarke’s American poetry
depicts a self stranded at ‘the spot in the ocean / that’s just as far from
one home as the other’. In self-consciously describing herself as a ‘rem-
nant envoy / to a province of depleted relevance, outlying home’, the
poet acknowledges the obsolescence of such representations. The lim-
ited use of these traditional tropes flags the poet’s reluctance to actively
participate in reworking emigration narratives, her ethical responsibility
discharging itself in the poetic act. Yet by admitting the shared truths at
the heart of all migration, Groarke’s poetry, and the poetry of her con-
temporaries, is important for the ways it contributes to narrating the evo-
lution of emigration. Poetic journeys take place across many levels, and
geographical peregrinations form part of the profoundly layered story
of poetry and migration. Through her journeys of ‘no ordinary return’,
Vona Groarke’s poetry forms its own seam in the complex stratigraphy of
contemporary Irish poetry.

‘laying holy miles between myself and home’:

Sara Berkeley’s Ecopoetics
Given the distance in both miles and years from Ireland, Sara Berkeley’s
collections Strawberry Thief (2005), The View From Here (2010) and
What Just Happened (2015) are understandably neutral when it comes
to expressions of national or cultural affiliation.25 This ambivalence can
be seen, however, to stretch back to her earliest work, Penn (1986) and
Home Movie Nights (1989).26 As Kathleen McCracken observes in her
1989 review, ‘Berkeley’s work charts conscious and unconscious terri-
tories, but what is surprising is that these landscapes rarely correspond
to her native Ireland [….] The intention is neither to probe nor define
a cultural identity.’27 Berkeley’s poetry is concerned with the character-
istics of the landscape rather than with the inhabitants, and ecological
and environmental concerns particularly underpin her later volumes. In
veering away from identifiably Irish poetic concerns, Berkeley distances
herself from the national literary tradition. When familiar motifs such as
place, heritage, memory and loss do appear, her poems push away from
collective expression, using instead a determinedly individual voice. Her
engagement with the landscape is less influenced by dinnseanchas than by
ecopoetics, and her interest is in bodies of water rather than the history
72  A. McDAID

of the land. In this manner, Berkeley re-envisions the landscape of poetry

through her retrieval of alternate and ecocentric poetics.
The possibilities of water offer a means of circumnavigating the mas-
culine topographical tradition of poetry rooted in Ireland. By diverging
from the established norm in various ways (gender, location, ­subject)—
and engaging a metaphor of water rather than earth—poetic and
thematic spaces are opened out in which diverse experiences may be
positioned. The element of water is manifestly appropriate for female
migrant poets in America, not least for its resistance to the ground-
ing affect of traditional Irish poetry.28 Its inherently feminine princi-
ples of fertility and fluidity propose alternative modes of engagement,
while the significance of water to the migrant consciousness retains its
historical relevance. The transatlantic journey has defined the flow of
emigrant traffic to the United States for generations and even in the era
of easy air travel, the symbolic significance of crossing the ocean retains
its power.
While the Atlantic separates, it also connects the two shores and
water is the binding element that links the land-masses. The mutabil-
ity of water means its shape is defined by its boundaries: shorelines form
outlines and coasts offer contours to an otherwise amorphous element.
Similar to the ways migrants are bound to drift between home- and host-
lands, the fluctuations of water are measured by its interactions with
local terrain. The cultural, social, historical and communal characteris-
tics of the land define and dictate the migrant’s relationship to the new
society as well marking his/her negotiations with the place left behind.
Oceans and seas have a particular significance in the divided migrant
consciousness, but other bodies of water are also meaningful, especially
in a contemporary suburban American context. The image of the lake
as a pleasure-place, a site of retreat and recuperation, reaches back to
Thoreau’s Walden (1854), offering immersion in an all-American exist-
ence. Its symbolic function as a repository of time and history is prob-
lematised by the lake’s stagnant passivity, however. Rivers, on the other
hand, are linear progressions through time, space and place, and propose
another series of symbolic significances for female poets moving beyond
existing paradigms. Berkeley’s ethic of reinvention rejects limiting topo-
graphical memory frames and instead recovers alternative sites of mem-
ory in which she situates her poetry.
Through the mediated prism of photographic memory, Berkeley inti-
mates the appropriated nature of her central imagery. Black and white
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  73

photographs frame Berkeley’s volume The View from Here, acting as

imagistic prompts that participate in the collection’s remembering of
the social significance of water-scapes while also inveigling themselves
into the reader’s cognitive memory of reading the volume. The opening
image captures a small jetty on a still lake, with distant houses reflected in
the water’s surface while the final image shows a rusty boathouse on the
shoreline, with its jetty stretching into water that fades, borderless, into
the white of the page. In bookending the volume with visual remind-
ers of its central element, Berkeley nods to the structural and thematic
importance of water in The View from Here. Whether in man-made or
natural bodies, water figures throughout; indeed she goes so far as to
confess her infatuation in ‘Swimming Pool’:

I have fallen for water,

a silky bolt of it
rolling and unrolling under the heavy sky.
The View from Here, 20.

The banality of the suburban pool-side setting is transformed into a

scene of mythic import, charged with power and profundity. The poet
sees her ‘kneeling by the water / a makeshift altar’, in an offering of the
self. The elemental purity of water heals as, in harmony with the sun
and the trees, it ‘breaks life down to its simplest concerns’. The setting
invokes a Mediterranean location with the ‘sun slanting through the
olive tree’. The final verse transforms the girl into Persephone.

If I did not have her

there would be no more summer
and the darkness would not go
with the night.
The View from Here, 20.

If Persephone is the daughter-figure, then the poet is Demeter, and this

is surely a conscious allusion, considering the poet’s environmental and
ecological concerns. Elsewhere, in ‘Carrying’, Persephone reappears
‘among the wild iris and the blue-eyes grass; she filled her basket, she was
overflowing’, while Demeter engages her archetypal emotions, coming
to understand her ‘own mother’s sleepless nights / and the fury of her
love’. The retrieval of the Persephone myth here surely owes a debt to
74  A. McDAID

Eavan Boland’s ‘The Pomegranate’ as well as to inherited versions of the

Greek and Roman stories.
As an allusion, Berkeley’s remembering and reinvention of Boland’s
poem operates on multiple levels of memory. ‘The Pomegranate’ is a
poem of motherhood, of loss and of inevitability.29 It is also itself an act
of repudiation—the poem refuses to remember Cathleen Ní Houlihan as
the female archetype in poems of mythology within the Irish tradition.
Boland’s retrieval of memory that lies outside the parameters of Irish
myth is central to her ethic of reinvention, as asserted in both her prose
writing and within her poetry itself.30 The enabling influence of Boland’s
poetics for subsequent generations of Irish women poets is harnessed in
Berkeley’s poetry, which retains Boland’s memory practices, not only in
its mythic principles but also in the way the younger poet engages inter-
generational anxieties along expressly female lines.
The complex, evolving dynamics between mother and daughter pre-
occupies a number of poems, as reflected in this deceptively harmonious
couplet from ‘Carrying’, a title that services the weighty reciprocity of
the relationship:

we carry our daughters until they are too light to bear

then we carry our mothers; they are heavy as air.
The View from Here, 15.

Berkeley’s personal journey of motherhood occupies her poetic thought,

with poems marvelling at the wonder of her growing child. The balance
of independence and need, of individuality and inheritance embodied in
the young girl enchants the poet.

I never thought
eight would be so fragile,
so delicate, so robust, such a synthesis,
a symphony, a gallery full
of astonishing art. For my part,
now and then,
I see where I held the brush.
The View from Here, 23.

The daughter is a precious creation but possesses a force of her own, a

force that is almost otherworldly at times, ‘one whom ‘the fairies number
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  75

[…] among their own’. Here in ‘The Business of Rain’, the daughter
becomes elemental in her own way, embracing the rainstorm as ‘she
opens the windows, / she opens all the doors, / […] / and she bursts
upon the great outdoors’. As for Eamonn Wall and his daughter, the
synchronicity between the child and nature reconfigures the poetic rela-
tionship with physical and emotional landscapes. In Berkeley’s poetry,
it engenders reflections on the substance of nature in terms of universal
human experience. The element of water dictates the lexicon of poems
such as ‘Dark Summer Days’ and ‘Approaching Eight’ that transfigure
the difficulties of growing up into metaphors of voyage and expedi-
tion. The daughter’s books and toys become ‘the bowed and weathered
instruments of her navigation’, her strength ‘driving up like a mast
through the sea foam’. The precariousness of life’s journeys, even at this
early stage, is pronounced.

In fragile possession of her course

and her short set of ship’s orders
she steps bravely out with me onto the burning waters.
The View from Here, 19.

The lure of the water, despite its dangers, is perceptible to both poet
and daughter, who knows ‘how scary, / that moment when the oar /
rode up, what a relief / to make it back to shore, / how tomorrow you
want more’. The solo journey on the water is a kind of rite of passage, an
Odyssean trip across the ocean with dangers lurking beneath the surface.
The ocean’s charm seduces the poet in ‘Heart’s Desire’, tempting her to
relinquish her worldly worries through immersion.

She rocked me back and forth

with the small swell of occasional boats
and I sank my head into her muffled reedy world[.]
The View from Here, 22.

For Berkeley, water tantalises with offers of escape—declaring ‘all roads

lead to the sea’—while remaining elusively untameable and unattainable:
‘they don’t belong to me, the snatches / of blue sea between the winded
trees’. Steering a way through unfamiliar spaces defines Berkeley’s jour-
neys in poetry, and ‘the bowed and weathered tools of … navigation’
chart a course that is unfailingly precarious. ‘Azimuth’ considers the urge
76  A. McDAID

for exploration, its title a technical term principally used in navigation or

astronomy. An azimuth is the measure of the angle of the horizon’s arc
and, as well as establishing a motif of charting routes, the title also con-
tinues the undercurrent of nautical references, emphasising the poem’s
central theme that draws on, and ultimately dismisses, man-made land
maps. Like the titular parallax of Sinéad Morrissey’s 2014 collection, the
angle of the azimuth is dependent on the position and perspective of the
observer. By centring subjectivity through mathematical and astronomical
concepts, Berkeley imposes a deliberate stamp of individuality that rejects
any implication of articulations along collective or national lines.
The distrust in hegemony is extended by again invoking the senior
female poet Eavan Boland; her poem ‘That the Science of Cartography is
Limited’ is referenced through Berkeley’s depiction of the unreliability of
plotted demarcations on the page.31 The stasis of sketched lines is anath-
ema to the changing scapes of the migrant’s journey: ‘I am going on
alone / through towns redrawn since we were young.’ In this unheimlich
place, maps prove no guide. But where Boland seeks the stories hidden
between contours, Berkeley refuses the atlas entirely. ‘We are much far-
ther north than we ever meant to be’ the poem confesses, a statement
that reveals the folly of following the map as well as a deeper convic-
tion of not belonging. The poem resorts instead to the body, to nature
and to the vocabulary of water as trustworthy alternative coordinates.
The mutability of maps in ‘Azimuth’ reinforces Berkeley’s belief in the
fundamental flux at the heart of human experience that is best expressed
through fluid metaphors of water.

On my hands river veins, maps of the years,

hands that anointed you with oils,
sandalwood, jojoba, lavender for rest.
The View from Here, 34.

The narrator’s confidence in the lines of her hands, and the easy syn-
chronicity between water and body, contrasts sharply with the ensuing
stanza’s difficulty in articulating the inner life.

But how to express—I need my mother tongue

for this—l’étrangeté—strangeness of the ghost
who walks alone inside my shoes.
The View from Here, 34.
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  77

The formal stutter brought about by the caesurae echoes the emo-
tional content of the difficult lines, lines that reach for an other language
to express themselves. The ‘strangeness of the ghost’ draws on ideas of
the unheimlich and the foreigner, which refract Berkeley’s personal expe-
rience as an emigrant. The multiple selves of the exilic subject can’t help
but engender psychic crises of identity, suggested here in linguistic inad-
equacy and expressive limitations. Personal and cultural alienations are
tightly woven, and the paradoxical urge for familiarity as well as distance
is expressed towards the end of the poem: ‘I ride the same train every
afternoon / laying holy miles between myself and home.’
The sense of the uncanny infusing the poet’s observations defines
her relationship to these foreign places. Peculiarities in nature are eerie
and foreboding, at times threatening to disrupt the natural order as she
understands it. ‘There are bees at the flowers in December. It is not right
/ to live like this down here in the half-light.’ These disturbances are
distressing to her instincts, an affront to her understanding of how the
world works. Berkeley’s expectations are challenged by this foreign cli-
mate, and she perceives a catastrophic aspect to these natural digressions,
anticipating the deluge. ‘[I]t’s never rained like this before / at Easter.
Where the colours should be pale yellow, pale blue, they are an unre-
mitting slate’. This tarnished land is an alien place, full of suffering and
distress. The strangeness she perceives is, on one level, borne out of her
outsider status but the poet is equally concerned with the profound dam-
age to ‘the robbed earth’ that translates across cultures and countries.
Berkeley’s ecopoetic approach equates the environmental and seasonal
disruption with insidious ecological and social devastation. ‘Absolution’
develops those connections between personal and public crises, indicting
both herself and society.

I’m at the low-water mark

and I want the journey back.
I sold it, or someone stole it,
and now those same little birds
with the bleeding throats
can hardly sing their way past
the dark stain of hunger, the loneliness.
The View from Here, 63.

The limitations of birdsong are also the limitations of poetry, for

‘there aren’t even adequate words for it / down here in the wreckage’.
78  A. McDAID

Post-apocalyptic images invade Berkeley’s poetic view of ‘the parched

earth’. Reflections on endings and deaths, on how ‘the flowers starved,
/ the streams ran dry’, and the sound of the wind which ‘rolled through
the cottonwoods / like labour pains’ are scattered throughout her work,
even in poems espousing hope.
In its title, ‘Absolution’ points to the possibility of pardon and its final
lines are an act of faith in ‘the world turning constantly from depletion /
towards forgiveness, absolution’. Berkeley offers a prayer for release that
is Beckettian in its recognition of the cyclical stasis of existence: ‘I want
to come to the end / of coming to the end, / begin again / as through
there had never been / that sparse, underfed exhaustion.’ These lines,
and the poem’s earlier invocation of birdsong, water and spring, also call
forth Brendan Kennelly’s poem ‘Begin’ with its opening encouragement
to ‘[b]egin again to the summoning birds / to the sight of light at the
window’.32
Aspirations of fresh starts are linked to prospects of escape in
Berkeley’s aesthetic. The suggestion of incarceration brought about by
the poet’s prayers for release is accentuated by multiple mentions of exits
and escape routes. The possibilities of water resurface in ‘A Thousand
Letters’ where ‘all roads lead to the sea’, whereas ‘59th Street Bridge’
proposes alternate methods while stressing that ‘the time for flight has
come’. With ‘escape routes inked on our palms’, Berkeley is urgent in
her need to break away from this uncanny place which is both utterly
strange yet troublingly familiar.

It isn’t mine, the grey road,

that wanders on down to the point
[…]
They don’t belong to me, the snatches
of blue sea between the winded trees,
the painful greens, so like home,
the milk trucks lumbering by with their payload.
The View from Here, 28.

Wes Davis proposes that Berkeley’s ‘poems of memory and loss link her
to a longer poetic tradition than first glance might suggest’, and this
can also be perceived in the bereft quality to her writing.33 An aware-
ness of the past and its extinct possibilities enthrals Berkeley, as she ven-
tures back to junctions to lament what might have been lost. ‘I wish I
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  79

had built more fences / taken down more fences’ she keens in ‘Meals for
Friends’, a poem that laments and rejoices life in equal measure. Like the
Cailleach Beara, the speaker rues the onset of old age while acknowledg-
ing the joys of her life. ‘Everything I needed to remember / has been
remembered; everything I yearned to forget / is lost.’ Trust in the natu-
ral order trumps human expectation, hopes revealed as foolish when ‘the
ocean gives its undivided attention’. Yet for all the nonchalance, the final
line suggests the vulnerability of the human condition and offers little
consolation as the last reflections of an aged narrator in asking ‘what
matter now / when the heart has proved such a porous vessel for love?’
The presentation of fragmented and devastated individual lives high-
lights the ecopoetic impetus behind Berkeley’s poetry. Along with a
heightened sense of the uncanny, this disorder permeates Berkeley’s per-
ception of the natural world, an awareness intensified by her migrant sta-
tus as well as by her eco-consciousness. At the core of Berkeley’s poetry
is a post-pastoral aesthetic that sees human culpability in the devastation
of the earth’s natural resources. Through this lens, the significance of
water in her writing is more than a poetic device of self-liberation from
migration and national narratives; the post-pastoral speaks out of an
ethic of responsibility to larger environmental and ecological concerns.
While the traditional pastoral mode, especially in the Irish tradition, uses
nature as a means of redeeming history or violence, or as a unifying tribal
motif, Berkeley’s poetry refuses distinctions between nature and culture,
treating both as a sinlge integrated system. Historically the pastoral is
concerned with landscape, countryside (in opposition to city) and ide-
alisation; the specifics of post-pastoral ethics differ in kind. Arguments
have been made for (and against) the consideration of prominent Irish
poets, including Heaney, Longley and Murphy, as writing in an ecopo-
etic or/and post-pastoral mode.34 It is worth noting also the emergence
of ecofeminist criticism that considers post-pastoral traits in a gendered
context, especially in Adrienne Rich’s poetry; this approach is particu-
larly illuminating with regard to the work of Moya Cannon, Medbh
McGuckian and Mary O’Malley, as analysed by Donna L. Potts and
James McElroy.35 Ecofeminism provides another interpretative dimension
to Berkeley’s work although this analysis is less concerned with gender
than with post-pastoral elements in her writing. A post-pastoral approach
allows contemporary migratory poetry to move beyond ‘a preoccupation
with place as an unseverable aspect of self’ to address universal environ-
mental issues which Berkeley views with ethical and poetical urgency.36
80  A. McDAID

The post-pastoral mode makes place discrete from identity and

nationality by creating a universal language of environment rather than
landscape, of quality rather than criteria. Berkeley’s post-pastoral per-
spective complements her water aesthetic, by allowing the poet space to
probe her environment without being ideologically bound by or to it;
the post-pastoral mode effectively enables the poet to reinvent the terms
of poetic engagement with nature. In Pastoral (1999), Terry Gifford
examines the six defining characteristics of the post-pastoral mode, and
demonstrates how the range and scope of a post-pastoral approach. It is
particularly for a poet who has purposely removed herself from familiar
surrounds, thereby allowing herself to absorb the world anew. Gifford’s
elements include: awe of the natural world; acknowledgement of a ‘cre-
ative-destructive universe’; seeing ‘inner nature as outer nature’; accept-
ing ‘culture as nature’ and vice versa; a sense that ‘with consciousness
comes conscience’; and an understanding of exploitation of nature as on
par with the exploitation of human beings.37 Each element features in
Berkeley’s work, some more prominently than others, but all to such a
degree as to warrant considering Berkeley’s poetry as post-pastoral. This
appreciation of nature as divine is evident in the tellingly-titled ‘You
Don’t Have to be Mary Oliver to Write a Poem about Geese’:

This is my church. I come here to worship

at the feet of redwoods and squirrels and monarch butterflies,
at the hem of the soft blue cloak of the sky.
The View from Here, 27.

Berkeley’s disavowal of Mary Oliver, pre-eminent American poet of the

natural world and her earnest poetry of ‘droll metaphor’, betrays inse-
curity around Berkeley’s own attraction to the natural environment
and how that might be received. In trying to un-remember Oliver’s
poetry, Berkeley’s anxiety about the possibility of reinventing nature in
poetry is clear, in both Irish and American contexts. It is significant that
Berkeley expressly addresses American cultural memory, implying the
poet’s self-positioning within the literary narrative of her adopted coun-
try. The imagery of her poetic journeys focuses, with heightened clar-
ity, on the destination rather than on the origin of the journeys, origins
which remain blurred and out-of-focus, like memory receding beyond
retrieval. Aesthetically, and ideologically, Berkeley is more interested in
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  81

the landscape of her new surrounds than the imprint of a past place; her
ethic of reinvention obliges her to persist with and rework the inherited
trope of nature imagery. Her sense of awe at the ‘radiant storm of light
and sound’ finds its language in religious wonder, realising ‘every day is
holy, full of miracles’. In conceiving of life as ‘a ceremony, simple among
the redwoods, / each of us in our own shaft of celestial light’, Berkeley
is inspired and humbled by the magnitude of nature and, by extension,
human experience within the natural world. ‘I bow down before her, I
give her all praise and blame’ she announces in ‘This I Take With Me’.
Awe-inspiring as nature is, Berkeley is also acutely aware of its crea-
tive/destructive qualities: the balance of power between affirmation and
devastation forms the central imagery in numerous poems. In document-
ing the cyclical thrust of nature, Berkeley recognises her own minor role
within that system: ‘I am part of the pattern / that time makes lovely
and destroys.’ In her writing, the potential for growth leads inevitably
to the prospect of demise and the poetry accepts the symbiosis between
life and death. In every act of nature, both possibilities exist, as when
‘the heavy drops beat the tulips down / into their final embrace with
life’. Rain is simultaneously life-giving and damaging, the flowers both
dependent on and subject to the vagaries of rain. The uncontrolla-
ble, double-edged aspect of nature and its ‘moons and moods’ features
throughout Berkeley’s poetry, creating an atmosphere of apprehension
and unease at times in her work. The sense of a looming power hangs
over the poems, like ‘trees in the river’s mirror, / … almost there’, cast-
ing shadows across even the positive narratives.
Reflections of other kinds also feature, as internal personal experi-
ence is externalised in nature. The dialogic exchange between human
and natural expression positions itself with ease, as the poet flits between
physical and emotional modes of articulation. Seasonal shifts are given
individual characteristics: ‘Fall, obediently grey with rain, hugs the car’
in ‘Smoke from Oregon Fires’, while in Feet First ‘the days ached to be
longer / and the dawns fired up blue in our veins’. The poet conceives of
herself as constituent of the earth, longing to be rejuvenated and thereby
redeemed by natural cycles. She declares, ‘Come spring, after the long
months / of slumbering I want my life / to unfurl again, transcend-
ent green’. Furthermore she longs to be released into the environment
at death, acknowledging the cyclical structure of life that sees the body
return to the earth and the spirit survive in nature.
82  A. McDAID

and when it is done

they can scatter me among the Mexican Gold,
the fire poppies and columbines,

and who knows:

tomorrow I may still be alive,
still dancing.
The View from Here, 62.

The idea of nature as performative and as a work of art is central to the

post-pastoral mode; for Berkeley, it is tied in with a sense of awe. She
refers to the ‘endless concert hall / of the ocean floor’ and ‘the flurries
of winter birds / drawn in crayon against a wayward sky’. In ‘Golden
Temple’ she constructs a delicate image that is as visual as it is verbal,
nature functioning both as subject and backdrop.

We may walk, arm in golden arm,

across the fractured canvas of this place
toward the perfect dome
while light from a primitive source
begins to write the surface of the Khan[.]
The View from Here, 32.

The simple synchronicity between landscape and human figures creates a

harmony that tempers the at-times menacing tone brought about by the
creative/destructive nature within Berkeley’s poetry.
The destructive capacity of humanity is also alluded to in Berkeley’s
work, although she shies away from an explicitly didactic approach. Her
poetry shies away from responsibility for the world’s degraded condition
as presented in her work, and this is perhaps the least relevant post-pasto-
ral element in her writing. That said, the damage wreaked on the earth is
made clear, and she draws implicit parallels between human and ecologi-
cal suffering.

It was a time of deprivation,

hunger, the trees doing without their leaves.
I went down on my knees; it seemed
to be the place to be.
The View from Here, 48.
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  83

Arboreal deficiencies are aligned with individual afflictions, and the

earth’s hurt is equated with an intensely personal pain. This anthro-
pomorphism lends an eerily human aspect to the world, blurring the
boundaries between the sentient and the scenic.

The world had never bled so much

[…]
The wind rolled through the cottonwoods
like labour pains; I had to wail aloud.
The View from Here, 48.

The cyclical pattern of the pastoral mode centres around retreat and
return. This depends on a separation of urban and rural, and on a dis-
tinction between home and away. It requires the concept of arcadia that
is missing in post-pastoral literature, since post-pastoral dismisses those
necessary divisions. Nevertheless, the discourse of retreat figures in
Berkeley’s poetry at an ideological level; The View From Here uses retreat
as a post-pastoral poetic device, in that the volume itself is presented as
a perspective from elsewhere. The poet is careful to establish her out-
sider-status, and this position is used to explore alternative realities and
possibilities.
On a personal level, Berkeley’s relocation to rural southern California
signals a retreat from her urban Dublin roots, while thematically, the way
her poetry moves away from material and cultural early concerns towards
the ecocentricism laid out above is, in itself, an act of withdrawal. Her
act of retreat also chimes with her urge to disassociate from Irish canoni-
cal poetic concerns, and with the way she priorities water over land as an
integral motif. Berkeley’s poetry can be read as escapist and renunciatory,
without the pejorative implications of these terms. As Gifford suggests,
‘[a]gainst necessary notions of roots, neighbourhood and community,
there is another necessary impulse towards retreat, renewal and return.
This is the circle of post-modern mobility.’38 This ongoing dialectic is
consciously espoused by Berkeley, particularly in the way she counter-
points roots with renewal, as in ‘Park Bench, Queens: ‘some distance
from the fork in the road / I turn and look the way I have come, /
step by step away from my last home.’ Even ‘home’ is temporary and
renewable, the insinuation of ‘last’ as ‘most recent’ rather than ‘final’
suggesting that there will, in time, be a next home. Memory reinvents
and rejuvenates itself as it anticipates the future as well as preserving (or
84  A. McDAID

forgetting) the past. Expectations of America as an urban, industrialised

alternative to an idealised Ireland are reinvented entirely. By avoiding
migrant dichotomies, Berkeley creates a poetry that slips between cate-
gories, especially within an Irish poetic paradigm. As McCracken notes
in an early review, Berkeley’s landscapes ‘rarely corresponds to her native
Ireland’, even in her first volumes written in her home country. This urge
to disassociate from Ireland continues throughout her poetry, coming to
full expression in her latest volumes.39 The post-pastoral aesthetic per-
ceptible in her work enables Berkeley to intentionally distance herself,
both physically and poetically, from the idea and the actuality of Ireland.

Notes
1. Anne Fogarty, ‘“The Influence of Absences”: Eavan Boland and the
Silenced History of Irish Women’s Poetry,’ Colby Quarterly 35, no. 4,
December (1999).
2. Patrick O’Sullivan, ed. Irish Women and Irish Migration (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1995); Dorothea Schneider, ‘The Literature
on Women Immigrants to the United States,’ Actes de l’histoire de
l’immigration 3 (2003). The phenomenon of the silenced female is
a common issue in classic histories of American immigration, which
Schneider (2003) argues are ‘incomplete accounts because throughout
women are almost entirely absent from the story’.
3. Erica Mena, ‘The Geography of Poetry: Mahmoud Darwish and
Postnational Identity,’ Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self
Knowledge VII (2009): p. 112.
4. Catríona Clutterbuck, ‘New Irish Women Poets: The Evolution of (In)
Determinacy in Vona Groarke,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish
Poetry, eds. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012): p. 654.
5. Ailbhe Smyth, ‘Dodging Around the Grand Piano: Sex, Politics and
Contemporary Women’s Poetry,’ in Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth-
century Women Poets, ed. Vicki Bertram (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1997): p. 76.
6. A version of this chapter was published as an article entitled ‘“I mean it
as no ordinary return”: Poetic Migrancy in the poetry of Vona Groarke
and Sara Berkeley,’ Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 13 (2013): pp.
45–63.
7. Vona Groarke (in interview with Jillian King), ‘A Brief Interview with
Vona Groarke,’ http://wfupress.wfu.edu/An%20interview%20with%20
Vona%20Groarke.html.
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  85

8. Vona Groarke, X (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2014). Other recent
publications include Selected Poems (Co Meath: The Gallery Press, 2016)
and a personal essay entitled Four Sides Full (Co Meath: The Gallery
Press, 2016).
9. Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
10. ‘The Debt-Collectors’ in Eamonn Wall, The Crosses (Cliffs of Moher, Co.
Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2000).
11. ‘Pause’ in Eamon Grennan, Relations: New and Selected Poems
(Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1998).
12. Spindrift contains two poems entitled ‘Away’. For the purposes of clarity,
I have appended (1) to the poem appearing on p. 14 of Spindrift and (2)
to the poem appearing on pp. 26–27.
13. Colette Bryce, The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (London: Picador,
2014).
14. Fran Brearton, ‘“The Nothing-Could-Be-Simpler Line”: Form in
Contemporary Irish Poetry,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish
Poetry, eds. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012): p. 360.
15. Justin Quinn, ‘The Irish Efflorescence,’ Poetry Review 91, no. 3 (2001):
p. 46; David Wheatley, ‘Irish poetry into the twenty-first century,’ in
The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew
Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): pp. 250–251.
16. Vona Groarke, Other People’s Houses (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
1999).
17. Shane Alcobia-Murphy, ‘Safe House: Authenticity, Nostalgia and the Irish
House,’ in Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern
Culture, eds. Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006): pp.
107–108.
18. As early as 2006, David McWilliams coined the term ‘ghost estates’
for the proliferation of unfinished housing developments in under-
serviced and peripheral regions in Ireland with little to no demand
for increased residential units. With remarkable prescience, in a blog
posted on September 30th 2006 he warns that ‘these ghost villages,
like our famine villages, may stand testament to a great tragedy which,
although predicted by concerned observers, was never fully appreciated
until the morning the crops failed.’ See http://www.davidmcwilliams.
ie/2006/10/01/a-warning-from-deserted-ghost-estates. For literary
reflections on the post-Celtic Tiger landscape see Colm Barrett, Young
Skins (Dublin: Stinging Fly Press, 2013); Tana French, Broken Harbour
(London: Hodder & Staughton, 2012); Donal Ryan, The Spinning
Heart (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012); William Wall, Ghost Estates (Cliffs
of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2011).
86  A. McDAID

19. D. E. Pease, ‘National narratives, postnational narration,’ Modern Fiction

Studies 43(1), Spring (1997).
20. Stuart Hall, ‘Minimal Selves,’ in Identity, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London:
Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1987).
21. Caitríona Ní Laoire, ‘Complicating host-newcomer dualisms: Irish return
migrants as home-comers or newcomers?’ Translocations: Migration and
Social Change 4, no. 1 (2008).
22. Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller, ‘Polymedia: Towards a new theory of
digital media in interpersonal communication,’ International Journal of
Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2012).
23. Vona Groarke and Conor O’Callaghan have sustained an epistolary con-
versation of their own via their respective poetry, both throughout their
marriage and since their separation. See Maria Johnston, ‘Here Comes
the Sun King!’ Poetry Matters: Tower Poetry Reviews July (2013).
24. Madianou and Miller, ‘Polymedia: Towards a new theory of digital media
in interpersonal communication,’ p. 175.
25. Sara Berkeley, Strawberry Thief (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2005);
The View from Here (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2010); What Just
Happened (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2015).
26. Sara Berkeley, Penn (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1986); Home Movie Nights
(Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1989); Facts About Water: New and Selected
Poems (Dublin: New Island Books, 1994).
27. Kathleen McCracken, ‘Review of Home Movie Nights and Penn,’ The
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 15, no. 2 (1989).
28. See Gerardine Meaney, ‘History Gasps: Myth in Contemporary Irish
Women’s Poetry,’ in Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature ed. Michael
Kenneally (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1995) for discussion of
water and myth in poetry by Irish women writers, including references to
Berkeley’s earlier collections.
29. Eavan Boland, New Collected Poems (New York: Norton, 2008).
30. Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our
Time. See also Kerry E. Robertson, ‘Anxiety, Influence, Tradition and
Subversion in the Poetry of Eavan Boland,’ Colby Quarterly 30, no.
4, December (1994); Anne Fogarty, ‘“The Influence of Absences”:
Eavan Boland and the Silenced History of Irish Women’s Poetry,’ Colby
Quarterly 35, no. 4, December (1999).
31. Boland, New Collected Poems.
32. Brendan Kennelly, The Essential Brendan Kennelly (North Carolina: Wake
Forest University Press, 2011).
33. Wes Davis, ed. An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry (Harvard: Harvard
University Press, 2010): p. 858.
 2  ALTERNATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES  87

34. Oona Frawley, Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish

Literature (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005); Edna Longley, ‘Pastoral
Theologies,’ in Poetry and Posterity, ed. Edna Longley (Newcastle-
upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2000); Donna L. Potts, Contemporary
Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (Columbia, Missouri: University
of Missouri Press, 2011); Christine Cusick, Out of the Earth: Ecocritical
Readings of Irish Texts, (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010); Eamonn
Wall, ‘Wings beating on stone: Richard Murphy’s ecology,’ in Out of
the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts ed. Christine Cusick (Cork:
Cork University Press, 2010).
35. James McElroy, ‘Ecocriticism and Irish poetry: a preliminary outline,’
Estudios Irlandeses 6, no. (2011).
36. John Wilson Foster, ‘The Geography of Irish Fiction,’ in Colonial
Consequences, ed. John Wilson Foster (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991).
37. Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999).
38. Ibid., p. 174.
39. McCracken, ‘Review of Home Movie Nights and Penn.’
 CHAPTER 3

Memory Spaces

Migration is a concept inscribed by borders and crossings—national

and domestic, defined and unseen. As demonstrated by the migrations
undertaken by Wall, Delanty and Muldoon into and across the United
States, internal and local migrations, across states and towns, can be
equally significant as larger-scale international border crossings. The
new location can be definitive for its environmental rather than human
qualities, as seen in Sara Berkeley’s post-pastoral aesthetic, or it can be
incidental, the mere backdrop to displacement as technology encourages
and undermines affiliation in Groarke’s poetry. Migration not only insti-
gates a dialogue with the adopted place; it also requires renegotiation of
the place left behind. This chapter, Memory Spaces, concentrates on the
reconstructions of home in the work of three poets who, despite their
long-term relocations to England, continually revisit their native places
through their poetry.
Bernard O’Donoghue, Martina Evans and Colette Bryce have each
made a permanent home in England for most of their adult lives and
yet their poetry obsessively returns to the site of their childhoods.
The subject of their daily lives in England is subdued in favour of
poetic re-enactments of acts of appearing and disappearing that essen-
tially form the migration experience. In reinventing the detail of their
home places, O’Donoghue, Evans and Bryce attempt to suture past
and present together, using memory as the binding (if flawed) meth-
odology. The skeins of memory weaving through myth in the poetry
of Bernard O’Donoghue balance his obligation to represent lived

© The Author(s) 2017 89

A. McDaid, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63805-8_3
90  A. McDAID

experience (his own and others’) with his private need to retrieve the
past. His deliberate use of mythology as a frame of memory is a tech-
nique that transforms the rupture of migration into emotionally and
poetically manageable material. In deploying myth as a narratological
device, O’Donoghue frames his migration in a way that allows him to
reappear at crucial moments in a remembered past and his reconstruc-
tion of his native place is an act of myth-making essential to his migrant
sensibilities.
Martina Evans’s poetry pushes at the limits of memory (in Facing
the Public) and of poetic form (in Petrol), but the location of her poetry
is seldom disrupted. In situating her poems in the rural hinterlands of
County Cork, Evans reconstructs a childhood through the self-conscious
fictions of personal and collective memory. Present-day realities are
entirely dissolved in her reconstructions of private and public narratives.
She interrogates cultural and literary memory through an ethic of rein-
vention that serves to distort as well as to clarify the past. Evans’s sub-
versive approach to memory, both private and collective, is realised in the
mimetic fragmentation and disruption on multiple levels in her poetry.
Colette Bryce’s migration from Derry to England is less clear-cut in
terms of the geopolitics of the archipelago, but the psychic significance
of the event is unquestionable. This section concludes with an analysis
of Bryce’s poetic preoccupation with space and transgression, and argues
that her thematic and imagistic emphasis on appearing and disappear-
ing reflects the conditions of her childhood during the Troubles as well
as her sexuality. This section examines how the ethics of memory and
reinvention in queer migration challenge heteronormative constructions,
while recognising the legacy of growing up in a society in conflict. In
returning home, whether in practice or in memory, this chapter recog-
nises how acts of reinvention can be subversive as well as healing.
The individual poetries of Bryce, Evans and O’Donoghue are each
compelled by the multiple acts of appearing and disappearing that define
migration. All three are drawn to the home space, both domestic and
geographical, varying from rural to urban, in ways that bind their work
to the moment and space of their migrations. By continually reinvent-
ing their home spaces, these poets’ works demonstrate how the migra-
tion imagination can be captivated by origins in ways that go beyond
traditional tropes of nostalgia and sentimentality. Indeed, whether in
O’Donoghue’s bitterness, the unheimlich domestic in Evans’s poetry
or in the ongoing tensions of escape and return for Bryce, there is little
 3  MEMORY SPACES  91

trace of an inherited emigration narrative. Rather, through memory—

mythic, cultural and collective—these poets widen the spectrum of
critical discourse around migrant poetry, demonstrating how, at times
surprisingly, the poetry of migration is simultaneously the poetry of
home.

‘Neither here nor there, and therefore home’:

Memory and Myth in Bernard O’Donoghue’s Poetry
Salman Rushdie’s assertion that ‘the past is a country from which we
have all emigrated’ is especially pertinent for Bernard O’Donoghue’s
poetry, in which estrangement from the past is as profound a loss as his
migration from Ireland.1 His poetry encompasses a poetics that is char-
acterised by separation and loss, and is mediated through memory as a
means of recovery. Individual and collective memory features promi-
nently in O’Donoghue’s work, although his poetry demonstrates a
reluctance to invoke the personal voice, preferring for the most part a
narrative-driven, character-focused poetics. In the elegiac mode and in
the mythical poems, however, there is space for a narrative ‘I’, a per-
sonal voice. Adrienne Rich recognised the enabling function of formal-
ism in her poetry: ‘like asbestos gloves it allowed me to handle materials
I couldn’t pick up bare-handed’.2 In O’Donoghue’s work, a mythic
framework allows the poet to address the traumatic circumstances of his
youthful migration, while his use of elegy opens a space for an ‘I’ that
is situated in terms of a mourned other. O’Donoghue’s ethic of rein-
vention harnesses memory practices as modes of recuperation of a past
that is distanced, as Rushdie suggests, by geography as well as by time. A
mythic framework enables the poet to access childhood memory, while
elsewhere the inherent disjunction of migration is healed, or indeed con-
founded, by the malleability of memory.
O’Donoghue’s birthplace, the village of Cullen, Co. Cork, forms the
template for the poet’s revisionings of the remembered past. Just as his
elegiac poems are both an act of memory and a gesture of transforma-
tion, O’Donoghue’s attention to the intimate spaces of rural social life
and to forgotten corners of emigration experience is evidence of his
deep-seated ethic of remembering that is, in itself, an act of reinvention.
O’Donoghue’s personal migration is, in many ways, a traditional emigra-
tion, but his continued connection with his native place, punctuated by
periodic stretches living in Cork, complicates a straightforward dialectic
92  A. McDAID

of home and away. O’Donoghue emigrated to England aged 16, follow-

ing the sudden death of his father, and has thus spent far longer living
in England than in his native country. The double rupture is embedded
in the way his poetry commits to returning to the site of that emotional
trauma, and is further elucidated by the notable absence in his poetry of
his life in England. O’Donoghue’s journeys of memory are born out of a
desire to reconstruct and even transform the past, and yet remain suspi-
cious of sentimentality and of tropes of exile.3
Myth is a form of cultural memory: in Roland Barthes’ words it is ‘a
system of communication, […] a type of speech’.4 As a signifier of cul-
tural configuration, the mere invocation of myth situates a poem (and
a reader) in a pre-established context. The archetypal and intertextual
aspects of myth carve out a literary landscape before ever averting to the
actual historical, psychological or semantic elements of a poem. Yet, as
Julie Sanders notes in Adaptation and Appropriation (2008), mythic
memory in literature is a dual process of familiarity and estrangement:

Mythic paradigms provide the reader or spectator with a series of familiar

reference points and a set of expectations which the novelist, artist, direc-
tor, playwright, composer, or poet can rely upon as an instructive short-
hand while simultaneously twisting and relocating them in newly creative
ways and in newly resonant contexts.5

The use of mythology—both classical and Celtic—is a familiar practice

in Irish literature, especially in the poetry of Heaney, Longley, Boland
and Ní Chuilleanáin. In all cases, the use of myth is a kind of recruit-
ment of authority—whether, as Iain Twiddy reads Longley’s ‘Ceasefire’,
as an effort if not to reconcile then to console the troubled present or,
as Meaney recognises, as a deliberate circumvention of restrictive mythic
structures such as ‘Mother Ireland’.6 For O’Donoghue, myth works
as a form of memory practice that can recruit the past to an alternative
narrative. Using Greek, Irish and Icelandic mythologies, O’Donoghue
retrieves the past by reinventing it through archetypal structures. In this
way, myth, as inherited narrative, satisfies the poet’s impulse towards
recuperation as well as his need to make it new even while assuring him
that it will be anchored in the collective memory of human experience.
His rendering of myth works on multiple levels and is interlaced
with configurations of exile and return, as well as with piseoga (curses).
 3  MEMORY SPACES  93

‘Nechtan’ retells the Old Irish saga of ‘The Voyage of Bran’ from the
perspective of the poem’s eponymous voyager.7 Personalising the myth,
O’Donoghue narrates Nechtan’s nostalgia as crucially damaging; he con-
fesses: ‘I spoilt it / For them—and for me—by being homesick / For
Ireland’. The original manuscript has Nechtan turn to ash upon touch-
ing Irish soil for the first time after his wanderings. In Meyer’s transla-
tion: ‘As soon as he touched the earth of Ireland, forthwith he was a
heap of ashes, as though he had been in the earth for many hundred
years’.8 O’Donoghue casts it slightly differently in his poem:

They wouldn’t let us land, so now we’re fated

To sail for ever in the middle seas, outcast
Alike from the one shore and the other.
Here nor There, 1.

O’Donoghue moulds the myth to accommodate an ethical demand

in his work to represent a state of enforced liminality that he perceives as
integral to an emigration experience. By staging the observation within
a mythic framework, O’Donoghue distances himself while nevertheless
foregrounding a version of psychological exile that traps an emigrant
between ‘home’ and ‘away’. The use of the phrase ‘the middle seas’
refers to the Greek name for the Mediterranean, but it also evokes the
Irish sea, poised as it is in between Ireland and Britain, replete with reso-
nances of emigration.
Folklore is a form of myth that resides on the border of collective and
cultural memory. Folkloric truths feature throughout O’Donoghue’s
poetry, in a characteristically democratic approach that perceives equiv-
alent mythic capacity in local piseoga as in established Greek tropes.9
O’Donoghue recognises the local and the universal in ‘Horses for
Courses’:

Whatever they called it in Greek, our name for it

was pisheogues: those strange gifts that people,
neighbourly enemies, or gods, pushed through
railings and under wires, or hid in ditches
to confound us.
Farmers Cross, 7.
94  A. McDAID

‘Pishogue Master’ is a dark evocation of those practices, the intoxicat-

ing language reiterating the affect of the pisheog itself:

I fold the rancid butter in my coat

And slide from its sock the orange-bottle, full
of slime-twining water from the sick calf’s bed.
Everything must be said and nothing seen.
Sprinkle the water on the boundary fence;
Smear the butter on the pumptree. Listen (shush!)
Selected Poems, 7-8.

O’Donoghue’s narrative positioning here neither condemns nor con-

dones the practice but merely renders it poetic, with an atmospheric,
almost Macbethian, conjuring of this black magic. The ‘proverbial wis-
dom’ of rural Ireland, such as displayed in ‘Finn the Bonesetter’, is taken
as known in ‘The Weakness’, where the casual reference to ‘the fairy-fort
he’d levelled last May’ is implicated in the sudden stroke or heart attack
that sends the subject to the ground, ‘groping for the lapels / [o]f the
shocked boy’s twenty-year-old jacket’.
These linkages between portent and event are seen throughout
O’Donoghue’s mythic poems, which rely on myth to situate tragedy
as part of a pattern. Pishogues prefigure misfortune, while myth makes
sense of otherwise incomprehensible events. In ‘Horses for Courses’, the
figure of Jer Mac instigates a spiral of disaster by accepting a pishogue,
‘one of those strange gifts’, a horse which ‘was of course / the start of all
the trouble, as everyone knows’. Collective memory and myth are inter-
twined through a common language of cause and consequence shared by
the community. The death of his father is cast as fated, the result of an
unnoticed pishogue, and this urge to reinvent memory in a mythic con-
text is an effort to reason out the senseless twist of life:

We never discovered
exactly what gift it was that brought in its train
our father clutching his chest before he fell
and our particular wanderings across the sea.
Farmers Cross, 7.

Those ‘wanderings across the sea’ conflate the mythic with the his-
torical, reworking Odysseus’ journey in terms of the poet’s personal
 3  MEMORY SPACES  95

experience while simultaneously drawing upon the immrama of Irish

mythology. This use of the immram motif is also employed by Paul
Muldoon but unlike Muldoon, O’Donoghue finds that by appealing to
universality and fate as frames of remembering the traumatic past, his
migration is situated and thereby managed. O’Donoghue adapts mem-
ory to accommodate myth by assuming a preordained destiny in the
familial tragedy and tracing linkages through the past into the present,
and this offers comfort in its own way.
‘The fundamental contradictory impulse towards dependence and
liberation implicit in … adaptations and appropriations’ is evident in
O’Donoghue’s use of myth, but his poetry succeeds in its careful bal-
ancing of hypo- and hyper-text.10 The fundamental resonance of the
mythic principle is retained and restaged in a way that reinvents the past
and comments on the present. In Mythologies (1972), Barthes describes
myth as ‘an alibi’, that registers both ‘meaning and form’, an analogy
that serves to comprehend the contradictions of myth. Recognising its
inherent paradoxical quality, Barthes declares that ‘myth hides nothing:
its function is to distort, not to make disappear’.11 In O’Donoghue’s
poetry, myth and memory are reinvented and through its distortion,
myth becomes revelatory.
Less familiar mythic structures also offer archetypal frameworks
which serve O’Donoghue’s recourse to the emotional universality
of myth, as in ‘Freyfaxi’, which draws on Icelandic sagas.12 Reaching
beyond the Irish frame of remembering, O’Donoghue inserts the
totemic figure from his childhood, Joe Mac, into the Hrafnkel folk-
tale in the opening stanza, while the second stanza offers the Njal saga
as another version of Nechtan’s tale. Andrew McCullough notes how
the poem ‘reconciles O’Donoghue’s childhood with his professional
occupation as a teacher of medieval literature’, an observation that
reinforces the multiple levels of memory operating within the poem.13
Entrusted with the horse’s reins—‘the greatest honour / of my life’—
the child narrator is unwittingly entered into a Sophoclean predestiny,
like the boy Einarr in the Hrafnkel’s story. In the Njal’s tale, Gunnar is
exiled from Iceland but is seduced by its beauty and is thus trapped in a
fatal communion.

Gunnar too would have fled Iceland, never

to return, but that his horse tripped in a hole
…
96  A. McDAID

He could never leave it then; but it also meant

he’d chosen to remain where death closed in.
Farmers Cross, 5.

The questions of agency raised in these lines reiterate yet again the
complexities of volition versus fate. There is a psychological liberty
in rescinding responsibility, and this is realised through the framework
of myth. By considering individual experience as age-old and univer-
sal, traumatic personal memory is dispersed. O’Donoghue’s choices of
myths prioritise tales of exile and return, pointing to the poet’s ambigu-
ous relationship to Ireland. In an interview in 2001, he acknowledges a
central displacement in his work that is temporal and existential, rather
than geographical, asserting that ‘I don’t feel especially displaced myself
except … by loss’.14 He asks rhetorically ‘doesn’t everyone like the rather
luxurious feeling that they have something in reserve?’, alluding to the
aesthetic of alterity that contributes to the detachment in his work.
Nevertheless, Ireland constitutes the dominant site of his poetic imagina-
tion, ‘rooted in one dear perpetual place’ as Yeats says in ‘A Prayer for
my Daughter’ and quoted by O’Donoghue in his 2001 interview.15
The varieties of Ireland presented in his poetry are recovered spaces
of memory; as he confesses in ‘Aisling’, ‘My dreams now increasingly
move along / the unmetalled roads of childhood’. His honesty towards
the detail of the past is complicated by his urge towards reinvention—to
remake personal memory as seen in his use of myth. As such, by delib-
erately setting out his poems as recollections rather than observations,
O’Donoghue permits a fallibility of memory that enables his poetic. The
vaguely fictitious nature of his memorial portraits is signalled repeatedly,
as in ‘Bona-Fide Travellers’ which presents an awareness of the layered
reality in which the poet resides:

It meant you had to be from somewhere else

to get a drink. But that was alright for us;
we always were, whether travelling west
or east

Your book
has slipped to the floor, the John Hinde postcard
has fallen out, and now you’ve lost your place.
Farmers Cross, 3.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  97

The simple metaphor of losing one’s place in a book serves as a

metaphor for the larger ontological uncertainty of ‘always’ being ‘from
somewhere else’. This is underpinned by the symbol of the page-marker
that signifies the representational crisis of the poet’s task. The John
Hinde postcard is a synecdoche for nostalgic artificiality; it is, as Aidan
Arrowsmith suggests, ‘indicative of that production of the “referen-
tial”—the search for connection with an endorsed ‘authentic’ past, lost
(again) as a result of “modernization”’.16 The staged quality of Hinde’s
photographs casts a shadow over O’Donoghue’s own capacity to address
Ireland as subject or setting in his poetry. The reference to a lost place is
more profound than a mere page number and speaks for the emigrant
on the boat as much as for the ever-widening gap between representa-
tion and reality. This is imbricated with the limitations of memory, inso-
far as memory can only ever be a lens through which the past is staged.
Reinvention is a deliberate choice for O’Donoghue, but it is also an inev-
itable consequence, particularly as his poetry relies so heavily on memory
practice on various levels. The artificiality of memory and the limitations
of language dominate the poem’s final lines:

In the real world, of course, there’s no such person

as a Bona-Fide traveller. They will pull
the glass out of your hand and order you
to go back to the place you came from,
whatever you might have called that at the start.
Farmers Cross, 3.

O’Donoghue’s inability or reluctance to categorise the concept of

home in ‘Westering Home’ is echoed elsewhere, in poems that offer sim-
ilar negotiations with the word. The difficult position of being an out-
sider in one’s native country surfaces in poems that linger on the journey
as a means of delaying the destination, as in the boat journey across the
Irish Sea in ‘Bona-Fide Travellers’. ‘The Sugawn Road’ presents, in son-
netina form, a car trip on a summer’s night that travels through the fog
of memory to reconstruct the scene: ‘[j]ust before midnight, late July. /
The mist from the Araglen below / Ribbons in white patches by’. The
narrator’s easy familiarity with the countryside offers cognitive certainty
through repetition of the oft-taken route: ‘[a]head you know, less than
a mile, / is the cross by Glash school, where / you have to turn left for
98  A. McDAID

home.’ The note of obligation chimed by the use of ‘have to’ sours the
perfect intimacy between landscape and narrator, introducing a dissonant
tone that is sustained in the poem’s conclusion.

But, as the car hums through that air,

Suspended in the radio’s music
You might by fortune never reach it.
Selected Poems (from Gunpowder), 48.

As for Harry Clifton in ‘Icy Pandemonium’ and Paul Muldoon in ‘It Is

What It Is’, the interstitial space is choice here. Clifton revels in being
‘[s]afe, a bord, /Between two worlds, suspended in mid-flight’ while
Muldoon is less certain about his seeming endless journey of ‘rowing
/ for fifty years’; in O’Donoghue’s case, he delights in the journey but
dreads the arrival. This sentiment encompasses the conflict of memory
and reality in O’Donoghue’s work that is embedded in the fine line
between ethical reinvention and poetic responsibility.
In any migrant poetry, borders are uncertain spaces, and ‘Westering
Home’ is again located between origin and destination where definitive
spatial coordinates become nebulous. The title is taken from Hugh S.
Roberton’s Scottish folk song, while the air of the song is thought to
derive from the Irish song Trasna na dTonnta.17 The intertextual and
intercultural memory that is intractably layered across the archipelago,
O’Donoghue’s title seems to imply, is as imprecise as the borderline
itself. Like David Wheatley’s ‘To the M62’, ‘Westering Home’ tracks the
familiar journey west to Holyhead to take the ferry to Dublin, a well-
trodden emigrant route.

Though you’d be hard pressed to say exactly where

It first sets in, driving west through Wales
Things start to feel like Ireland.
Selected Poems, 88.

The poem approximates the vagueness of memory, offering mem-

ory as diffuse sentiment rather than episodic or specific recall. The
recollection presented here is an impression hindered by language;
instead, the elusive sensory nature of memory is cued and coded.
The terminology—it and things—lends itself to the irretrievability of
 3  MEMORY SPACES  99

synchronised memory and the obscurity of what ‘it’ might be is reiter-

ated by the ensuing negation which defines precisely what ‘it’ is not: ‘It
can’t be/the chapels with their clear grey windows’. The poem observes
the Welsh countryside and the characteristics that distinguish it from
Ireland while searching for commonalities that just might ‘[h]ave some-
thing to do with it’, such as ‘blurred blackthorn hedges’ and ‘houses …
with their masoned gables’.
Intangibility is imbued in the repetition of ‘it’, and the poet’s resist-
ance to venturing classification suggests that to define would be to defuse.
In Portuguese, the term saudade is used to describe a sense of absence,
an inexpressible longing for something or someone eternally beyond
reach. Like frayed memory and blurred borders, the poem too is charged
with the task of reinvention while being permanently caught on the cusp
of retrieval. O’Donoghue’s use of such a robust term as architecture is
surprising, effectively analogising the creative act of capturing emotion
within the structure of the poem despite the flawed tools of language:

More, though, than all of this,

It’s the architecture of the spirit;
The old thin ache you thought that you’d forgotten—
More smoke, admittedly, than flame;
Less tears than rain. And the whole business
Neither here nor there, and therefore home.
Selected Poems, 88.

The imprecision of the description is nevertheless evocative, an ‘old thin

ache’ like a palimpsest of memory that surfaces unexpectedly. Calling to
mind the proverb ‘no smoke without fire’, the image of ‘more smoke …
than flame’ reaches for the imperceptible transitions between states of
matter, mirroring the poet’s task to re-present the alchemy. The phrase
‘the whole business’ again reinforces the ambiguity that characterises
‘Westering Home’ in its exquisite irresolution. The final statement insti-
gates a poetic conversation with Heaney’s ‘The Tollund Man’, in which
the protagonist anticipates feeling ‘lost, / unhappy and at home’.18
Unlike Heaney’s narrator who can deftly define the characteristics of feel-
ing ‘at home’, O’Donoghue’s speaker identifies home with elision (‘the
whole business’) and repression (‘[n]either here nor there’), and thereby
avoids defining the term at all.
100  A. McDAID

This troubled space between home and away is also complicated

by the respective values and opportunities enacted by the experience
of leaving. Undoubtedly, on a personal level, O’Donoghue’s experi-
ence of long-term emigration to England has been immensely reward-
ing. O’Donoghue published his first collection Poaching Rights in 1987,
aged 42, some three decades after his initial emigration to England, and
this period of gestation clearly enabled the poet to wrest control over
the emotive topic which, for other poets, can be the subject of difficult
poetic negotiations. Despite his own successful migrations, O’Donoghue
retains a sense of responsibility to the wider realities of traditional emi-
gration across the Irish Sea and further afield. He presents snippets of
emigrant reality rarely encountered in contemporary poetry of migration,
through his impulse to recuperate those stories from the sidelines of lit-
erature and history. ‘Telegrams’ poeticises the building sites, boarding
houses and drinking venues of the Irish in England both historically and
as part of the new wave of emigration in the eighties.19 Bronwen Walter
has written extensively on migrant experiences that fall outside accepted
narratives of emigration that premise a matrix of class, gender, hetero-
sexuality, and location as definitive.20 ‘Crumpsall’ captures the essential
loneliness of emigration, as well as the strangeness:

At night she heard people laughing in the street,

where at home she’d hear the frantic barking
of dogs challenging each other.
Farmers Cross, 15.

The facts of poverty and squalor attached to a particular generation of

Irish emigrants in England are alluded to in ‘Dockets’ which dreams of
parallel possibilities, and this theme of alternative lives recurs in migrant
poetry.21 After respecting the truth of the man ‘found a few days dead in
the house / he’d squatted in with dogs for thirty years’, O’Donoghue
proposes to reinvent the past, asking ‘[i]n a different life, might he have
been / Jimmy the Clerk, in jacket and red tie’.
Migration is a profound loss, and the spectre of lost chances lingers
around poems that delve into the intimate sadness of missed opportunity,
as in ‘Ter Conatus’ where a ‘lifetime of / taking real things for shadows’
has left behind repression and stagnation. The poem’s title references
Odysseus’ encounter with his mother’s ghost and the language absorbs
 3  MEMORY SPACES  101

the intertextual memory to remake the myth in terms of a brother and

sister: ‘Three times, like that, he tried to reach her / … / [t]hree times
the hand fell back’. Like Odysseus reaching to embrace his mother’s
ghost, the siblings in ‘Ter Conatus’ are bound by stunted gestures of
emotion. ‘A Nun Takes the Veil’ similarly offers a glimpse of a life half-
lived and of memory’s cruel unreliability in preserving the detail of the
‘vision’ of a motor-car while retaining only the outline of the novitiate’s
final sighting of her father: ‘I said goodbye / [t]o my father then. The
last I saw of him / [w]as a hat and jacket and a salley stick.’
The elegiac nature of much of O’Donoghue’s later narrative poetry is
a response to the natural aging process, and numerous poems expressly
elegise a specific individual. Although memory is increasingly frail with
age, through elegy O’Donoghue can remember his friends through the
frame of the poetic form, an act that places the poem within the mythic
space of the elegiac form. The strategy of mourning is also a gesture of
reinvention—to withstand death through memorialisation within the
poem. The migratory patterns of birds offer a model for O’Donoghue’s
interpretation of life and death, and the sight (or absence) of birds punc-
tuates his sense of loss in numerous elegies. The rising skeins of geese in
‘Geese Conversations’ spark the moment of memory that grounds the
elegy: ‘It would have been about this time of year / that we watched
the field-geese near Macroom / grow restless’. The reliable circularity of
avian habits heightens the absence of passed friends who will return now
only in memory and in poetry; for whom no ‘signs of progress: the win-
ter robin … the tentative and wistful mistle thrush’ will reappear, as in
‘The Year’s Midnight’. There is a consolation in their presence as well as
in the language itself, careful and sonorous, a celebration of sorts.
It is the absence of swallows that alerts the narrator to the year draw-
ing to a close in ‘Any Last Requests’, an elegy that faces the situation
of being an emigrant abroad at the time of bereavement. Like Eamonn
Wall’s declaration in ‘Election Day’—‘I can’t vote so I gotta paint’—
O’Donoghue has his narrator undertake a similar act of compensatory
domesticity.

I’m busy brushing wood preservative

into my English garden fence, while you
are being driven for the final time.
Selected Poems, 114.
102  A. McDAID

In the parallel realities that characterise migration, both Wall and

O’Donoghue make a personal ritual gesture to counterbalance their
inability to participate, whether in democratic processes or in commu-
nal mourning and, in doing so, invest in an ethic of alterity that rein-
vents migrant practice. In ‘Any Last Requests’, grief is not diminished
by the narrator’s bricolage but it serves to corral memory by allowing
the mourner to accompany the hearse ‘down from Eagloune, past the
ditch’. As the poet addresses his deceased friend, his guilt in being absent
from the funeral is mediated by his imaginative ability to navigate the
roads—‘I should be driving with you / past your untended loganberry
beds’—but is quickly halted: ‘but then I’m not there.’ Self-recrimination
is implicit in the abruptness of the statement: there are limits to the con-
solations of memory and, indeed, of elegy.
This dialectic between presence and absence is replayed in the ten-
sion between longing and loathing for Ireland, and between emigra-
tion as positive and negative. O’Donoghue’s Selected Poems (2008)
concludes with ‘The Mule Duignan’, an uncharacteristically explicit
poem on the conflicted nature of the emigrant’s relationship with his
home country. Louis MacNeice’s difficult negotiations with Ireland
are echoed here, tonally and thematically, an echo heard in other
migrant poets’ work, including in Bryce’s reworking of MacNeice’s
‘Carrickfergus’ in her poem ‘Derry’ and in Sinéad Morrissey’s ‘In
Belfast’. MacNeice’s complicated relationship with his birth-coun-
try is depicted in ‘Valediction’, as he curses Ireland and swears to
renounce ‘your drums and your dolled-up Virgins and your ignorant
dead’.22 The toe-curling litany of the country’s damaged, and dam-
aging, traits, and the poet’s accusations (‘This is what you have given
me / Indifference and sentimentality’) are a damning indictment of
the country that held sway over MacNeice’s poetic imagination.
O’Donoghue is similarly preoccupied by Ireland, and there are paral-
lels to be drawn between the biographical details of both poets’ lives.
‘The Mule Duignan’ sharply dismisses Ireland in a similar ­ fashion,
declaring:

I hate that country:

its poverties and embarrassments
too humbling to retell. I’ll never ever
go back to offer it forgiveness.
Selected Poems, 117.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  103

‘The Mule Duignan’ places the remembered scene at a geographic

and historical remove by expressly staging memory within the poem.
The opening lines bring the reader into the narrator’s continuous present
through the emphasis on adverbs of time: ‘Nowadays it always rains in
Bristol, / and every night, trying to get to sleep / I hear it’. The nam-
ing of Bristol and subsequent mention of ‘the Irish mailboat’ reference the
emigrant history of this port-city without labouring the point, and prepares
the reader for the poem’s journey back across the Irish Sea. The initial sug-
gestion of childhood memories as soothing recollections, as a method of
relaxation, is briskly complicated by the invocation of locks and doors.

It helps me to drop off if I go over

details from childhood, like the big key
of acrid cast iron that shut and opened
the front door.
Selected Poems, 117.

Memory is a balm; the details of childhood initially function as a

lullaby but quickly attain nightmarish qualities. The ‘acrid’ metal of the
imposing key conjures an image of institutional incarceration rather than
youthful exuberance, and this sense of things out of place is realised in
the dysfunction of the lock itself—‘it opened clockwise, and locked the
way / you’d expect to open it’. The unexpected syntax here mirrors the
narrator’s surprise at the door’s flawed design—placing the subject ‘it’ at
the end of the line, rather than the more standard structure ‘you’d expect
it to open’, disrupts the flow of the sentence. It also serves to confer the
responsibility for failing to open the lock on the narrator himself instead
of blaming the lock’s quirk. This curious recollection holds sway over the
narrator’s memory, burned into his mind’s eye by the repetition of this
everyday action that still maintains its strangeness decades later.
The next event, remembered ‘most often’, reveals the hardship and
intimacy of close quarters, and the indignity of a subsistence lifestyle that
forces a family’s future to hinge on the health of a single heifer.

We listened to our father’s voice,

emphatic and quiet: ‘If the cow does die tonight,
we’ll have to sell up and go.’ We prayed ourselves
to sleep.
Selected Poems, 117.
104  A. McDAID

The relief to find the cow ‘standing up, eating hay’ brings about his par-
ents’ reaction, which resurfaces in his memory on wet sleepless nights in
Bristol. That emotional response to the cow’s survival sparks the narra-
tor’s withering outburst:

And then for the first and only time I saw

my parents embracing. I hate that country[.]
Selected Poems, 117.

The expression of repulsion looms over the line, tainting the parents’
embrace and linking their action with ‘poverties and embarrassments’.
Behind the phrase ‘too humbling to retell’ lie stories of greater indig-
nity which the narrator is unwilling to call to mind. Though memory is
managed and manipulated here, it seems to evade the narrator’s author-
ity by its rapid descent into traumatic recollection. In the same way that
the lock possesses agency in the earlier image of the turning key, ‘the
country’ looms over the narrator, demanding absolution despite his
refusals.
The callousness of this rejection continues in the final section of ‘The
Mule Duignan’, as the narrator describes the final breaking of ties. The
punctuation of the first line seems misplaced, but the harshness is delib-
erate. ‘When my father died at last, the place / was empty.’ In depicting
his father’s death as long-anticipated, the implication of difficult pater-
nal relations compounds the already-flagged antipathy to his birthplace.
The unexpected placing of the comma before rather than after ‘at last’
intensifies the hostility of the sentence. The run-on final line of the poem
reduces his father’s burial, his final visit to the house, and the handing
over of the keys to a series of minimally significant events. The narrator’s
return is functional, disregarding any emotional weight by levelling, on
the page, the death with a trip to the estate-agent. The poem finishes
with that long sentence, the final phrase an expression of the narrator’s
contempt for Ireland and his childhood.

I went back to bury him,

then turned the key in the lock and dropped it
in the estate-agent’s letterbox
and turned my back for ever on it all.
Selected Poems, 118.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  105

Beneath its criticisms of Ireland, religion, and emotionally-stunted

personal relationships, ‘The Mule Duignan’ is ultimately a poem about
the impossibility of purging the past. The circular nature of the poem
suggests that taking the path of emigration as a means of escaping a
stultified society only leads onto a looped trail of memory. The ritual of
remembering is initiated as a comfort and then develops into a cause of
distress, and the poem makes clear that this is a recurrent process. For
the poem’s narrator, the necessary act of leaving creates a psychic tension
between the renounced and the remembered past. Even when ‘home’
is de-housed and memory is de-anchored, the past is a potent force that
demands a firm response.
This outright rejection of Ireland is uncharacteristically vituperative
in ‘The Mule Duignan’, whereas in another key poem, ‘Emigration’,
the version of home is more measured. Here, the value and apprecia-
tion of the homeplace is proportional to journeys taken and time spent
elsewhere. Remaining in the native place is a recipe for dissatisfaction, as
reinforced by the anaphoric drilling of the phrase ‘unhappy the man’ at
the outset of each stanza.

Unhappy the man that keeps to the home place

and never finds time to escape to the city
…
Unhappy the man that never got up
on a tragic May morning, to go to the station
…
Unhappy the man that has lacked the occasion
to return to the village on a sun-struck May morning[.]
Farmers Cross, 12.

The possibilities of emigration, with its powerful positive and nega-

tive effects, are teased out in this poem that situates emigration as a
necessary element in the process of living. The flocks of migrant birds
that capture O’Donoghue’s elegiac imagination emblemise reinven-
tion, returning each year to make anew, while yet remembering how
(and when) to leave. The inherent liberation of cutting ties and shed-
ding responsibilities is an under-acknowledged aspect of the emigra-
tion experience, a freedom ‘Emigration’ succinctly expresses in rural
anxieties:
106  A. McDAID

where he can listen to the rain on the ceiling

secure in the knowledge that it’s causing no damage
to roof-thatch or haystack or anything of his.
Farmers Cross, 12.

The difficulty of parting is brought about by the description of ‘a

tragic May morning’ but the intoxication of elsewhere is heady, as the
emigrant has his chance to ‘dr[i]nk in the light / that floods all the
streets that converge on Times Square’. For all the opportunities of trav-
elling abroad, it is in the return trip that emigration is truly worthwhile,
according to the final stanza:

to return to the village on a sun-struck May morning,

to shake hands of the neighbours he’d left
a lifetime ago and tell the world’s wonders,
before settling down by his hearth once again.
Farmers Cross, 12.

The journey of emigration is constructed here as an Odyssean epic,

and one that ends well with the hero’s eventual repatriation. The solace
of myth allows for the narrative completion of an emigrant tale, although
in reality few 19th- and 20th-century emigrations culminate in return.
A more truthful (and unusually confessional) articulation of the facts
of emigration is offered in ‘Nel Mezzo del Cammin’, as a journey that
begins as a temporary diversion but results in an ongoing division, being
‘neither here nor there’.

This road I had taken for a good byway

Is the main thoroughfare; and even that
Now seems too costly to maintain
Too many holes to fill; not enough time
To start again.
Selected Poems, 51.

Running on parallel tracks of myth and memory through his ethic of

reinvention via mythic frameworks, and his ethic of retrieval of forgotten
and deceased lives, O’Donoghue’s poetry is a quiet act of faith as well a
gesture of shared humanity.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  107

‘Listen to that for twisting’: Martina Evans

and Manipulations of the Past

Oh but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.23

The opening lines of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Filling Station’ accurately

depict the rural garage beneath the swinging BP sign in the front-cover
photograph of Martina Evans’s Petrol (2012).24 ‘Do they live in the sta-
tion?’ Bishop’s speaker asks, characteristically adrift from domesticity.
Evans’s collection lays bare the interior life of the filling station, which
is also the local pub and grocery store, a typical combination in many
small Irish towns. This unnamed location forms the backdrop to most
of Evans’s poetry, and is based on her own upbringing in the small vil-
lage of Burnfort, Co. Cork, where her family indeed owned and ran the
pub/shop/garage. Evans has lived in London since the 1980s, but her
poetry continuously revisits the scenes and settings of her childhood; as
in O’Donoghue’s and Bryce’s poetry, the adopted space appears mark-
edly infrequently.25 Rather, her poetry is transfixed by personal and col-
lective fictions of memory that constitute versions of the past. Her poems
are simultaneously tools of remembering and memories themselves that
reach to modify and restage the past. Facing the Public (2009) and Petrol
(2012) in particular demonstrate how Evans’s poetic of reinvented mem-
ory operates on Assmann’s multiple levels of social memory, namely cul-
tural, collective, and individual.26
The intersections of migration and memory are crucially coded in
Evans’s adaptation of memory as a literary device as well as a reflec-
tion on the process of remembering. As for Muldoon, O’Donoghue
and Clifton, the fallible and malleable nature of all levels of memory are
prominent in Evans’s poetry. Her collection Petrol functions as a rein-
vention of the home space, as mediated through the theoretical frame
of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964). Resisting inherited spatial
categorisations, Evans remakes the home space through the dissolution
of accepted boundaries between public and private. Her manipulations
of memory are perceived in the interplay between personal, collec-
tive and cultural processes of remembering. Facing the Public confronts
108  A. McDAID

embedded recollections of significant historical events in Irish history

through external oral and written texts, and reinvents them by exposing
the unreliability of the narrative voice as a medium of memory.
In addition to the explicit acts of memory that function thematically
and stylistically within her poetry, Evans’s poetry also engages memory
through its invocations of alternate literary texts; as Lachmann notes in
Memory and Literature (1997), ‘the memory of a text is its intertextual-
ity’.27 Positioning her poetic narrative beyond ‘the cement porch behind
the pumps’ of Bishop’s observation, Evans engages literary memory
and reinvents it by inhabiting the transient space of the filling station.
If Bishop’s poem is one strand of memory in Petrol, then surely too is
Mahon’s ‘A Garage in Co. Cork’:

But the cracked panes reveal a dark

interior echoing with the cries of children.
Here in this quiet corner of Co. Cork
a family ate, slept, and watched the rain
dance clean and cobalt the exhausted grit
so that the mind shrank from the glare of it.

Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood?

Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home[.]28

Mahon’s poem deploys the image of the deserted garage, of which there
are many in rural Ireland, as an ‘emblem of post-war Irish emigration’.29
Where Mahon presents the discarded shell of family (and community)
life, Evans recalls it still as a ‘roadside oasis’, populating the scene with
the ‘somebody’ of both Mahon’s and Bishop’s poems. Memory has a
palliative purpose for Evans here in that it enables her poetry to ‘forget’
the contemporary reality of the garage as deserted and defunct, and to
restore its lived-in energy. Returning directly to the past, Petrol recreates
the details and dramas of life beyond the shop counter without entertain-
ing the inevitable demise of those who think ‘of this as home’.
The role of memory in migration as a tool of reinvention without
recrimination is clear—‘memory’ as opposed to ‘remembering’ grants
access to a past without the necessity of reintegrating that past with the
present. ‘Remembering’ is an active dialogue between the foregrounded
present self and the removed past self; ‘memory’ on the other hand
privileges the past as unmediated by the present. In Evans’s poetics
 3  MEMORY SPACES  109

of migration, this is accomplished by the way she conducts her poems

within that continuous past, most notably through a child narrator who
has no corresponding adult self. Appadurai posits his theory of ‘rup-
ture’ as integral in transnational migrations.30 Like O’Donoghue, whose
poetic imagination circles around the site of his pre-trauma childhood,
Evans is poetically attached to a reconstructed domestic and local space.
The past is indeed ‘a foreign country’, as per Hartley’s phrase, and in
Petrol and Facing the Public (the volumes in which the past is given full
reign), past and present selves seldom synthesise.31
If the distinction between selves is absolute, other boundaries in
Evans’s work are far more porous. Most explicitly, the line between
poetry and prose is breached in Petrol, ‘a prose poem disguised as a
novella of adolescence’ according to its blurb.32 The essential hybridity
of a prose poem refuses definition. It is an appropriate medium indeed
for a migrant writer for whom formal digressions can operate as necessary
gestures of self-assertion.33 As a gesture of reinvention, manipulations of
form implicitly reject inherited structures including, by extension, inher-
ited memory. Form and genre are the memory practices of literature,
and acts of reinvention or repudiation are also statements of ‘forgetting’
those practices. The prose poem is an over act of genre modification, as
described by American poet Charles Simic:

[A]n impossible amalgamation of lyric poetry, anecdote, fairy tale, allegory,

joke, journal entry, and many other kinds of prose. Prose poems are the
culinary equivalent of peasant dishes, like paella or gumbo which bring
together a great variety of ingredients and flavours and which, in the end,
thanks to the art of the cook, somehow blend.34

The local flavour of Evans’s Petrol is brought about by the poem’s spe-
cific location in space and time—rural Ireland during the 1970s—while
the range of formal and thematic elements at work are varied and ambi-
tious. The dark humour and intimate voice are offset by the high-literary
allusion to Lear through the trope of the father with his three daughters.
Evans has mentioned the tale of Bluebeard as a template for Justin as a
serial widower, while the presence of the step-mother figure has many
mythic and folktale precedents, not least The Children of Lir. 35
At the level of form, Petrol is liminally located while within the poem
itself, the lines between public and private space are similarly uncer-
tain. The setting of the poem—‘McConnell’s bar, shop and petrol
110  A. McDAID

station’—ensures that key and constant transgressions take place between

the domestic home (located above the bar) and the public arena of bar/
shop/garage that continuously encroaches on the home. In The Poetics
of Space, Bachelard outlines the ‘poetics of the house’, suggesting that
‘topoanalysis’ offers an opportunity for ‘the systematic psychological
study of our intimate lives’.36 The presence and affect of the house in
Evans’s poetry diverges entirely from Bachelard’s theory of the child-
hood house as ‘a heartwarming space’.37 The houses constructed by
Evans are disturbed and disturbing spaces, where memory of childhood
is restaged without nostalgia or sentimentality.
Rather, the domestic realms presented in Facing the Public are sites
of gothic dilapidation and dysfunction, including the intergenerational
memories of ancestral homes. ‘The Height of Crows’ and ‘Stones’ are
two rare poems of remembering rather than memory, where the adult
and child selves, and past and present, coexist within a single poem.
In ‘The Height of Crows’, the narrating adult self is spurred into rec-
ollection by the sound of a crow passing her window. ‘Caw, caw. The
sound is lonely and homely.’ The decaying outhouses with ‘stable doors
hung splintered as hangnails’, and the vanishing ‘outline of a garden’ of
her father’s family home, indicate how the materiality of the space has
receded through the processes of time and memory. Even the remem-
bered house is itself a version of a previous incarnation, reduced to
eerie reproductions where ‘the only horses were photos on the wall’.
The assonantal pairing of ‘lonely’ with ‘homely’ rattles the domestic
space, and when the bird sound recurs to conclude the poem, the crows
become vulture-like, circling for prey as they ‘caped past, caw, caw / vil-
lainous, homely, familiar / cries that last’.
‘The Height of Crows’ and ‘Stones’ take their titles from the Irish-
language names of the paternal and maternal farms (Ard na Preachán
and Cloch), and this distancing through language adds another element
of estrangement to the poems’ attempted retrieval of an unsettling past.
‘[I]ts stories itched the family’ Evans remembers, as ‘Stones’ recollects
ghostly horrors of ‘riding accidents, bodies on the railway tracks, /
Johnny the dead dog the children buried up to his neck’. The uncanny
atmosphere also defines Evans’s representation of the personal child-
hood home, in Facing the Public and Petrol. Memory, on a cognitive
level, requires rehearsal and repetition in order to form; Evans, in recon-
structing her childhood home, undertakes a series of poetic rehearsals
by restaging versions of a narrative in multiple poems. As Jürgen Straub
 3  MEMORY SPACES  111

elaborates, ‘[t]he contents of memory are complexes of ideas which are

constructed and re-constructed in the process of recollecting, at times
spontaneously and seemingly unsystematically and at other times in a
deliberate and focused manner’.38 The narrator of ‘Boa Constrictor’
from Facing the Public is terrorised by the prospect of a snake escap-
ing from ‘the thick glass in Dublin Zoo’ and the poem curls around
the image of the child ‘in the dark, the lights from the cars / travelling
across the room in white bands’. In Petrol, Imelda’s fear of snakes is ridi-
culed by her father—‘But the Zoo, I said. But the Zoo, he repeated in a
squeaky voice, mocking me’—while the trope of transgressed space is
enacted in the repetition of the visual from ‘Boa Constrictor’: ‘It wasn’t
that dark with the lights from the / cars outside and the glow from the
Major Cigarettes / sign’. Indeed, a number of the poems in Facing the
Public prefigure themes that later feature in Petrol, although the autho-
rial distance contrived in the later volume is yet to be developed in
Facing the Public.
The setting is often the same, however, and spatial disruption
abounds. The family home is vulnerable because of its positioning on the
cusp of public space. The mutually distinct zones are unnaturally proxi-
mate in Evans’s construction of the family domain: the young narrator of
‘The King is Dead’ can easily move between them: ‘I’m in the old dining
room peering down / at the bar’. In ‘Desperate Men’ the sound of ‘dark
ravens / tap tap tapping at our front door’ disrupt Christmas dinner
while the family huddle in silence behind locked doors. Disruptive forces
permeate the domestic space, and the child-narrator of ‘The Blue Room’
is trapped, rather than secure, in her bedroom. Bachelard describes the
‘original warmth’ of the house in which one was born but this space in
Evans’s poetry is intensely unheimlich.39 The ‘ship’s panelling rescued
from a wreck’ that adorns the bedroom walls materialises the house as
a repository of damage, and it prefigures the narrator’s later realisation
‘how in the end everything / ends up a wreck’. The precociousness of
the girl jars against her childish fears—‘afraid of [her] own skeleton’ and
‘the patter of mice’. The infiltration of her room is enacted by the ‘light
of the Major cigarettes sign’ and by the inescapable noise:

Sometimes
the singing voices from the bar were very near,
they sang A Nation Once Again which was
companionable. Or I’m nobody’s child
112  A. McDAID

which was like a soundless hole in my throat

and sometimes
they didn’t sing only mumbled and the voices
were very far away and snakes and devils crowded
the room.
Facing the Public, 36.

The vexing conjunction of ‘homely’ with ‘lonely’ in ‘The Height of

Crows’ defines many of Evans’s representations of domestic space, most
especially in Petrol. Bachelard invests heavily in ‘the maternal features
of the house’ in his Poetics of Space, evoking the childhood home as the
place of ‘original fullness’, a kind of Freudian womb to which we oneiri-
cally return.40 The transgressed space of the home and its innate inhospi-
tability in Evans’s poetry refuses this idea of comfort, and the oneirism of
her poetry introduces less a dreamsphere than a nightmare realm. Just as
ancestral homes in Facing the Public provide no succour to intergenera-
tional memory, in Petrol, the notion of a secure maternal lineage is itself
undermined through the trope of mothers who die and are replaced with
little ceremony.

Hasn’t every wife ended up bed-

ridden? – But he’s had only two, I said. – Only two?
Only two? said Bertha. Isn’t one wife enough for most men
around here and isn’t he about to take a third?
Petrol, 14.

Rather than offering a nurturing environment for the three sisters, the
house is a space of incarceration, dominated by their father Justin, whose
controlling presence is constant: ‘Justin was everywhere, worse than
God.’ (P, 38)
Society is also implicated in the subjugation of the women both
within and peripheral to the text. The prospective third wife, Clodagh,
will soon leave her job as a teacher, a reference to the Civil Service mar-
riage ban, while the death of Imelda’s mother appears to be by suicide
after repeated miscarriages.

He might as well
have put the gun to her head, twenty-nine miscarriages, sure
who in the name of god would put up with that? The
 3  MEMORY SPACES  113

women wore thick tan tights and one woman’s leg

went in a straight line form knee to ankle. The last one
put her clean out of her mind.
Petrol, 9.

In this version of the female gothic, women are trapped in their homes,
by society, and even by their bodies, over which they have no control.
Imelda’s recollection of her mother’s breakdown shows a tiny, futile act
of rebellion against overwhelming oppression: ‘Last time Mammy Agnes
and / me down the fields, she took all her clothes out of a / big suit-
case and threw them into the river and started / bawling crying.’ (P, 9)
The suitcase, with its symbolism of escape, carries her only as far as the
river, while the renunciation of her femininity, her (in)fertility, and her
responsibility through the gesture of discarding her clothes is a stunted
act of desperation, an act that will be shortly repeated by her suicide: ‘I /
wished hard that she’d die like Bertha’s Mammy and / three weeks later
she had.’ (P, 9)
The confessional tone of Petrol lends itself to the construction of the
prose poem as a version of a journal, with multiple entries. While there
is narrative momentum of sorts, the prose poem is comprised of a series
of memories contained, almost exclusively, within the house. The dark
humour and unflinching rendering of rural life balances the poignancy of
this coming-of-age narrative of bereavement and grief. Imelda is poised
between childhood and maturity, a dialectic symbolised by the alternat-
ing roles of alcohol and sweets in Petrol. In addition to the cast of ‘Main
Characters’ preceding the text (a strategy designed to further confound
attempts to categorise the genre of the book), various types of choco-
late bars, sweets, ice-creams, and lollies feature so regularly as to war-
rant character listings of their own. In Petrol, and in her earlier work,
sweets function metaphorically as symbols of innocence or, occasionally,
of transgression. ‘Song of Sweets’ from Can Dentists Be Trusted traces
the path from childhood through to adolescence via confectionary road
signs: from the unselfconscious ‘slabs of concrete’ chewy bars to the rela-
tive sophistication of ‘Catch bars and Yorkies’ for ‘later forays out of /
boarding school’.
In Petrol, eating sweets offers a refuge in childhood that appears con-
stantly under threat by the encroaching adult world, denominated by the
public spaces in which Imelda is obliged to function. The opening scene
has the child ‘under the table with the sugar bowl the day of the funeral’,
114  A. McDAID

a search for solace that is restaged throughout. Sharing sweets between

the sisters is also an act of community that allows the girls to escape from
the obligations of Justin and the pub: ‘Bertha…eased another bar out of
the glass jar quietly and cracked it in two on the lino’ (P, 39) These lit-
tle treats, ‘a Choc Ice dipped in Coke and…Milky Mints and Scots Clan,
one of each in my mouth at the same time’ (P, 62), give Imelda a taste
of her rapidly diminishing innocence, as the sensory memory of taste
mobilises associations with childhood. The final line of the prose poem
picks up the image from the front cover in an approximation of the way
memory seeps in and out of this intriguing text: ‘the BP sign creaked
and creaked like a horror in the wind’.
If Petrol offers an insight into the manipulations and machinations
of personal memory, then Facing the Public is compelled by how cul-
tural and collective memory is distilled. The volume contains a series
of poems that probe the practice and purpose of remembering and the
price of forgetting in the context of the Irish War of Independence and
Civil War. In Irish literature, the theme is enduring. From Bowen’s
The Last September (1929) to Farrell’s Troubles (1970) and Doyle’s A
Star Called Henry (2000), the novel, in particular, has proven adept
at accommodating the cultural upheaval of the period.41 War poetry
has its own traditions of remembering, and Gerald Dawe’s Earth Voices
Whispering (2009) anthologises Irish poetry of successive conflicts from
1914–1945.42 Dawe has also written on the Easter Rising in Irish poetry,
recalled as recently as Muldoon’s ‘7 Middagh Street’, in terms of the
complexities of representations that track from ‘high idealism and bloody
struggles’ into ‘bitter irony’ and ‘distant shadow[s]’.43 Given that poetry
is a public act of memory and memorialisation, the challenge of how to
represent contemporaneous violent and political acts is a source of ten-
sion that has been well-explored in Jahan Ramazani’s treatise on poetry
and the news.44 More recently, the Troubles have provided a new set of
traumatic events for its contemporaries, and debates continue about the
manner and means of poets’ engagements with the crises of their times.45
The relationship of poets from the Republic with events in the North
has also been the subject of discussion, with some poets of Evans’s gen-
eration professing their lack of knowledge, interest or desire in writing
about the Troubles.46 The ways politics and violence are remembered
(and forgotten) in Irish literature reflect the complex workings of cul-
tural memory, in which acts of omission are as significant as the selective
preservation of the past.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  115

In Evans’s poetry, the past is gathered close and history is reinvented

not as public moments but as local stories, over which her characters
wield their powers of narration. In this way, by concentrating on how
collective and cultural memory crystallises and occludes past events
with a thick frosting of conjecture that increases with time, Evans posi-
tions local narrative as a possible poetic truth. Like memory, poetry’s
‘boundaries are porous’, inflected by and with the myriad of interactions
that characterise its composition.47 The fraught events of the War of
Independence and the Civil War have themselves eluded historiographi-
cal consensus, and the elapse of time has proved inadequate to salve to
familial and communal wounds.48 Oona Frawley describes how recent
reconfigurations of Irish history have resulted from a ‘period of reassess-
ment’ during which ‘there is a strong sense in which the Irish past has
come to be perceived not as an etched-stone memorial without change,
but as a shifting subject that depends on present positioning’.49 The
positioning that Evans presents in her opening three poems of Facing
the Public is very deliberately located in a particular space and time,
and within a specific community. The opening lines of ‘The Boy from
Durras’ demand complicity with that community through the speaker’s
assumption of shared knowledge:

Yes, that’s right, the Tans picked up children

and you know why of course, don’t you?
They were looking for information.
I’ll tell you something now on the quiet
and you’ll get no one round here
to talk about it.
Facing the Public, 11.

This verse teems with the contradictions of memory. It initially confirms

an external prompt—‘[y]es, that’s right’—thereby extending, continu-
ing or repeating an already existing memory. The second line is less a
question than a search for affirmation or a defence against possible
divergence, while retelling asserts the very process of memory, which is
formed unconsciously through repetition. The implication of secrecy,
that ‘no one round here’ will talk about it, seems to disavow the purpose
of collective memory as a ‘moment of ritual, communal bonding’, but
the poem itself is an enactment of the transmission of memory, intimated
through the conversational tone.50
116  A. McDAID

The interplay between telling and not-telling mirrors other exchanges

involved in the construction and conservation of memory and history:
the power dynamic between authorised and subversive narratives, the
distinction between true and invented/adapted memory, and the pur-
poses and practices of remembering and forgetting. As Aleida Assmann
explicates, there is a fine difference between active and passive forgetting,
with conscious and unconscious motivations behind both.51 While the
narrator of ‘The Boy from Durrus’ insists on recounting the collective
memory, he is equally adamant that the story remain suppressed. ‘You’ll
get no one round here to talk about it’ becomes a refrain in the poem,
repeated three times in thirty lines. Memory is incubated, as the ‘selec-
tion criteria for what is to be remembered and circulated in the active
cultural memory and what is to be merely stored’ remain fluid.52 In a
society continuously exercised by versions of its past, time consolidates
rather than recuperates silence. ‘[S]eventy years on’ memory is diffused
only in whispers by anxious anonymous narrators, in a practice that rests
somewhere between remembering and forgetting: ‘[a]nd don’t forget
that you never heard this from me.’
The position of the poet in these exertions of memory is uncertain,
extending the tendency toward divided selves in Evans’s poetry. Aside
from ‘50th Anniversary of Easter Rising 1916’, there are almost no
allusions to a personal voice in the memory poems. Inherited memory
becomes vaguely mythical in these poems, and Evans’s narrators within
the poem embody wider significance on a communal level; they repre-
sent shared memory while nevertheless undermining it. Their narrative
unreliability captures the flawed quality of memory even while reaffirm-
ing Connerton’s observation in How Societies Remember (1989) that ‘[t]
o recite a myth is not necessarily to accept it‘.53 Nevertheless, the myths
of memory in Evans’s poetry are seen as structures of containment,
and the narrative of memory operates from assumed shared knowledge
and shared vocabulary. ‘Reprisal’ conducts a critique of the potentially
repressive nature of inherited memory similar to that in ‘The Boy from
Durras’, in employing colloquial tone and language—‘Ould Fritz’, ‘The
Boys’, ‘those fellas’—and each casual reference presupposes the read-
er’s collusion. Again, questions of power and control, whether through
violence, memory or history, underpin the poem’s recounting of the
shooting of Ould Fritz, ‘no more than he was a dog’. Victim/oppres-
sor dichotomies are scrutinised by the narrator’s flippant tone and by the
violence inherent in the execution of the enemy at ‘his sister’s funeral’.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  117

The cruelty of the IRA men is lent little attention in these memories,
but the perception of the Black and Tans as sadistic is crucially detailed:
‘fingernails pulled off and a slow death by the barracks fire—they were
very fond of the red hot poker, the Essex were.’ In ‘Reprisal’, the Tans
are depicted as even more extreme, building on popular perception that
many of the Auxiliary force were mentally unstable ex-soldiers brutal-
ised by their experiences in World War I.54 Evans relays this collective
belief in the fear running through the young mother’s mind as she goes
to retrieve her small child, who has been ‘picked up by another Crossley
Tender’:

knew that these hated men from the trenches

had shot children
and old men working in fields
dragged a priest by a rope for sixty miles
wrecked homes never once forgetting
to crush pictures of Virgin
and Sacred Heart under their heel.
They came like pirates with patches over their eyes
hooks instead of hands, tormented minds[.]
Facing the Public, 10.

In David Leeson’s book-length study of the Black and Tans, he asserts

that ‘most people have believed, and still believe, that the ranks of the
Black and Tans were filled with criminals and ex-convicts’ while believ-
ing the Auxiliaries were ‘men degraded and brutalised by years of
trench warfare’.55 Evans’s narrators offer that widespread memory of
the Tans as blood-thirsty, merciless, and even deformed human beings.
The recitative nature of the language as the mother reels off what she
‘knows’ about the Tans implies how inherited memory is easily repeated
and rarely interrogated. Frawley coins the phrase ‘narrative imperative’
to describe how collective and cultural memory is transmitted through
various forms.56 In collective memory, narrative acts as both means and
method, but is inherently fragile and fluid.
Referencing Frederic Bartlett’s 1932 study Remembering, Frawley
extends Bartlett’s observations on individual memory as applicable to
wider collective and cultural memory practices, suggesting that ‘pat-
terns are established, details highlighted or done away with, major
changes […] only occasionally introduced, and the narrative reduced
118  A. McDAID

and tightened over time most often in line with cognitive needs’.57 ‘50th
Anniversary of the Easter Rising’ embeds this process into the poetics of
the poem. The poem is comprised of two verses that, upon reading, are
revealed as a single verse laid out forward once and then, line-by-line,
in reverse. The length of the poem initially disguises the device and by
the time the reader realises the cyclical structure, s/he is entrapped in
the reductive, self-defeating recitation. The poem controls the reader just
as narrative dominates memory in this orchestration. Told from a child’s
perspective, the poem is pitched precisely at the point between official
commemoration and individual recollection.

Suddenly I was awake.

I put on my petticoat with the three frills,
Yellow, pink and blue.
I tied the big pin on my mustard pleated kilt.
As I combed my hair in the grey mirror, I noticed the silence.
Facing the Public, 54.

The detail of the child’s careful preparations allow memory’s equal

attention to intimate recollection as the later, more momentous,
events—the vividly recalled clothing approximates a militaristic uniform,
complete with stripes and a sparán. The event of the annual parade is
one of ‘countless symbolic and material practices of commemoration,
remembrance and historical self-reflection [which] have taken on the
forms of societal rituals’ that constitute ‘cultural geographies of remem-
bering and forgetting’ according to Jens Brockmeier.58 Thus, the ritual
of the child dressing becomes part of the commemorative practice. The
verse repetition mirrors the yearly ritual of public remembrance, as the
second iteration intensifies the articulation and functions to poetically
stage the formation of memory:

The Thomas Davis piper band out from Mallow

the waving of the green white and gold
the old IRA closing one eye to fire shots over the monument.
Years later, I saw shaky old men who could hardly lift their rifles.

Years later I saw shaky old men who could hardly hold their rifles
the old IRA closing one eye to fire shots over the monument
 3  MEMORY SPACES  119

the waving of the green white and gold

the Thomas Davis piper band out from Mallow.
Facing the Public, 54.

Aside from slight syntactical alterations, the poem is exactly the same for-
ward and backwards except for a single word change. ‘[L]ift their rifles’ in
the initial verse becomes ‘hold their rifles’, insinuating the damage of time
on these elderly men. The way the poem reels forward and backwards
through time demonstrates the structures of memory and history in which
all narratives take place. The poem’s narrative purpose is reinvented as a
commentary on personal and ritual memory, whereby the poem is a vehi-
cle for a re-enactment of the process rather than the substance of memory.
Evans’s evident fascination with these narratives of the past resurfaces
in the final poems of Facing the Public. The Tans poems, which open the
volume Facing the Public, privilege oral memory in terms of tone, con-
tent, and narrative construct. ‘50th Anniversary of the Easter Rising’ and
later Petrol, can be seen to emphasise the poetics of personal memory.
The closing set of poems of Facing the Public approaches cultural mem-
ory through the memoirs of IRA commander Ernie O’Malley. Excerpts
from his memoir On Another Man’s Wound (1936) preface ‘Mallow
Burns, 28th September 1920’ and ‘Wooden Horse’, while the poems
themselves directly re-state O’Malley’s exact words from his memoir.59
It is a curious act of appropriation, not least because O’Malley’s own ver-
sion of personal and collective history was itself also a deeply literary ges-
ture.60 As lieux de memoire, O’Malley’s memoirs now stand as part of
the cultural memory of the War of the Independence, yet the memoirs
themselves are carefully constructed literary works, reinventions of per-
sonal and political memory. Evans’s appropriation of O’Malley’s carefully
constructed version of the past has the effect of distancing history by fur-
ther blurring the boundary between narrative and fact. The fluidity and
unreliability of memory, as mediated through narrative, is at the heart of
Evans’s evocation of O’Malley’s memoirs.
Evans’s poems here are problematic pieces of writing, as again she
engages her technique of genre manipulation, a stylistic imperative that imi-
tates the commingling of sources and modes within the O’Malley poems
themselves. At the level of form, the poems engage a prose poem narrative
similar to Petrol, straddling the boundaries of the genre just as O’Malley’s
books reside somewhere between history, memory and literature. Unlike
120  A. McDAID

the intimacy of Petrol, however, there is no identifiable speaker in these

prose poems; the epitaphs are attributed to O’Malley but the poems
themselves are detached from narrative attribution. ‘Mallow Burns, 28th
September 1920’ drifts through the dying thoughts of Sergeant Gibbs, the
NCO killed in the IRA raid on the Mallow Barracks that led to the infa-
mous sacking of the town by the Black and Tans. The stream-of-conscious-
ness style brings the prose poem from beginning to end without a full-stop,
gaining momentum as the town burns and ‘the sun goes finally / down
on two hundred years of loyalty to the Crown’ in Mallow, ‘long a garrison
town’—as the quote from O’Malley states at the poem’s outset.
The difficulty in pinpointing the distinction between inherited mem-
ory and original statement is brought into full relief in ‘Wooden Horse’,
which undertakes a comprehensive restaging of O’Malley’s exact words.
The epigraph quotes O’Malley on the IRA siege of the Mallow Barracks:
‘We’re like the Greeks in the wooden horse, here in the belly of the town, I
thought, and laughed.’ In order to highlight the extent of Evans’s appro-
priation of O’Malley’s original words, an extensive quotation from the
original is required here:

The column was drawn up. They smiled joyfully when they were told
we were going to seize the barracks. At two in the morning, behind out
scouts, we moved into the town. The advance guard was told to make pris-
oners of anyone they met and blindfold them. There were no lights in the
houses, no people on the streets. […] Our approach up to higher ground
brought us through back yards, barbed wire and across high walls. We
used ladders on the high walls. When I looked down on the house, I saw a
toy town, blurred and misty with half light [.]61

Read alongside Evans’s poem, the conflation is clear:

If you meet anyone, blindfold them, they were told that

and the men were smiling at the thought of seizing the
barracks where an officer was starting to write a letter
Mallow is a quiet town, nothing ever happens here. And it was
true—at 2a.m. on the twenty eighth, there was no one
on the streets, everything pitch as they navigated back-
yards and barbed wire, put their ladders up against the
high walls. Up there Ernie saw a toy town wrapped in
mist[.]
Facing the Public, 58.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  121

O’Malley’s original is evidently lyrical in its own right, but Evans’s use
of the original material surely invokes questions of authorship, of the past
as well of the words. Importing O’Malley’s writings into her own poetry,
Evans deliberately espouses the liminality provided by iterative poet-
ics, allowing her both to inhabit and expose the material she absorbs.
O’Malley’s memoirs form part of the abiding cultural memory of the
War of Independence and ‘Wooden Horse’ initially represents, without
interpretation, O’Malley’s version of the past. In doing so, the poem
seems designed to highlight, by virtue of authorial anonymity, questions
of ownership, representation and memory.
When the final lines of the poem diverge absolutely from O’Malley’s
narrative, this question becomes even more acute:

but
Mallow wasn’t made of wood, it was flesh and blood, like
Achilles’ horses, Bailius and Xanthus, who dragged their
shining manes along the ground when they wept for the
death of Patroclus.
Facing the Public, 58.

Like O’Donoghue’s invocation of myth to manage personal trauma,

Evans turns from memory to myth to find a mode of accommodating
the past. The flawless segue from O’Malley’s memoir to Greek mythol-
ogy signals a narrative synchronicity that questions the historical truth
of On Another Man’s Wound. Evans picks up O’Malley’s analogy of his
column as being ‘like the Greeks in the wooden horse’, where myth is
deployed as validation, and offers an alternative tragic myth from The
Iliad. Bailius and Xanthus, the horses who are defined by their grief
at the death of their charioteer, embody sorrow rather than hubris, as
Evans’s poem reinvents O’Malley’s use of myth to emphasis the effects of
the burning of the town with its ‘flesh and blood’ inhabitants.
This alternative version of events in Mallow underlines the difficulties
of narrating the past without recourse to myth, and ultimately suggests
that cultural memory itself is a kind of myth, another means of assem-
bling the fragments of the past. Evans’s conclusion of ‘Wooden Horse’
calls forth subsequent events of The Iliad, invoking Michael Longley’s
‘Ceasefire’ with its final consolatory image of Achilles and Priam.62
Longley’s poem articulates the crucial, tentative beginnings of peace in
Northern Ireland and, not unlike O’Malley’s memoir, ‘Ceasefire’ now
122  A. McDAID

forms part of the fabric of cultural memory around that period in history.
‘Wooden Horse’ however serves to complicate the ways cultural memory
is transferred by problematising ideologies of remembering encoded in
the appropriated narrative.
The centrality of memory in Evans’s poetry, in spite of its fragility,
seems to speak to a fundamental misgiving about permanence. In the
constant rewriting and undermining of codes of legitimacy, history and
belonging, Evans exposes the vulnerability of identity constructs; yet
her poetry clings tightly to a remembered, recreated or invented past.
Her migrant status barely registers in her poetry at an explicit level, but
it is implicit in every act of cultural, collective, and personal memory
undertaken in her writing and keeps her poetic imagination bound, very
tightly, to her roots. Her poetry attempts to reinvent a past that is both
impenetrable and yet constantly in the process of reconsideration. The
fluctuations of memory and myth demand persistent renegotiation, par-
ticularly for Martina Evans whose relationship to her hometown, despite
the distance in years, remains integral to her poetics of reinvention.

‘Imagine a tilt and the consequence’:

Colette Bryce’s Strategies of Escape
Like Bernard O’Donoghue and Martina Evans, Colette Bryce and her
poetics of home are concerned with appearing and disappearing. Her
poetry returns to her home city of Derry through journeys of mem-
ory as well as physical revisitations to a place that continues to bear the
marks of its recent sectarian history. Given her upbringing in a city riven
by division, it is unsurprising that her poetry is conflicted by the politics
and prejudices of space. Bryce was born in Derry in 1970 and her child-
hood, spent in a society inscribed with actual and ideological boundaries,
lays the contours for a nuanced poetic engagement with the various ways
structures of power are transferred within these symbolic demarcations
of inclusion and exclusion. In looking for ways to map her personal iden-
tity within those pre-defined spaces, Colette Bryce engages poetic strate-
gies of escape, erasure and invisibility. Her carefully balanced interplay of
normative political, cultural and sexual expectations is deftly presented
and promptly problematised in poetry that is at once both intimate and
obscure. Her insider/outsider position—as both witness to and alien
from the past—reinforces this duality while Bryce’s personal history as a
 3  MEMORY SPACES  123

native of Derry, a lesbian and an emigrant suggests the multiple levels on

which she transgresses the traditional cartographies of identity.63
This question of identity has occupied Bryce: ‘I see myself as a poet
of ‘the UK and Ireland’ but very much as an Irish poet within that.
It’s strange. I’ve been away now for longer than I lived in Derry, yet
when my work wasn’t represented in a recent anthology of my Northern
Irish peers I was surprised at how hurt I felt. It was as though I was
being edited out of the story.’64 Currently resident in Newcastle, Bryce
left Derry aged eighteen, and has spent most of her adult life living in
England, with periods in Spain and Scotland. She has published four
volumes of poetry, The Heel of Bernadette (2000), The Full Indian Rope
Trick (2005), Self-Portrait in the Dark (2008) and The Whole and Rain-
domed Universe (2014), and has received much critical acclaim including
the Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection as well a number of awards
for individual poems.65 Bryce’s poetry explores presence and absence as
subversive gestures, and her personal experiences of migration intersect
with political and personal imperatives as motivation towards reinven-
tions of self and past within her work.
Despite having spent the greater portion of her years living outside
of her native city, Bryce’s work continues to identify Northern Ireland
as its crucial location; indeed, there is far less in her poetry of elsewhere
than of her home city, replete as it is with sectarian violence and sus-
picion. The Whole and Rain-domed Universe is a confronting evocation
of childhood during the Troubles, and addresses personal and political
memory in a far more explicit fashion than earlier books. The backdrop
of the Troubles attunes her poetry with sensitivity to the interplay of
private and public spheres and Bryce expands the aesthetic of division,
borders and boundaries to probe questions of enclosure and exclusion.
Taking its prompt from the theory of locational feminism and of queer
migrations, this interpretation of Bryce’s poetry considers her ‘com-
plex and multiply constituted’ identity as a female, lesbian, migrant
poet from a Catholic upbringing in Co. Derry and currently living in
England.66 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan note, in their introduc-
tion to Transnationalism (1994), ‘the relationship of gender to scattered
hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal national-
isms, “authentic” forms of tradition, local structures of domination, and
legal-juridical oppression on multiple levels’.67 Anne-Marie Fortier goes
further in questioning the very construction of migration as ‘not simply
about the undoing of home as stasis […] but as the re-forming or indeed
124  A. McDAID

enforcement of the very bounded spatiality of homes’.68 In this light,

Bryce’s spatial configurations are necessary devices to negotiate and rein-
vent the ‘multiply-constituted’ society of her native town.
Similar to the way Evans’s poetry worries the boundaries between
public and private space, Bryce employs the central trope of the line as
a symbolic and material theme in her poetry. Her formal strategies use
the poetic line to contain, subvert and reinvent the city of Derry while
figurative and contextual invocations of lines as demarcations surface
throughout Bryce’s aesthetic. ‘Vertical Blinds’, from Self-Portrait in
the Dark refutes the conventions of the poetic line by composing the
poem in four columns across two pages, thereby presenting the reader
with multiple possibilities in constructing the line. At a literal level, lines
are geographical and ideological boundaries, borders and markers that
demarcate public space, especially with regard to the segregations of the
city of Derry. Lines are also the cultural and social parameters of behav-
iour and belonging; keeping between those lines is appropriate, while
falling outside is transgressive, or subversive. Implicit in this strategy of
delineation is the possibility of rupture or fissure, as well the potential
for blurred, crossed or broken lines. With the suggestion of containment
also comes the prospect of permeability or even escape. Furthermore,
this emphasis on spatiality especially in her Derry poems heightens the
reader’s awareness of Bryce’s general reticence towards geographic spec-
ificity in poems set outside Northern Ireland, in which she inclines to
vague indications of ‘somewhere’ and ‘out there’.
Related to this imprecision is Bryce’s interest in provisional or hetero-
topic spaces that exist outside or beyond the lines of the actual; imperma-
nent or impossible spaces that rely on their tangential or opposite relation
to physically and socially delineated topoi. The interactions of these varie-
ties of lines form the strata of Bryce’s poetry. Gilles Deleuze’ and Felix
Guattari’s theory of the rhizome is familiar now in post-national conversa-
tions, and it is relevant here also, via its principle of lines as linkages rather
than lineages. More prescient still is their concept of the ‘ligne de fuite’
or ‘line of flight’, which ‘never consist[s] in running away from the world
but rather in causing runoffs’.69 As translator Brian Massumi explains, the
Deleuzean concept of fuite ‘covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding
but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanish-
ing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no relation to flying.’70
These varieties of the line contribute to a complex matrix in Bryce’s work,
particularly in her reconstructions of the city of her childhood.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  125

The lines of separation defining the streets of Derry, both physically

and metaphorically, during the Troubles, provide a structuring trope in
Bryce’s poetry. ‘Line’, an early poem in The Heel of Bernadette, deals
explicitly with the scored flesh of Derry’s city centre, ‘the criss-crossed
heart of the city’. The poem addresses a named subject, ‘Line’, as an
intimate ancestor, ‘drawn in the voice of my mother’. The importance
of genealogies of memory is represented across multiple poetries in this
study, including Sara Berkeley’s and Sinéad Morrissey’s maternal genealo-
gies that are alternately reclaimed and reinvented. ‘Line’, in Bryce’s work,
announces a similar inheritance, in this case of received cultural norms as
well as of a mother figure who, as the colloquial phrase has it, ‘draws the
line’ of acceptable behaviour. The transgressions of boundaries are sug-
gested in the ways ‘Line’ seeks to push past its self-defined boundaries,
through linguistic implications of subterfuge and caution that resonate
in the poem’s setting: ‘Saturday border, breach in the slabs, / creep to
the right, Line, / sidelong, crab’. The lively, energetic movement of Line
is underscored by the poem’s mingling of verbs and participles, creating
the impression of constant action as well as suggesting that Line has an
agency of its own, a counter-movement to the hegemony of the city:

ravelling under the traffic

up, you’re the guttering scaling McCafferty’s
maze through the slating,
dive from sight and down in history, Line,
take flight in the chase of the fences[.]
The Heel of Bernadette, 4.

In pursuit of Line, the poem follows its movement through the city,
an action restaged in the poetic structure itself that stretches the line
from beyond the poem’s boundaries by starting at the title and ending
in that ‘criss-crossed’ heart of the city. The personalised ‘Line’ dissolves
into the multiple ‘lines’ of the poem’s conclusion, thereby gesturing with
a nod to the various traditions of the city.

where lines will meet you, race you, lead you

into the criss-crossed heart of the city
of lines for the glory, lines for the pity.
The Heel of Bernadette, 4.
126  A. McDAID

The so-called ‘peace lines’ constructed in Northern Irish cities to min-

imise sectarian violence at the interface between republican and loyalist
neighbourhoods leave their pattern on the place and its people, although
their ultimate usefulness is called into question through their fusion in
the poem’s final image. Real and imagined lines merge here, as meta-
phorical and imagined boundaries are recognised, acknowledged, and
ultimately challenged through the elevation of the poem’s ‘Line’. The
definite delineations of the society in which she grew up are imprinted
on her poetry in the trope of the line as subject and symbol, as well as
the ways lines demarcate social, ideological and cultural boundaries.
These constructs of emotional and physical space suggest that Bryce’s
migration might be fruitfully read as an effort to refuse the delimiting
structures of identity and belonging such as those depicted in ‘Line’,
and in ‘Stones’—a reworking of Stephen Spender’s ‘My Parents Kept
Me from Children who were Rough’.71 Through her direct inversion
of Spender’s lines, Bryce inhabits the counter-space of the poem, rein-
venting the original in terms of the cultural prejudices and divisions of
a Northern Irish childhood. ‘From walls we saw them come and go’ the
poem recollects, staging the spatial segregation through the contrast of
the children perched atop the City Walls and those ensconced in ‘foreign
cars / whose quick electric windows rose / effortlessly’, an image that
maintains the separation of social spheres through easy disassociation.
Some critics have seen Bryce’s work as an ongoing search for liberation,
but the dialogue between enclosure and escape in her poetry is more
complex than that clear-cut dichotomy.72 While challenging restrictive
parameters, the poet also requires those restrictions as a measure against
which she can define herself, and as a line to transgress or transcend.
Northern Ireland is constructed as a rent society, ‘yeared into two
deep tracks’ and possessed of grotesque artistry. Nevertheless, Bryce is
enthralled by her native city in recollections and revisitations. Her poetry
is compelled by poetic appearances and disappearances—whether in the
imaginative and ideological escapes of ‘The Full Indian Rope Trick’ and
‘Car Wash’ or as a place to which her imagination inexorably returns,
as in The Whole & Rain-domed Universe. The urban context of her
poetry distinguishes it from O’Donoghue’s and Evans’s rural settings,
but they share this emphasis on presence and absence, whether through
myth, memory, or migration. Bryce’s complicated relationship to her
hometown of Derry also has parallels with Sinéad Morrissey’s periph-
eral positioning of the Belfast of her youth, and the common backdrop
 3  MEMORY SPACES  127

of the Troubles links these poets through the difficulty of representing

the past violence and changing present of their shared country’s history.
Like Morrissey’s ‘Thoughts in a Black Taxi’, Bryce’s imagery of violence
is derived from a ‘twisted, stricken’ cityscape where destruction is rein-
vented in an attempt to reclaim the warped scenes of a post-riot Derry
morning.

The street lamp by the gutted bus

soft-ticks, watches us from the stuck
joint of its neck. There’s windscreen
shattered on the ground like jewels,
diamonds, amethysts, on the school
walk.
The Full Indian Rope Trick, 13.

Searching for beauty in the devastation, the smashed windscreen is trans-

formed into something precious, the poignancy of which is amplified
when the setting is clarified as ‘the school walk’. Similar images of beauty
and bestiality are repeated in her later volume The Whole and Rain-
domed Universe, which leave the reader to decide how to judge the hov-
ering helicopters—‘so much depends / upon the way you choose to look
at them’—as ‘minor flares, confused / among the stars’ or as ‘a business
of flies/ around the head wound of an animal’.
‘Last Night’s Fires’ follows ‘Device’ which, in turn, follows ‘1981’,
and the three poems pursue an exploration of cause and effect. ‘1981’
takes the public/private events of the hunger strikes and traces the cor-
rosive effect on the public psyche of the display of ‘[a] makeshift notice
in the square / … with numbers, each day higher’. This leads to ques-
tions of power and expression, culminating in the threatening observa-
tion of the final lines:

heads are bowed, as mute as theirs,

that will find a voice in the darker hours,
say it with stones, say it with fire.
The Full Indian Rope Trick, 11.

This question of articulation and how a section of the community can

express itself when it is reduced to the mute humiliation of a ‘make-
shift notice’ leads into ‘Device’, which challenges those standards of
128  A. McDAID

communication. There’s a similar matter-of-factness in the way Bryce

presents the construction of the ‘device’, although the titular euphemism
lends a delicacy that balances the bluntness of the ensuing lines.
The opening statement—‘[s]ome express themselves like this’—is a neu-
tralised acknowledgement of how certain segments of society choose to
communicate, and it leads directly from the closing lines of ‘1981’ on the
previous page. The dull litany that follows is similarly drained of colour:

circuit kit; 4 double-A batteries, 1 9-volt,

1 SPDT mini-relay, 1 M-80
rocket engine, a solar ignitor,
a pair of contacts, 1 connector;
The Full Indian Rope Trick, 12.

While the Irish literary tradition is familiar with poets and playwrights
incanting a litany of placenames to invoke their native locations, Bryce’s
subversive recitation is of darker substance. The paraphernalia of a car
bomb is reeled off with the ease and familiarity of a prayer, but these
utterances, while bland on their own, compile a sinister mass. The pre-
cision of the recitation reflects the process of assembling the device:
‘wired, / coiled and crafted together, care / taken over positives and
negatives.’ A suggestion of responsibility and consequence is brought
up by the reference to ‘positives and negatives’ but these remain, finally,
issues of electrical rather than moral imperative.
The representation of the device as a gift over which its creator has
toiled implies the extent to which this society is monstrously misshapen.
In this place, the act of destruction becomes a gesture of creativity, and
devastation bequeaths immortality. The gentleness of the closing stanza
enshrines the disjoint between the depicted act and its inevitable effect.

Dawn or before, the artist’s hour,

it is placed, delicately as a gift,
under a car in a street that will flare
to a gallery in the memory,
cordoned off and spotlit for eternity.
The Full Indian Rope Trick, 12.

There is no hint of violence here; only the word flare suggests an explo-
sion, while the reference to ‘under a car in a street’ is subtly represented
 3  MEMORY SPACES  129

as the installation of an artwork. The destruction it will cause is alluded

to only in its impact on the collective memory where it will be ‘spotlit for
eternity’. That destruction is made explicit in ‘Last Night’s Fires’, which
completes Bryce’s triptych of oppression, violence, and suffering.
The uncertain boundary between destruction and creation is further
explored in the poem ‘Form’, which also considers an unconventional
act of creativity. Ostensibly about hunger artists, the poem flows through
undercurrents of gender, politics and art that surface during the narra-
tive. The imprint of growing up during politically fraught times is per-
ceptible here in the unspoken allusion to the hunger strikers of ‘1981’,
which she addresses in that poem. In ‘Form’ however, those events
remain as a presence outside the poem yet casting their shadow across
the work: a method of addressing a trauma without ever mentioning it.
Bryce inhabits the persona of a hunger artist and conveys the act of self-
starvation as a creative act, as valuable (or pointless) as any other artistic
gesture. The purpose is pure—‘because it is something to do / and I do
it well.’ The undertaking is religious, like a ‘vocation’, and an enabling
experience—‘the hunger isn’t a sacrifice / but a tool.’
This sense of liberation through self-denial parallels with the creative/
destructive binary that troubles much of Bryce’s work. It also speaks to
the need ‘to find a voice in the darker hours’. Whether through ‘stones’
and ‘fire’, a ‘device’ or ‘hunger’, the search for a mode of expression is a
theme Bryce explores with empathy but also detachment. It is difficult
to place the poet herself in these poems, and harder still to perceive her
position around these Troubles poems, which might indeed be a deliber-
ate strategy.

I’m writing this as my only witness

has been the glass on the wall.
Someone must know what I’ve done
and there’s no one to tell.
The Heel of Bernadette, 17.

The urge to share is curiously depersonalised by this disassociation

from the reader who becomes incidental to the act. The use of the first-
person in ‘Form’ contrives a certain intimacy, but that is contradicted
in this stanza by the speaker’s justification for the poem’s existence. In
constructing an isolated, incarcerated space, Bryce approximates a prison
of sorts, and her reference to the wall suggests an image of a prisoner
130  A. McDAID

scratching out his/her final words. The prison wall also calls up the so-
called ‘dirty protests’ that preceded the hunger strikes, reinforcing the
unstated external framework of ‘Form’. Within the poem, form reso-
nates. It becomes the binding goal of the hunger artist’s act as she rev-
els in the steady revelation of smooth lines and perfect contours on the
body.

Or would lie, supine, stomach shrinking,

contracting, perfecting its concave line.
Each day gave a little more: depth to the shallows
of the temples, definition to the cheek,
contrast to the clavicle, the ankle bone, the rib,
the raised X-ray perception of my feet.
The Heel of Bernadette, 17.

Hard consonant sounds and strong internal rhymes (‘supine’/‘line’;

‘shrinking’/‘contracting’/‘perfecting’; ‘temples’/‘clavicles’/‘ankle’;
‘raised’/‘ray’) reiterate the emphasis on the body shedding flesh. This
careful poetic reconstruction adds another dimension to the poem’s title,
‘Form’, which is also an analysis of the private/public act of creativity
and exposure. In private, the artwork is moulded and made to ‘conform
to my critical eye’, but once out on the street, the speaker (and by exten-
sion the artwork) is exposed to ‘a latent contamination of eyes / from
windows and cars’.
In her delineation of threatening and safe spaces, Bryce recognises the
codes of behaviour dictated through inherited structures. By reinventing
spatial configuration within her poetry, space itself is turned into a tool
to acknowledge and question those very boundaries. Migration is a ver-
sion of disappearance that challenges the societal expectations laid out in
public space, while memory works as a form of reappearance in the way
it revisits and reconstructs the past and the self. Bryce’s poetry enacts
a sharp tension between an imagistic desire to disappear and a narrato-
logical and thematic urge to reappear in poems set in childhood and in
Northern Ireland. ‘Form’ is a poem about artistry and politics, but it is
also a poem of self-erasure; ‘Car Wash’ and ‘The Full Indian Rope Trick’
also conspire towards vanished and concealed selves. Contrastingly, ‘The
Search’ and ‘The Analyst’s Couch’ reach for restitutions that remain, like
damaged memory, marginally beyond grasp.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  131

Bryce’s migration impulse is comprised of an urge for distance from

an inescapable but uneasy relationship to a home place, similar to that
depicted by Evans, Morrissey and Clifton in their poetry. Just as Sinéad
Morrissey’s unconventional background locates her childhood out-
side accepted religious codes of belonging, Bryce’s sexuality problema-
tises her identity formation in the strictly heteronormative society of her
upbringing. ‘A Clan Gathering’ insists on its contemporaneity in its sub-
title ‘Dublin, 2009’ and analogises familial and societal attitudes towards
the speaker’s lifestyle:

I don’t mention my lover

how we have to invent
for ourselves a blank, unscripted
future; her guaranteed absence
from the diagram, the great
genetic military campaign,
and no one asks,
sensing a difference.
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe, 30.

The poet’s relationship is excluded from ‘the family chart’, an ‘excitable

flow of births, / deaths, accidents, marriages’, by virtue of its homosexu-
ality. The doubly othered conditions of her relationship—as a migrant
and as a lesbian—maintain her exclusion from the conventional family
structures inscribed through the family tree. In ‘Cé Leis Tú? Queering
Irish Migrant Literature’, Tina O’Toole considers the ways LGBT
diasporic identities trouble established migrant narratives, arguing that
‘queer kinship and migrant affinities unsettle the fixities of family and
place in Irish culture’.73 In seeking alternate spaces in her poetry, Bryce
pursues and, through migration, finds a mode of realising and represent-
ing the self.
The individual in ‘The Full Indian Rope Trick’ reaches for libera-
tion into the infinite space of ‘thin air’ enabled by the sleight of hand
of the magic trick. The trick itself sees a fakir or Hindu ascetic toss a
coiled rope into the sky where it remains, levitating, while his assistant
(a young boy) ascends it. Some versions have the boy disappear into the
sky and reappear on the ground; others claim the fakir climbs after the
boy, slashing at the sky with a knife until the boy’s bloodied limbs fall
to the ground. Bryce’s poem is purposefully located in the delineated
132  A. McDAID

space of Guildhall Square, a setting that foregrounds a desire to tran-

scend the constructed parameters of societal behaviour. The location also
lends a political angle to the poem, particularly given the historically-
charged setting of Guildhall Square, the destination for the Civil Rights
march on Bloody Sunday 1972. Within the poem, the paraphernalia of
the rope and the square whisper of public hangings; but the protago-
nist’s feat in ‘The Full Indian Rope Trick’ is entirely voluntary and self-
motivated. The speaker makes careful avowals of independence from the
outset—‘[t]here was no secret / murmured down through a long line /
of elect’—and any hint of assistance (‘no dark fakir, no flutter / of notes
from a pipe’) is dismissed. The communal space of the square is empha-
sised by the detail: ‘walls’ to delineate (and enclose) the area, ‘bells’ to
call attention, and ‘passers-by’ to observe. Even the time of day suggests
a ‘high noon’-style confrontation. The scene set by Bryce is an arena,
primed for public performance:

Guildhall Square, noon,

in front of everyone.
There were walls, bells, passers-by;
then a rope, thrown, caught by the sky
and me, young, up and away,
goodbye.
The Full Indian Rope Trick, 17.

There is a gentle lilt to the rhyming of ‘by’, ‘sky’, ‘away’ and ‘goodbye’
that allows the act to take place with ease within the poem, and that
rhyme continues into the next stanza: ‘Goodbye, goodbye. / Thin air.
First try. / A crowd hushed, squinting eyes’. The speaker’s marginality is
encoded in her performance that is, essentially, an attempt to refute the
dominant parameters of social behaviour.
In Bryce’s version of her one-off trick’, there is, however, no possibil-
ity of return, no miraculous reappearance. The act of disappearing is irre-
versible, a ‘one-off trick / unique, unequalled since’. There is ‘no proof,
no footage of it’ nor, implicitly, of the woman herself—erasure is the
realisation of the trick’s ambition. Having disappeared, the difficulties of
reappearance are immediately made clear in the final lines of the poem.
Striving if not to undo the performance, then to at least reassert the self,
the speaker reaches from her place above the rope to try to reconnect
with the public she left below. She asks ‘[a]nd what would I tell them
 3  MEMORY SPACES  133

/ given the chance?’, establishing the permanence of the trick’s conse-

quence. Even the self-evidence of the poem does not suffice as a state-
ment of existence as the speaker is still at pains to state her presence.

It was painful; it took years.

I’m my own witness,
guardian of the fact
that I’m still here.
The Full Indian Rope Trick, 18.

The poem speaks to the transition from childhood to adulthood, from

co- to in-dependence, to coming out or distinguishing oneself from the
mass, and to emigration as a means of escape.
The process of dissolving and realising the self is ‘painful’, but is
a necessary act of self-determination that allows the speaker to declare
in that final sentence ‘I’m still here’. Bryce offers the poem as the only
‘proof’ that the trick happened, and in this way, the poem is also an
analogy of artistic purpose and value—to capture events for which there
remains ‘no proof, no footage’, and to speak for those who have van-
ished or been erased from the public narrative formed within the walls
of a city square. ‘Hide-and-Seek’ picks up the theme of disappearance
as it appears to caution against ‘hiding’ too well, particularly in migra-
tion: ‘Watch out, / if you’re too clever you might not ever / be found.
England, say. Or adult life.’ Along with her expressed anxieties about
her anthological presence, the personal dimension of hiding in migra-
tion is exposed in the way Bryce’s poetry finds its way back to Northern
Ireland.
Disappearing through migration means having continually to reappear
on return; it also requires renegotiating the terms of public space. ‘Car
Wash’ centres conflicted structures of identity in the innocuous setting of
the forecourt of a petrol station. As in Petrol, the garage is a shared space
of social regulation, itself a microcosm of society whether in Evans’s
native rural Cork or Bryce’s urban Belfast. Ed Madden suggests that in
‘queer narratives […], home must be negotiated as a site of estrange-
ment and nostalgia, complex (dis)affiliations and (dis)identifications,
especially since “home” (domestic space or place of origin) is linked to
heterosexuality’.74 The ‘business of driving / reminds us of our fathers’,
evoking familial and patriarchal structures, and the speaker and her part-
ner, in returning to Northern Ireland, find themselves ‘two / women in
134  A. McDAID

our thirties, / [in] this strange pass, / a car wash in Belfast’. The ‘strange
pass’ of the petrol station becomes a kind of portal through which Bryce
realises an alternate space in which her reappearance and her sexuality
are accommodated. The sub-space of the car in the carwash exists both
within and beyond the visible public sphere where all acts are scrutinised
and, once the machine begins, the car itself becomes a private, enclosed
space, a heterotopia, which cannot be observed or invaded.

[…] and find ourselves

delighted by a wholly
unexpected privacy
of soap suds pouring, no,
cascading in velvety waves.
Self-Portrait in the Dark, 6.

The heterotopic space, realised here within the car going through the
carwash is, according Foucault’s construction, a ‘counter-site’.75 Highly
localised, it is a space of marginality and alterity that is simultaneously
improvised and actual. The counter-site occupies a physical presence
as well as a space of imaginative disruption; it is ‘a kind of effectively
enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be
found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and
inverted.’76 Society’s norms are reinforced by the association of ‘driving’
with ‘fathers’, but in this heterotopia, that expectation is challenged and
overturned by the female drivers. Requirements are observed (they ‘have
minded / the instructions to wind up / our windows and sit / tight’)
but in obeying the rules, the heterotopia is fully realised rather than
inhibited, granting ‘a wholly unexpected privacy’.
The erotic tincture of the ‘soap suds pouring, no, / cascading in
velvety waves’ brings the poem to its inevitable climax, a private act
snatched in a normally public space. The sentence begins as a plea
to the reader but soon turns its question into a statement. The initial
appeal to a shared sense of human connection is retracted as the narrator
remembers her own outsiderness, even within this temporarily safe zone.
Bryce’s deft phrasing carries the weight of the image’s allusions lightly:

what can we do
but engage in a kiss
 3  MEMORY SPACES  135

in a world where to do so
can still stop the traffic.
Self-Portrait in the Dark, 7.

The construction and collision of gendered sites in ‘Car Wash’ is

another manipulation of space by Bryce. The domain of the car and the
act of driving is recalled as and the aural, visual and olfactory detail of the
‘low purr of fifth gear, / the sharp fumes, the biscuity / interior’ reinforces
the embedded, almost subconscious association of the car with a male fig-
ure of power. The repudiation of patriarchal control by these ‘two women
in our thirties’ through the occupation of the car is, thus, an act of rebel-
lion against that gendered discourse. Within the space created by ‘spinning
blue brushes / of implausible dimensions’, a creation myth of violence
that belies the calm affection of the kiss, the heteronormative expectations
of society are dissolved. Emerging from the car wash, those expectations
are restored as the machine dictates how the car is presented and when it
can progress.

we are polished and finished

and (following instructions)
start the ignition (which
reminds us of our fathers)
and get into gear
and we’re off
at the green light.
Self-Portrait in the Dark, 7.

In ‘Car Wash’, enclosure within the heterotopic space is a liberating

experience that enables the motorists. Heterotopias are not always posi-
tive, however, and Bryce plays with the multiple permutations of space in
various poems. ‘A Spider’ problematises the emancipating enclosure of
‘Car Wash’ by acknowledging the complexities of spatial configurations.
The act of making art is also constructed as a delicate balance of empow-
erment and imprisonment in ‘A Spider’:

I trapped a spider in a glass,

a fine-blown wineglass.
It shut around him silently.
Self-Portrait in the Dark, 3.
136  A. McDAID

The constructed space is simultaneously an act of agency by the artist,

and an act of entrapment for the spider: a duality that suits Bryce’s incli-
nation towards ambiguity. With echoes of Wallace Stevens’ ‘Anecdote of
the Jar’, and in dialogue with Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’, ‘A Spider’
layers detailed precision over anxiety around creativity, evoking the physi-
cality of the spider as he perceives his imprisonment: ‘cap/ at the hub
of his eight spokes, / inked eyes on stalks; alert, sensing a difference.’77
This phrase is repeated in ‘A Clan Gathering’, where it serves to signify
the exclusion of homosexual narratives from the accepted lines of history
and memory dictated by heteronormative customs.
In ‘A Spider’, the ‘difference’ similarly denotes a separation; it is the
creation of the new space orchestrated by the poet, but the spider itself
is also construed as an artist of sorts in its own right: ‘but still he taps
against the glass / all Marcel Marceau’. Within the confined space, the
spider performs his own artistry, and so the poem takes questions of cre-
ativity as both theme and content. The final lines draw poet and spider
into a tighter bond, with the suggestion of interchangeability:

in the wall that is there but not there,

a circumstance I know.
Self-Portrait in the Dark, 3.

The image suggests an uncomfortable familiarity with unspoken bound-

aries and invisible borders that serve to contain as well as to reject. ‘A
Spider’ reflects on the condition of willed migration and its conse-
quences while speaking to wider questions of artistic agency and pur-
pose, a theme pursued in ‘Form’. Bryce’s use of the image of a hare in
its ‘self-shaped lair’ and ‘preserved in its form’ echoes Michael Longley’s
poem of the same name, and this symbol of the hare is repeated in a later
poem ‘White’ from The Whole and Rain-domed Universe:

I could drop
here and sleep in my own shape, happily,
as the hare fits
to its form.
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe, 1.

The emphasis on self-realisation invested in the image of ‘form’ coun-

terpoints the lack of agency of ‘A Spider’ and suggests an ethic of
 3  MEMORY SPACES  137

self-determination that is also realised in the poet’s construction of

counter-spaces. Going back to Northern Ireland, and the cycle of disap-
pearance/reappearance, demands continual reinvention of those counter-
spaces. On a practical level, as a migrant, Bryce is bound in a constant
pattern of return and departure, and her poetry uses this cyclicality to
ask larger questions about the nature of belonging and estrangement. In
particular, these poems query the nature of revisitation and how the pre-
sent is wrapped up in the past for the emigrant returnee. ‘When I Land
in Northern Ireland’ takes that idea of an eternal past by suggesting inev-
itability about each return. Every visit, the title suggests, is already tied
into a series of events that unfold on each occasion ‘down through a tun-
nel of years’ back to the height of the Troubles:

to a time preserved in a cube of fumes, the seventies-yellowing

walls of remembrance; everyone smokes and talks about the land,
the talk about the land, our spoiled inheritance.
Self-Portrait in the Dark, 30.

This ‘cube of fumes’ is another counter-space in which time stands still.

Returning to Northern Ireland is a return to an enclosed, static place of
repetition and rehearsal, obsessed with ‘walls of remembrance’ and age-old
conflicts about the land. The physical disassociation of migration clearly
does not necessarily correlate with imaginative or emotional separation, as
these poems of return demonstrate. The poem ‘+’, like ‘When I return to
Northern Ireland’, also takes the occasion of a visit home, although in this
case the speakers never set foot on land at all; rather, the poem is located in
the heterotopic space of the airplane’s fuselage, a space similarly constructed
in Justin Quinn’s poetry as desirable in its dislocation. Images of divergence
open the poem: ‘we watch the black shadow of our plane/ free itself from
the undercarriage, / separate, then fall away.’ The familiar tension between
loss and liberation is staged in the poem’s evocation of takeoff:

with it falls the sunlit runway,

grids of crops and reservoirs, then all
the scattered glitter of a city
falls, the tattered coastline of a country

plunges out of view.

The Full Indian Rope Trick, 48.
138  A. McDAID

Once again, Bryce delineates her space, in this case into ‘grids’, as the
city is viewed from above in its flawed beauty. The vista gained by dis-
tance is quickly compromised, however, and the passengers’ hopes are
dashed: ‘[a]nd just when you might expect to see / the globe in brilliant
clarity, / cloud fills the tiny screen’. The expectation of insight, or at
least perspective, from afar is not realised, with the result that the poem
acknowledges the cyclical predictability all of life’s endeavours, ‘[W]e …
wait, seatbelts on, / for the world to turn and return to us / as it always
does, sooner or later’. That the plane, and the poem, returns to where
it started, ‘a point marked with the shadow of a plane / … growing /
larger under Irish rain’ suggests that Bryce’s umbilical connection to
Northern Ireland is stronger than she might openly declare. This effort,
indeed every effort, to leave is bound by inevitable return; a trajectory
that is borne out by the development of her poetry.
Bryce’s first three collections are mostly coy on political matters, and
the sectarianism and violence of her youth are almost exclusively averted
to through imagistic and formal references. Her fourth collection, by
contrast, is an explicit engagement with her personal experiences of the
Troubles. The Whole & Rain-domed Universe demonstrates a sense of
responsibility towards the past that Bryce’s poetry carries in personal
lyrics. While Bryce shies away from assuming representative status, her
reconstructions of the past represent personal and familial experiences
on one side of the sectarian divide. The provocative titles of poems in
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe include the colloquial ‘Don’t speak
to the Brits, just pretend they don’t exist’, ‘The Republicans’, and the
ekphrastic ‘Positions Prior to the Arrival of the Military’. One particu-
lar poem with disappearance at its heart is ‘The Search’, subtitled ‘i.m.
Jean McConville’, which conjures a crowd of children searching the sand
for the lost wedding ring of a family member. It is only in the dedica-
tion that the poem’s underlying subject is articulated, but the language
of erasure and irretrievability as well as the familiar imagery of failed digs
definitively locates ‘The Search’.

Close to the dunes,

we sifted, dug. One
patch of sand soon merged
with another. Not a land
mark, not a post or rock,
the script of the beach
 3  MEMORY SPACES  139

erased by the weather.

Our shadows loomed
on the lit strand,
conducting their own
investigation.
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe, 19.

The recovery of McConville’s body on Shelling Hill beach in 2003 is

secreted into the poem in the quiet dignity of the final stanza’s opening
lines: ‘Thirty years. / The coolness of that sand; / just coarse enough
/ to hold itself together / in the wind’. In trying to recover the past,
memory is as opaque and yet as insistent as the ‘cloudy gems / of green-
ish glass’ turned up by the children.
If Bryce’s early concern about being excluded from the story of
Northern Irish poetry, The Whole and Rain-domed Universe leaves no
doubt about her personal and poetic lineage. Her assertive reappearance
as a Northern Irish poet is an effort to exorcise the erasures of migration.
She expressly writes herself into Northern Irish poetry by constructing
a dialogue with Louis MacNeice within a coming-of-age poem set dur-
ing the Troubles; similar to the way Morrissey’s ‘In Belfast’ converses
with MacNeice’s ‘Valediction’, Bryce’s ‘Derry’ reworks MacNeice’s
‘Carrickfergus’:

I was born between the Creggan and the Bogside

to the sounds of crowds and smashing glass
by the river Foyle with its suicides and riptides.
I thought that city was nothing less

than the whole and rain-domed universe.

A teacher’s daughter, I was one of nine
faces afloat in the looking-glass
fixed in the hall, but which was mine?
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe, 2.

Like her earlier evocation of Spender’s ‘They kept me from children

who were rough’, Bryce’s ‘Derry’ conjures a childhood marked by the
‘ancient walls with their huge graffiti, / / arms that encircled the city’ in
an unrelenting embrace. While MacNeice’s poem also recollects military
presence, the calm distance of the ‘dummies hanging from gibbets for
140  A. McDAID

bayonet practice’ is transformed into the reality of ‘another explosion, /

windows buckling in their frames’ in Bryce’s unstinting representation of
the Troubles in ‘Derry’.
The poems returning to childhood and its traumatic events carry an
emotional intensity in the way they confront the past. The visceral bru-
tality of the Troubles is seen through a child’s eyes, as depicted in ‘The
Analyst’s Couch’. The Troubles are made to reappear, although the
speaker complicates the veracity of memory. ‘I was not there when the
soldier was shot, so I didn’t see him / carried up the street’, the opening
sentence announces, yet the poem continues with detailed recollection of
his suffering.

Blood, seeping into the cushions, dark brown stuff

like HP sauce, soaking thoroughly into the foam, the worn
upholstery of the enemy.
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe, 15.

The fabric of memory, like the material of the couch, is stained by events
absorbed through cultural and collective memories as well as through
individual observation. The interjection—‘Am I making this up? Its
­animalness.’—doubts the memory but the repetition of bestial imagery
that characterises Bryce’s depiction of victims of the Trouble asserts its
validity, if not necessarily its truth, through its association.
In returning her poetry to Derry, Bryce configures memory as flawed
and subjective; similar to the map in ‘North to the South’, it is ‘like a
kite, a barely / controllable thing / to be wrestled’. In ‘Re-entering
the Egg’, memory takes on spatial configurations in a grotesque version
of a Fabergé egg that, once opened, reveals overwhelming detail. The
poem’s final lines recoil from the intensities of memory, and demand
that ‘the egg’ of the past be set aside: ‘Close it up. That’s enough for
now.’ Approaching the past through frames that contain and can be set
aside, Bryce engages precautionary modes such as the Fabergé egg or
the snow globe of ‘The theatrical death of my maternal grandmother as
revealed in a 1960s glitter globe’ of The Whole and Rain-domed Universe
and through distancing devices including the hunger artistry of ‘Form’
and the sleight of hand in the eponymous poem of The Full Indian Rope
Trick. She places memory in carefully configured spaces over which the
poet and narrator maintains strict control and there is a furtive, cautious
 3  MEMORY SPACES  141

quality found in the constructed distance of her formal approach. ‘I give

it a shake and look again’, the narrator announces in ‘The theatrical
death of my maternal grandmother …’, and the image of the snow globe
is an appropriate symbol for the complexities of memory, space, enclo-
sure and escape that make up Bryce’s poetry of migration.

Notes
1. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991
(New York: Penguin Books): p. 12.
2. Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,’ in Arts of the
Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York: Norton, 1972 (2001): p. 13.
3. Bernard O’Donoghue’s collections include The Weakness (London: Faber
& Faber, 1991); Gunpowder (London: Faber & Faber, 1995); Here
Nor There (London: Faber & Faber, 1999); Outliving (London: Faber
& Faber, 2003); Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2008); and
Farmers Cross (London: Faber & Faber, 2011).
4. Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today,’ in Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang,
1972): p. 109.
5. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2008):
p. 81.
6. Iain Twiddy, ‘Visions of reconciliation: Longley, Heaney and the Greeks,’
Irish Studies Review 21, no. 4 (2013); Gerardine Meaney, ‘History Gasps:
Myth in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry,’ in Poetry in Contemporary
Irish Literature ed. Michael Kenneally (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe,
1995).
7. Kuno Meyer, ed. The Voyage of Bran, son of Febal, to the land of the living:
an old Irish saga (1895).
8. Ibid.: p. 32.
9. Angela Bourke explores the sociocultural as well as the etymological sig-
nificance of the word piseog in The Burning of Bridget Cleary, defining it
as ‘malevolent sympathetic magic, when something organic is hidden and
left to rot on another’s land. The belief was widely held, and still prevails
in places, that that person’s well-being would decay as a result’. Angela
Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (London: Penguin, 2001): p. 92.
10. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation: p. 6.
11. Barthes, ‘Myth Today.’
12. George W. DaSent, ‘The Story of Burnt Njal,’ in Icelandic Saga Database
(1861); John Coles, ‘The Story of Hrafnkell, Frey’s Priest,’ ibid. (1882).
13. Andrew McCullough, ‘‘Freyfaxi’: An Introduction,’ Times Literary
Supplement.
142  A. McDAID

14.  Lidia Vianu, ‘Interview with Bernard O’Donoghue, 2001,’ Desperado

Essay-Interviews (Bucharest: Editura Universitati din Bucuresti, 2006):
http://www.escoala.ro/lidiavianu/poets_bernard_donoghue.html.
15. Ibid.
16. Aidan Arrowsmith, ‘Photographic memories: nostalgia and Irish diaspora
writing,’ Textual Practice 19, no. 2 (2005): p. 302.
17.  Hugh S. Roberton, ‘Westering Home,’ (Scottish Poetry Library).
O’Donoghue has written about the popularity of Scottish folk music
in Ireland in the 1940s and 50s, especially Robert Burns’ songs that
formed ‘the most prominent and loved vernacular literature in the Irish
countryside I grew up in’. Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Ireland’s National
Bard,’ in Burns and Other Poets, ed. David Sergeant and Fiona Stafford
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012): p. 199.
18. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996 (London:
Faber & Faber, 1998).
19. Russell King and Ian Shuttleworth, ‘Ireland’s new wave of emigration in
the 1980s,’ Irish Geography 21, no. 2 (1988).
20.  Bronwen Walter, ‘Irishness, gender, and place,’ Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 1 (1995); ‘Contemporary Irish
settlement in London: women’s worlds, men’s worlds,’ in Location and
dislocation in Irish society: emigration and Irish identities ed. Jim Mac
Laughlin (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997); Outsiders inside: whiteness,
place and Irish Women (London: Routledge, 2001).
21. Tony Murray, London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
22. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).
23. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar,
Strauss & Giroux, 1983).
24. Martina Evans, Petrol (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2012).
25. Evans’s other collections include The Iniscarra Bar and Cycle Rest (Ware:
Rockingham Press, 1995); All Alcoholics Are Charmers (London: Anvil
Press Poetry, 1998); Can Dentists Be Trusted? (London: Anvil Press
Poetry, 2004); Facing the Public (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2009);
Burnfort, Las Vegas (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2014); The Windows of
Graceland: New and Selected Poems (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2016).
26. 
Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory,’ in Cultural
Memories: The Geographical Point of View eds. Peter Meusburger, Michael
Heffernan, and Edgar Wunder (Heidelberg: Springer, 2011).
27. Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian
Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): p. 15.
28. Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1999), p. 130.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  143

29. Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2007): p. 187.
30. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1996).
31. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: New York Review Books,
2002): p. 1.
32. Evans, Petrol.
33. Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries
of the Genre (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); David
Lehman, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present (New York:
Scribner, 2003).
34. Charles Simic, ‘A Long Course in Miracle,’ in Pretty Happy! ed. Peter
Johnson (Fredonia: White Pine Press, 1997): p. 15.
35. Martina Evans, ‘In Conversation with Sean Rocks,’ Arena, 18 January
2013.
36. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964): p. 8.
37. Ibid.: p. 10.
38. Jürgen Straub, ‘Psychology, Narrative and Cultural Memory: Past and
Present,’ in Media and Cultural Memory eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar
Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): p. 218.
39. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: p. 48.
40. Ibid.: p. 7.
41. See Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (London: Vintage, 1998
[1929]); J. G. Farrell, Troubles (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970); Roddy
Doyle, A Star Called Henry (London: Penguin, 2000).
42. Gerald Dawe, ed. Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War
Poetry 1914–1945 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2009).
43. Gerald Dawe ‘‘Pledged to Ireland’: The Poets and Poems of Easter 1916,’
in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry eds. Fran Brearton and
Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): p. 92.
44. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the
Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Ramazani pays particular attention to Yeats and MacNeice in his chap-
ter entitled ‘Poetry and the News,’: pp. 63–125. See also Ramazani ‘Irish
Poetry and the News’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed.
Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012):
pp. 548–565.
45. The Northern Poets, in particular Heaney, Longley and Mahon, engage
and withdraw to varying degrees; see Matthew Campbell, ‘Irish Writing
of Insurrection and Civil War, 1916–1949,’ in The Edinburgh Companion
to Twentieth-century British and American War Literature eds. Adam
144  A. McDAID

Piette and Mark Rawlinson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2012).
46. In the introduction to The Inherited Boundaries, editor and writer
Sebastian Barry states that Northern Ireland (and its poetry) is ‘a fine
part of the story of an island, but … no part of the story of the Republic’.
Sebastian Barry, ‘Introduction,’ in The Inherited Boundaries: Younger
Poets of the Republic of Ireland, ed. Sebastian Barry (Dublin: Dolmen
Press, 1986); also John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: from stillness into
history (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Harry Clifton’s
ambivalence towards the North is discussed in detailin elsewhere in this
study.
47. Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of
Genres: p. 4.
48. Peter Hart, The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork,
1916–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The controversy
surrounding Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies: The IRA Community
in Cork 1916–1923, published in 1998, indicates just how hotly contested
these century-old issues continue to be.
49. Oona Frawley, ed. Memory Ireland, Volume 1: History and Modernity
(New York: Syracuse University Press, 2011): p. xv.
50. Tamar Kartiel, ‘The past in Israeli pioneering museums,’ in Cultural
Memory and the Construction of Identity, ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane
Weissberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999): p. 127.
51. Aleida Assmann, ‘Memory, Individual and Collective,’ in The Oxford
Handbook of Political Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Jens Brockmeier, ‘Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural
memory,’ Culture Psychology 8, no. 15 (2002): p. 336.
52. Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive,’ A Companion to Cultural Memory
Studies eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010).
53. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989): p. 54.
54. For an account of contemporaneous perceptions of the Black and Tans,
see Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and
Fear of Brutalization in Post-First World War Britain,’ Journal of Modern
History 75, no. 3 (2003): pp. 557–589.
55. D. M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the
Irish War of Independence, 1920–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011): p. 192.
56. Oona Frawley, ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Memory in an Irish
Postcolonial Context,’ in Memory Ireland Volume 1: History and
Modernity, ed. Oona Frawley (New York: Syracuse University Press,
2011): p. 27.
 3  MEMORY SPACES  145

57. Frawley, ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Memory’.

58. Brockmeier, ‘Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural mem-
ory’: p. 17.
59. Ernie O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound (Lanham: Taylor Trade
Publishing, 2002 [1936]).
60. For a discussion of the self-conscious literariness of O’Malley’s writing see
Nicholas Allen, ‘Ernie O’Malley’s Afterlife,’ in Broken Landscapes: Selected
Letters of Ernie O’Malley 1924–1957 eds. Cormac O’Malley and Nicholas
Allen (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2011).
61. O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound: p. 204.
62. Michael Longley, Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007).
Longley’s collection The Stairwell (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014) is
a sequence of elegies for his twin brother, and includes a reference to
‘Patroclus harnessing Xanthus / and Bailius’ in the poem ‘The Stallion’.
63. An earlier version of this section was published as Ailbhe McDaid ‘“I give
it a shake and look again”: Memory, space and the Troubles in Colette
Bryce’s poetry,’ Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry edited
by Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair (Winston-Salem, NC:
Wake Forest University Press, 2017).
64. Rosita Boland, ‘What daffodils were to Wordsworth, drains and backstreet
pubs are to me,’ The Irish Times, 12 March 2011.
65. Colette Bryce, The Heel of Bernadette (London: Picador, 2000); The Full
Indian Rope Trick (London: Picador, 2005); Self-Portrait in the Dark
(London: Picador, 2008); The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (London:
Picador, 2014).
66.  Inderpal Grewal & Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered Hegemonies:
Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994): p. 10.
67. Ibid.: p. 17.
68.  Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘“Coming home”: Queer migrations and multi-
ple evocations of home,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4
(2001): p. 407.
69. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. B Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987): p. 204.
70. Ibid.: p. xvi.
71. Stephen Spender, New Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2004): p. 110.
72. Charles Bainbridge, ‘The great escape: review of The Full Indian Rope
Trick,’ The Guardian, 29 January 2005.
73. Tina O’Toole, ‘Cé Leis Tú? Queering Irish Migrant Literature,’ Irish
University Review 43, no. 1 (2013): p. 132.
146  A. McDAID

74. Ed Madden, ‘Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig
Rooney,’ Éire-Ireland 47, no. 1&2, Earrach/Samhradh /Spring/
Summer (2012): p. 177.
75. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,’
Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité October (1984): pp. 46–49.
76. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’.
77. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose (New York: Library of
America, 1997); Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979.
 CHAPTER 4

Wandering Songs

The tradition of the writer-in-willed-exile is well established in Irish lit-

erature, via the familiar figures of Joyce and Beckett but there also exists
an alternative Irish poetic tradition as pursued by such poets as Brian
Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin, Pearse Hutchinson and
Desmond O’Grady throughout the 20th century. Drawing on interna-
tional literary traditions, the work of these writers owes much to their
permanent, temporary and imaginative emigrations to England, Europe
and the United States. Departure from Ireland and its associated bag-
gage is a creative endeavour repeated by Irish writers as a kind of rite
of passage. While undoubtedly a self-conscious gesture of renunciation,
the act of migration-as-liberation is nevertheless a deliberate aesthetic
action that draws on the chosen destination as much as the place of ori-
gin. These acts of migration are artistic gestures in the poetry of Harry
Clifton and Sinéad Morrissey, actions that allow for the construction
(and reinvention) of a poetic self in response to the specific qualities of
elsewhere. Both Clifton and Morrissey return to Ireland after prolonged
migrations, and their poetry is considered here in terms of the conse-
quences of return for the constructed migrant self.
The predominantly urban contexts of Harry Clifton and Sinéad
Morrissey engage with settings that problematise migration and memory
in different ways. Poetry set in rural spaces, as by Bernard O’Donoghue
and Martina Evans, can draw upon a rooted stability that is resisted by
the shifting populations and changing configurations of urbanity. The
unstable contexts of the city—whether Paris, Dublin or Belfast—challenge

© The Author(s) 2017 147

A. McDaid, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63805-8_4
148  A. McDAID

permanence while embedding multiple histories within their streets; the

city is a fragmented space wherein history and progress jostle for position.
The urban spheres invoked in Clifton’s and Morrissey’s poetry are exclu-
sionary spaces, supporting the poets’ key ethic of marginality through
which reinventions of the self are continuously appraised. The deliberate
detachments from home are realised for Clifton and Morrissey through
a migration impulse that perceives liberation in distance. This distance is
constructed in terms of geography, familiarity and identity; it is reiterated
in the way both poets problematise the construct of home as ontologi-
cally stable. For these poets, having perceived themselves as outsiders at
home, migration allows for substituted selves in poetry. Whether real-
ised through the borrowed languages of counter-myth, as in Clifton’s
Wandering Jew, or of kanji, as in Morrissey’s attempts to learn the
Japanese character system, migration serves to emphasise the delicate
scales of belonging and not-belonging. In returning home, the ethic of
marginality that informs both poets’ work is subjected to new challenges,
requiring new and ongoing reinventions of the self.
The dialogues of departure and return in Clifton’s and Morrissey’s
poetry further articulate the complexities of migration. The variety of
what migration theory terms ‘push/pull’ factors include, for these poets,
the lure of the ‘exile’ experience and the desire for the exotic, as well
as the evident ethic of marginalisation that permeates both Clifton’s and
Morrissey’s poetry. In relocating elsewhere, the possibilities for reinven-
tion are as appealing as the potential of discarding the prescribed selves
found in a domestic context. For Clifton, his imaginative association with
an alternative community is adequate compensation for his migration
which, ultimately, is experienced as liberation. Throughout his return,
he retains an ethic of marginality that allows him to engage with Ireland
from an outsider perspective; a position that suits the poetic stance devel-
oped throughout his migrations. In Morrissey’s case, her willed migra-
tion is related to her desire to escape from the prescribed society of her
youth and difficult familial circumstances. Morrissey’s initial liberation
is complicated by the troubling sense of not-belonging that her ethic
of marginality engenders and, in returning to her home city, she even-
tually comes to terms with that sense of peripherality. The experiences
of return are inwrought in the processes of contemporary migration,
increasingly so in the contemporary conditions of global mobility. For
Clifton and Morrissey, migration and return are equally significant relo-
cations in their poetic journeys.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  149

‘No need to mention where all this was’:

Harry Clifton’s Cultivated Marginality
The subtitle of Susan Gubar’s 2003 study Poetry after Auschwitz:
Remembering What One Never Knew posits one of the central contra-
dictions of collective, cultural and literary memory.1 The past, especially
the traumatic past, is attributed, appropriated and reinvented in ways
that increasingly estrange history from the present. How can memory
function to ‘remember’ events that have receded beyond living mem-
ory? Furthermore, what criteria of legitimacy are invoked when literary
representations ‘remember’ versions of the past of which their authors
have minimal cultural or historical memory? The distinction between
testimony and witness is, as Gubar sees it, manifested in the crises of
language and representation defining the poetry of Holocaust writers.
Benjamin Keatinge’s exploration of the Holocaust in Irish poetry sug-
gests that ‘the linguistic dilemmas of Celan and Sachs have not troubled
to the same extent the surprisingly large number of Irish poets who have
written about the Holocaust’, arguing that Mahon, Paulin, Heaney and
Clifton ‘remain rooted in the lyric tradition’.2 While recognising the top-
ographical aesthetic of many of these Holocaust poems, Keatinge consid-
ers Clifton’s elegy ‘Benjamin Fondane Departs for the East’ as essentially
dislocated, becoming a ‘meditation not just on history, or even Jewish
history, it is a complex presentation of the provisionality of all our lives’.3
This essential ‘dislocation’ identified by Keatinge is deliberately
sought after by Clifton as an enabling device in his poetic. Through
the figure of the Wandering Jew, a construct used in a fashion similar
to Bernard O’Donoghue’s myth, Clifton prioritises an ethic of margin-
ality that allows for continual reinvention of the self. From the outset
of his poetic career, Clifton is careful to position himself outside the
­traditional Irish emigration narrative, although his investment in figures
of European émigré culture locates his work in conversation with an
alternative narrative of 20th-century Irish migration literature, as rep-
resented by Beckett, Joyce, Devlin and MacGreevy. In Clifton’s poetry,
migration is an ethical act of detachment from a society that he expressly
disavows. Migration is also enabling, however, in that the act of migra-
tion permits reinvention of the self within a community of exiles and
allows for a reconfiguration of identity that Clifton devises through his
repeated allusions to various writers displaced by the Holocaust. These
figures function as incarnations of Clifton’s ethic of marginality while
150  A. McDAID

simultaneously representing damaged cultural memory and the irrepa-

rable rift in memory practices in post-Holocaust society. Clifton’s early
collections seek out the idiosyncrasies of elsewhere; the poet has worked
and lived in a range of diverse locations including Thailand, Africa, Italy
and Spain since leaving Ireland in the 1970s.4 Those volumes, including
The Walls of Carthage (1977), Office of the Salt Merchant (1979), The
Liberal Cage (1988), The Desert Route (1992) and Night Train Through
the Brenner (1994), construct a dialectic between home and away as he
‘tries to relate his experiences in Asia or Africa to Ireland, and [to] his
own status as a kind of exile’.5
The early work prioritises exotic locations, with geographic indicators
explicitly placed in titles like ‘Latitude 5° N’, ‘Loneliness in the Tropics’,
‘Field Hospital, Thailand 1982’ and ‘Absinthe at New Orleans’, all from
The Desert Route. Secular Eden (2007) moves away from these specifics
towards a more existential displacement, but maintains the poet’s ‘pact
with the marginal’, in Sebastian Barry’s phrase.6 ‘The Garden’ from
Secular Eden sets out Clifton’s faith in the essential insignificance of
elsewhere:

No need to mention where all this was.

I had travelled enough, by then,
To dispense with where. Sufficient to say
[…]
I was here, in the garden.
Secular Eden, 18–19.

The leitmotif of the eternal wanderer, a Wandering Jew-type figure

defined by his peripherality, is powerfully deployed in the urban Parisian
environs of Secular Eden. Returning to Ireland, as represented in The
Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), presents the experience of dis-
placement in repatriation and demonstrates that return, as well as depar-
ture, is an integral aspect of the migration experience. In this analysis
of Clifton’s Secular Eden and The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, the
reinvented self, as authorised by migration, is complicated by the poet’s
physical and imaginative return ‘home to original homelessness’.
Tracing the history of literary representations of the Wandering Jew,
Alberto Manguel declares that ‘all exile […] affirms the perseverance
of memory’.7 Perseverance is not preservation, however, and Clifton’s
versions of existence repeatedly assert the isolation of the wanderer
 4 WANDERING SONGS  151

in ‘the slippage and lost ground / of so many cities’. Secular Eden

takes place primarily in Paris, the modernist city of literary exile. The
titles of the various notebooks comprising the volume inscribe the
migrancy of the poetry: Notebook One, Three and Four travel, respec-
tively, via ‘(Paris-Bordeaux-Paris)’, ‘(Paris-Dublin-Paris)’ and ‘(Paris-
Sydney-Paris)’, while Notebook Two and Five both resolutely remain
in ‘(Paris)’. Paris holds a symbolic and actual position at the epicentre
of Secular Eden, imbued with the historical significances of the city’s
literary heritage while also being both subject and setting for many of
the poems.
The city in Secular Eden is populated by ‘ciphers of exile’, as Clifton
informs us in ‘White Russians’, who speak in and through the volume in
various guises of actual and imagined individuals. Clifton’s careful con-
structions of poetic remembering contribute to a European and interna-
tional memory of cultural heritage. Paris itself is also a symbol of exile,
replete with possibility and disappointment, of participation and exclu-
sion, of history and promise. Though the Polish city is the expressed
location of ‘Łódź’, the poem’s celebration of the spaces of human inter-
action is infused with the poet’s commitment to Paris:

Between thumb and forefinger

A city crumbles. I love it, though,
For all that rubs off, the living dust
Of people and situations[.]
Secular Eden, 118.

The prospect of reinvention through contact with the ‘living dust’ coun-
ters any construction of migration as disabling—the possibilities of the
city, a shifting repository of memories, motivate the poet. Drawing on a
counter-memory to Delanty and Wall’s emigration inheritance, Clifton
empowers his poetry with the invocative powers of the fourteenth arron-
dissement, ‘[a]ll softness of acacia trees, and plane-trees’ and its role-call
of former residents. Mentioning Beckett, Dali, Giacometti and Althusser,
‘The Fourteenth District’ celebrates the city ‘[w]here the lost-in-space
drop in, the émigrés getting by’.
This ‘remembered’ version of the city is a kind of construct, imagi-
natively reinvented through the city’s reputation as a literary and social
hub between the wars. The community of outsiders complements and
contradicts Clifton’s professed marginality, which his poetry admits is
152  A. McDAID

the product of a certain privilege: ‘True, it takes some luck and a little
money / to set yourself up around here, but it can be done.’ Like other
migrant poets, Clifton is acutely aware of the parallel lives that migra-
tion engenders, and the sliding doors of fortune and fate that determine
one’s path. From amongst his imagined community of writers and art-
ists in the historical fourteenth district, he recognises a moral imperative
to acknowledge other migration experiences. ‘How it might have been,
/ How it might be yet, in the other nineteen districts / Anyone may
guess’. Like Wall’s and Muldoon’s recognition of diverse migrant lives,
Clifton similarly reflects on the diversity of the city and its inhabitants. In
‘Epiphany Cakes’ the speaker ventures into the urban maelstrom:

In the immigrant quarter—

African dates, and oranges in season
For it is deep winter, and the clothes-presses
Billowing steam, and the doors of hammams
Behind which bodies soak.
Secular Eden, 67.

The familiar Paris of the Latin Quarter is occluded by the exotic and sen-
sual intoxications of the immigrant districts. ‘Billowing steam’ enacts a
sense of gleeful disorientation in the bustling ‘Middle Eastern crowds’
thronging Faubourg Saint-Denis. ‘Epiphany Cakes’ merges the city’s
spheres of existence through the image of the baked treats, which shift
the poem’s focus from its present-day immigration back to its west-
ern lineage. Reaching through cultural memory to a Christian herit-
age, the speaker tries to define for himself some meaning, ‘to see what
it is made of’; however the epiphany cake crumbles, and instead the
speaker reaches to ‘pick up an objet trouvé’. Moving easily between tra-
ditions, the speaker is comfortable in his essential outsiderness, both of
the Christian ritual and the Middle Eastern routine. The poem concludes
with Clifton’s sense of his own purpose as a poet:

No saint, but a go-between

On lines of faith and lost transcendence,
One who, in his time, has shamed the devil.
I was born for this and other acts of retrieval.
Secular Eden, 68.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  153

The ‘acts of retrieval’ are also acts of memory—memory that is con-

structed, adopted, reinvented and even impersonated through Clifton’s
personae. Outsider figures function throughout his poetry as a mode
of remembering a variety of pasts, allowing the poet to access indi-
vidual and collective memories. Clifton stages memory through what
Neumann calls ‘conceptual and ideological fictions of memory’ that
are an ‘imaginative (re)construction of the past in response to current
needs’.8 Clifton’s philosophical conviction in the essential solitariness of
human experience is complicated by his urge to represent history, espe-
cially European, traumatic and literary history, as the overarching pattern
into and from which all memory feeds. ‘White Russians’ balances these
crises of representation by positioning the city’s apartment blocks as
honeycombs of memory, each cell cocooning individual experience that
contributes to larger cultural structures of the past; the image is insinu-
ated through olfactory stimulation upon entering the building, ‘that
smell of beeswax’ acting as a memory cue for the poem.
The listed names on the apartment building’s entrance function
as another device in ‘White Russians’, allowing the poem to introduce
the range of historical characters who inhabit the memory comb. The
poem opens with the speaker—‘I scan them, floor by floor, the lists of
names’—but the narrative ‘I’ disappears until the final line of the poem,
as the voice is commandeered by the individuals and their memories.
Memory is rendered through mimesis here, in the way that voices are
interrupted, thoughts truncated, and details are vague—unreliability is
memory’s constant companion, especially in the crowded urban space.
The ‘ensemble of narrative forms and aesthetic techniques through
which literary forms stage and reflect the workings of memory’ is exqui-
sitely performed in Clifton’s poem.9 His use of the sensory prompt, and
the organisation of potential modes of remembering in the image of
listed names, suggest the multiple possibilities of memory from the out-
set, as the poem is poised on the cusp of its ‘fiction of memory’.
Entering the realm of recollection, the poem travels through imag-
istic flashes of memory impelled by the mention of names and places:
‘Lazarevitch? Blue in his Renault fatigues, / Among white-hot bob-
bins’. The associative nature of memory carries the poem through cul-
tural memory, in the form of a Russian ‘refrain’ which stands, italicised,
within the poem as an uncertain snippet of something once known: ‘At
Vladivostok, the Sea of Japan froze. / Our clothes rattled like tin. / For
fear of gangrene, we amputated our toes.’ The poem is interspersed with
154  A. McDAID

ellipses, dashes and question marks, which operate as semantic incarna-

tions of the linkages and lapses of memory:

[…]Who remembers now, who cares

Which side, if any, you were on?
Lazarevitch? A name on the fifteenth floor,

Indifferent as Paris…Sellier, Langlois,

Senecaux, Fabre. What about Le Bigot?
Who was he? And what about you? And what about me?
Once upon a time there were Green intrigues
And goings into exile … John MacBride are you there?
Secular Eden, 11.

The litany of names, along with émigré union leader Lazarevitch,

and writers Shestov, Tsvetayeva, Efron and Weil mentioned elsewhere in
‘White Russians’, is another construction of community created by mar-
ginalisation. The indifference of the city conflates these individuals into
a vague collective of ‘exile’ that includes an Irish national touchstone for
the poet in the form of John MacBride. All of the names recede into
obscurity through the inevitable erasures of time and urbanity, however,
and through the phenomenological thrust of memory, the poem swings
back to the original ‘I’. The ongoing negotiations between past and pre-
sent, and between self and other, that dominate memory construction
are restated in the final lines: ‘Someday, when we all have time to spare /
From dreaming of the future, / Re-imagine the past, how I came to be
here.’ The self is subdued in the appropriation of historical exilic experi-
ence, a gesture that treads a fine line between excoriation and aspiration.
Clifton’s marginality is doubled then, firstly by the distance he places
between himself and his birthplace, and secondly by his poetic recupera-
tion of obscure historical and literary migrants. Like Morrissey’s wilful
linguistic and cultural displacement in Japan, Clifton’s quiet identifica-
tion with outsider figures is, itself, a reinvention of the self in the implicit
terms of those earlier migrations. Clifton’s wanderers range from politi-
cal refugees to the more cosmopolitan or bourgeois émigrés, for whom
travel is desired rather than required. In ‘the million immigrant lives that
shoot like grass / [b]etween the tracks’, as he observes in ‘Estacion el
Retiro, Buenos Aires’, Clifton is less invested. It is the individual trau-
mas of memory and loss, as well as the possibilities of newly-formed
 4 WANDERING SONGS  155

communities, that truly transfix his work. The larger context of revo-
lutionary Russia and the Holocaust are alluded to in his poetry, but
Clifton never lays claim to the waves of global and historical crises. This
reluctance to represent surely relates to Gubar’s recognition of anxie-
ties of testimony and witness, while also adverting to Clifton’s deliberate
decision to shun domestic Irish literary expectations in his consciously
European aesthetic.
The question of audience for the migrant poet is complicated,
whether migration is through contrived detachment or unavoidable
circumstance. The persona of Polish novelist Witold Gobrowicz who,
through a series of unfortunate circumstances, found himself effectively
stranded in Argentina upon the outbreak of World War II, agonises over
the question ‘Who am I writing to? in ‘Letter from Buenos Aires’ from
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.10 The latent anxieties of the novelist,
semantically present in the poem’s trailing ellipses, centre on his fear of
being ‘abandoned by history’ in ‘a city of exile …’. Given Clifton’s own
return to Ireland after almost three decades living elsewhere, the poem’s
final lines are pithy:

Returning from the dead, to find myself famous,

[…]
To step back into, a man half-shade,
Half-revenant, my destiny half-complete.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 126–127.

For others in Clifton’s retinue of historical migrants, the dream of

return is never realised. Elegising the Romanian poet, Clifton’s poem
‘Benjamin Fondane Departs for the East’ stands alongside Mahon’s
superlative ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ as artistic gestures that
fully inhabit, without appropriating, the events of the Holocaust. Mahon
and Clifton share an avowed European sensibility, as well as an ethic of
marginality, which can also be perceived in the writing of novelist John
Banville. Clifton’s ‘Dying Generations’ converses directly with Mahon’s
‘Everything is Going to Be Alright’; Clifton’s evocations of sky and
light—‘I wake / [w]ith an empty mind / to a high ceiling’—drawing
upon Mahon’s ‘clouds clearing beyond the dormer window / and a
high tide reflected on the ceiling’. Clifton’s question—‘[w]ho wouldn’t
feel’—seems to reiterate Mahon’s rhetorical ‘[h]ow could I not be glad’,
in a rehearsal of intertextual memory.11 Both poems aspire to a condition
156  A. McDAID

of clarity while refusing easy consolations—a shared ethical position

underpinning both poets’ work.
‘Benjamin Fondane Departs for the East’ demonstrates an elegiac
impulse towards solace through honesty, and through the written word.
Clifton’s fiction of memory through the characteristic ‘reminiscing narra-
tor or figure … [using] the typical pattern for the literary representation
of memories [which] is retrospection or analepsis’,12 and is populated by
‘unreal, uprooted, spectres drifting through’. The poem is constructed as
a coda of sorts to Fondane’s work: the poem the Romanian poet might
have written if he had not been executed.13 The sense of responsibility
permeates the poem’s imagery, eliding the distinction between the active
and ventriloquising poetic self.14 As Rudasvsky-Brody observes in his
translator’s note on ‘The Sorrow of Ghosts’, Fondane writes of ‘ghosts
[…] fleeing from a world falling to pieces. They are fatally estranged,
from that lost world that was never theirs in the first place [and] from
their own past’.15 These ‘ghosts’ visit Clifton’s poem, waiting to depart,
with ‘[t]he ashes of our ancestors in suitcases, / [b]ound for Buenos
Aires, bound for the New’. The poem encodes memory’s shorthand with
reference to ‘Athens and Jerusalem, Ulysses and the Wandering Jew’.
Fondane’s close relationship with philosopher Shestov is implied in the
reference to Shestov’s philosophical dialectic of Reason vs Absurdity
for which he substituted Athens and Jerusalem respectively.16 ‘Ulysses’
refers to Fondane’s own poem, but also to Joyce and the longer path-
ways of mythic memory, to which the image of the ‘Wandering Jew’ also
belongs. The many levels of memory functioning within the poem serve
as a tenuous anchor against the steady annihilation of certainty brought
about by the Holocaust:

As the monies collapse

And the borders, all of us transmigrating
Like souls, through the neutral space on the map.
Athens and Jerusalem, Ulysses and the Wandering Jew–
There we all go, the living and the dead,
The one in the other…
Secular Eden, 200.

In a prose piece on Fondane, Clifton quotes Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘two

simplicities, that of departure and that of return. Fondane lived to expe-
rience only the first’.17 The essence of the Wandering Jew archetype is
 4 WANDERING SONGS  157

the dream, but never the realisation, of return. Like a diaspora, for which
the Wandering Jew is an historic symbol, the Wandering Jew’s very exist-
ence is predicated on the impossibility of repatriation. If the Wandering
Jew (or the diaspora) were to simply return, the myth would lose its
potency. The Wandering Jew is always peripheral, on the outskirts of his-
tory and society, even if he manages an approximation of return. In The
Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, the experience of return to Ireland con-
fronts the poet with the actuality and the associations of Ireland that his
ethic of marginalisation deliberately strives to avoid. Through an affective
conflation of the personal and the archetypal, Clifton’s poetic negotia-
tion of return demands a further reinvention of the self and, indeed, of
Ireland as a construct as well as a material, historical and topographical
location. Carrying forward the humanist, universal and European per-
spective of Secular Eden, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass conveys the
protagonist as one of the many ghosts of Secular Eden; belated, periph-
eral, and detached.
The epilogue to The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass sets out in a hazy
scene of ‘Dublin under sea-fog, dreeping weather, / [s]alt air blown
inland …’ that signals its debt to Joyce in the word choice of ‘dreep’.18
‘Dreeping’ features in the Penelope episode—‘he did look like a big
fool dreeping in the rain’—and the journey in Clifton’s poem takes us
deep into the heart of Joyce’s Dublin: ‘The cab turns west / [a]t Brady’s
pharmacy, into the nightlit drizzle / [o]f Harrington Street.’ ‘Dreeping’
evokes the dreary depression of the city streets, its pervasiveness con-
veyed by the present participle form and the elongated doubled vowel.
The streets are vaguely threating, with a Circean quality that intensifies
the unheimlich nature of this nostos: ‘Alive to the danger, in this mon-
key-puzzle / [o]f ancestry’. The figure’s return is enacted under the
city’s watchful eyes, its own ghosts populating the poem’s background.
Molly, Bloom, Stephen and Joyce all lurk in these lines, questioning the
protagonist:

Are you not scared, young man, of your Daddy’s ghost

And his before him, waiting here to greet you,
Latest of blow-ins, ready to try again?
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 14.

This explicit confrontation of the returning artist (addressing him as

‘young man’ is less a designation of age than an insinuation of his lack
158  A. McDAID

of authority) introduces the challenges of repatriation that define The

Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.
By re-situating himself in Ireland both poetically and physically,
Clifton reengages a set of cultural and personal memories with which he
is charged to address; memories around identity, heritage, and responsi-
bility temporarily suspended by his migrations. Return is another migra-
tion and demands similar reinventions of the self and the past. Clifton
positions his return as to a defamiliarised location; signifiers like street-
names, historical resonances and literary lineages are recognisable but
not intimately known. The uncertainties of return migration are simu-
lated through memory loss and ontological anxiety as well as through a
pervasive belatedness that situates the poet as incontrovertibly marginal.
This self-positioning empowers Clifton to reinvent, rather than subscribe
to, inherited versions of Ireland—indeed by returning, he rediscovers the
country from which he originally migrated.
Literary heritages loom over The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.
Joyce’s shadow is cast through the reinvention of the Wandering Jew
figure while Beckett is suggested by the cover image of two lonely fig-
ures traipsing through an emptied landscape, allusions that recognise
a weighty literary lineage of exilic writers for whom Ireland remains a
troubling place. The cover image of the Dublin mountains is taken from
Eoin O’Brien’s The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland (1996),
thereby acknowledging his one-time fellow Paris émigré and alerting
the reader to the specific literary lineage with which Clifton identifies.19
Clifton’s efforts to return are fraught with a familiarity blended with
apprehension, in this place where ‘the heart still melts / [f[or the mil-
lionth time, old snow becoming rain / [o]ff the Irish Sea’. The epilogue
concludes with a manifesto of sorts for the poet:

Immerse yourself, disturb the human silt,

An anchor feeling for bottom, in home waters.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 14.

The soft searching here is antithetical to the harsh determination of

Stephen Dedalus to forge in the smithy of the soul, but the guiding
‘anchor’ strikes the anvil of Joyce’s own investment in the literary pos-
sibilities of the subject of Ireland. Clifton’s use of fluid imagery, particu-
larly his quest for home ‘waters’ rather than home ‘ground’, signals an
uneasiness with the topographical metaphors of Ireland; a poetic device
 4 WANDERING SONGS  159

of detachment seen in the writings of female migrant poets including

Vona Groarke and Sara Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Clifton aspires to rein-
vent the codes of engagement with the motifs of Irish poetry; Clifton’s
epigraph avows to strike a balance between the gravitational pull of the
anchor and the constant mobility of the water.
This quest for home is navigated in a vignette of return and estrange-
ment entitled ‘Little Jerusalem’ that relocates the archetypal Wandering
Jew figure, via Joyce, in contemporary Dublin. Taking its refrain from
Psalm 137, ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’, the poem remembers the collec-
tive suffering of the Jewish people while reinforcing the fragility of mem-
ory through its single-line chorus, ‘If I forget thee o Jerusalem’. Positing
the persona of the returning wanderer, the poem ‘foreswears the possi-
bility of return altogether’ in its expressed prayer20:

Let me not be granted entry

To my homeland. Let me awaken,
A wandering Jew, in a faraway place[.]
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 18.

The performativity inherent in acting the role of a figure of displace-

ment is surely present in this wish; for Clifton, the lived experience of
migration has enabled his central ethic of marginalisation. In their intro-
duction to the volume Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement
in Contemporary Literature, Baronian, Besser and Jansen describe the
productive aspect of displacement, functioning not only ‘as an impulse
to (re)produce and (re)create the loss but, simultaneously, to reinvest
something else somewhere else in the present and future’.21 Having success-
fully invested his poetry elsewhere, in The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass
Clifton recognises the ‘Imaginary Israels / I have come back from’, and
after ‘forty years in the wilderness’, returns imaginatively and literally to
Dublin as the city ‘heaves a fin-de-siécle sigh’.
Writing as critic rather than poet, Justin Quinn identifies Clifton as
foremost amongst a group of poets whom he sees as collectively and
individually ‘uninterested in the historical fate and crises of Ireland in
the 20th century’.22 While this holds true for the earlier work, Quinn’s
analysis does not predict the turn for home that Clifton’s poetry takes
in The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass. The altered tilt of his imagina-
tive universe is inscribed in the structure of the book—where Secular
Eden approximates the peripatetic lifestyle by counterpointing Paris with
160  A. McDAID

named other places, The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass is comprised

of three sections, entitled ‘Twenty-Six Counties’, ‘Six Counties’, and
‘Elsewhere’. That is not to suggest that Ireland is absent in Secular Eden;
however, when it does feature, it remains an obtuse, unfathomable place
that mesmerises and maddens the poet in equal measure. ‘The Place’,
from Secular Eden, anticipates the tone of The Winter Sleep of Captain
Lemass:

Unnameable, that blinding sheet of water

High in the hills I came upon out of the blue
And off the map, on my own way through
The sites of famine and the sites of slaughter.

That called themselves Ireland. I had fished it, of course,

In childhood. That much, at least, was clear[.]
Secular Eden, 115.

Invoking an intertwined topography of personal and collective mem-

ory, the protagonist moves through history in an attempt to clarify what
might be meant by ‘Ireland’. Just as Eamonn Wall negotiates with the
myth of ‘America’ in his migration across the continent, and as Sinéad
Morrissey comes to appreciate in Japan, Clifton recognises the depths
behind the easy motifs. The deliberate vagueness of the poem’s title
reveals the poet’s reluctance to classify, and when his home country is
named once more in ‘The Place’, it is qualified immediately: ‘Ireland, so
to speak, / [h]ad come between us’.
If Ireland is ‘unnameable’ until the final lines of ‘The Place’, in ‘The
Country of Still Waters’ the eponymous country is not specified at all.
Through a store of cultural references—‘the book of invasions’, ‘great
houses’, ‘the workhouse slate’—memory is mobilised and location
implied. ‘Frozen in time’, the ‘country of still waters’ is a place of sta-
sis, with depths of submerged memory that resurface in those points of
reference. The ‘stillness, a moratorium’ grants a moment of pause not
dissimilar to Stevens’ ‘Autumn Refrain’. It is ‘the stillness of everything
gone, and being still’ that inscribes belatedness on nature itself.23 This
belatedness marks much of Clifton’s poetry where his protaganists, in
their return to once-familiar spaces, find themselves on the margins of
time as well as of society. In ‘The Country of Still Waters’, the poem
apprehends the difficulties of entering a landscape, whether poetic,
 4 WANDERING SONGS  161

political or geographical, which remains inwrought with legacies of the

past. Even language itself is aesthetically belated in the way it rephrases
John Montague’s 1972 poem, ‘A Lost Tradition’:

Water, wood and stone,

A lost inheritance, physical, entire,
Disentangling itself from barbed wire,
Ridding itself of history, coming into its own.24

When Clifton declares, just two poems later in Secular Eden, ‘I want to
go back, / [j]ust once, behind all that is Ireland’, he finally articulates
the problematical cultural encoding of ‘Ireland’. Like Sinéad Morrissey’s
attempts to unravel the accumulated associations of the kanji in her
Japanese poems, Clifton is eager to find a mode of addressing Ireland
without finding his words recruited by rhetoric. ‘The Country of Still
Waters’ is an exercise in pushing the language of ‘Ireland’ without invok-
ing Ireland itself, as the poet probes at the borders of shared memory.
Clifton’s resistance to essentialism results in a creative tension between
his poetic impulse to represent and his inclination towards marginality;
by using the technique of belatedness, the poet distils that creative ten-
sion into poetry that prioritises peripherality through existential distance.
Literary, cultural, and anecdotal memory conflate in ‘The Winter
Sleep of Captain Lemass’, which takes the historical figure of Captain
Noel Lemass, who was kidnapped and murdered in July 1923, just two
months after the end of the Civil War during which he had fought on
the Anti-Treaty side. History remembers his younger brother Seán,
who became Taoiseach in 1959, but the passages of time and politics
have mostly forgotten Noel Lemass. His death is memorialised chiefly
through a lonely monument in the Featherbed Mountains where his
body was found, encountered by Beckett’s protaganists in Mercier and
Camier (1988). The erosions of memory over time have already worn
away the facts for Mercier and Camier; trying to find its location, neither
can fully recall: ‘I once knew, said Mercier, but no longer. I once knew
said Camier, I’m almost sure.’25 Lemass’s reputation and even his name
also suffer the trial of time in Beckett’s novel:

His name was Mass, perhaps Massey. No great store was set by him now,
in patriotic circles. It was true he had done little for the cause. But he still
had this monument. All that, and no doubt much more, Mercier and per-
haps Camier had once know, and all forgotten.26
162  A. McDAID

Seán Kennedy’s analysis of the workings of the Lemass story within

Beckett’s post-war novel offers comprehensive detail of the murder
and events surrounding the death.27 Kennedy suggests that Beckett’s
obfuscation of the Lemass story is ‘deliberately disingenuous’ and won-
ders whether ‘Mercier and Camier’s cultural amnesia has allowed them
to escape the burden of [Irish military] history’.28 In The Irish Beckett
(1991), John P. Harrington notes the complexity of Beckett’s attitude
to his native country in the novella; he writes ‘the antinomies of place in
Mercier and Camier are attachment to it and repulsion from it, identifi-
cation of self with place ruptured by distance of self from place’.29
These particular ‘antimonies of place’ are played out by Clifton through
similar crises of memory. His impulse towards maligned historical figures is
contradicted by his reticence towards Irish history. Whereas his European
sensibilities hitherto buffered this duality, in The Winter Sleep of Captain
Lemass the strands entangle, and memory (with its fallibilities) is recruited
to sustain the characteristic distance to which Clifton’s poetry continu-
ally aspires. Like Beckett’s characters, the speakers in ‘The Winter Sleep of
Captain Lemass’ are vague in their recollections—‘[“]It might have been
Marlborough Street— / Or was it Griffith barracks?[”]’. In light of the
failure of memory to protect and present the past, the repercussions (‘our
bitterness, our confusion’) continue through time: ‘A single shot— / A
hundred years of travelling echoes, / Family history, unmarked plots.’
Clifton etches the Civil War politics onto the landscape itself, the bit-
ter divisiveness of post-war society incarnated in the environment and
represented in the poetics of the stanza:

The life of the country

Hardened against you
Like frost, and a new front

Opened – brother against brother[.]

The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 68.

The ‘new front’ expands into space on the page as the stanza breaks
and then recommences with ‘[o]pened’, the possibility of the ‘new’
briefly held in the poem’s pause before it is closed down by the tightly
bound two-syllabled words of the ensuing sentence. The murky events of
post-Civil War Ireland and its hypocrisy burn into the poem in a death-
bed flash of recognition:
 4 WANDERING SONGS  163

Your eyes,
Blindfolded, beheld the ideal State
As the real one steadied itself
To annihilate you.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 69.

Divided into three chronological stanzas—1923, 1943 and 2004—the

poem, speaks out of the dominant atmosphere of ‘a universe of haunt-
ings, aftermaths and returns’.30 The unquiet grave of the Featherbed
where the Lemass memorial stands is deep in the Dublin Mountains, a
dangerous liminal space located just beyond the city boundaries. In let-
ters to Thomas McGreevy, Beckett professed his own discomfort at the
‘stealthy, secret variety’ of the landscape and its ‘calm secret hostility’.31
Present-day associations link the mountains to shallow graves, hidden
loot, abducted women and the Provisional IRA. The stretch of history
is anticipated from the ‘single shot’ of the opening stanza and while nar-
ratologically, memory may be vague, its insistence is lodged like ‘a splin-
ter of ice in the soul / still growing’ and its persistence unremitting:
Lemass’s ghost begs of the past ‘[w]hen will you ever go to ground?
Must I lie here endlessly[?]’.
‘Groggy with nature, history, space’, Clifton’s speaker is bewitched by
the interplay of these elements, recognisable as dogged themes of tradi-
tional Irish poetry. Landscape, the past, and place are central tenets of
precisely the kind of poetry that Clifton had publicly disavowed in the
past; in his essay ‘Coming Home’ (2006), Clifton raises his reservations
about Irish poetry and the various pressures and expectations exerted on
poets with a harp on their passport. He declares that Irish poetry was
concerned with ‘roots, etymologising, the recovering of old place-names
[…] The direction was inward and backward […] Ireland, if you were
an Irish writer, was what you wrote out of and what you wrote about’.32
After three decades deliberately circumventing such tropes through his
migrations, his marginality and his European sensibility, returning to
Ireland necessarily reintroduces poetic agitations of subject and expres-
sion that present themselves throughout The Winter Sleep of Captain
Lemass.
Questions of return and anxieties about theme and content trou-
ble Clifton’s writing even as he anticipates repatriation, as poems such as
‘The Country of Still Waters’ and ‘That Place’ demonstrate. In his vexed
expressions of the conflicts of expectation and aspiration, Clifton’s poetry
164  A. McDAID

narrates some of the challenges of return migration for a poet who has
definitively sought to slip the nets of inherited ideologies and stock themes.
The allusive figure of Noel Lemass is used to reach through cultural, col-
lective and literary memory while also positing an apt counterpoint for
Clifton’s own sense of marginalisation and his personal journey of return:

Again, I kiss myself goodnight

In the name of the lost, the disinherited,
All who never came back from the dead
To tell their story, claim their place[.]
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 71.

Even this conclusion, in succeeding to lay Lemass to rest, conducts a

problematic synchronicity between place and person that relies on invest-
ment in the landscape as a medium of knowledge and experience. For
all the disavowals of ontological certainty inscribed within the poem, the
steady rhyme and regular rhythm of the final quartet offer a resolution in
its careful cyclicality:

By a memory-stone, a fouled lair,

Bog-cotton whispering in my ears,
The sound of a car, a light somewhere
In the silences, the years.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 71.

Emptied landscapes like the Featherbed are prominent in The Winter

Sleep of Captain Lemass, as Clifton attempts to manage the antagonisms
of form and subject as well as the Beckettian antimonies of place and
self.33 Clifton resists the hermetic limitations of landscape and nation,
as articulated in his forthright criticisms of conformative Irish poetry.
Nevertheless, his poetry is possessed of a sense of place, although it dif-
fers from what Richard Tillinghast describes as ‘rootedness in Ireland’.
Instead, Clifton’s poetry is marked ‘by being attache[d] to landscape’.34
In committing to the physical space of his return migration without
inhabiting the mythic ‘Ireland’ that his poetry distrusts, Clifton car-
ries forward his enduring commitment to marginality. Aligning himself
with Joyce and Beckett from the outset of the volume, Clifton reinvents
Ireland as a valid space in which he can maintain the deliberate outsid-
erness that characterises his early poetry. Rather than conferring him
 4 WANDERING SONGS  165

with a set of unwanted responsibilities, with which his prose reflections

are preoccupied, returning to Ireland brings a new sense of possibility to
Clifton’s poetry.
Intonations of marginality underpin Clifton’s poetic imagery of the
Irish landscape, specifically in spaces of desolation that encode a familiar
belatedness in the sense of arriving after the event. Wide-open vistas are
unbroken by human presence, serving to disengage the umbilical con-
nection of self and place, as in ‘A Crossroads’:

I was down there

In the midlands, waiting
Under slate-grey skies
At a crossroads.

Aspens whispered,
Miles of wheat. Eared silences
Ripened, imperceptibly,
Towards I knew not what.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 41.

In ‘The Approaches’, ‘westering skies, wide, melancholy / [u]ncut fields

and paced-out walls’ depict an unsettling emptiness that removes the
human element; yet absence itself is a presence, realised through reinven-
tion. Just as forgetting is integral to memory, absence and presence co-
operate in a crucial dialectic. The ‘abandoned houses’ pockmarking the
collection tell of how ‘[s]omeone had walked away / [f]orever’, creating
a double marginality in the positioning of the volume.
Being both an outsider and outside history, Clifton constructs a frame
of distance through which past, present and future can all be simultane-
ously re-envisioned. The temporal conditionality of memory is managed
here by the suspension of historical time; it is as though a freeze frame
pauses the scene at the moment of the poet’s intervention. The possi-
bilities of past and future are crystallised in this pure moment in ‘The
Approaches’:

They are gone, now, the hours of light

It took to get here. Might-have-beens,
Lost wanderyears, But that’s alright
We are trading it in, the seen
166  A. McDAID

For the experienced, the car-keys

For the end of the journey.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 112.

The shades of parallel lives—the ‘[m]ight-have-beens’—are hauntings

that linger around many of the poetries under discussion in this study.
Migration necessarily suspends one life while initiating another, and the
temporal disruptions resulting from these disjunctions are repeatedly the
subject of migrant poetry.
Clifton sees ‘shadow selves’ beckoning him on to ‘the release / [i]
nto childhood, and the coming home’. It is an ambiguous summons,
from ‘a barren crone’ and ‘a man alone’—a belated version of Cathleen
Ní Houlihan and her virile menfolk—but once again, Clifton locates a
Beckettian solace to be found here. ‘Dying Generations’ purports to
offer little but it ultimately celebrates the liberation inherent in renuncia-
tion and nullification:

I no longer believe in anything

But the greenness, the greyness,
The eternal everydayness
Of Ireland. Time, they tell me, will come back –
The past, the future.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 53.

Although confronting to the reader (another instance of Clifton’s antag-

onisms of form and subject), the disavowal embedded in the conflicted
negative opens a space for alterity—of memory and of time. With no
belief in ‘any’ thing, there is space for belief in ‘some’ thing, and the sen-
tence’s enjambment hangs briefly on the refusal before collapsing into a
profuse expression of faith. The repetition of ‘-ness’ denotes abundance,
and gives the stanza urgency and momentum to propel the line away
from the negative initiation.
The ‘-ness’ of ‘Dying Generations’ approximates the indefinable joy
found in the specific, ‘the small thing done well’ as Clifton calls it. The
macro-pattern of his poetic ethos that finds the universal human expe-
rience in the specific is approximated in his celebration of nature in its
miniature detail. ‘I hunker down and see the daffodils / at eye-level
with the light coming through them’, he says in ‘Daffodils’. Such small
gestures of beauty transcend and defuse larger structures of contested,
 4 WANDERING SONGS  167

traumatic histories and the capacious landscapes of a troubled depopu-

lated Ireland. A particular effect of this strategy is that by adopting a
small-frame perspective, context becomes irrelevant and the reader is
obliged to relinquish the urge to situate the poem. It is a device that
serves the migrant poet well, freeing him from the expectations of geo-
historical specificity and allowing for repeated reinventions while requir-
ing none. The yellow light—‘indefinable, but absolutely pure, / [i]
rradiating everything’—diffuses the ‘grey Irish light’ of ‘days that never
rise about themselves’ in those wider, cloud-filled panoramas of the Irish
countryside. Where memory occludes, aesthetics clarify, and the consola-
tions of lyric tether the existential anxiety underpinning these poems that
‘do not bypass history [but] wrestle with and work through the past in a
wholly measured and compelling way’.35
Returning to Ireland as subject for poetry means unavoidable reengage-
ment on some level with cultural and historical memory, including the
fractured histories of Northern Ireland. The sectional subtitles of the vol-
ume—‘Twenty-Six Counties’, ‘Six Counties’ and ‘Elsewhere’—are (sur-
prisingly for Clifton’s poetry) politically loaded. The terms ‘Twenty-Six
Counties’ and ‘Six Counties’ insinuate Republican sensibilities, as these terms,
substituted for the official place-names ‘Republic of Ireland’ and ‘Northern
Ireland’, impute a particular mode of cultural remembering. Maureen
Murphy’s quantitative analysis of lexical preferences amongst Unionist
and Nationalist communities in Northern Ireland demonstrates the dis-
parities of usage of terminology. In referring to the Republic of Ireland, the
term ‘twenty-six counties’ is used by Republicans as a variant in political
speeches, publications and news articles as frequently as 49.1% pre-Good
Friday Agreement and 57.6% post-GFA; corresponding Unionist usage
is 0%.36 Analysis of the same variety of sources yields similar results for
the phrase ‘six counties’.37 The encoded bias of language performs an act of
unconscious remembering in the way it participates in identity formation and
ideological positioning. Clifton’s use of these charged terms opens another
unexpected avenue of memory that the poet had earlier vehemently refused.
The fractious negotiation between responsibility and ambivalence
amongst Republic of Ireland poets with regard to the perceived pressure
to represent the Troubles has been well-discussed, summed up by John
Goodby as the ‘belief still held in some quarters in the Republic that
Northern Irish poetry is a “journalistic invention”’. Goodby considers
‘the South’s detachment of itself from Northern atavisms’ as character-
istic of poetry of the Republic at that time.38 As one of the poets to
168  A. McDAID

whom Goodby refers, Clifton has written of his own sense of detach-
ment from the Troubles, and his recollections stir a measure of resent-
ment at the dominance of the Troubles as poetic subject during that
period.

And within Ireland, as a poetic force-field, the assumption of guilt towards

Northern Ireland, so that even those like Paul Durcan not born into it felt
impelled to write about it, and those like Derek Mahon who had left it for
wider fields of exploration, came back to it in guilt and expiation.39

On an individual level, Clifton declares an absolute lack of interest

or obligation in writing about the North during that period: ‘I had
had no connections, apart from tenuous literary ones, with Northern
Ireland’. His marriage to novelist and Armagh native Deirdre Madden
changes his horizons however, and he now finds himself ethically
charged to revisit his original apprehensions of writing about Ireland.
This reconfiguration of his relationship with Ireland is realised in his
prose: ‘Now … we were going back on our annual visits from main-
land Europe, not to one Ireland but to two Irelands.’ Marrying into
Northern Ireland also means that the poet has become enmeshed in
the cultural, linguistic and landscape memories that had previously
eluded him. In ‘Deep Ulster’ he looks for, and finds, the imperceptible
‘unnameable’ that recurs in his work: ‘It was here, the elemental cen-
tre, / All the time. Eternally present, repeating itself ’. Accepting that
‘the old knowledge / opens the mind again’, the poet finds himself
navigating ‘the map of becoming’ even while knowing, as in ‘Sweat-
House’, that the gaps of memory will always be flawed: ‘something is
missing, something is incomplete.’
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass can be read as a journey back,
then, not through memory but to the places where memory resides.
Active remembering rarely takes place in this volume, but everywhere is
haunted by the possibilities and the absences of memory. The final sec-
tion, ‘Elsewhere’, is located mostly in South America and the section’s
title is an intertextual allusion to Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel.
Bishop’s totemic status as the definitive poet of dislocation finds her
featuring as a powerful influence in the poetry of Martina Evans and
Colette Bryce; for Clifton, the shared geographical experience sparks his
poetic memory of Bishop. In ‘The Mynah Bird’ the act of making poetry
is constructed as an inevitably isolated act:
 4 WANDERING SONGS  169

Always pulling
Alone, to some station
In the middle of nowhere,
Giving it a name,

Exactitudes. A glass
To be rubbed clean.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 134.

Clifton’s poem casts the eponymous bird as an albatross, a symbol of

poetry as both a blessing and a curse that becomes the medium of mem-
ory with its multiple purposes: ‘repeating / the unspeakable, passing
along / the chatter of the ages’. The rhyming couplet of the final stanza,
‘neither here nor there / is your only heir’ grammatically purports to the
mynah bird ‘in the hanging cage’, but the subject is distanced by stanzas
and pagination. The exact rhyme of heir with there pushes the clauses
together, and the poem asserts dislocation as Bishop’s final legacy.
Likewise, the typically bereft spaces of ‘Elsewhere’ echo with mem-
ories from other ghosts, whose voices distort inherited narratives of
belonging and exclusion:

A run-down hall of echoes. Shout your name,

You will hear it again, from generations
Gone before you … The souls they have become
By the million, look at them, transmigrating[.]
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 114.

This version of ‘postmemory’, in Marianne Hirsch’s definition as a ‘connec-

tion to the past … not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative invest-
ment, projection, and creation’, allows the poet to ‘remember’ without ever
having experienced the inherited past.40 Hirsch applies her theory with regard
to the Holocaust, but its structuring of postmemory as clarifying ‘the multi-
ple ruptures and radical breaks introduced by trauma and catastrophe inflect
intra-, inter- and trans-generational inheritance’ is applicable to wider contexts
of remembering.41 Migration is essentially a rupture, which ceases one mode
of existence and instigates another, and it undoubtedly influences and alters
versions of inheritance, whether familial, communal or cultural. Hirsch’s gen-
erational gloss can be expanded to incorporate these varieties of social struc-
tures that are surely as integral to the formation of the self as the family unit.
170  A. McDAID

For Clifton, this ‘postmemory’ is multiply enabling. In ‘Elsewhere’,

he can retrieve and reinvent some measure of his own complex ances-
tral history—watch as ‘[a] door blows open, into a vanished world’—
while maintaining the ‘post’ that is crucial to his ethic of marginality.
Furthermore, the ‘post’ of postmemory lends itself to the atmosphere
of belatedness that pervades Clifton’s work. The epilogue to The Winter
Sleep of Captain Lemass is an exquisite evocation of the kind of emptied
spaces in which postmemory is both essential and inescapable. It is a
landscape of human and natural degradation that yet lends itself to its
present and its possibilities. A key criteria of postmemory is that is allows
both then and now, while its essential creativity also engages a future.

The bog-cotton infinite, shimmering like a sea,

The gulls blown in on the wind, off Blacksod Bay,

The power station shut, the stock derailed

On rusty tracks. The obsolete, epic scale.
The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 144.

The poem’s imagery inhabits the processes of memory, which oper-

ate inexorably from absence. ‘The mountain ash is lonely for the moun-
tain’ is a haiku-like image that reaches to grasp the symbiosis of memory
and loss. Pursuing the line of memory has its limits—‘only so far, they
tell you’—but in returning ‘home to original homelessness, glad to be lost’,
memory, like displacement, is realised in its absences and its failings, in
the place and the thing missed and forgotten. Clifton’s structures of dis-
placement are inscribed in and by the workings of memory in his poetry.

‘As at home here as I’ll ever be’: Sinéad Morrissey

and the Poetry of Parallax

The peripherality that Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry pursues through migra-

tion is predicated on cultural otherness that has its roots in her formative
experiences in Belfast. The origins, motivations and expressions of her
poetic peripherality have a personal tone, differing from the constructed
detachment of Clifton’s poetry. Morrissey’s early constructions of oth-
erness are realised through stagings of migration and home in her first
two volumes, There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996) and Between Here
and There (2002).42 As efforts to escape, the migrations of Between Here
 4 WANDERING SONGS  171

and There result only in reinvention as a perpetuation of the kinds of

delimiting codes of belonging that mark There Was Fire in Vancouver.
Morrissey’s poetry courts marginality through migration journeys that
ultimately reinforce the original peripherality of her childhood. Her
perception of cultural rituals as memory practice reinforces an outsider
experience for a poet who is continually at the margins. Nevertheless,
Morrissey’s difficult migrations are necessary undertakings in order to
resituate her poetic positioning in her native city, enabling her to admit
herself as ‘at home here as I will ever be’.
Morrissey’s prize-winning collection Parallax, published in 2013,
opens with the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the title.
Derived from astronomy, the term speaks to Morrissey’s poetry since
her precocious beginnings as the youngest-ever winner of the Patrick
Kavanagh Poetry Award.

PARALLAX: (Astron.) Apparent displacement, or difference in the appar-

ent position, of an object, caused by actual change (or difference) of posi-
tion of the point of observation.

The collections under discussion here are the products of Morrissey’s ini-
tial experiences as a migrant from Belfast, firstly to Dublin and Europe as
a student, and later to Japan and New Zealand. The physical and emo-
tional displacements from the material and psychological space of ‘home’
dominate There Was Fire in Vancouver, while Between Here and There is
preoccupied with the experience of otherness. Both volumes are domi-
nated by versions of belonging, and Morrissey’s ethic of marginality is
borne out by her inability to belong, either in her native or adopted cities.
As for many migrant poets, the native space features prominently, if
intermittently, in Morrissey’s poetry, although for Morrissey, home is
continually counterpointed by elsewhere. In addition to the social and
political crises of the Troubles that also frame Colette Bryce’s childhood
in Derry, Morrissey’s unusual upbringing and her familial breakdown
generate an original condition of outsiderness that migration serves to
enhance. Where Harry Clifton finds a community of literary and his-
torical émigrés with whom he ideologically identifies, Morrissey’s poetry
emphasises collective and ritual memory as processes that exclude as well
as cohere. Memory is a balm in Clifton’s poetics of marginality, reassur-
ing the outsider of antecedents, but for Morrissey it is a more volatile
device. The cost of forgetting in a city contingent on its tribal memories
172  A. McDAID

positions memory (and forgetting, or not knowing) as a valuable tool

and a dangerous flaw. Morrissey recognises community and synchronicity
(of language, of family, of cultural practice, of landscape) as structures of
memory in which she cannot participate. This realisation is highlighted
by her inability to fully comprehend Japanese ritual practices – her lack of
shared cultural memory places her as a permanent outsider.
Lucy Collins notes that ‘[i]mmersion in other cultures offers a particu-
lar vehicle for exploration in the case of Irish women poets. Often it is the
relationship between the familiar and the strange that triggers acts of self-
scrutiny, generating new attitudes towards personal and political differ-
ence’.43 Morrissey’s emphasis on codes and cultures of belonging presents
ritual as stylised collective action, and as a form of memory practice that is
configured as exclusionary within various poems. Proceeding from Pierre
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as inscribed discourse, ‘[a] structuring struc-
ture, which organises practices and the perception of practices’, Morrissey’s
poetry can be situated outside the existent dominant dispositions, whether
in Belfast, Germany, Japan or New Zealand.44 Where Harry Clifton cul-
tivates an existential and universal outsiderness by conjuring worlds of
shared non-belonging, Morrissey’s poetic-scapes are always the product of
parallax. Her presentation of shifted, alternate or tangential spaces, wherein
the action takes place alongside but independent of the protagonist, dem-
onstrates a fundamentally parenthetical position. Morrissey’s loss or lack
of memory in situations where memory is essential speaks to questions of
belonging and identity to which her poetry adverts.
Belfast, as home, is a problematic space in Morrissey’s poetry. As rec-
ollected in ‘Among Communists’ and ‘CND’ from There Was Fire In
Vancouver, Morrissey’s parents were members of the Communist Party,
and so the poet was not brought up in either of the dominant religious
traditions of the North. Ostensibly, this might have enabled her to tran-
scend the divisive characterisations of Northern Irish society during the
Troubles but, as Morrissey recollects, it more often served to exclude her
from both communities, thereby embedding an original self-configura-
tion of marginalisation. Revisiting her home city in ‘Thoughts in a Black
Taxi’, the speaker is physically on the outskirts, inhabiting a ‘problem-
atic, liminal position as one who is neither/nor’.45

Four days to go until the twelfth and the bonfire is fourteen feet
high.
I want the driver to drive ten times around the diamond.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  173

I’ve been gone too long—

I want to stare and stare
[…]
Fascinated by the organisation,
I want to ask them where they got their ladders from.
One ‘What are You called?’ from them, and it would all go black.
I’d have to run to stay whole.
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 19.

Complex codes and practices denote belonging in such situations of

crucially differentiated identity. The act of constructing the Twelfth’s
bonfire is a ritual of sorts, a cultural transmission within a specific com-
munity. This tradition can be understood through Eric Hobsbawm’s def-
inition of ‘invented traditions’ as ‘a set of practices, normally governed
by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature,
which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by rit-
ual’.46 Uninitiated in the practices, outsiders, such as the speaker, do not
understand the rules, and thus cannot be permitted entry to the group.
Morrissey’s first-person narrator is not only ignorant of the codes but
she is also oblivious of the criteria and is therefore unable to distinguish
between the accepted rules of engagement preserved and defended by
that community:

It’s not as though I haven’t blundered before—

Asking what UYM means by the Rushpark estate,
Or laughing at how the Germans think Paisley is mad
In a taxi heading east of the city.

I never registered thrown looks for hours afterwards.

My father sweated.
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 19–20.

Ethnographic studies of Northern Ireland have identified this phe-

nomenon as telling, a term coined by Frank Burton in his 1978 book
The Politics of Legitimacy, and defined as ‘the pattern of signs and cues
by which religious ascription is arrived at in everyday interactions’, and is
‘a central process in creating and sustaining the coherence of a sectarian
cosmology’.47 Heaney’s 1975 poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’
alludes to the embedded codes of telling in this ‘land of password,
174  A. McDAID

handgrip, wink and nod’.48 In ‘Thoughts in a Black Taxi’, multiple cul-

tural identifiers, including the speaker’s name, are beyond her control
and complicate the simplest everyday task in Belfast: ‘Even ordering I
get it wrong these days— / This rank is UVF-run. Never say Morrissey
again.’ ‘Thoughts in a Black Taxi’ is a powerful poem that captures
the impossibility of neutrality in a conflict-riddled place, where every
choice is seen as political statement and every act as cultural assertion.
The innocence of a child’s school uniform is transformed into a procla-
mation of allegiance to the wrong side, or the right side, depending on
which streets you ventured. ‘Grosvenor Road in a state high school uni-
form / Was like having Protestant slapped across your back’ recognises
the ‘complexities and tensions within ethnic identification in Northern
Ireland’.49 For this remembered child, not belonging to either commu-
nity exposes a vulnerability that generates a constant atmosphere of fear
and trepidation.
The shattered past is beyond recuperation, but the poem’s final stanza
finds poetic potential in its destruction:

I always walked with my heart constricting,

Half-expecting bottles, in sudden shards
Of West Belfast sunshine,
To dance about my head.
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 20.

The unexpected splendour of the image collides with the ugly real-
ity of splintered glass raining down on the child’s head, which foresees,
with eerie accuracy, the Holy Cross disputes watched by the world on
television more than five years later.50 The conjunction of private and
political memory, and the way it conflates, is a feature of Northern
Ireland poetry, seen also in Colette Bryce’s poetry of Derry. Both
Morrissey and Bryce perceive a twisted beauty in the debris of vio-
lence that punctuates their recollections of their home-cities. Bryce’s
‘Last Night’s Fires’, with its ‘windscreen / shattered on the ground
like ­jewels, / diamonds, amethysts, on the school / walk’, picks up the
imagery of Morrissey’s lines. These transmutations of traumatic mem-
ory into something salvageable, even beautiful, are ethical efforts of
reinvention that, although not always successful, nevertheless strive to
elevate beauty over tragedy.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  175

On the occasions that beauty cannot triumph, wry humour might

also master the memory of trauma. Taking the world’s most bombed
hotel, The Europa, Morrissey transforms Belfast’s famous landmark into
a grande dame musing on her own demise. Like a lady bemoaning the
ageing process, the hotel speaks wryly of ‘a hard truth to have to take in
the face’. There’s a refreshing flippancy in her litany of injuries:

You wake up one morning with your windows

Round your ankles and your forehead billowing smoke;
Your view impaired for another fortnight
of the green hills they shatter you for.
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 16.

Irreverence wanes to sobriety as the poem proceeds, and the final line
implicitly questions the cause by which the hotel is repeatedly targeted.
Morrissey is engrossed by the intractable nature of the situation and in
the associated impossibility of narrating or symbolising such a contested
history. The public face of the North, post-Troubles, is duplicitous, and
when she finds herself acting as a representative, she is similarly unsettled
by her role.

Today I taught the Germans about Northern Ireland.

High on their interest, I paraded as a gunman
On the Falls Road. Death holds the attention—
BANG! I blew them off their seats and I got away scot-free.
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 18.

The ironically-titled ‘English Lesson’ addresses the issue of how the past
is manipulated and marketed as a unique selling-point. Performing the
past, she is intoxicated by the spell she can weave with history. Morrissey
is aware she is using suffering for her own ends—as a teaching tool in her
classroom to entertain the students. She is also commenting on the allure
of violence as the subject of poetry, particularly pertinent for a poet from
the North with its tradition of poetry about the Troubles. In ‘English
Lesson’, language begins to break down when it comes to addressing
the detail of violence. Instead of maintaining articulacy, the vocabulary
resorts to comic-book style sound effects and exaggeration. By caus-
ing language to degrade, Morrissey admits her ethical reservations.
176  A. McDAID

Acknowledging the central contradiction between art and atrocity, the

poem proceeds to espouse Theodor Adorno’s maxim that ‘to write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.51 In the image of the Jewish violin-
ist playing music to accompany the extermination of his fellow prison-
ers, Morrissey’s allusive lines attempt to capture the crises of expression
in the context of conflict and brutality: ‘‘A fiddler in a death camp’ /
Beyond the lot of it. // The only honesty is silence.’
Morrissey’s difficulty of speaking the past comes not only out of a
horror of what has gone before but also out of an apprehension around
how to represent and reinvent what has physically vanished. As in Bryce’s
Derry, the city of Belfast is a place where lives, bodies, histories, memo-
ries and artefacts can be “disappeared” with little warning and even less
trace. Morrissey’s poetry locates these absences in the hole where the
Titanic stood, the unremitting destruction of the Europa, and the sites
of the Twelfth bonfires that burn into oblivion. The continuous ero-
sion of physical artefacts of the past challenges representational memory
and speaks to a wider reality of forgetting as a controversial, if necessary,
currency in Northern Ireland both during and after the Troubles. There
Was Fire in Vancouver was published in 1996, and the previous two years
had seen stable, if tentative, ceasefires from paramilitary groups across
the sectarian divide.52 During these early steps towards the Good Friday
Agreement, the necessity for selective amnesia in the name of reconcilia-
tion is already evident.53
If her city betrays her by pushing her to the margins, the poet’s
depiction of a disintegrated ancestry similarly indicts her family. In
‘Hazel Goodwin Morrissey Brown’ childhood vanishes amidst familial
rupture, and the past is threatened by the erasure of the family home.
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews sees the title of the poem, ‘listing the moth-
er’s several names’, as highlighting ‘the theme of identity, the instability,
hybridisation and multiplicity of identity’;54 this is undoubtedly at play
within Morrissey’s poem, but the title might also be read as an allusion
to the way that memory is occluded by time and by societal practices.
The tradition of replacing a woman’s maiden name with her husband’s
name occludes lines of female ancestry. By reinstating the mother’s
maiden names, the poem foregrounds an act of resistance to the process
of social memory that actively, and collusively, forgets women’s names.
Morrissey’s poem is certainly, as Kennedy-Andrews suggests, about iden-
tity but it is principally a poem about the retrieval of memory.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  177

Sorting through the wreckage in the aftermath of her parents’ separa-

tion, the speaker is in a post-conflict zone on the domestic, rather than
political, front. She searches for a memento to symbolise and verify the
past:

I salvaged one picture from the general clear-out, plucked

(Somehow still dripping)
from the river of my childhood.
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 39.

The single remnant from the debris of the poet’s childhood is a photo-
graph of her mother in her ‘GDR-worker phase, salient, rehabilitated’.
The photograph operates as a testimony from the past, proof of another
life that existed before the devastation when ‘[o]ur lived-in space /
Became a house of cards’. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
(1981), itself a gesture of grief for a lost mother, Barthes recognises the
inevitable inauthenticity of the photograph: ‘not only is the Photograph
never, in essence, a memory, […] but it actually blocks memory, quickly
becomes a counter-memory’.55 The photograph is an emblem of loss,
because the scene it conveys can never be fully recovered, and it manipu-
lates memory towards inauthentic recollection.
In ‘Hazel Goodwin Morrissey Brown’, the artificiality of the photo-
graph is conveyed through the manner in which it is displayed—like an
artefact, it is exhibited alongside a missive from the most recent episode
in her mother’s life: ‘I’ve hung your smile beside your latest business card:
Nuskin Products. / / Contact address: Titirangi, New Zealand’. These
two versions of reality, the photograph and the business card, suggest fab-
ricated pasts and futures; the company name ‘Nuskin’ homophonically
conjures new skin, suggesting the mother’s desire for reinvention and her
urge to discard the past. The daughter is left behind, scrabbling for secu-
rity as the lines of genealogy are distorted through circles of time. The
parent/child role is inverted as the narrator ‘remembers’ an earlier rein-
carnation: ‘in a previous life / I’d been your mother / / You were my
albino son.’ This past life during the French Revolution is represented as
just as plausible, and as unreachable, as the time spent in their shared and
vanished home. This instance of parallel possibilities is a recurrent trope
in migration poetry, the product of the temporal and ontological disrup-
tions that characterise migration experiences. Similar to the ways Conor
178  A. McDAID

O’Callaghan, Vona Groarke, Bernard O’Donoghue and Greg Delanty

entertain alternate realities—the ‘might-have-beens’ in Clifton’s phrase—
Morrissey evokes a version of a prenatal past as an unsustainable reinven-
tion of her damaged childhood. The clarity of this reinvented ‘previous
life’ contrasts with the scraps of the lived childhood, symbolised by the
salvaged photography which highlights the fragility (and malleability) of
material and cognitive memory practices.
This precarious nature of the past and the present is encountered in
the ‘Mercury’ sequence: a six-poem sequence within There Was Fire in
Vancouver. The sequence opens with ‘Bottom Drawer’ as a repository of
memory as identity:

Her bottom drawer lay filled with all her life:

Diaries and letters and photographs and gifts.
A testimony to every rage, every kiss
And every moment when the light gave shape
to that precise outline of who she was
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 33.

The chest of drawers, the ‘veritable organs of the secret psychologi-

cal life’ as per Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, contains ‘all her life’.56
Safeguarding its contents against the perils of the passage of time and
against the prospect of familial dissolution, the drawer as a hiding space
also speaks to the specific hazards of Belfast during the Troubles which
are surely distilled in the following lines:

No gaps where fear had burned the evidence:

No sudden invasions, or abandoned residence,
Or loss.
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 33.

The residue of life in a conflict/post-conflict zone internalises the experi-

ences of trauma and transfers it to personal memory, which is constructed
here as crucially vulnerable—the drawer has served to preserve memory in
a way that exposure could never allow. This collector has succeeded where
others have not—her history is intact and her life’s ‘outline’ has not been
warped by violence or disappearance. The shape of her memory is pristine,
and this, in itself, is unique. ‘Intricate as a snowflake, intact as childhood’,
 4 WANDERING SONGS  179

memory and the contents of the drawer are interchangeable. The space of
the drawer bears within itself ‘a kind of aesthetics of hidden things’ but, in
hiding away, the drawer might also be seen to incarcerate as its contents
accumulate.57 By shrinking a life to the precious contents of the drawer,
memory becomes like a priceless ‘Chinese vase … beautiful and brittle as
bone’, too fragile to risk handling.
An entirely contrary approach to living is espoused in ‘Nomad’, the
second poem in the ‘Mercury’ sequence, which juxtaposes the search for
stability with the irretrievability of childhood. Continuing the impetus of
the sequence as a study in memory and dislocation, ‘Nomad’ uses the
metaphor of eternal wandering to reflect upon the poet’s personal expe-
riences of repeated relocation:

It’s the leaving of villages

One after the other—
The repeated conclusion
It’s not here either—
Beauty, home, whatever[.]
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 34.

Like Clifton and the ‘unnameable’ in his poetry, Morrissey similarly

struggles with the expressive limitations of language. The nomad’s
desires are inarticulate—her attempts to define ‘it’ waver in cliché
(‘beauty, home’) before collapsing into ‘whatever’. The inevitability of
the ‘repeated conclusion’ suggests the nomadic journey is never satisfied
but is continually perpetuated by the reinvented search. Taking Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of nomadism as resistance to hierarchical struc-
tures of centralisation, Morrissey’s nomadic instinct is evident in reac-
tion to her sense of alienation from the imposed structures of belonging,
along religious and political affiliations, that dominates the Belfast of her
youth. The ‘line of flight’ that is fully applied to Bryce’s work can also
be considered here in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s description of
the rhizome as ‘an antigenealogy … a short-term memory, or antimem-
ory’.58 The repeated disruption of genealogical patterns in Morrissey’s
poetry suggests an intention towards this idea of the ‘acentred, nonhier-
archical’ system, but her work demonstrates ambiguity around the ena-
bling aspects of such an aesthetic. The ‘antimemory’ results in temporal
disruptions, where linear time is displaced by cyclical, circular and parallel
180  A. McDAID

patterns, not unlike the visualisation of the rhizome. The protagonist in

‘Nomad’ meets versions of herself at every juncture:

That leaves you where you are

Where you always are
Side-stepping yourself, side-
Stepping the days you find no sense in
And facing the road.
There Was Fire In Vancouver, 34.

Morrissey’s continued experience of cultural otherness perpetuates her

ethic of marginality—a version of Clifton’s cultivated marginality, except that
Morrissey is born into, rather than chooses, her initial outsiderness. By mov-
ing to Japan, Morrissey actively seeks to replicate the cultural peripherality
that defines her childhood. Between Here and There, from its title, recog-
nises the self-consciousness of her positioning. The familiar role of outsider
is dramatically enhanced by her status as a Westerner and a non-Japanese
speaker. Derived from an urge for reinvention, these poems of Between Here
and There are essentially acts of repetition borne out of the poet’s unstated
ethic of marginality. The epilogue to Between Here and There signals many
of Morrissey’s preoccupations and is worth quoting in full:

My voice slipped overboard and made it ashore

the day I fished on the Sea of Japan
within sight of a nuclear reactor.

At first I didn’t notice,

my flexible throat full of a foreign language
and my attention on the poison of the puffer fish.

*
Sometimes, I picture its lonely sojourn
along the coast of Honshu, facing the Chinese frontier.
And then I’ll picture its return –

eager, weather-worn, homesick, confessional,

burdened with presents from being away
and bringing me everything under the sun.
Between Here and There, 9.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  181

Depicting the writer’s block that ensued after her two-year stint living
in Japan and lasted until she eventually returned to Belfast, the epilogue
sets out the image of the voice as independent and self-determining.
Furthermore, the poem proposes a symbiosis between the act of migra-
tion and the loss of her poetic voice that runs contrary to the accepted
notion of travel and exoticism as fuel for the creative process.
‘My voice slipped overboard …’ is located in a typical tourist scenario,
a fishing trip on the Sea of Japan and it juxtaposes the received imagery of
traditional Japan—a boat, the sea, the puffer fish—with the more threat-
ening contemporary presence of ‘a nuclear reactor’. This disjunction
between aesthetic expectations and actual reality, with particular reference
to environmental degradation, becomes a pattern as Morrissey mediates
her experience as both tourist and resident. The exploitative aspect of the
visitor is suggested by the speaker’s activity of fishing: the visitor seeks to
capture a part of Japan for herself and is so consumed by immersing her-
self in her task that she fails to notice her own depletion. Intoxicated by
exoticism, with a ‘flexible throat full of a foreign language / and my atten-
tion on the poison of the puffer fish’, the loss of voice and, implicitly, self
goes unremarked. The poems of the Japanese sequence struggle to rein-
vent the self within a profoundly unfamiliar place, replete with codes and
customs of which the speaker is unaware. Striving to maintain a sense of
identity and a distinctive voice, the speaker of the poems ultimately sub-
mits to the criteria of being elsewhere with its incumbent baggage.
Every act of migration is also an act of attrition and in Between Here
and There the erosion of Morrissey’s poetic voice is a traumatic conse-
quence of her migration. Morrissey has spoken in interview about the
writer’s block she suffered in Japan that continued for a further two years
while living in New Zealand. Upon returning to Belfast, it would be
another twelve months before she finally began to write again—albeit in
a different voice than before.

[Before writer’s block] it would be a matter of listening and then the poem
would just flow onto the page … [T]he voice would be very, very clear.
Since the writer’s block I’ve never had that clear voice … It’s much more
like chiselling away, of something emerging, rather than having a clear direc-
tion at the beginning. There’s much more labour, more craft involved.59

The distinction between the style of the Japan sequence and the other
poems is evident in the collection, which is strategically arranged in
182  A. McDAID

reverse-chronological order; ‘Part I’ is comprised of post-writer’s block

poems of return while ‘Part II: Japan’ is located as the closing section.
The opening poem of the volume, ‘In Belfast’, is tightly punctuated and
controlled into two sections, three quartets apiece, in direct contrast
with the opening poem of ‘Part II: Japan’, ‘Goldfish’, which takes the
form of a loose, long-line stream-of-consciousness with no punctuation.
Even when the Japan poems adopt a formal coherency, as in the Festival
sequence, they maintain their overarching effect as imagistic snapshots
that flow from perception to page with ease.
The Festival sequence stages ritual as cultural memory. By highlight-
ing the speaker’s marginality, placing her on the literal fringes of the
Japanese festivals, the sequence reinvents Morrissey’s earlier experiences
of being an outsider in her home city of Belfast. While political and reli-
gious heritage dictates the peripherality in There Was Fire in Vancouver,
the Festival sequence courts a deliberate outsiderness through the poet’s
positioning of herself within festival rituals of which she has no knowl-
edge. The Japanese traditionally celebrate with two types of festivals,
according to Gillespie: ‘those in which Shinto deities and the people
communicate through certain rites on specific dates’ and ‘matsuri’ which
are mass events ‘for commemoration and celebration’.60 Both festival
events, like the bonfires of the Twelfth, conduct and confirm belonging
through cognisance of those ‘certain rites’.
The initial poem, ‘Ogaki Festival’, places the speaker at the heart of
the festival’s action in the destination town of Bashō’s Narrow Road
to the Deep North.61 The festival’s ritual consists of performing laps of
the town while drinking beer, and the speaker participates in the cus-
tom along with the locals. Of these articulations of bodily social mem-
ory, ‘conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances’, the
speaker is ignorant, and her participation merely highlights her marginal-
ity.62 The narrator’s ignorance of the ritual and her lack of social memory
leave her unable to manage the parade’s customs:

They push beer cans into my hands with red and yellow leaves.
I’m so drunk by the fourth lap round the street
that my students who stand to either side have the faces of leaves[.]
Between Here and There, 48.

Festivals are traditionally linked to ‘the breaking points in the natu-

ral cycle’ such as ‘[d]eath and revival’ and ‘change and renewal’.63
 4 WANDERING SONGS  183

Morrissey’s Festival sequence tracks through a calendar year, taking in

a festival for each season, and this participation, however naïve, stakes a
claim to legitimacy through presence. The poems themselves, however,
speak to the disorientation and cultural confusion experienced during
that period. Ritual celebrations service collective memory, a ‘memory
technique that stands in the service of bonding memory and has the
purpose of bringing to life and stabilizing a collective identity through a
process of symbolic dramatization’.64 In the Festival sequence, the defini-
tive use of pronouns highlights the distinction between ‘they’ and ‘I’;
‘we’ does not feature. Despite being involved in the ritual performances
of the festivals, rather than coalescing a sense of community, Morrissey’s
poems demonstrate the impossibility of integration.
This theme of seasonal impetus is traced through the shunkashuto—
the Japanese word for the four seasons of the year—in imagistic, three-
lined stanzas that approach haiku-style. Where the traditional haiku is a
moment of enlightenment, a reinvention of the mundane as the extraor-
dinary, the subjective experiences within the poems fail, however, to real-
ise that philosophical moment of transcendence. The poems aspire to
reinvention but Morrissey’s sequence is entirely un-Zen; these are poems
of insight, not of peace. The poet is disturbed by the connotations of
the festival rituals, particularly the gendered significance, and is unable to
participate, despite her sense of being recruited as a woman: ‘My body
has become the body of the festival: / the vaginas on shrines reduce me
to the facts of life.’ The diminishing of the individual woman through
an artistic display of multiple genitalia on a shrine ‘reduce[s]’, yet at the
same time elevates. This emphasis on the role and representation of the
female, and of female sexuality, continues throughout the sequence, in
graphic language. Rituals familiar and amusing to the local population
are strange and confronting to Morrissey’s foreign sensibilities. Lynn
Meskill notes ‘[c]ross-culturally, festivals take place in a supranormal
time and space in which people experience themselves differently for the
period of celebration whether it be ecstatic encounter or sensual/sexual
activity’, suggesting that festivals have ‘codes, moral values, and norms
significantly different from those governing actions in other situations’.65
Comprehending that the festival sphere dictates alternate behaviours,
the locals revel in the ritual obscenities. For the narrative I, the confron-
tational scene is immensely disturbing, and ‘Summer Festival’ transfers
its challenge directly to the reader by questioning him/her in the open
sentence:
184  A. McDAID

What do you think when you see a mâché vagina

Being rammed with a penis as broad as a battering ram
So that children disguised as elements shriek with joy?
Between Here and There, 50.

This blunt line of interrogation leaves nowhere for the reader to

hide—s/he is impelled to the event through this device as the poet
transfers her ethic of marginality onto the reader. Ritual celebrations
‘dramatize the interplay of the symbolic with the corporeal’, and the
grotesquely exaggerated imagery of ‘Summer Festival’ brings to mind a
correspondingly explicit tradition, the sheela na gig carvings.66 Fertility
links pre-Christian Ireland and the UK with this contemporary Japanese
celebration, but the disembodied vagina of ‘Summer Festival’ is infinitely
more disempowered than the grinning female figure of sheela na gig.
Morrissey has spoken about her Japanese poems, saying ‘I try to write,
not so much about these other places, but about my experience of being
there’,67 and the Festival sequence realises this ethic of incontrovertible
marginality locating herself within the scene while reflecting a sense of
being outside the action:

In the streets I watch women who are dancing in rings

in the slow, hindered steps of the kimono. Again and again,
a festival of women. They are declaring what’s been done.’
Between Here and There, 51.

The stylised solemnity of the women’s bodily practice ‘refer back inexo-
rably to a pattern of social memories’ to which Morrissey has no access,
and once again, as in Belfast, she is on the periphery of rituals that
denote belonging.68
Given that access to communal memory through ritual is impossible,
Between Here and There turns to alternate ways of reinventing belong-
ing, namely through language. The Japanese written system of kanji,
or characters, is courted by the poet as a potential mode of asserting
herself in the Japanese culture, but like the festival codes, the kanji are
impenetrable. The pictograms encode cultural meaning in their carefully-
drawn line. Memory is encrypted in the way the characters are formed.
The visuality of kanji appeals to the poet’s eye; in ‘Night Drive in Four
Metaphors’ she deconstructs ‘the kanji for centre’ as ‘[t]he eye of an
 4 WANDERING SONGS  185

animal skewered and shown on its side’. It takes a leap of imagination to

transform the character—央—into a slaughtered animal but Morrissey
revels in the multi-dimensional, reinventive possibilities of a lexis that is
simultaneously an art of depiction. Her absorption in learning the lan-
guage, despite its evident challenges, is shown in ‘To Encourage the
Study of Kanji’.

I’ve been inside these letters it seems for years, I’ve drawn them
on paper, palms, steamed mirrors and the side of my face
in my sleep, I’ve waded in sliced lines and crossed boxes.
Between Here and There, 53.

In her efforts to integrate, Morrissey inhabits the language and it

engulfs her consciousness, seeping into her dreams. The act of tracing
the letters becomes unconscious as she rehearses the calligraphy on her
own body as proof of her commitment. If memory is formed through
rehearsal and through bodily inscription, then the poem is a testimony
of performative memory. The visceral texture of ‘sliced lines’, especially
when paired with the ‘side of her face’, suggests an underlying element
of self-flagellation in this mission to belong, and subscribes to the idea of
social or collective memory as inhabited by the body. Both dream space
and waking are saturated with the brushstrokes of kanji—‘[t]hey stay,
stars in the new-moon sky’—which form the fabric of her new world.
Despite her efforts to access belonging through language as an alter-
native to ritual, the ideographic texture of the characters adds a further
unknowable dimension to the poet’s ongoing experience of alienation.
The language remains ‘as dead as the names of untraceable constella-
tions. / Intricate, aloof, lonely, abstracted’; a self-reflexive iteration of
the marginalisation of her migrant experience. Like language, the envi-
ronment is another source of alienation—the scale of environmental
degradation and commercial development of post-war Japan ultimately
undermines any potential romantic depictions: ‘Factories chew through
a mountain beyond my window / and each time I look at it it’s less.’
Once again, Morrissey is let down by cultural memory, as reality diverges
entirely from the received image of Japan as constructed through domes-
tic and foreign cultural representations. The large-scale re-industriali-
sation of Japan after World War II is bypassed via a flight of nostalgia
whereby the poem recalls a pre-industrial time ‘in the world before the
186  A. McDAID

war’ when the route Bashō walked, the Tōkaidō, passed through the
poet’s temporary hometown. Felice Beato’s famous photographs of the
ancient route, taken in the 1860s, provide Morrissey with the imagina-
tive springboard to envisage life before commercialisation, and she takes
solace in this comfortable cultural memory.69

There are photographs of women in an amber light

stopped dead in their surprise at being captured as the image of a
time.

Behind them all, the mountain rises white.

Between Here and There, 56.

The unsullied power of the looming mountain in the picture belies its
future, while the repetition of an earlier reference to Bashō indicates that
art, as well as nature, is under consideration here. Derek Mahon’s ‘The
Snow Party’ takes its cue from the disconnect between poetry and real-
ity, questioning the role of poetry in the wider context.70 The ‘silence’ of
the snow party in Mahon’s poem drowns out the violence and suffering
of ‘elsewhere’, questioning the privileging of aestheticism over responsi-
bility. The ‘tinkling of china / and tea into china’ overpowers the ‘burn-
ing of witches and heretics’, thereby documenting one version of official
memory while other, more urgent, narratives are left unspoken.
The intertextual memory in Morrissey’s ‘February’ affirms
Lachmann’s assertion that ‘[l]iterature inscribes itself in a memory space
made out of texts, and it sketches out a memory space into which ear-
lier texts are gradually absorbed and transformed’.71 ‘February’ absorbs
Beato’s photographic works while echoing both Bashō’s haiku in
Nagoya— ‘Goodbye now / I go snow viewing / til tumbling over’—and
Mahon’s rendering of Bashō’s visit. The anxiety in ‘February’ is borne
out of the multiple responsibilities of memory; it centres around the
poet’s duty to aestheticism and her sense of accountability to her envi-
ronment. How can the poet prioritise forms of memory, and what is the
impact of this eco-poetical memorialisation on traditional mnemonic
literary memory? Sara Berkeley’s poetry realises and tries to resolve this
conflict between ecopoetic ethos and aesthetic aspiration that results in a
curious (and effective) voiding of memory in her poetry. Morrissey bares
 4 WANDERING SONGS  187

the contradiction within the frame of memory limitation, as ‘February’

anticipates a time when the landscape will be so utterly changed that it
will no longer remember its own function.

When all the fields are town,

the mountain stones, it will be spring, and I’ll be called on

to be generous. There will be days when fruit trees, like veterans

left standing here and there in pools of shade, will forget about use
and bloom.
Between Here and There, 56.

In addition to Japan, there are other places on Morrissey’s map: New

Zealand with its Southern Cross smiling ‘with a million silver teeth’,
and the American South, home of her new husband. With her aware-
ness of the complexity of genealogy, Morrissey is keen to explore the
heritage that their children will assume. This is wonderfully probed in
‘An Anatomy of Smell’, a poem that binds together the distinctive char-
acteristics of two individual lives merged in marriage and made flesh by
their offspring. Cataloguing the features of her husband’s ancestry, the
poet compiles an evocatively sensual list, memory ensconced in olfactory
stimulus:

From you, the smell of the Tucson desert:

copper deposits, animal skulls, the chalk trajectory
of stars no cloud covers or stains, ochre and chilli[.]
Between Here and There, 34.

The dry clarity of the desert-scape is yang to the yin of her Northern
Irish heritage comprised of ‘bog cotton, coal fires, wild garlic, river dirt’.
Intertwined smells, unique to every household, create ‘slipped givea-
ways of origin’, yet another identifying marker in the complex codes
of belonging that Morrissey’s Belfast upbringing instilled in her con-
sciousness. Unable to remember a community for herself in her native
place, and in the aftermath of the disintegration of her nuclear family,
Morrissey seeks and finds a new way to define herself through the unas-
sailable marker of smell that she and her husband create together.
188  A. McDAID

Now we too have an identity—

the smell of us is through our sheets and wrapped around our
home—
invisible ink encoded onto bone.
We have wrought it as surely as any family[.]
Between Here and There, 34.

In an act of self-determination, Morrissey eschews the need for an exter-

nal community to validate and accept her. There is no anxiety around
language or saying the wrong thing; the rituals and routines of Japanese
festivals or Orange Order parades fade against the ‘noise and light’ of the
domestic scene. The act of making a home, and with it an identity, is an
act of creation – she and her husband ‘forge something wholly themselves
and wholly different’ in their self-conscious creation of familial memory.
These reinventions lead Morrissey through the Tucson desert via ‘Jo
Gravis in his Metal Garden’, a remarkable poem that analogises compet-
ing tensions of creation and derivation in the act of making art. Gravis
commits himself to crafting ‘flesh in a fleshless gallery, by sculpting
twisted figures from the material detritus of contemporary living and
turning ‘trolleys into children, knives into rose petals’. Like the kanji
stripped bare and reconstructed in Morrissey’s poems on the ontology of
language, Gravis’ artworks represent a metapoesis of how the ordinary,
the disregarded and the discarded can be hewed and honed into some-
thing of artistic merit.
Returning finally to Belfast after more than a decade of living else-
where, like Gravis, Morrissey settles to make poetry amongst the debris.
Her early ambitions to locate poetry in the exotic yield to an acceptance of
her native city as a legitimate subject of, and backdrop to, her poetry. The
return segment of Between Here and There is placed as the opening section
of the volume, distorting the lines of memory and perception, but as the
opening poem ‘In Belfast’ unfolds, the disjunctions of time are revealed.
If the title weren’t already distinct in its location, the details of the poem’s
setting place the reader right at the hard-wearing urban heart of the city.

Here the seagulls stay in off the Lough all day

Victoria Regina steering the ship of the City Hall
in this the first and last of her intense provinces,
a ballast of copper and gravitas.
Between Here and There, 13.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  189

The low-looming sky and brimming river compress the streets, and
the lines, into a compact, functional space, encouraging an atmosphere
of encroachment and even claustrophobia through the panic-attack phra-
seology of ‘inhaling shop-fronts’ that ‘exhale’, pause,/ inhale again’.
Veering into the personal in the second section, Morrissey addresses
her own relationship with the city; anxieties around authenticity surface
immediately, as the returned emigrant struggles to come to terms with
the aftermath of her wanderings.

I have returned here 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.
More real, even, with this history’s dent and fracture

splitting the atmosphere.

Between Here and There, 13.

The idea of elsewhere as a more legitimate subject for poetry is sur-

prising, especially considering the profile of Northern Ireland in late
20th-century English-language poetry. Using Heaney-esque language
of ‘history’s dent and fracture’, Morrissey acknowledges the unique cir-
cumstances of her homeplace and its inherent possibilities for poetry. She
speaks to her own generation’s curious position within the dialogue of
past and present:

And what I have been given

is a delicate unravelling of wishes
that leaves the future unspoken and the past
unencountered and unaccounted for.
Between Here and There, 13.

In the context of the Good Friday Agreement and in light of paramilitary

ceasefires, the old dichotomies of allegiance are subtly dissolved to allow for
possibility in the place of inevitability. The disruption of memory, staged in
the collection’s shifting temporal and geographic locations, is critical to the
progress of the peace process. Trauma necessitates amnesia, and the consen-
sus to forget in order to reconcile, to unremember the past in order to allow
the future, is a complex code of behaviour that the newly-returned speaker
struggles to grasp—‘[t]his city weaves itself so intimately / it is hard to see’.
190  A. McDAID

As in much of her poetry, Morrissey’s viewfinder is set between the

perspective of the insider and the outsider, a position that suits her par-
ticularly well as she returns to reinvent her native city, which has under-
gone enormous political change in her absence. ‘Tourism’ considers
Belfast in its new incarnation as a post-Troubles holiday destination.
Morrissey turns her sharpened eye on the processes of commodification
inherent in its transformation. ‘Our day has come’, the poem declares
with a cheery Northern Ireland Tourist Board-style slogan, an ironic
inversion of the IRA slogan ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’ (‘Our day will come’).
The arrival of European visitors, ‘landing in airports / and filing out
of ships’, confirms that the city is now a tourist destination worthy of
attention. Yet Morrissey’s depiction of the city and its sights on offer for
tourist consumption suggests a measure of discomfort at the disjunction
between visiting observers and the lived lives of the locals, suggesting
that memory of the recent past might be occluded but it is most cer-
tainly not discarded, and is still carried by the city’s scars:

We take them to those streets

they want to see most, at first,

as though it’s all over and safe behind bus glass

like a staked African wasp. Unabashedly, this is our splintered city,
and this, the corrugated line between doorstep and headstone.
Between Here and There, 14.

The newly-developed practice of ‘Troubles tours’—taking in the

Peace Walls, political murals, Shankill and Falls Roads amongst other
sights—is seen as capitalising on recent history that has yet to set-
tle. The city is subject to the demands of the visitors, whose presence
confers some kind of legitimacy on its fragile, post-conflict state: ‘They
bring us deliverance, restitution’. The image of a ‘splintered city’ mir-
rors Colette Bryce’s depiction of her home city of Derry, riven with
divisions embedded in the city’s architecture. Morrissey’s city is sim-
ilarly split but it is also paradoxically united by its anxiety to perform
for these outsiders. Though the city is ‘unabashed’ by its ruptures, it
succumbs to the expectations of ‘the Spanish and the Dutch’, reflect-
ing how ‘we straighten our ties, strengthen our lattes, / polish our
teeth’. The destinations on offer are sites of devastation that reach back
to ‘the festering gap in the shipyard / the Titanic made when it sank’.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  191

In her identification of a Northern Irish ‘talent for holes’, Morrissey

pithily links the doomed Titanic with the stuttered beginnings of the
Stormont Parliament amidst political disagreement.72 The palpable frus-
tration at the failure of the democratic institution and at the collective
negative reinforcement of its inevitability suggests that Morrissey’s rela-
tionship with her homeplace is, like many of her fellow-poets, compli-
cated on personal and political levels.

Another instance, we say,

of our off-beat, headstrong, suicidal charm.

So keep coming here.

Between Here and There, 14.

For Morrissey, as for her expatriate contemporaries Alan Gillis, Colette

Bryce and Nick Laird, Northern Ireland is an ambiguous, troubling
space. The changing configurations of the North in this generation’s
post-Troubles poetry, much of which is toned by permanent or tempo-
rary migration experiences, warrant an in-depth study in its own right.73
Once she has returned in Between Here and There, Morrissey emerges
from the spell of her home city. Her migration and return is a kind of
exorcism and in her later work, Belfast recedes comfortably into a steady
undemanding backdrop to her poetry. As her work matures, her journeys
mostly take place in the imagination, through history and on the page.
Her third collection The State of the Prisons (2005) travels to China, but
firmly as a tourist rather than as a migrant – the long sequence poem
‘China V’ takes place on a train journey, confirming her transitory inter-
actions with the country flashing past her window. There is certainly no
attempt culturally to integrate in the way her Japanese sequence aspires
to, and this is surely related to her resettlement in Belfast.
Ultimately, for Morrissey, Belfast (or Northern Ireland) is no more or
less confronting than other, less politically fraught places of memory and
the past. Harry Clifton’s Dublin (and indeed his discovered Northern
Ireland) is similarly shown to be a place of hauntings and trauma; Greg
Delanty’s Cork is a reconstruction of a city vanished in space and time;
Martina Evans’s microcosm of rural Irish society is as dysfunctional as
any conflict-ridden city. In interview in 2002, Morrissey speaks of her
determination not to write ‘any more travel poems’ while acknowledg-
ing that ‘travel has been important, … the central theme of [the first
192  A. McDAID

two] collections’. On choosing to return to Belfast, she says ‘I’d enjoyed

the freedom of travelling, mostly, but there was always that tension of
being somewhere which wasn’t where you were from. Which can be a
drain on your energy. Even though Belfast isn’t ideal, I feel that now I’m
there more of my energy can go into writing’.74 Her poems of return in
Between Here and There evoke the definitive poet of dislocation, Louis
MacNeice, whose poem ‘Valediction’ describes the city as ‘devout and
profane and hard, / Built on reclaimed mud, hammers playing in the
shipyard’—images that are recast in Morrissey’s ‘In Belfast’.75 In the
final, almost resigned, lines of ‘In Belfast’, Morrissey refracts the emo-
tionally-charged ‘home’ of Mahon’s ‘Afterlives’ to a calm acceptance that
the terms of belonging here are as vague and as relevant as anywhere else
in the world:

and in its downpour and its vapour I am

as much at home here as I will ever be.
Between Here and There, 13.

Notes
1. Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never
Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
2. Benjamin Keatinge, ‘Responses to the Holocaust in Modern Irish Poetry,’
Estudios Irlandeses 6 (2011).
3. Keatinge, ‘Responses to the Holocaust’: p. 32.
4. Harry Clifton, The Walls of Carthage (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
1977); Office of the Salt Merchant (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1979);
The Liberal Cage (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1988); The Desert
Route: Selected Poems 1973–1988 (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1992);
Night Train Through the Brenner (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1994).
5. Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): p. 190.
6. Sebastian Barry, ‘Introduction,’ in The Inherited Boundaries: Younger Poets
of the Republic of Ireland, ed. Sebastian Barry (Dublin: Dolmen Press,
1986); Harry Clifton, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994–2004 (North
Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 2007).
7. Alberto Manguel, ‘The Exile‘s Library,’ The Guardian, 21 February 2009.
8. Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representations of Memory,’ in Cultural
MemoryStudies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, eds. Astrid Erll and
Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): p. 334.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  193

9. Neumann, ‘The Literary Representations of Memory,’: p. 334.

10. Benjamin Paloff, ‘Witold Gombrowicz and to Hell with Culture,’ Words
without Borders, Magnetic Poles, March (2004).
11. Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1999).
12. Neumann, ‘The Literary Representations of Memory,’: p. 335.
13. Fondane was transported to Drancy from Paris, and died in the concentra-
tion camp just before the end of WWII.
14.  Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, ‘Translator’s Note: On ‘The Sorrow of
Ghosts’ by Benjamin Fondane,’ Cerise Press 3, no. 9 (2012).
15. Rudavsky-Brody, ‘Translator’s Note’.
16. Brian Horowitz, ‘The Tension of Athens and Jerusalem in the Philosophy
of Lev Shestov,’ The Slavic and East European Journal 43, no. 1 (1999).
17. Harry Clifton, ‘Shylock’s Lament,’ The Dublin Review 18, no. Spring
(2005): p. 39.
18. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 2000). ‘Dreep’ is in common
usage in Scots-English (see: http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/dreep)
but Clifton’s allusion to Joyce seems deliberate here, in context of the
poet’s return and the poem’s setting.
19. Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland (London:
Faber & Faber, 1996).
20.  Aingeal Clare, ‘The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (review),’ The
Guardian, 22 June 2012.
21. Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, and Yolande Jansen, eds., Diaspora
and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts
and Politics, (New York: Rodopi, 2006): p. 15.
22. Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry: p. 190.
23. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose (New York: Library of
America, 1997).
24. John Montague, The Rough Field (North Carolina: Wake Forest
University Press, 2005).
25. Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier (London: Picador, 1988): p. 98.
26. Beckett, Mercier and Camier.
27. Seán Kennedy, ‘Cultural Memory in Mercier and Camier: The Fate of
Noel Lemass,’ in Historicising Beckett / Issues of Performance, ed. Marius
Buning, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994).
28. Kennedy, ‘Cultural Memory in Mercier and Camier,’: pp. 123–124.
29.  John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (New York: Syracuse University
Press, 1991): p. 151.
30. Fintan O’Toole, qtd in Benjamin Keatinge, ‘“Home to Original
Homelessness”: Review of The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass by Harry
Clifton, World Without Maps by Geraldine Mitchell and Happy Hour by
Andrew Jamison,’ Poetry Ireland Review 109 (2013).
194  A. McDAID

31. SB to TM, 8/10/1932 and 18/10/1932, qtd. in Kennedy, ‘Cultural

Memory in Mercier and Camier: The Fate of Noel Lemass,’: p. 127.
32. Harry Clifton, ‘Coming Home,’ Irish Pages 3, no. 2 (2006).
33. Harrington, The Irish Beckett: p. 151.
34.  Richard Tillinghast, ‘The Future of Irish Poetry?’ in Finding Ireland
(Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2008): p. 194.
35. Tillinghast, ‘The Future of Irish Poetry?’: p. 109.
36. Maureen A. Murphy, ‘From Shibboleths to Shared Terminology? The
Divisive Place Names of Northern Ireland,’ Studi irlandesi: A Journal of
Irish Studies 4 (2014): Table 2: p. 42.
37. Murphy, ‘From Shibboleths to Shared Terminology?’: Table 4: p. 45.
38. John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: from stillness into history
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): p. 2; p. 176.
39. Clifton, ‘Coming Home.’
40. Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory,’ Poetics Today 29, no.
1 (2008): p. 107.
41. Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory,’: p. 111.
42. Sinéad Morrissey, There Was Fire in Vancouver (Manchester: Carcanet Press,
1996); Between Here and There (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002).
43. Lucy Collins, ‘Northeast of Nowhere: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey
and Post-Feminist Spaces,’ in Irish Poetry After Feminism, ed. Justin
Quinn (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 2008): p. 14.
44. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984): p. 170.
45. Michael Parker, Northern Irish Literature 1956–1975 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Vol II: p. 159.
46. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): p. 1.
47. Frank Burton, The Politics of Legitimacy: Struggles in a Belfast
Community(London: Routledge, 1978): pp. 13–14.
48. Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975): pp. 57–59.
49. Dominic Bryan, Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and
Control (London: Pluto Books, 2000): p. 13.
50. The Holy Cross dispute centred on a Catholic girls’ primary school in
Ardoyne, Belfast in 2001 and 2002. Loyalist protesters picketed the route
taken by the children and their parents in an initial demonstration against
Republican intimidation which targeted the Protestant community. The
protests turned increasingly violent and lasted for months, leading to
police in full riot gear escorting the children through the blockade amidst
missiles, bomb blasts and aggression.
51. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber
Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982): p. 34.
 4 WANDERING SONGS  195

52. The volume’s title draws attention to the Great Vancouver Fire of 1886
that decimated the Canadian city.
53.  Michael Cox, Adrien Guelke and Fiona Stephen, eds., A Farewell to
Arms?: Beyond the Good Friday Agreement, Second Edition (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2006).
54. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern
Ireland 1968–2008 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008): p. 259.
55. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard (Reading: Vintage, 2000 [1981]): p. 91.
56. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964): p. 78.
57. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: p. xxxvii.
58. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism.and
Schizophrenia II, trans. B Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988):
p. 21.
59. Declan Meade, ‘Interview with Sinéad Morrissey,’ The Stinging Fly Winter
2002/3, no. 14 (2002/3).
60. Gillespie, qtd in Irene De Angelis, The Japanese Effect in Contemporary
Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): p. 148.
61. The seventeenth century writer, famous for his poem-punctuated trave-
logue, has repeatedly figured as inspiration and influence in contempo-
rary Irish poetry. Mitsuko Ohno’s interviews with several prominent Irish
poets elucidate the widespread interest in Japanese aesthetics and liter-
ary expression in this cross-section of poets. Mitsuko Ohno, ‘Hokusai,
Basho, Zen and more - Japanese Influences on Irish Poetry,’ Journal
of Irish Studies 17 (2002). See also De Angelis’s The Japanese Effect in
Contemporary Irish Poetry. This later study of the ‘Japanese effect’ per-
ceives variously subtle and significant manifestations of Japanese influence
in Irish poetry, and suggests more profound modes of engagement with
Japanese forms than Ohno’s survey might suggest.
62. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989): p. 40.
63.  Lynn Meskill, ‘Memory’s Materiality: Ancestral Presence,
Commemorative Practice and Disjunctive Locales,’ in Archaeologies of
Memory, ed. Ruth M. Van Dyke and Susan E. Alcock (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers Ltd, 2003): p. 40.
64. Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2006): p. 16.
65. Meskill, ‘Memory’s Materiality: Ancestral Presence, Commemorative
Practice and Disjunctive Locales’: p. 40.
66. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies: p. 10; For a
study of the Sheela-na-gig carvings, see Barbara Freitag, Sheela-na-gigs:
Unravelling an Enigma (London: Routledge, 2004).
196  A. McDAID

67. Meade, ‘Interview with Sinéad Morrissey.’

68. Connerton, How Societies Remember: p. 13.
69. Felice Beato, ‘Felice Beato’s Japan: People - An Album by the Pioneer
Foreign Photographer in Yokohama,’ Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/beato_people/
index.html.
70. Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
71. Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian
Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): p. 15.
72. Meade, ‘Interview with Sinéad Morrissey.’
73. See Birte Heidemann, Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature: Lost
in a Liminal Space? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Naomi
Marklew, ‘The future of Northern Irish poetry: Fragility, contingency,
value and beauty,’ English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of
English Studies 31, no. 2 (2014); Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘In Belfast’ in
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry eds. Fran Brearton and Alan
Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
74. Meade, ‘Interview with Sinéad Morrissey.’
75. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).
 CHAPTER 5

Technologies of Distance

Technological advances and increased ease of mobility in recent years

have altered contemporary migration. Diasporic theory relating to tra-
ditional modes of departure is complicated by the continuous reconfig-
uration of ‘home’ and ‘away’ brought about by ongoing engagements
through the innovations of technology. As Avtar Brah observes, for many
present-day migrants a ‘homing desire … is not the same as a desire for
a homeland’ not least because the notion of a ‘homeland’ has receded
beyond recognition.1 Technology itself is a crucial component in how
migrant experience has changed. It has created new online communities
while simultaneously eroding local and individual constructs of identity
and belonging. The poetics of migration in the post-capitalist, digital
realities of the 21st century present new challenges both to critics and
poets of contemporary Irish poetry.
The shifts in the actuality of the migration experience require reinven-
tion of how migration is represented and reproduced, and Justin Quinn
and Conor O’Callaghan deliberately deviate from established lines of
migration discourse. Leaving the reservoir of collective emigration mem-
ory untapped in their work, these poets favour a transformed paradigm
of dislocation as the essential contemporary human condition. By rein-
venting the poetics of migration, Quinn’s and O’Callaghan’s poetry
advances the necessity of dissolving essentialist thinking about contem-
porary migration practices. Their work demands a wider frame of refer-
ence than the national and transnational perspectives that have served
migration theory to date, particularly in terms of the new technologies

© The Author(s) 2017 197

A. McDaid, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63805-8_5
198  A. McDAID

of human experience, with migration as an important dimension of the

mobile and globalised 21st century. The mutation of memory in an
era of persistent digital mediation has transformed the lived experience
of migration, and this analysis engages the theoretical approaches of N.
Katherine Hayles, Brian Massumi and Paul Connerton to bring 21st-
century questions of materiality, remediation and technology to bear on
Quinn’s and O’Callaghan’s poetry.
Justin Quinn has signalled his dissatisfaction with the problematic
classification of national identity and national literature in the past. As
co-editor (with David Wheatley) of the now-defunct Metre magazine,
Quinn’s 1997 essay ‘Irish Poetry and the Diaspora’ declares it high time
‘to jettison narrow ideas of what a national canon is’, calling for recog-
nition of diasporic writers as ‘an integral part of Irish writing’.2 More
than a decade later, his essay ‘The Edge of Ireland’ reiterates this convic-
tion in his provocative question ‘[w]here does Irish poetry from?’ As a
long-term migrant, Quinn is unperturbed by claims of inauthenticity on
the basis of thematic or physical non-residence of Ireland. For Quinn,
the simple binaries of home and abroad, upon which traditional iden-
tity and migration theories are balanced, no longer hold fast in a global
community defined by technological and consumerist borders. His col-
lection Fuselage (2002), on which this discussion centres, commits to
the uncomfortable disorientations of digital existence, discarding famil-
iar referents of place and memory to leave the reader unmoored within
the collection.3 In a similar fashion, Conor O’Callaghan’s Fiction (2005)
and The Sun King (2013) are located is explicitly transient spaces, while
its formal innovations serve to mimeticise contemporary dislocation.4 In
reinventing the dual demands of memory and migration in the postmod-
ern society, Quinn’s and O’Callaghan’s poetry pursues alternative possi-
bilities for the future of poetry of all nationalities and none.

‘personal history irrelevant’:

Justin Quinn’s Fuselage
Justin Quinn’s poetry brings 21st-century questions of materiality, reme-
diation and technology to bear on traditional concepts of the experience
of migration. In examining the impact of technology’s intervention, not
only on migration but on the wider human experience, Quinn’s formally
confrontational poetry is an effort to approximate the changed cog-
nitive environment of the digital era. While his early poetry pursues a
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  199

European position, his migrant sensibilities are superseded by his need

to find poetic language adequate to address contemporary global capital-
ist society. By the publication of Fuselage in 2002, his poetry is preoccu-
pied by a technological present in which the past is continually erased and
updated in a frenzy of information.
Quinn has always positioned himself on the peripheries, a sceptical
observer of his surroundings: the perambulations of his first collection
The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird (1995) navigate the streetscapes of Dublin as well as
of Prague, his adopted city, depicted through the figure of a solitary out-
sider.5 The international inclinations of Quinn’s work are stated from the
outset of his published poetry: the opening lines of ‘Mistook’ from The
‘O’o’a’a’ Bird capture the deliberate peripherality of Quinn’s poetic per-
sona. ‘In another city, / Slightly lost, and wandering through its suburbs
/ Anxiously’. Quinn’s migrations are related to his expressed discomfort
with paradigmatic definitions of Irish poetry, reiterated in his iconoclastic
treatment of the inherited tropes of the national literature. ‘Ur-Aisling’
from The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird is regularly anthologised as the poetic manifesto
of Quinn and his generation of poets. This satiric dismantling of Irish
literary inheritance through the figure of Cathleen Ní Houlihan casts
Quinn as an enfant terrible, subjecting Mother Ireland to a ruthless
dressing-down. ‘Ur-Aisling’ initially confirms the trope in its awe at the
figure’s beauty and power:

‘Make me a nation as you will.’

She paused and thought. ‘Make of its past
What you can.’ Her face was pale
And red hair blazed about it.
Her breast
moved with a power which I now felt as well.
The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird, 65.

The poem moves swiftly to shrug off Mother Ireland’s commands

of ‘nostalgias’ and ‘mythologies / like slabs across the open land’, and
nationalist rhetoric is disempowered through the speaker’s indifference
to the sacred investments of land and identity-building. The nonchalance
of the final lines sums up the poet’s avowed disregard for the inherited
myths of nationhood associated with poetry: ‘“You have usurped my
power and my name”’ Mother Ireland accuses, to which the speaker
responds ‘I shrugged. “So usurp it back again”’.
200  A. McDAID

Disavowals of this sort are the exception rather than the rule in Quinn’s
poetry; in his later collections, he pays little attention to questions of nation-
ality and literary tropes. Like Conor O’Callaghan’s ‘East’ from Seatown
(1999), ‘Ur-Aisling’ is published in Quinn’s debut volume of poetry, and
both poems respond to an obligation to declare an ethical standpoint with
regard to the expectations of Irish poetry. By deflating the bubble of sym-
bolic inheritance, Quinn and O’Callaghan purposefully release themselves
from representative responsibility. This refusal to engage with traditional
modes is independent of (although complimentary to) their positions as
migrant poets; rather, it is a consciously aesthetic decision designed to ena-
ble the kind of innovative poetics developed as their poetry matures.
Quinn’s Fuselage is the product of a 21st-century conviction in the
steady erosion not only of national boundaries but of individual sub-
jectivity. Written in Prague, Quinn’s home city since the early nineties,
Fuselage is inflected by the new republic’s aspiration to membership of
the European Union; Ed Larrissey writes of Quinn’s poetry as represent-
ing ‘a constantly mobile Europe of shifting and merging identities, and
one in which Eastern Europe is fully participant’.6 In other volumes,
Quinn explicitly addresses the changing shapes of Ireland and Prague
within the larger European context, most notably in the ‘Days of the
New Republic’ sequence from The O’o’a’a’ Bird and in Close Quarters
in the sequence entitled ‘Blackrock’, but in Fuselage, the central preoc-
cupation is with the depersonalisation of daily life. The larger acceleration
towards the domination of digital technology at the expense of individual
autonomy is obsessively tracked in Fuselage. Migration and nationality are
outdated concerns for Quinn, superseded by the encroaching technologi-
cal and capitalist systems that Fuselage depicts. There are other Irish poets
writing towards a poetic vocabulary that recognises cyber-spatial as well
as national constructs of existence: Peter Sirr’s Bring Everything (2000)
articulates individual isolation within crushing global connectivity while
Billy Ramsell’s Complicated Pleasures (2007) and The Architect’s Dream of
Winter (2013) take their cues from Quinn’s perception of technogenesis,
as in Ramsell’s ‘Secure Server’: ‘Connect yourself via the posts // in your
face to the system’.7 The ‘depersonalized spaces’ that Keatinge identifies
in ‘The Language of Globalization in Contemporary Irish Poetry’ domi-
nate Quinn’s Fuselage which likewise responds to the ‘impersonal features
of the global technological revolution’.8
The very structure of Fuselage represents this spinning-out into the
unfamiliar territory of an unfolding digital world and forces the reader
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  201

into an unnervingly anchorless poetic position. Dense and elusive, the

volume is composed of two distinct parts; the first comprises of a sin-
gle poem entitled ‘Laurel’, the second is composed of 31 unnamed,
unnumbered poems identified only by their opening lines. This refusal to
clearly demarcate one poem from another creates a fluidity between the
poems that is reflected in the dominant imagery of slippage and erosion
in Fuselage. The acceleration with which the poems crowd on top of one
another, each barely distinct from the previous, is one indication of how
the aggressive, imposing quality of global capitalism informs Quinn’s
poetics throughout the volume. Selina Guinness notes that at the heart
of this collection lies ‘the dissolution of identarian thinking in connec-
tion with a globalised modernity’, and this central theme is reflected in
the way the poems interweave in Fuselage.9
Alive to the realities of increased global connectivity and ever-inten-
sifying political and commercial surveillance, the poems in Fuselage
invoke transitory spaces that are continually renewed by external forces.
Renewal is not associated with possibility and reinvigoration but with a
tyranny of online updates, always-on media and continuous surveillance.
In Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
(2002), the author argues for a reinterpretation of the codes of engage-
ment in the digital era. Analysing the erasure of the individual at the
hands of technology, Massumi asserts that the contemporary ‘model of
power is usurpation’, exemplified by the digital impulse to constantly
update.10 Massumi further interprets the suppression of individuality and
the erosion of idiosyncrasy as the sublime articulation of our global capi-
talist society, declaring ‘capitalism is the global usurpation of belonging’.11
Quinn merges these themes—belonging and capitalism—in his startling
and discomfiting volume that anticipates many of the grotesque qualities
of advancing technology.
Modifying the lyric tradition, Quinn decentres—indeed usurps—
the individual within the poems of Fuselage; the lyric ‘I’ rarely features,
instead invoking a nameless, faceless ‘us’ that struggles in an inhospi-
table coercive environment. The ‘massive pattern’ depicted in ‘Laurel’,
the opening (and only named) poem of Fuselage, is likened to a honey-
comb, but the natural phenomenon is debased into a post-Soviet apart-
ment block in which Quinn sees the drones submitting to an invisible,
imposed system. The language struggles to capture the experience: ‘And
then it drops us back in things, / a zone that has been emptied of all
tidings’.
202  A. McDAID

This inability to articulate—resorting to vague locutions such as ‘things’

and ‘tidings’—limits the possibilities for connection. Where other migra-
tion poetries reach for historical narrative, shared tropes or familiar sym-
bols, Quinn’s poetry struggles to communicate across the highly-mediated
zone of digital existence. Baudrillard’s hyperreality is synonymous for
Quinn with usurpation; Sect. 3 of ‘Laurel’ unpicks how the individual is
continuously undermined by these technological interventions:

In waves and waves the mixed reports come in.

(It’s often best to leave the TV on.)
They eddy through us, lifting up our limbs
into their panorama – swirls and gleams
of rapid imagery and breaking news,
a pageantry, a kind of global nous.
Fuselage, 14.

The parentheses transform the illusion of company into an instance

of insidious control—the television incarnating influence, the brackets
expressing received wisdom that is neither attributed nor challenged. An
anonymous puppeteer controls the viewers by ‘lifting up our limbs / into
their panorama’, ultimately inducting the audience into the ‘pageantry’
of the broadcast. Through the intervention of the TV reports, a dysto-
pian community is created, of which we are all unwitting members.

Our bodies join and move in these transactions,

round and round, in antique, practised accents
of want and give[.]
Fuselage, 14.

Puppetry lends itself to ventriloquism, and those ‘practised accents /

of want and give’ are designed to recite secular prayers of consumerist
longing. In a literary recitation of intertextual memory, ‘Laurel’ incorpo-
rates lines from Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reworking
the creation myth in an era of digital dislocation:12

Once upon a time the old Gods sang

Of bodies chang’d to various forms and airs,
Of seasons ceding, making up the years,
Of human creatures risen from the stones
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  203

Up into seeing how the sky extends

And dreaming of some muddy origin
That flicker’d from the Gods or in a gene
And gave its tenour to everything that teems,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth to present times.
Fuselage, 14–15.

The opening lines of Ovid’s Metamorphosis serves as an apposite reflec-

tion of Quinn’s intentions in Fuselage—‘of bodies changed to various forms
and airs’. In Quinn’s volume, the central theme of transformation is real-
ised in the representation of 21st-century realities of technological advance-
ment that have fundamentally altered human experience. Where Ovid’s
Metamorphosis considers mythical mutabilities, Quinn’s ‘Laurel’ reinvents
the canonical poem by concentrating on the phenomenological instability
that defines the contemporary human condition. The literary memory of
Ovid’s lyric is reinvented in Sect. 3 of ‘Laurel’; Quinn adapts and infuses
inherited memory with 21st-century anxieties of authenticity.
‘Bodies chang’d’ loom large in Quinn’s dystopian representation,
particularly the loss of bodily integrity. The bodies in Fuselage are dis-
connected from their cognitive selves, robotically participating in the
recitations of late capitalism; the lines from ‘Laurel’ quoted earlier—‘our
bodies join in and move in these transactions’—impress the disjunction
in the syntax. Through the medium of ‘mixed reports’ via the televi-
sion, bodies are coerced into participation, becoming as much part of the
‘rapid imagery and breaking nous’ as the newsreels themselves. This idea
of information flowing in ‘waves and waves’ lends an organic inevitability
to the flow of transmission, suggesting that, like ‘the noise of crows’, it is
futile to try to stem the expanse of the ‘news reports’.
In sensing this alienation, ‘Laurel’ seeks out nature as counterbalance. The
urge for compensatory connection to the earth is such that the speaker again
relinquishes his own voice, in this instance in exchange for his lover’s nar-
rative. The fourth stanza opens in the first person and then quickly admits
its impersonation: ‘About when I was twenty, (you are saying) / I was on
my way home up Strahov hill’. The intensely-realised sensory experience of
nature counters the technological void that ‘Laurel’ presents up to this point:

I had to lie
down on the grass beneath the glinting sun
and feel it in me, as if I had been sown
204  A. McDAID

into the earth and rooted like a tree

before I stretched up skywards, sure and true[.]
Fuselage, 15.

The intoxication of nature is distinctly different from the loss of bod-

ily autonomy of the poem’s opening stanzas; these are not ‘transactions’
of necessary conjunction’ with technology but rather voluntary inter-
actions with nature. Exalting in nature, ‘Laurel’ (the title itself invok-
ing the symbol of success) climaxes in a glorious communion with the
earth and the sky. The ultimate image is a freeze-frame of harmony: ‘and
stayed there swaying in that scene, / forever in love with the only sun’.
The inimitable essence of the moment, experienced between the individ-
ual and the ‘only sun’, pushes back against the inevitable post-capitalist
condition of Fuselage by revelling in subjective, unmediated human expe-
rience. In preserving the brief synthesis of human and nature, the poem
purposefully locates itself in this halcyon scene, celebrating a synchronic-
ity that, in a postmodern digital society as Fuselage proceeds to dissemi-
nate, is increasingly remote.
Sara Berkeley’s post-pastoral ethos centres on environmental destruc-
tion, but Quinn’s use of nature has a different purpose. While Berkeley
retains an anthropological dimension to the degradation of nature,
Quinn sees an inevitable end to both human and nature at the hands
of technology. Part Two of Fuselage is a stream-of-consciousness-style
sequence of unnamed poems depicting this cognitive environment; the
opening poem of Part Two, ‘Suddenly small islands…’, challenges inher-
ited geographies with new technological horizons:

Suddenly small islands

of colour can be seen
through drizzle on the screen—
thousands of words and signs
exchanged in the transaction,
eddying.
Fuselage, 19.

As for many migrant writers, including Berkeley and Morrissey in this

study, alternative maps are necessary for new environs, but in Quinn’s
case the entire mode of cartography needs overhauling in order to
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  205

navigate this unchartered territory of technology. Old terminologies

acquire new meaning in Quinn’s poetic language—rather than mapping
the land, his coordinates are directed at ‘the screen’. The familiar ‘driz-
zle’ of Irish weather, used by Clifton in the epilogue to The Winter Sleep
of Captain Lemass to denote the disorientations of returning to Ireland,
is transformed in Quinn’s poetics to indicate the static of poor digital
connection. Quinn presents his reader with a reinvention of the land-
scape and language of poetry, and his motivating ethic in Fuselage is to
find an appropriate poetic mode of representing this new space defined
by technology.
In the constant flow of information, the horizon of the screen is over-
whelmed by messages: the ‘thousands of words and signs / exchanged
in the transaction, / eddying.’ The turbulence of the verb ‘eddying’ car-
ries the ‘fury’ of relentless process, co-opting the language of nature for
emerging digital practices. Signalling a dual need for reinvention and
familiarity, Quinn’s careful reconstruction of vocabulary, like his recon-
struction of maps, is key to navigating this digital context. By anthro-
pomorphising disembodied digital features, the poem bridges the gap
between human and technological in imagery that is disturbingly con-
vincing. There is tenderness in the grotesque here:

Then one black zone

is flesh and flowing violence:

so beautiful the skin,

so starved and yet so silken—
shimmering with software.
Fuselage, 19.

The lines recall with Vona Groarke’s ‘Away’ (2), and the instinctive
parental longing to ‘touch their silky faces on my screen’ when faced
with her children mediated by technology through the experience of
migration. Where Groarke reaches for her children’s skin through the
screen however, Quinn persists in conflating human and digital into
a new formulation of embodiment. The screen does not approximate
human features—it ‘is flesh’. The collusion and collision between human
and machine in contemporary existence pushes Quinn (and his reader)
to consider the point where conscious embodiment begins and ends. In
206  A. McDAID

questioning the boundaries of hitherto utterly distinct realms, Quinn’s

poetry accepts the increasing fluidity of such definitions.
Mary-Louise Pratt’s theory of ‘contact zones’ is familiar in migration
discourse, and it can be usefully deployed here in relation to human and
digital realms. Pratt uses the term ‘contact zones’ to denote the ‘social
spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’, invit-
ing reflections on how contact zones are spaces of innovative and fluid
interaction.13 In Fuselage, ‘contact zones’ are spaces engineered between
digital and sentient acts, causing tussles of autonomy similar to those
depicted by Pratt with regard to migrant communities. Quinn’s search
for a mode of reconciliation between the human and the ­technological
finds temporary refuge in contact zones, but the steady erosion of
human autonomy ultimately leans towards a conception of a future as
commingled rather than co-operative. N. Katherine Hayles has coined
the term posthuman to describe this altered conception of the human
subject in a world profoundly embedded in information technologies.14
The conflation of human and machine is a feature of a posthuman world;
other criteria include virtuality of bodies and the supercession of pres-
ence/absence by pattern/randomness as definitive interpretative modes.
By displacing the epistemological binary of presence/absence, the
embodied self is redundant; by extension in Quinn’s poetry, the inter-
woven, untitled, sequential poems of Part Two of Fuselage aspire to a
similar elision of autonomy.
In a posthuman environment, the exchange of information trumps
materiality, as in ‘Suddenly small islands …’ where the consciousness
birthed through the ‘black zone’ and ‘shimmering with software’ is the
product of technogenesis (the coevolution of humans and technics) and
possessed of information rather than of body. The intrinsic value of ‘the
thousands of words and signs’ is explicit—it is ‘worth so much’, despite
relying on a pair of eyes for its single incarnation. The posthuman subject
exists in a world of surveillance and omnipresence, and is both product
and purveyor of a new value system depicted in Quinn’s poetry: ‘Press
pause just there. / Two eyes watch the earth.’
As Part Two of Fuselage proceeds, the reader is taken deeper into a
realm of unfamiliar and unnerving creatures, whose genesis seems both
human and technological, as in the opening line of the second poem
which declares ‘[t]he thick dark current runs, flows out from us’. Hayles’s
theory of posthumanism observes how ‘[t]echnical beings and living
beings are involved in a continuous reciprocal causation in which both
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  207

groups change together in coordinated and indeed synergistic ways’.15

Quinn’s imagery begets a 21st-century version of a familiar rough beast:

The surface coils and rends

itself so monstrously –
swirls flicker strenuously,
then sink like sodden fronds[.]’
Fuselage, 20.

‘The Second Coming’ is a certain companion to this postmodern revela-

tion, where ‘mere anarchy’ is replaced by relentless entropy. Yeats’s image
of his rough beast, ‘[a] gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / […] moving its
slow thighs’ is surely echoed in Quinn’s evocation: ‘as though beneath the
surface / something huge had woken—lazy, moving, limber—’.16
The sinister quality of the unnameable surge is intensified by its dis-
embodiment. It is composed of ‘rumour, / data and vast funds’ and is
purely an informational entity. Its possession of knowledge without
materiality underpins the deferred menace as it ‘swerves/ off sideways
and back down / again into light slumber’. That ‘light slumber’ is remi-
niscent of a computer in sleep-mode, ready to resume at a moment’s
notice, another instance of Quinn’s restagings of language to adapt to
the emergent features of a technological existence. Machine and human
are indistinguishable. Sentient and technological spheres are no longer
discrete. In ‘Lift the remote control …’, the opening sentence is an order
to participate: ‘angle it into / the systems the waves’, the poem com-
mands, depicting the ‘reciprocal causation’ of Hayles’s posthumanism.
The anthropomorphised screen is tenderly described—its ‘tiny tendril’
an imaginative projection of a glaringly absent physicality. The remote
control, the most banal of household devices, permits the invasion and
occupation of the home through its enabling of televisual discourse. The
illusion of volition is granted to the householder—‘Do you want to con-
tinue?’ the poem asks—but the answer is abrupt, as if assumed: ‘Yes.’
Human and machine ultimately fuse, the remote control becom-
ing an extension of the individual: ‘and then you find the wiring’s /
coloured rivulets / streaming from your hand.’ The word-order of the
final sentence of ‘Lift the remote control …’ brooks no disobedience,
eroding individual autonomy. The poem blurs the lines of bodily sover-
eignty, a concept undermined by the technogenesis of that final image.
208  A. McDAID

In Quinn’s confronting poetic stance, the subjective human body is

untrustworthy; sentient intelligence has been hijacked by artificial intel-
ligence. The omnipresence of fear informs every move, in anticipation of
the scenes in ‘Recently illiteracy …’.

that any moment your own hands

would swoop down from the skies
with exceptionally intricate weaponry destroying
foliage, cats, schoolchildren, you also
Fuselage, 33.

The image begins as a futuristic, science-fictional nightmare but as

it proceeds, it quickly becomes familiar. The ‘intricate weaponry’ is just
one further advancement on the drones regularly deployed by mili-
tary air forces, while the innocence and mundaneness of ‘foliage, cats,
schoolchildren’ reminds the reader of the victims of these technologi-
cal advancements. There is undoubtedly an ethical position in Quinn’s
insistence on recording the damage, but Fuselage observes rather than
protests. The poetic language reflects a sense of futility; the jargon, or
‘voice-over’, of global capitalism—‘plenitude, the trickle-down / /effect,
World Bank suits arriving any minute now, they say’—is dully recited in
an extra-long line, deadening the effect of the airstrike and neutralising
any outrage through its muted tones.
Those hands, a synecdoche throughout Fuselage for the erasure of
individuality, are progressively defamiliarised to the point of unrecog-
nisability. ‘Recently illiteracy …’ is nostalgic for ‘a time when your hand
moving through / / the air, whatever air that be, / was not what it (lift
it up and look) is today’. Quinn’s syntactical strategy here emphasises the
poetics of loss that are realised in the deferred comparison between the
past and ‘today’. Quinn postpones actually articulating the comparison,
firstly by struggling with the quality of the present—‘whatever air that
be’—and secondly through his parenthetical distraction—‘(lift it up and
look)’—a strategy reminiscent of the final line of Bishop’s ‘One Art’.17
Unlike the devastating conclusion of Bishop’s poem however, when
Quinn’s sentence eventually concludes, the analogy of past and present
is vaguely dissatisfying. The weariness of reaching for distinction is symp-
tomatic of the insipidness of contemporary experience, as this collection
sees it. Migration and geographic location are insignificant against the
overwhelming dissolution of the individual.
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  209

In this postmodern capitalism, individualism is suppressed and, ulti-

mately, synthesised into homogeneity. Quinn directly assimilates Terry
Eagleton’s theoretical assertions on capitalism into the poem ‘The step-
ping up, the sudden information, the seed’. Taking Eagleton’s exact
words from his 1990 text The idea of the aesthetic, Quinn remakes the
statement as poetry by virtue of its inclusion: ‘the relentless dissolution
of forms and commingling of identities, // the confounding of specific
qualities / into one indeterminate, purely quantitative process’.18
Just as human and technic are indistinguishable in Fuselage, the lan-
guages of poetry and theory are equally intertwined as a statement of
commitment that serves in principle but not in practice. The qualities
of poetry are lost in the dense theoretical language of Eagleton’s quota-
tion, and these kinds of aesthetic sacrifices are problematic in Fuselage.
Quinn’s determination to represent the realities of 21st-century living
seems designed to mutilate the very language of poetry. Thematic con-
cerns displace language in Fuselage and Quinn’s invocation of Eagleton
signifies his particular preoccupation with the role of capitalism. In
‘Recently illiteracy …’ established crises of poverty and deprivation are
overturned and remarketed—‘illiteracy, murder and malnourishment
/ were re-invented; the logo designed’ while unquestioning shop-
pers consume. ‘[N]ew products…leap out / from the shelves’, the lat-
est must-haves in a mediated, marketed world that repackages and sells
horrors back to its eager customers. Consumerism is as concerned with
the manipulation of space as of products, and here, in ‘the supermar-
ket that’s faceted with choice’, the vulnerability of the consumer to the
flatteries of marketing is a dispiriting reflection of the emptiness of the
capitalist lifestyle. Consumption validates existence while influencing per-
sonal and social identity:

you’ll feel that this product is for you

that your personality is best expressed
through its purchase; it’s you; you know it too
Fuselage, 33.

Identity has been rescinded to brand loyalty—there are no questions

of nationality here, nor any organic demonstrations of cultural or com-
munal belonging. The rituals of belonging and exclusion that preoccupy
Sinéad Morrissey in her Japanese sequence and in her Belfast poems have
210  A. McDAID

no place in Quinn’s perception of the 21st century. Products equal per-

sonality in this post-national, and post-human, poetic space.
Quinn pushes the symbiosis even further through his customary care
with syntax. The slogan ‘it’s you’ is slotted into the sentence between
semi-colons as a poetic subliminal message, like an image flashed on
screen that vanishes before it consciously registers. The motif of the
car on the highway in ‘More or less intact …’ represents the detached,
accelerated postmodern condition, where everyone is separate and yet
indistinguishable—faceless drivers ‘enmeshed / in roadsigns, traffic sys-
tems, the errand and instructions’. Even homes are merely ‘the large
machines for living in’. The contrast with traditional migration formula-
tions of ‘home’ is striking—for Quinn, the erosion of the individual is
encapsulated in the consumerist motto ‘[p]ersonal history irrelevant’,
the absence of the verb further divesting the unnamed subject of his/her
identity. In its approximation of universal dislocation, Fuselage is appro-
priately anonymous.
One of the stand-out poems in Fuselage is ‘Flashes, specks…’ for the
manner in which it addresses the concerns of the postmodern capitalist
generation while maintaining its poetic integrity throughout. It also is
the culmination of the technological subsection of Part Two, which pro-
ceeds to slightly more personal reflections on the intimacy of estrange-
ment in the late capitalist context. ‘Flashes, specks …’ sustains the
unrhymed couplet structure of most of the technological poems, with
varied syntactical and rhythmic designs. In the deliberate but somewhat
random patterning of the poem, Quinn refracts the urge for structure
over information by delivering the required pattern but prioritising
the content. Language, like experience, is distorted here: vocabulary is
strange and subject is eschewed. Humans are unrecognisable and their
actions even less so:

Flashes, specks: if not men and women crowding fast in the streets
what are they?

They flange out far across the special zones, scud

the pavements’ edges
surge and tack this way and that, into the main drag
or trickle through the sidestreets
Fuselage, 39.
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  211

The verbs—flange, scud, tack—express peripheral actions, aligning

the dubious human beings as marginal to the profile, mere avatars in an
advertisement for life on earth. Indeed, the poem alludes to artificiality
and approximation with the interjection of ‘the voice-over’, whose utter-
ance changes the tone of the presented scene.

(feel the gear-change, the summoned boost,

…
the pitch, the soothing timbre
assembled by men and women in dark rooms checking
levels, watching monitors)
Fuselage, 39.

In this Orwellian territory, surveillance and manipulation render the ‘air

dense with overview’. The voiceover describes the human scene as ‘fabric
[…] of society’ to which Quinn promptly appends the qualification ‘flesh
made spectral’. This ghosting of community has turned the world into a
‘flaring, phosphorescing play of flindered surface’, an image that surely is
borne from grainy digital reproductions of real life, Google Earth-style.
The poem proceeds inexorably to place the subject within that envi-
ronment: ‘& I move through this’, changing the perspective to the
personal voice, unexpected at this point in the collection. The use of
‘&’ anticipates the ‘ampersands and copulae’ of the poem, logograms
replacing words, just as simulacra now substitute reality. The ‘spick tor-
rent’ that for Wallace Stevens’ in ‘The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring
Voyage’ heralds and assists the ‘goldener nude’ in her voyage of discov-
ery becomes, in Quinn’s reinvention, a coercive, uncontrollable force.19
Contemporaneously, torrent is more instantly linked to web servers and
download speeds than oceanic currents; significantly, a torrent file con-
tains coded metadata rather than any actual information. At linguistic,
formal and thematic levels, ‘Flashes, specks …’ continually questions the
integrity of representation and the reliability of perceived realities.
For citizens of a global capitalist society, the wearing of ‘GAP jeans,
NEXT sale shirt’ advertises privilege. This uniform suggests complicity in
(and wilful ignorance of) the exploitations enacted by the dominant capi-
talist systems. The poem undertakes an act of concealment similar to the
one posed by concerned consumers in the way the lines initially affect
moral culpability before trailing off in a wave of disinterest:
212  A. McDAID

GAP jeans, NEXT sale shirt,

their ‘Made in’ tags discreet

white stigmas stitched on inside seams—

China, Indonesia—flashpoints, joint trade,

flouting of …

4402 3028 127* ****

the numbers wielded for the purchase[.]
Fuselage, 40.

Rather than concluding the litany of human rights abuses, the poem
stages the limited attention span of the blasé consumer in the ellipsis. The
poetic line is distracted by the credit card number, that entwines the con-
sumer into the massive process of production and consumption; swiping
the credit card sees ‘the tiny fibres / / furiously knitting me into the flows,
the circuits, the systems / as data’. Both worker and consumer are elided
in a system of which they are an integral part, a system where ‘figures com-
ing in from Europe and East Asia’ alludes to profit margins and volume of
imports as well as the mass migrations of human beings. The dissolution
of individual and communal concerns in this ‘massive rippling arras of the
world’ speaks to a new kind of migration, in which the movement of prod-
ucts and data are at least as significant as the movement of human beings.
The wide-lens, detached perspective of the opening poems of Part Two
of Fuselage— the ‘billowing array of coloured stitchwork’—shifts to a more
intimate voice in the final poems of Part Two, from ‘Fly into …’ onwards.
Reflecting the entropic ideological qualities of the volume, Quinn offers
another set-within-a-set of poems in the second section of Part Two,
in this case seven sonnets in Onegin or Pushkin form. Fran Brearton
has traced the varieties of sonnets and the investment in formal tech-
niques in Quinn’s work in ‘The ‘nothing-could-be-simpler line’: Form in
Contemporary Irish Poetry’.20 The ease with which he deploys various for-
mal strategies is one of the most distinctive aspects of his poetry. Brearton’s
essay notes the highly stylised approach of Quinn’s generation of poets,
attributing it, to some extent, to the influence of Michael Longley who was
Writing Fellow at Trinity College Dublin when Quinn, Caitríona O’Reilly
and David Wheatley were students. For Quinn, formal variety is truly ena-
bling, permitting his poetry to enter new territories of ideological and
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  213

philosophical exploration while also giving him the necessary equipment

to encounter established themes anew. The Onegin sonnets carry Fuselage
forward from the ‘massive rippling arras of the world’ to a close-up appre-
hension of life in contemporary society. The sequence addresses the crucial
themes of capitalism, consumerism, displacement and dislocation through
the lyric mode that immediately engages the reader with its personal, con-
fessional tone, distinct entirely from the distant, almost robotic, voice of
the earlier poems.
The natural cadence and active narrative rhythm of the Onegin form
are perfectly adapted to Quinn’s approach in this section. From the out-
set we are geographically located, having wandered through indistinct
digi-scapes to get here. Time, place and mode of transport are all out-
lined ­ immediately—‘Fly into London Stansted early. / Friday morning.
Commuter train’. Quinn’s account of the ‘undulating boredom, brick /
on brick’ reality of living, working and commuting in the city, where bod-
ies are poised against bodies in an overcrowded train ‘[s]tuffed full of peo-
ple’, is a personalised perspective of the minutiae of 21st-century existence.
Observed from above, the city is a colony of ants, a ‘milling swarm’ drawn
to the ‘cash-points, corporate logos, the teachers, / the posters, the theo-
ries, the great T-shirts’. The apartment blocks dotting the river banks are
‘endless catacombs’, the corporate buildings ‘multinational ziggurats’.
Although the poetic voice has shifted, the poetic concerns remain the same;
the Onegin sequence documents the individual’s sense of disconnection,
despite (or perhaps due to) being in the heart of the city and surrounded
by crowds. As the sequence progresses, the narrative reveals this sojourn in
London as a weekend break, opened and closed with a flight, and its pur-
pose a reunion of sorts with the speaker’s brothers. As such, it is a version of
a homecoming-narrative, complicated by the fact that that none of the three
belong either here in London, or indeed in their original homeplace. In this
inverted world, even the Holiday Inn is hostile to these itinerant individuals.

An old lush clowns

at the bar of our Holiday Inn,
then comes up to us, flicking her hair:
‘I hate you tourists…I live here.
Just fuck off home.’ Which is Dublin
for Jack, Stockholm Shane and Prague
myself. Two days and no jet-lag.
Fuselage, 44.
214  A. McDAID

The multiplied versions of home for the three brothers suggest the
distance from their shared past that no longer exists. The ‘unmentioned’
reason for the reunion, ‘the legal separation’, has dissolved the final
bond to the irretrievable past with the ‘ancient / family house going on
the market’. As in O’Donoghue’s ‘The Mule Duignan’, the sale of the
family house is a moment of identity rupture, the removal of the site of
memory crucially altering the practice of remembering. In Quinn’s con-
figuration, personal history is sacrificed on the altar of capitalist endeav-
our and memories recede into the abyss of technological representation:
‘Our childhood shrinks, / but flows in coloured hyperlinks.’ The online
webpage of the real estate company now provides the link to the past—
even memories are commodified, offered for consumption to potential
purchasers.
The final poem of the Onegin sequence is a prayer—directly appealing
to a higher power for transcendence. It opens with ‘And, Jesus, get me
out of here’. It is no small irony that the vehicle for transcendence is not
divine intervention but rather an aircraft, not least given the volume’s
preoccupation with globalism, capitalism and displacement. Yet even an
aircraft can provide a secular grace, and the heavenly space aspired to is
an escape from the city and its attendant obligations and impositions.
Here, in fuselage, there is a certain liberation, although within the rigid
confines of the airplane.

Time to rise into the slipstreams,

attain the matchless civic freedoms
of miles and miles of open sky
(albeit I go steerage.)
Fuselage, 48.

Social standings are still encoded within the relative liberty of the
airplane, but the moment of bliss granted in the penultimate lines of
this sonnet is unmatched at any other moment in the entire collection.
‘Exhilaration. / Joy of brightness. Clouds like an ocean.’ While celebra-
tory, the final sentence nevertheless reiterates the inescapable loss of
authenticity that the postmodern world endures. Even the glorious sky
is not itself but rather it is ‘like’ an ocean. Imitation, replication and
assimilation define every interaction in Quinn’s confronting collection.
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  215

The act of boarding a plane is no longer a symbolic act of rupture, as

in Delanty’s ‘The Emigrant’s Farewell’; the migration context is stripped
back in Justin Quinn’s poetry. Rather, the plane opens onto the poten-
tial of ‘miles and miles of open sky’, offering an escape from the bom-
bardment of commercial and capitalist demands that leaves every
21st-­century citizen in a state of constant and irreparable dislocation that
has little to do with national borders or concepts of home.

‘Refresh: There’s nothing left to send/receive.’:

Migration, Technology and Poetic Innovation in Conor
O’Callaghan’s Poetry
Described by Matthew Campbell as part of a ‘middle generation’ of
Irish poets, Conor O’Callaghan is poised between old and new frames
of identity and migration.21 In his use of memory as a mode of ena-
bling alternative futures rather than of retrieving the past, O’Callaghan’s
poetry raises pressing questions around composition, stability and mem-
ory practices in the digital era. Migration and memory are complicated
by technological innovations and while memory studies have prolifer-
ated in recent years, the transformative effects of technology on memory
have yet to be fully disseminated in cultural discourse. Paul Connerton
proposes that twinned impulses of ‘the great archivisation and the new
information technologies, the one centralizing, the other diffusive’ are
the definitive features of memory practices moving forward into a digi-
tally mediated context.22 Furthermore, Connerton suggests that this
‘cultural surfeit of information’ will require ‘that the concept of discard-
ing may occupy as central a role in the twenty-first century as the con-
cept of production in the 19th century’.23
This dialogue between preserving and discarding provides Conor
O’Callaghan with the central focus of his 2013 volume The Sun King.
Like Quinn’s Fuselage, The Sun King configures its poetry at the inter-
face of human and digital frames. O’Callaghan’s repeated migrations—
initially to the United States, and subsequently to England—inflect his
poetry with instabilities that are reiterated through the dislocations of
technology. O’Callaghan’s more recent work concentrates on the ways
technology mediates, reinvents and intervenes in poetry’s positioning
of memory and community, with an emphasis on the role of language
216  A. McDAID

and form as tools of disembodiment and declarations of presence. His

repeated migrations from Ireland to the United States and then to
United Kingdom are the focus of the critically acclaimed Fiction (2005)
and The Sun King (2013).24
O’Callaghan poetry resists literary expectations and is forthright in
its manner of deflating inherited tropes: his early and oft-quoted poem
‘East’ undercuts the romanticism of Irish landscape poetry with unflinch-
ing urban realities:

But give me a dreary eastern town that isn’t vaguely romantic

where moon and stars are lost in the lights of the greyhound track
and cheering comes to nothing and a flurry of misplaced bets
blanketing the stands at dawn is about as spiritual as it gets.
Seatown, 42.

In looking beyond the stock themes of national poetry, O’Callaghan

has always been a ‘poet of transitions, segues, connections and cross-
ings’, not unlike Muldoon.25 Initially in Fiction and then wholeheartedly
in The Sun King, O’Callaghan moves away from Ireland; the volumes
chart the poet’s migrations initially to the United States before settling
in the United Kingdom, where he is based at present. The multiple
‘homes’ to which the poetry refers indicate the increasing instability of
traditional concepts of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’. The layering of memory
implied by these multiple homes reinforces a necessary reconsideration
of the paradigms and referential frameworks of migration theory, seen in
O’Callaghan’s work as invested in his ethic of continual reinvention of
his poetic language and his self-positioning. The volumes also documents
the collapse of the poet’s marriage (to fellow poet Vona Groarke), and
his separation from his children. Unsurprisingly, then, both Fiction and
The Sun King are volumes of transitions and of insecurities—of location,
of relationships and of community. O’Callaghan’s poetry is the product
of dislocation and its mediation of migrant experience is related to the
mobilities of the present; that is, the physical and technological fluidities
particular to the 21st-century experiences. His engagement with a vir-
tual community mitigates his ‘homing desire’, while the multiplicities of
form available through a technological aesthetic can accommodate the
fluctuating sense of self. O’Callaghan’s poetry has always demonstrated
his formal adventurousness and The Sun King in particular shows a poet
expanding even further the boundaries of poetic presentation while
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  217

engaging with an anonymous but potentially infinite community of read-

ers. As such, even his self-presentation as a poet appeals to a virtual net-
work by maintaining technological connections and employing a digital
medium via Twitter. These are new constructs of affiliation, light-years
removed from the criteria of traditional identity-markers and enabled by
O’Callaghan’s willingness to reinvent connectivity through the ephem-
eral memory practices of a global online community.
If memory is a ‘social framework’ and communities are consolidated
through shared memory, how do new media formats influence the way
memory and identity are composed and transferred? Where traditional
emigration narratives have strict spatial contours, technology disrupts
temporal and geographical distinctions, advancing earlier developments
in communication in unprecedented ways. New media not only enables
continual engagement with collective and cultural memory discourses of
the original community via online newspapers, radio/television and social
media windows, but it also opens towards prospective alternative com-
munities. These communities are formed through affiliations of volition
rather than through accidents of geography; in the vast space of the inter-
net, anonymity and intimacy coexist in a strange but powerful harmony.
These network structures transform how memory and meaning is collated,
where memory resides in sites and webpages and oral communication
cedes to digital connectivity. In Fiction and The Sun King, O’Callaghan
commits his poetry to represent these reinventions by playing with the
concepts of memory and community on formal and thematic levels.
The dislocations of modern life, whether technological or migratory,
are the productive source of poetry for O’Callaghan. The instinctive
geographies of the psyche are challenged by the realities of contemporary
migrancy which demands separations from family and repeated moves
to new destinations. Fiction meditates on those internal disorientations
through formal and thematic iterations of the migrant experience—in
‘Shanty’, language is stretched and separated across the page, with strate-
gic pauses rehearsing the musicality of the title:

I flicked across three provinces

inland of any shore
and have since turned back on
with chorus enough to keep
the memory of a squeezebox company
Fiction, 22
218  A. McDAID

As the poem drifts across the page, it imitates the drift of memory and
imagination which, in O’Callaghan’s poetry, is inexorably drawn back to
some kind of home. The disorientations of migration are related to dis-
tance from the sea; in ‘Inland’, the prairie landscapes are stifling, ‘the air
is chaste, literal’, under the ‘whole afternoon’s glare’. Poetic inspiration
and migrant dislocation merge in the imagined horizons of the poem’s
aspirations:

Some knowledge
you dream, is felt first
ages before it’s known. Take dawn, the way it floods
our curtainless room. Drifting out and in

its wake: petrels, white caps, the tide rolled back to Wales.
Fiction, 23.

The migrant fantasy is deflated in the poem’s final line, simply stat-
ing ‘I wish.’ These disappointments of distance underpin both Fiction
and The Sun King, and O’Callaghan is acutely conscious of the creative
tension which produced by distance: ‘the debt all losses owe to senti-
ment’, as he describes it in ‘Peace’. This sehnsucht is the source of poetry:
‘a grief- / nostalgia some Germanic compound coins / and we don’t
share. A shadow warms to peace. / The heatwave, at its stillest, yearns
a storm.’ It is in these emotional upheavals, the ‘groundless / momen-
tary displacement of hotel lounges’, that O’Callaghan sources his aes-
thetic. Whether as in ‘Time Zones’, where carefully rhymed stanzas are
punctuated by the Wingdings symbol of an airplane, or in ‘The Burbs’
where personal identity is eroded in the way ‘sticks and stones are being
shipped home / surface, piecemeal, with our accents’, the disruptions of
migration dominate Fiction.
The eight-year lapse between the publication of Fiction and The Sun
King brings a new dynamic to bear on O’Callaghan’s mobilisation of
migration as poetic inspiration. An awareness of the possibility of paral-
lel lives, of roads taken and roads left untrodden, brought about by the
realities of migration, inflects O’Callaghan’s poetry and is intensified by
his obsession with technological presence which allows for those multi-
ple identities. Repeat migration, which requires reinvention in a new city
or country on a number of instances, clarifies the manifold varieties of
life available. In the cycle of repeat migration, the migrant can inhabit a
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  219

certain life for a period: s/he engages in local culture and is immersed in
habits and customs of this particular place. It is an act—the migrant wears
the costume and speaks the lines but is ready to walk off-stage when the
time comes—but it is also alchemy. O’Callaghan inhabits the process in
‘Woodsmoke’ where the purchase of a backyard stove indoctrinates the
speaker into the American way of life. The poem outlines the coping strate-
gies of successful migration: immersion in the strange rituals that mark the
local way of life. Initially, the woodstove is an alien—it ‘hogs the patio … /
looks like some wild creature / in from the sticks to hunt scraps’—but over
time, the speaker comes to take control of the foreign beast by taking own-
ership of the paraphernalia of his new life.

Stock reports double

as tinder, TV listings,
twigs the ice storm left
in its wake, war coverage
and a struck match.
The Sun King, 23.

In accepting the unfamiliar ephemera of domesticity and using it for

his own ends, the speaker is released into a reciprocal relationship with
the woodstove, a symbol of the host-country itself. ‘It changes me /
much as it changes / maple and newsprint’, the speaker acknowledges,
opening himself to an understanding of the migration experience as nec-
essary and inevitable. The final lines of ‘Woodsmoke’ invest faith in the
purification ceremony to which all things—‘this garden / my son’s and
daughter’s faces / …. / its stove’s words, my writing them, / the page’s
threshold even’—are subject: ‘all bound to get threaded / through some
flame’s liminal eye.’
The hard-won ‘odd peace’ of ‘Woodsmoke’ is nowhere to be found,
however, in ‘Required Fields’, which captures the essence of lives spent
in transit. The poem conjures poetry from the practical challenges of
transferring the detritus of modern life from one place to another, and
illustrates the psychic impact of such a contingent existence. The unre-
liability of memory and the vagaries of human sentiment are shown
up as unreliable indicators of both past and future—‘one memory too
far’ for the mind to maintain. The overabundance of memories com-
piled throughout a migrant life necessitates forgetting in order to move
220  A. McDAID

forward, while the electronic recording of the past in an online form

reflects how memory practices are moving away from the act of cogni-
tion and toward questions of technological capacity.
O’Callaghan’s investment in remaking the vocabulary of technology
as poetic language is signalled in the title ‘Required Fields’. In allud-
ing to necessary information that must be submitted in an online form,
the title invokes the presence of the external force that looms over The
Sun King: the tyrant of technology dictating modern life. Like Eamonn
Wall in ‘Outside the Tall Blue Building: Federal Plaza’, which meditates
on the dehumanising nature of immigration bureaucracy, O’Callaghan
depicts modern migrant experience as saturated with official procedure,
with ‘required fields’ and ‘red asterisk’. The simplicity of reducing one’s
life to answers on a form or to items packed in boxes is challenged by
numerous poets included in this survey. O’Callaghan knows the charade
all too well:

Perhaps at times it’s better

to submit to the pin-drop of forgetfulness,
accept that there are questions of provenance
no amount of empty boxes can hope to answer.
The Sun King, 40.

These ‘questions of provenance’ reinvent Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘ques-

tions of travel’ in O’Callaghan’s poetics where travel is a given but ori-
gins recede beyond retrieval. The fragmentation of memory through the
dispersal of the material past cannot be reversed but can only be rein-
vented. O’Callaghan’s embrace of the Twittersphere as a new way of
remembering repudiates the crumbling of cognitive memory, offering
alternate modes of flexible memory that can withstand the overload and
instability of contemporaneous migrant existence.
O’Callaghan reinvents the past as a broken web-link, where present
and past remain unsynchronised. The physical belongings that once
made a home are transformed into the relics of another life, unimagi-
nable now. Seeking out the warehouse to retrieve the boxed belong-
ings, the GPS coordinates are easily accessible—‘We Mapquest to it,
postcode to postcode’—but there is no such simple route back to nar-
rator’s previous existence. The precious ‘antiques mall maple, the see-
through tubs of Crocs and Cargoes’ have become ‘the flotsam of an old
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  221

life shipped ahead’, debris washed up on an unfamiliar shore where ‘[n]

one of it translates’. The poem is punctuated by stark declarations that
restage psychological disruption enacted by the experience depicted. The
shipped boxes ‘belong to a blank we are moved too far from now to fill’.
Like the empty spaces on the ‘required fields’, progression is impossible
with incomplete ‘required fields’.
Avtar Brah speaks of ‘multilocationality’ as the defining characteristic
of contemporary diaspora, situated ‘across territorial, cultural and psychic
boundaries’.26 The manifold connections formed by migration are dem-
onstrated by the second-generation Irish worker, and borne out by the
many places and affiliations in O’Callaghan’s The Sun King. Parallel pos-
sibilities are the subject of the poem ‘Kingdom Come’, which embraces
a consciousness that understands the varieties of existence through mul-
tiplicity of place (real or imagined). The poem takes the collapse of a
relationship and imagines its continuation in a parallel setting in which
love survives. Where for Muldoon imagined parallel realities are source
of poetic felicities, The Sun King is comprised of more sombre reflections
on the missed chances of migration. In poems that reinscribe the impos-
sibility of return, the prospect of disruption in linear time that allows
alternate life narratives to unfold is briefly entertained as a self-reflexive
fantasy. This is the fixation of the migrant: potential lives are glimpsed
and then hidden from sight as difficult choices dictate life’s winding path.
The lost home in Kingdom Come is the consequence of marital break-
down but it is also the collateral damage of a migrant life spent in the
flux of continually leaving home behind. Ireland, as the original home-
land, recedes against the repeated dislocations of migrations through
multiple lost homes. The coordinates of loss might be geographically var-
ious but the experience is consistent. In light of these sustained losses—
of home, of house, of family, of neighbourhood, of place—O’Callaghan’s
appeal to a virtual community is particularly poignant.
‘Kingdom Come’ is sparse, comprising 15 couplets documenting love
lived and lost over the course of a failed marriage. Shrouded in shadow,
the speaker is an outsider ‘stalking our old selves’ as he watches the still-
intact family live out its domestic destiny in a parallel space in time. The
poem imagines a blissful alternate life in ‘a street we owned a place on /
where the life we meant to love / / and ran screaming from mid-stream
/ completes itself without us’. Real time is suspended in this still-life
study in harmony:
222  A. McDAID

In the yard each lost wish still chimes

even though there’s no wind.

There is a barometer stalled on ‘Fair’,

a slow air remastered on the squeezebox.

The sea, gone miles out of its way, is there

as a screensaver reflected in the screendoor.
The Sun King, 48.

The saudade of these lines is underpins O’Callaghan’s poetry of disloca-

tion, characterised by a longing for something essentially unattainable but
nonetheless desired. O’Callaghan nevertheless finds consolation here, in
the prospect of continuation in a secular version of the afterlife (‘whatever
kingdom come there is’) and an off-kilter parallel universe that exists just
beyond reality (‘the sea, gone miles out of its way, is there’).
These multiple versions of reality are similarly the subject of ‘Three Six
Five Zero’, an adapted villanelle that concentrates on the tensions of tech-
nological existence and the tenuousness of connections in a highly-medi-
ated world. The discrepancies between temporal and technological time
are highlighted in this parallel universe of manipulation and disruption,
where month-old messages remain powerful and invasive. Like ‘Kingdom
Come’, ‘Three Six Five Zero’ takes something familiar and mundane (a
boarded-up house; contacting Voicemail to reset one’s password) and
transforms it into a moving reflection on human isolation and loneliness
in a world increasingly composed of failed connections and broken links.
The formal restrictions of the villanelle feel particularly appropriate here;
O’Callaghan’s careful rhyming causes the poem to mimic the limitations
of living in the technological era, while the repetitive nature of the poem
re-enacts the illusion of freedom within a regimented system.
In many ways, ‘Three Six Five Zero’ encapsulates the central thrust of The
Sun King in how it balances the blankness of digital life with quiet despair. The
urge to be ‘connected’ results inevitably in a greater sense of isolation within
the global network. The opening tercet establishes the terms of engagement:

I called up Tech and got the voicemail code.

It’s taken me this long to find my feet.
Since last we spoke that evening it has snowed.
The Sun King, 54.
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  223

The Orwellian ‘Tech’ is configured as an anonymous omnipresence

to whom the speaker is bound by his need to receive the ‘code’. Only
by contacting ‘Tech’ is the speaker validated: in doing so, he ‘find[s] his
feet’ and is finally located. The confusion of spatial and temporal coordi-
nates recurs in O’Callaghan’s work, as technological and real time jostle
for primacy in a heavily mediated world. The voicemails are ‘new’ to the
speaker but ‘old’ in the trajectory of time, which is increasingly distorted
by the interventions of a digital regime. Even when the code is received
and access granted, still communication is thwarted: ‘I contacted Tech
to get my voicemail code / to hear your voice, not some bozo on the
road / the week of Thanksgiving’.
The clash between form and content here is similar to Muldoon’s
manipulations of formal structures designed to discomfit the reader.
O’Callaghan’s self-conscious formalism makes the disarmingly casual
tone of the speaker’s voice, reminiscent of Bishop’s ‘One Art’, sit uneas-
ily with the emotional upheaval of the subject matter. The intractability
of the villanelle form emphasises the poet’s control of the poem’s shape
while highlighting the vulnerability of all other structures addressed
within the poem. Time is unstable: temporal disruption threatens to
overturn the poem’s narrative integrity. ‘Fifty-four new messages. Most
are old / and blinking into a future months complete.’ Epistemological
certainty is at risk in this scenario where information transmission is sty-
mied. Even ontological knowledge is unreliable—the speaker’s own
existence is tenuous and his surrounds contingent: ‘I blew a night on
lightening the system’s load, / woke to white enveloping the trees, the
street / that’s blanked out by my leaving.’ This fragmentation of the
known world into a kaleidoscopic exposure of multiple shifting voices
and scenes enacts a postmodern displacement belied by the stringency of
the villanelle form.

I contacted Tech to get my voicemail code

to hear your voice, not some bozo on the road

the week of Thanksgiving dubbing me his sweet
and breaking up and bleating how it snowed
the Nashville side of Chattanooga and slowed
the beltway to a standstill. The radio said sleet.
The kid in Tech sent on my voicemail code.
The Sun King, 54.
224  A. McDAID

The poem is interrupted by interjections (the technician, the truck-

driver, the radio, ‘other’s pasts’), capturing something of the voyeuristic
quality of contemporary life where one is simultaneously, and incessantly,
observed and observing. A motif of fallen snow compounds the atmos-
phere of isolation, with nature maintaining its supremacy even in a tech-
nologically-connected environment. The final quatrain is an exercise in
erasure, as the string of muddled tenses in the first line restates the tem-
poral confusion and increases the dominant sense of disorientation.

Lately other’s pasts will turn me cold.

I heard out every message, pressed Delete.
I’d happily forget my voice, the mail, its code.
We spoke at last that evening. Then it snowed.
The Sun King, 54.

In ‘The Pearl Works’, O’Callaghan merges dominant concerns of

migration, isolation, technology and form in an impressive act of poetic
innovation. Composed of 52 couplets, each of 140 characters, ‘The Pearl
Works’ has its origins in the Twitter-sphere as a weekly tweet, although
this modest compositional strategy belies the carefully crafted nature of
this strikingly coherent work. Even the physical appearance of ‘The Pearl
Works’ challenges poetic norms: printed as landscape rather than portrait
at the end of The Sun King, the reader obliged to flip the book on its
side in order to read the final long poem. This interchangeable ‘view’
assumes a digital reader, at ease with the alternating page layouts of an
iPad’s tilt. The genre of the Twitter poem is not, in itself, an entirely
new endeavour: indeed, by including ‘The Pearl Works’ in The Sun King,
O’Callaghan anticipates the popularity of the ‘twihaiku’.27 The appeal of
the tweet is evident: its immediacy and its reach are appropriate to the
era of instant communications, while its strict conventions, specifically
the 140 character limit, demands creative restraint. Within such rigid
confines, the act of creating a poem as a tweet requires formal discipline
like any traditional poetic structure, with the added attraction of its rela-
tive originality.
Composed of tweets published on a weekly basis, ‘The Pearl Works’
is, as described in The Sun King, ‘selected and revised from a Twitter
page: a sequence of improvised couplets of exactly 140 characters, one
for each week of 2012. The current selection, dedicated to Paul Durcan,
appeared as a chapbook from New Fire Tree Press’.28 The phrase
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  225

‘current selection’ invites the reader to consider whether there may be a

future (or indeed a past) selection and this prospect of alteration destabi-
lises the permanence of the printed poem. The flexibility of memory in a
digital context undermines even the consistency of the printed word and
the suggestion of the existence of other, parallel selections further chal-
lenges our concept of the poem as fixed on the page.29
While the specificity of the character quota sets out a new mode of
formal discipline, like the sonnet’s 14 lines and the haiku’s 17 syl-
lables, short-verse sequences are well-established. Directly restaging
Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and its final
verse—‘It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing and it was going
to snow.’30—O’Callaghan offers his version: ‘It was February all June.
It was raining and it was going to rain.’ O’Callaghan’s tone and his abil-
ity to blend whimsical wit with profound observation is a further nod
to the influence of the American poet. There are formal precedents in
Irish poetry, too; Cork-based Graham Allen has been web-publishing
a single ten-syllable line of his digital poem Holes daily since December
2006 on his website.31 While not abiding by any strict formal constraints,
Paul Muldoon’s The Prince of the Quotidian is nevertheless a disciplined
verse diary comprising of a poem a day composed in January 1992.32
Similar in length and approach to ‘The Pearl Works’, Michael Hartnett’s
‘Inchicore Haiku’ sequence allowed the poet temporary release from the
self-imposed confines of writing exclusively in Irish.33 The terse brevity
of the haiku enabled Hartnett to re-enter English-language poetry after
10 years of publication in Irish only. Indeed the haiku form is familiar
in Irish poetry, and Irene De Angelis’ account of the popularity of the
Japanese verse identifies Michael Longley, Gabriel Rosenstock, Ciaran
Carson, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney as proponents of the haiku
form.34 For contemporary Irish poets, O’Callaghan amongst them, there
is clearly an attraction to the liberation within limitation offered by the
restrictive confines of a rigid form.
Brevity of poetic utterance lends itself to invocation and apprecia-
tion, and O’Callaghan’s tweets are as intense as any haiku. The Twitter
medium appears to espouse an off-the-cuff, throwaway tone, but the
tweets themselves are often secular paeans to the urban scene or inti-
mate reflections on personal pain. The tidy line between minimalism
and expansiveness is well-trodden here as O’Callaghan exploits form and
content to their full potential. ‘The Pearl Works’ marks its time by the
Christian calendar—an unexpected frame of reference in this poem firmly
226  A. McDAID

located in a postmodern digital era. The tweets are dated by allusions to

the liturgical calendar: ‘Ordinary time’, ‘Lent’, ‘The three days’, ‘Easter’,
‘Pentecost’, ‘Advent’, ‘Christmastide’, suggesting a devotional element
to these ritual offerings of poetry. The opening tweet captures the tone:

Say one of these a week: a couplet, maxed-out tweet. Sound twee?

Resolve. The year has gone ahead, the bytes are disappearing.
Follow me.
The Sun King, 56.

Everyone who tweets has their followers, but the echoes of Christ
gathering his disciples reverberate even more loudly given the deliberate
contextualisation within the Christian calendar. The poem spans a calen-
dar year, as per the poet’s declared intentions, and it is marked as much
by references to the changing seasons of the natural world as to the reli-
gious framework. The ephemerality of nature and weather works in tan-
dem with the fleeting quality of Twitter. This interchange of vocabulary
between natural, technological and religious phenomena increases the
vigour of these energetic lines. Computer controls fail when applied to
the seasons:

Midsummer leaps too early. July already. Someone, place on frame-

by-frame, on pause, these long days.
The Sun King, 60.

On other occasions, the actions of the weather are comprehended as a

computerised command:

‘Refresh,’ the buffering May wind says, ‘refresh, refresh, refresh …’

The Sun King, 59.

Religious belief is cauterised into a 21st-century philosophy:

Herewith my current credo: all pastoral is virtual, ever was & shall
be, world without end … Boom!
This day of Our Lord I glimpsed into the server room.
The Sun King, 60.
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  227

As well as being an exercise in poetic innovation, ‘The Pearl Works’

asserts a defence against the passage of time, an ambition stymied by the
poem’s very nature. The Twitter form is essentially brief—both in con-
tent and longevity—and transitory and this conflict of intent and affect
asserts itself in the constant insinuation of anxiety at the rapid pulse
of time on a thematic level in ‘The Pearl Works’. The structure of the
poem, with its succinct 140-character tweets, operates like an accelera-
tor, while the content of various tweets themselves try to slow the pace,
whether through poetic or thematic devices.

Something bucolic to bureaucracy in high season: its clock stopped

on four,
its skeletal staff refectory, its dried mail, its deserted corridor.
The Sun King, 60.

The poem wants literally to stop time, and the steady repetition of
the second line’s litany elongates the moment both in and for the poem.
This stanza’s references to poems by W.H. Auden—‘Bucolics’ and the
stopped clock of ‘Funeral Blues’—make explicit the embedded presence
of the older poet in O’Callaghan’s detached and occasionally ironic tone.
As Heaney’s Audenesque succinctly notes

Trochee, trochee, falling: thus

Grief and metre order us.
Repetition is the rule,
Spins on lines we learnt at school.35

‘Repetition’ is indeed ‘the rule’ and while O’Callaghan’s rhythm and

metre might not be the heroic trochee, reinvention and referentiality
provide the foundations for ‘The Pearl Works’. The traumatised Ireland
in economic recession that greets the speaker on a visit home is likened
to a post-conflict scene:

Half-term home. Who knew post-boom would be (excuse me)

sublime?
Ghost estates, cranes paused, office block shells, pubs like wartime…
The Sun King, 57.
228  A. McDAID

Urging for redemption, this tweet again sees the possibility of sal-
vaged beauty in an urban wasteland. Where Auden’s sequence situates
man in relation to nature, O’Callaghan’s twitter-poem searches for the
human space in a global-capitalist, digital world. Personal devastation is
similarly scoured for potential salvation:

I sleep in my daughter’s bed one night, I sleep in my son’s the next.

I pray that I will wake each morning to azure, to absolution, to text.
The Sun King, 61.

The desire for ‘text’ is enigmatic here; is it the ‘text’ of a phone mes-
sage received whilst asleep? Or perhaps the typeface of an email drawn
up on an azure screen? To wake to ‘text’ is to be open to the redemptive
possibilities of the digital world, while the aspiration for ‘azure’ is the
hope for a clear blue sky as well as a blank computer screen—calm and
unsullied by open windows or icons. The tripled urge for ‘azure’, ‘abso-
lution’, and ‘text’ draw together natural, human, and digital worlds in
a new and necessary configuration that underpins O’Callaghan’s poetic
ethos. These distinct modes of existence jar against each other in this
uneasy tweet—the fundamental human desire for closeness is imagina-
tively at odds with prayers for ‘text’, and yet it is the condition of con-
temporary existence. This constant tug between the abstract and the
actual is key in O’Callaghan’s negotiations throughout The Sun King.
Connection and distance mark the migrant life, as the multiple ties to
various places and cultures show in tweet 4:

Year of the Dragon & red gooseberry lanterns & a prepaid minutes
stall.
My mam IMs all hours: ‘They’re getting northern lights off
Donegal!’
The Sun King, 56.

The presence of the stall selling phone cards to immigrants anxious

to contact their families reminds the reader of the fundamental separa-
tion that defines migration, while the Chinese New Year celebrations not
only indicate a multicultural society but also introduce another dimen-
sion of temporal instability. In addition to the Gregorian calendar with
its Christian reference points, the poem also responds to the Chinese
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  229

lunisolar calendar in the way it acknowledges the ‘Year of the Dragon’.

By conjoining the migrants’ inevitably difficult separation with cul-
tural assimilation that sees Chinese New Year celebrations all over the
Western world, the tweet calls into question the way multicultural mobil-
ity is often portrayed as an unquestionably positive undertaking for both
individuals and host-societies. O’Callaghan’s nuanced presentation rec-
ognises the multiple participants in the larger experience of migration,
which includes the migrants themselves, the host society, and those left
behind in the home country. In a climate in which, (on political levels at
least), migrancy is regularly represented as a choice rather than a neces-
sity, O’Callaghan’s poetry takes care to illustrate the multidimensional,
and often conflicted, nature of migration.36
Communication between home and away is now instantaneous, how-
ever, and the speaker is simultaneously connected to various parts of the
globe at a single moment. There is great joy in the gloriously celebra-
tory image of the Aurora Borealis off Ireland’s northern coastline, and
in the speaker’s ability to share that moment with his mother, even from
across the world. The phenomenon of the northern lights at unusually
southerly latitudes also captures the shifting exchanges between cultures
intimated in O’Callaghan’s meditations on migration. Like the earlier
invocation of ‘absolution’ ‘azure’ and ‘text’, redemptive possibilities
abound in this incantation in tweet 10:

And this? The handful of coppers daylight borrows from October.

Come bright hour. Be bright. Be ours. Be extra, immaterial, other.
The Sun King, 58.

And again in tweet 32:

Glory be this glare, this solar self, this blanched out screen.
Glory be this tangerine charging me all afternoon. Glory be it
indoor green.
The Sun King, 63.

Like Justin Quinn in Fuselage, O’Callaghan is continually interested

in making the vocabulary and experiences of 21st-century technologies
a fit subject for poetry. The verb to ‘IM’ in tweet 4, (IM standing for
Instant Messaging), uses a term already almost obsolete only a couple of
years after its introduction. The isolation brought about by the reliance
230  A. McDAID

on technology is a central theme in that poem, and surfaces repeatedly in

‘The Pearl Works’. The starkness of the tweet couplet exposes the loneli-
ness at the heart of many of the utterances. Tweet 30 is sardonic in its
choice of opening word:

Funny the way it is that you can confirm ‘friends’ that are virtual
and yet solitude comes exclusively in a form that’s far too real.
The Sun King, 63.

Referencing social media and Facebook friendships, the distance

between online and actual spheres is emphasised here. The kinds of
connections that O’Callaghan depicts in his poetry are often dispirit-
ingly unsatisfactory, and are mediated through some form of technol-
ogy. There is very little human contact in this volume: rather, it inhabits
a world defined by spaced interactions, where absence and distance are
decisive features. Despite being saturated by ‘connections’ and crowded
with ‘friends’, O’Callaghan reflects on the changing role of poetry and of
individual human experience.

Now not even lonesomeness, they crow, is subject for the muse.
Tell that to crossroads. Tell that to a bullfrog’s mating call in rushes.
Tell that to the blues.
The Sun King, 62.

These familiar tropes of poetry—the choice at a crossroads, the articu-

lations of nature, the expressiveness of indigenous music—are borne out
of ‘lonesomeness’, a well-established subject for the muse that calls up
the symbolically-charged crossroads of American blues lyrics rather than
the conviviality of the dance at an Irish crossroads. Indeed O’Callaghan
acknowledges the essential role of being alone in energising the muse:
‘Forgive me all this solitude I love. Forgive me all the life I have mis-
placed.’ The tension that the sought-after ‘solitude’ evokes intimates the
difficult conditions necessary for creativity and the costs of those choices,
a conflict that finds its corollary in the complexities of migration serv-
ing as the subject and impetus towards poetic composition. Ultimately a
poet does not truly wish to resolve these tensions but rather to reinvent
and restage them in his/her work.
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  231

As ‘The Pearl Works’ accelerates towards its conclusion, the tweets

gain momentum. Punctuation is discarded and each tweet is left hang-
ing on an ellipsis or remains open-ended, encouraging continuity in the
printed work that did not exist in the original digital form (which had a
week between tweets). The motif of ‘o’ features throughout the poem
as it represents the break between tweets; it is physically present on the
page 44 times. The initial impression of the ‘o’ is merely as a necessary
demarcation but as the poem progresses and the ‘o’ makes its way from
the silence between the tweets into the substance of the lyric itself, the
reader is insidiously alerted to its presence. The ‘o’ is the typographical
representation of the space between the utterances but by tweet 29, it
has becomes substantial in the imagery on which the poem relies. The
repeated references to the ‘solemn O’, along with the beguiling image of
a ‘copper coil’ as it ‘unspools’, suggest that ‘o’ has a particular symbolic
significance within the poem. Like its own structure, there is no end to
possibility; it is the ultimate symbol of reinvention. Playful word associ-
ations—‘[t]he table’s turning still. For the record, I’ve collected discs of
icy sun’—mask more profound allusions that are couched in irreverence:

I love the way a reflection so strong can singe a spot into your field
of vision
like the tiny corona of a frozen lake that you’ve just wizzed on.
The Sun King, 64.

With characteristic humour, O’Callaghan reaches for the cold heart of

truth: the insignificance of human gestures and the compensating indefati-
gability of human spirit. The philosophy of the ‘o’ lies in its completeness,
functioning as a symbol for the earth and for life. It is incomprehensible
and, for that, O’Callaghan offers his thanks to an unknown entity.

Grazie Signore for this fathomless astronomical fluke of landing here

at all,
for the full circle that we’ve come, the blast it’s been, the ball…
The Sun King, 65.

The final tweets become an exaltation, littered with ‘o’ as an exclama-

tion, an address and an aurally satisfying vowel sound. There is a touch
of Joyce in the word-play here:
232  A. McDAID

O slow coach, freeze-mode yellow solar yoyo O hand-thrown old

gold snow globe
O rose most blown O whole whorled ‘out there’ lodestar de l’aube
The Sun King, 66.

The circularity of the image and the open-mouthed sound of the

vowel are visually and aurally mesmerising by the poem’s climax. The
domination of the ‘o’ draws the reader into an oral reproduction of the
poem’s fluidity, while the language itself is celebratory in both form and
content. The ‘whole whorled’ is also the whole world that is contained
within the ‘snow globe’ while simultaneously remaining as distant and
majestic as the stars in a dawn sky. Although the poem is drawing to a
close, the increasing momentum of the poetics is enhanced by images of
sunlight, fecundity and possibility.

O heliotrope O blossom bole O trompe l’oeil orange grove we

home in
O old soul, no bones glowworm without whose strobe we’d mope
eternal gloaming
The Sun King, 66.

If Joyce is here, so too is Yeats: his recourse to the vocative and his
question ‘[a]re you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?’ echoes in this
tweet. Yeats’s meditation on life, creativity and interconnectivity in
‘Among School Children’ ultimately resolves itself in an appreciation of
the unity of existence. The light emitted by O’Callaghan’s glow-worm
offers a kind of salvation that delivers humanity from the threatening sol-
ipsism represented by technology’s advances. The final stanza celebrates
the spectrum of emotion and rather than concluding the poem, it pauses
on the cusp of something else:

O closing words O lovely hopeless song (one more!) invoking love

gone south
O storeroom door that’s on a slope and opens outwards O open
mouth
The Sun King, 67.

The final articulation of the poem obliges the reader to conclude with
an ‘open mouth’, the shape of ‘the goose-egg symbol of perfection’ of
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  233

‘perfectly pursed little lips’. Yet again there is solace to be found here,
this time in the pleasing completeness of the poem as spoken word. The
symmetry between the poem’s ultimate celebratory ethos of possibility,
the invocatory ‘o’ sound and the pronunciation of the final stanza enlists
the reader in an oral ovation, and the poem triumphs over the perva-
sive disorientations of technology. For the energetic and innovative way
it bears witness to the changing human experience, ‘The Pearl Works’ is
a poem that is truly contemporary.
In the configurations of global citizenry in O’Callaghan’s poetry,
migration is normative and dislocation inescapable. O’Callaghan’s indi-
vidual migration is subsumed into his poetic responsibility to represent
the actuality of the digital world. While a present and abiding concern,
migration, in itself, is configured neither as cause nor consequence of the
dislocations in his poetry. The dominant ethic in O’Callaghan’s poetry
is not one of responsibility to a defined expatriate or domestic national
group; rather the poetry is committed to representing the shared expe-
rience of a cybernated world that has already proceeded to dissolve
categories of individuality, nationality, and geography. In the way it
merges human experience with digital innovation, O’Callaghan’s poetry
poses new questions for the ways migration will feature in 21st-century
Irish poetry.

Notes
1. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Oxford:
Routledge, 1996): p. 180.
2. Justin Quinn, “Irish Poetry and the Diaspora,” Metre 3 (1997). Metre
published 17 issues between 1995 and 2005. The magazine was known
for its highly formalist ethos, and is fully available now at http://metre.
ff.cuni.cz.
3. Justin Quinn, Fuselage (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2002).
4. Conor O’Callaghan, Fiction (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2005); The
Sun King (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2013).
5. Justin Quinn, The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995);
Privacy (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999); Fuselage (Co. Meath: The
Gallery Press, 2002); Waves and Trees (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
2006); Close Quarters (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2011).
6. Ed Larrissey, ‘Irish Writing and Globalisation,’ in Globalisation and Its
Discontents, edited by Stan Smith (Cambridge: D.S. Breyer, 2006):
p. 131.
234  A. McDAID

7. Peter Sirr, Bring Everything (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
2000); Billy Ramsell, ‘Secure Server’ from The Architect’s Dream of
Winter, (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2013); Complicated Pleasures (Dublin:
Dedalus Press, 2007).
8. Keatinge, Benjamin. ‘The Language of Globalization in Contemporary
Irish Poetry,’ Studi irlandesi. A journal of Irish Studies. no. 4 (2014).
9. Selina Guinness, ‘Atomisation and Embodiment in Justin Quinn’s
Fuselage,’ Wasafiri 25, no. 2 (2010): pp. 36–37.
10. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002): p. 88.
11. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: p. 88.
12. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. John Dryden. www.classics.mit.edu/Ovid/
metam.html.
13. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992): p. 4.
14. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999).
15. Hayles, How We Became Post-Human: p. 104.
16. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, (New York: Scribner, 1996).
17. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar,
Strauss & Giroux, 1983).
18. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1990): p. 212.
19. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose (New York: Library of
America, 1997): pp. 4–5.
20. Fran Brearton, ‘“The Nothing-Could-Be-Simpler Line”: Form in
Contemporary Irish Poetry,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish
Poetry, edited by Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012): pp. 629–649.
21. Matthew Campbell, ‘Beyond the Jaded Fixities,’ Breac: A Journal of Irish
Studies (2014).
22. Paul Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting,’ Memory Studies 1, no. 1
(2008): p 65.
23. Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting,’: p. 65.
24. Conor O’Callaghan, The History of Rain (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
1993); Conor O’Callaghan, Seatown (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press,
1999); Conor O’Callaghan, Fiction (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2005).
25. Maria Johnston, ‘Here Comes the Sun King!’ Poetry Matters: Tower Poetry
Reviews, July (2013): p. 1.
26. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities: p. 194.
 5  TECHNOLOGIES OF DISTANCE  235

27.  See Charlotte Cripps, ‘Twihaiku? Micropoetry? The Rise of Twitter

Poetry,’ The Independent, 17 June 2013. Cripps writes of poets Ian
Duhig, George Szirtes and Alison Brackenbury employing the Twitter
medium.
28. O’Callaghan, The Sun King.
29. The practice of revising poems is increasingly commonplace by contem-
porary Irish poets, most prominently by Derek Mahon whose recent New
Collected Poems undertakes quite extensive reworkings (and erasures) of
his earlier works. See David Wheatley, ‘Picking at It,’ Dublin Review of
Books Winter 2011, no. 20.
30. Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose.
31. Graham Allen, Holes: http://holesbygrahamallen.org.
32. Paul Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The
Gallery Press, 1994).
33. Michael Hartnett, Collected Poems (Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2001).
34. Irene De Angelis, ‘“For Saké? Irish Whiskey”: Andrew Fitzsimons and His
Representation of Japan,’ Irish Studies Review 15, no. 1 (2007). (This is
explored in more depth in the section on Sinéad Morrissey and her rela-
tionship with Japan.)
35. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996 (London:
Faber & Faber, 1998).
36. Minister for Finance Michael Noonan attracted wide-spread criticism in
2012 for expressing his view of contemporaneous emigration as ‘a choice
of lifestyle’: Patrick Counihan, ‘Michael Noonan Slammed after Branding
Emigration a Lifestyle Choice,’ Irish Central, 20th January 2012. For
a balanced account post-Celtic Tiger emigration see Irial Glynn, Tomás
Kelly, and Piaras MacÉinrí, ‘Irish Emigration in an Age of Austerity,’
(Cork: Émigré, 2013).
 Conclusion

‘[A]s cultures change, so do their memory practices and their ideas of

what is worth and desirable to be remembered.’1 The reinventions of
memory, and the ethical imperatives behind those reinventions, are tied
up with normative cultural memory practices as well as with individual
philosophical, moral and aesthetic stances. If the ‘fictions of memory’
constitute an ‘imaginative reconstruction of the past in response to cur-
rent needs’ as Neumann declares, then, in reinvention, those fictions also
assert alternative possibilities for the future.2 Through its close reading
of a careful selection of poets, this analysis argues for a poetics of con-
temporary Irish poetry in migration that is essentially concerned with the
reinventions of memory—reinventions that variously reconstitute and
relinquish inherited versions of the past while continually remaking them
in accordance with an individual ethical position.
Levinas’s comprehension of ethics as social responsibility can be seen
to challenge/qualify John D. Caputo’s use of the term ‘poetics of obli-
gation’.3 As demonstrated by the varieties of poetry explored here, the
individual ethical stances employed by poets in migration are in resistance
to inherited paradigms of migrant identity and its attendant obligations.
The poetry explored here demonstrates a common urge consciously to
pursue alternatives to those poetics of obligation that propagate essen-
tialist notions of Irish and migrant poetry. Whether through the eco-
consciousness of Sara Berkeley, the subversions of domesticity by Martina
Evans, the reinventions of myth in Bernard O’Donoghue’s poetry or
the possibilities of technology in Conor O’Callaghan’s work, each writer

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 237

A. McDaid, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63805-8
238  Conclusion

creates a personal poetic vocabulary adequate to their individual experi-

ences. Through these vocabularies, the poets negotiate with structures of
cultural, communicative and individual memory practices, reconstituting
them in accordance to their own poetic priorities.
Rhetorics of displacement and exile serve as homogenising theories
of diaspora, and elide the kinds of locational, gendered, spatial and geo-
graphical differences highlighted in this study. The processes of migration
are considered here with regard to the variety of purposes and causes of
modern movement, while the experiences of migration are understood,
like identity itself, to be relational, fluid and in flux. The currencies of
encounter are denoted not only by questions of difference and belong-
ing, but of memory and reinvention. As James Clifford recognises in
Travelling Cultures, all cultural constructions are necessarily unstable and
this is realised in return as much as in migration. Established theories of
push/pull factors are too linear to accommodate contemporary modes
of migration, as represented by the reinventions of memory and home
embedded in the poetics of migration. For these poets, the aesthetic rep-
resentation of migration relies less on a centre/periphery dialectic com-
mon in diaspora studies than on a sense of layered imprints of memories in
an evolving palimpsest. In recognising the varieties and diversities of con-
temporary migration, Irish poetry written elsewhere destabilises canonical
constructs of what constitutes Irish poetry and offers a mode of reading
migrant literature that moves beyond restrictive exile theory. In the way
it recognises the essential displacements of the 21st century, the poetry of
migration captures our shared human experience.
While poets in migration are bound into memory practices, they are
liberated by the possibilities of reinvention, and these reinventions are
realised in formal, aesthetic, stylistic and thematic innovations across
their work. By reusing and/or refusing images of cultural and literary
unity, contemporary migration poetry can offer a mode to reorient the
critical discourses through which Irish poetry is considered. Increasingly,
migration is the normative human experience, and in overturning and
reimagining spatial, cognitive and cultural geographies, a poetics of
migration offers a new critical paradigm for reading contemporary Irish
poetry. As the poetry of Justin Quinn and Conor O’Callaghan high-
lights, it seems inevitable that technology rather than nationality will
come to dominate codes of belonging and dislocation. The transform-
ative effect of technology and media on the migration experience is
increasingly relevant to the emergent generation of migrant poets whose
 Conclusion   239

entire expatriate experiences occur under the conditions of connectiv-

ity. As the recent proliferation of nationalist/independence movements
demonstrates, the fact that national boundaries are porous and perme-
able doesn’t make them irrelevant; nevertheless, the role of social media
and technology in mobilising those communities reinforces the real-
ity that geopolitical borders are no longer definitive delimiting param-
eters for critical conversation. In an era of technological connectivity and
global transport links, the notion of distinct spheres of influence and
affect is dissolving rapidly. The multiple avenues for further discussion of
the migration impulse in contemporary Irish poetry promise to be excit-
ing, and must surely include immigrant literature as integral to new con-
ceptions of Irish writing.4 Looking forward to the emergent generation
of Irish poets, which includes Ailbhe Darcy, Caoileann Hughes, Dylan
Brennan, Ciarán Berry and Tara Bergin, the varieties of their poetry and
the diversity of their geographic locations suggests that the poetics of
migration will continue to be a crucial critical paradigm.5
Articulating the knots of rejection and reinvention that snag the processes
of memory in migration, this study shows the multiple ways contemporary
poets remove themselves from representative status towards a reflection of
dislocation as the prevailing circumstance in the 21st century. Kaplan’s
Questions of Travel recognises the ‘variety of historical constructs of modern
displacement: leisure travel, exploration, expatriation, exile, homelessness and
immigration, to name a few’.6 The multivalency of migration is apparent, as
evidenced by the range of migration experiences of these poets: temporary
and permanent; peripatetic and return; traumatic and liberating; across geog-
raphies, genders and sexualities. Alongside ‘those who seek metamorphoses
in form through the fruitful chaos of displacement’, there are also those who
experience what Nikos Papastergiadis has termed the ‘turbulence of migra-
tion’.7 Across the spectrum of migration, this critical interpretation offers a
way forward for reading contemporary Irish poetry that appreciates and
accommodates its glorious shared quality of being ‘incorrigibly plural’.8

Notes
1. Jens Brockmeier, ‘Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural
Memory,’ Culture Psychology 8, no. 15 (2002): p. 20.
2. Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representations of Memory,’ in Cultural
Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and
Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): p. 334.
240  Conclusion

3. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993).

4. There have been a number of significant publications in recent years on
migrant literature in Ireland, and is a growing field of anthological and
critical interest. See Eva Bourke and Borbála Faragó (eds.) Landing
Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2010); Faragó
Borbála ‘“I am the place in which things happen”: Invisible Immigrant
Women Poets of Ireland” in O’Toole, Tina, and Patricia Coughlan (eds.)
Irish Literatures: Feminist Perspectives (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008):
pp. 145–167; Villar-Argáiz, Pilar Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland:
The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2015).
5. Tara Bergin has lived in the UK for more than a decade and her debut col-
lection This is Yarrow (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2014) won the Seamus
Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection in 2014; Ciarán Berry is
based in the United States—his second collection is entitled The Dead Zoo
(Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2013); Dylan Brennan’s Blood Oranges
(Cork: The Dreadful Press, 2014) draws on his time living in South
America; Ailbhe Darcy has lived in the United States and in Germany,
and at present is based in Wales. Her debut collection was published in
2011, entitled Imaginary Menagerie (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books,
2011); Caoilinn Hughes spent the last number of years in Wellington,
New Zealand and is now based in The Netherlands. She was awarded the
Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2012 for poems later published as Collecting
Evidence (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014).
6. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement
(Durham, N.C./London: Duke University Press, 1992): p. 2.
7. Ibid.: p. 29; Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization,
Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
8. Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’ in Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber,
2007).
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 Index

A Black and Tans, 117, 120

Accent, 16, 20, 29, 63, 66–67, 202,
218
Adorno, Theodor, 176
Akenson, Donald, xxiv
Antimemory, 179
Appadurai, Arjun, xvi, 41, 52, 109
Assmann, Jan, 19, 26, 107
Assmann, Aleida, xx, 19, 21, 116
Auden, W.H., 227–228
B Capitalism, 201, 203, 208, 209,
Bachelard, Gaston, xxi, 107, 110–112,
178
Barry, Sebastian, xviii, 150
Barthes, Roland, 92
Beckett, Samuel, 78, 147, 149, 151,
158, 161–164
Beiner, Guy, xx
Bergin, Tara, 239
Berry, Ciarán, 239
Bhabha, Homi, xvi, 21
Bishop, Elizabeth, 107–108, 136,
168–169, 208, 220, 223
Boland, Eavan, xvi, xxii, 55, 74, 76
Bolger, Dermot, xxiii
Bourdieu, Pierre, 172
Brah, Avtar, xvi, 197, 221
Brennan, Dylan, 239
Brockmeier, Jens, 118
Brown, Terence, 32
C
Campbell, Matthew, 215
213–214
Cathleen Ní Houlihan
. See also Mother Ireland, 74, 166, 199
Celtic Tiger, xii, 64, 85, 235
Chandler, Raymond, 39
Civil War, 114–115, 161–163
Clutterbuck, Caitríona, 56
Cohen, Robin, 26
Collins, Lucy, 172
Community, xvi, 3–19, 20–28,
32, 61, 65–66, 83, 94, 108,
114–115, 148–154, 172–174,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 261

A. McDaid, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63805-8
262  Index
183, 187–188, 198, 202, 211,
215–217, 221
Connerton, Paul, xx, 116, 198, 215
Contact zones, 206
Corkery, Daniel, xii
Coughlan, Patricia, xii, xvii
D Grennan, Eamon, xxii, 61
Darcy, Ailbhe, 239
Deleuze, Gilles and Gauttari, Felix,
124, 179
de Paor, Louis, xxii, 24
Dinnseanchas, xii, 10, 71
E Hall, Dianne and Elizabeth Malcolm,
Ecopoetics, 71
Ellis Island, 6, 12, 24, 26
Erll, Astrid, xx, 57
Ethics, xviii–xxi, 237
European Union, xiv, 200
Exile, xiii, xvi, 18, 24, 30–31, 34–35,
92–96, 148–151, 154, 238–239
F Hinde, John, 96–97
Fathers, 9-10, 13, 27–28, 42, 65, 92,
94, 101, 103–104, 109–112,
133–135
Female migration, xvi–xviii, 55–84,
123
Female poetic tradition, 55–56, 72–76
Ferriter, Diarmaid, xxv
Fitzpatrick, David, xxv
Fogarty, Anne, xvii, 55
Fondane, Benjamin, 149, 155–156
Faragó, Borbála, xxii, 240
Fortier, Anne-Marie, 123
Foster, John Wilson, 87
Foucault, Michel, xx
Frawley, Oona, xix–xxi, 115, 117
G
Genre, 39, 109, 113, 119, 224
Gifford, Terry, 80, 83
Gillis, Alan, 191
Gobrowicz, Witold, 155
Goodby, John, 167–168
Gray, Breda, xi
Gregory, Lady, xii
Grewal, Inderpal and Kaplan, Caren, 123
Gubar, Susan, 149
H
Haiku, 170, 183, 186, 224–225
Halbwachs, Maurice, xix
xvi
Hall, Stuart, xvi, 3, 12, 22, 26, 66
Hartnett, Michael, 225
Hayles, N. Katherine, xx, 198, 206–207
Heaney, Seamus, xii, 10–11, 79, 92,
99, 149, 173, 225, 227
Heidemann, Birte, 196
Heterotopia, xx, 134–135
Hickman, Mary J., xxviii
Hirsch, Marianne, 169
Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence
O., 194
Holocaust, 149, 150, 155, 156, 169,
192
Hughes, Caoileann, 239
Hunger strikes, 127, 130
Hutcheon, Linda, xxix
Hutchinson, Pearse, xxii, 147
Huyssen, Andreas, xxi
I
Immigration, 3, 6, 7, 13, 16, 34, 55,
152, 220, 239

Immram, 95
Intertextual memory, xx, 44, 100,
155, 186, 202
Irish-American emigration literature,
xiii–xiv, 1–54
J Maher, Eamonn, 48
Japan, 153–154, 160, 171–172,
180–182, 185–187, 196, 235
Joyce, James, xvii, xix, 147, 149,
156–159, 164, 193, 231–232
K McGuckian, Medbh, xvi, 56, 79
Kanji, 148, 161, 184, 185, 188
Kaplan, Caren, xvi, 123, 239
Karhio, Anne, 46
Kavanagh, Patrick, xii, 25, 156, 171
Keating, Seán, 23–24
Keatinge, Benjamin, 149, 200
Kendall, Tim, 45
Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer, 176
Kreisel, Henry, 15
Kroetsch, Robert, 9
L Migrant objects, 41–44
Lachmann, Renate, xx, 23, 108, 186
Laird, Nick, 191
Larrissey, Edward, 200
Lawrence, Jon, 144
Lee, J.J., xxv
Leeson, D.M., 144
Lefebvre, Henri, 10
Lemass, Noel, 161–164
Liddy, James, xxii
Lieux de memoire, 119
Lloyd, David, 23
Longley, Edna, xxiv, 87
Longley, Michael, 79, 92, 121, 136,
212, 225
Index   263
Lowell, Robert, 7
M
MacBride, John, 154
Madden, Ed, 133
Madianou, Mirca & Miller, David, 68
Mahon, Derek, xxii, 65, 108, 149,
155, 168, 186, 192
Massumi, Brian, xx, 124, 198, 201
Maternity, 30, 112
McConville, Jean, 138–139
McCourt, Frank, 1
McWilliams, Ellen, xvii
Meaney, Gerardine, xvii, 86, 92
Memorialisation, 2, 37, 66, 101, 114,
186
Memory Ireland, xix
Memory theory, see Antimemory;
Collective memory; Cultural
memory; Genre; Intertextual
memory; Lieux de Memoire;
Migrant Objects; Myth;
Postmemory; Ritual
Meskill, Lynn, 183
Miller, Kerby A., xiii–xiv, 4, 31
Misztal, Barbara, xix
Moore, Marianne, 26
Mother Ireland, xvii, 23, 92, 199. See
also Cathleen Ní Houlihan
Mothers, 23, 30, 37–38, 60–61,
73–74, 112–113, 117, 125,
176–177, 229
Multicultural Ireland, xxix, 240
Murray, Tony, 142
Myth, xii, xxiii, 2, 8–12, 18, 30,
34–37, 42, 56–57, 66, 73–74,
89–106, 116, 121–122, 157,
199, 202–203
264  Index

N Q
Native American history, 10–12 Queer migration, xvii, 90, 123, 131,
Neumann, Birgit, xx, 153, 237 133–136
New Zealand, 171, 172, 177, 181
Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, xvi, 53, 92
Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, xvi, xxii, 57 R
Nora, Pierre, 20 Ramazani, Jahan, 114
Northern Ireland, xii, xix, 121, 123, Ramsell, Billy, 200
137–141, 167–168, 172–176, Repatriation, 106, 150, 157, 158,
190–191 163
Nünning, Ansgar, xx Rich, Adrienne, 79, 91
Ricoeur, Paul, xxi, xxix
Ritual, 27, 102, 105, 115–119, 152,
O 171–173, 182–185, 209, 219,
O’Brien, Edna, xvii 226
O’Flaherty, Liam, xvii Robinson, Mary, xi, 31–32
O’Grady, Desmond, xxii, 147 Robinson, Tim, 10
O’Loughlin, Michael, xii Rothko, Marc, 16
O’Malley, Ernie, 119–121 Rushdie, Salman, 91
Onegin, 44, 212–214
O’Sullivan, Derry, xxii
O’Toole, Fintan, xv S
O’Toole, Tina, xvii, 131 Sanders, Julie, 92
Ovid, 202–203 Serra, Richard, 6–7, 10
Sirr, Peter, 200
Smyth, Ailbhe, 56
P South America, 34, 168
Papastergiadis, Nikos, 239, 240 Spender, Stephen, 126
Pastoral/post-pastoral, 56–57, 79–84, Stevens, Wallace, 136, 160, 211,
87, 89, 204 225
Pine, Emilie, xx Straub, Jürgen, 110
Pisheogue/piseoga, 92–93
Placenames, 15, 128. See also
dinnseanchas T
Posthumanism, 206, 207 Technogenesis, 200, 206, 208
Postmemory, 169, 170, 194 Technology, 32, 59, 68–70, 89,
Potts, Donna L., 79 196–198, 200, 201, 204, 205,
Prairie poetry, 9–11, 15–18, 39, 60, 215–233
218 Terdiman, Richard, 50
Pratt, Mary Louise, 206 Thoreau, Henry David, 72
 Index   265

Tillinghast, Richard, 164 W

Tóibín, Colm, xvii Walter, Bronwen, 100
Trevor, William, xvii Wandering Jew, 148–150, 156–159
Twiddy, Iain, 92 War of Independence, 114, 115, 121,
Twitter, 217, 224–228, 234, 235 144
Wheatley, David, 63, 98, 198, 212
Whitman, Walt, 9, 27
U Wills, Clair, 34, 35
Unheimlich, 76, 77, 90, 111, 157 Wolf, Phillip, xviii

V Y
Villar-Argáiz, Pilar, xxii, 240 Yeats, W.B., xii, 96, 207, 234