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  • The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972
  • Thomas Dillon Redshaw
The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972, by Heather Clark , pp. 245. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. $99 (cloth).

Largely unencumbered by mystifications of disembodied theory, Heather Clark lays out for the specialist and casual reader alike a concise and tellingly detailed narrative of the "Belfast Group." Well aware of the buzz of ressentiment that accompanied this appellation during the opening decade of the Ulster "Troubles," Clark chooses to see the now renowned poets of the Belfast Group—Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and James Simmons, and then Seamus Heaney and later Paul Muldoon—as constituting an "Ulster Renaissance." Yet even that is a problematic term. Until the "Troubles," Belfast poets regularly looked elsewhere for their critical audience. During the Literary Revival, such figures as Joseph Campbell and John Lyle Donaghy looked to nationalist Dublin; during the 1930s, figures like MacNeice or Day Lewis looked to leftish London. And it is definitely not Ulster Regionalism as touted by John Hewitt that these poets have practiced.

The chief poets of the Belfast Group—the most local of them remaining James Simmons—did not represent the entirety of that efflorescence of Irish literary and cultural production notable during the latter 1960s and early 1970s. To convey the variety of those efforts, Clark anatomizes the wonderfully eccentric Honest Ulsterman, edited first by Simmons and then by Frank Ormsby. Appropriately, she titles this chapter "Renaissance." In the pages of the Honest Ulsterman may be found the many other Northern poets (Padraic Fiacc, for example) who were not established at Queen's University and not habitués of the Belfast Group. That demotic "anti-academic" stance made up Simmons's chosen remit for his "Handbook for a Revolution."

What Clark terms the "Ulster Renaissance" made up part of an Ireland-wide phenomenon dating from the Yeats centenary in 1965 and the anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966. In Dublin, this burst of literary activity came to be [End Page 149] associated with Liam Miller's Dolmen Press and with the Dublin Magazine, the Irish Times, Hibernia, or David Marcus's "New Irish Writing" page in the Irish Press—as well as with such fugitive efforts as Hayden Murphy's Broadside and New Writer's Press. This opening of the field to many new voices was general over all Ireland, as Longley's and Mahon's roots in their Trinity educations attest, Dublin being only a short trip away from Belfast on the Enterprise. Indeed, Dublin comes into play when Clark refers to Eamonn Grennan (a UCD poet) and especially Eavan Boland (a TCD poet), who had her own "group" in the late 1960s. Why Ireland should have been so suddenly fortunate in her writers may be attributed to the international zeitgeist of the 1960s. More specifically, it can be tied to the state, rather than sectarian, provision of college and university education to students coming from outside the standard bournes of the Irish bourgeoisie. What those students met was a rigorous and liberating, yet essentially Edwardian curriculum in the Humanities. And what a brave new world of learning it was!

Clark cannot be praised enough for rescuing the useful art of literary history—and of this difficult episode in Ireland's culture—from the overweening claims of politics and philosophy posing as critical method. The story told centers on Michael Longley's career and role in the group, mindful of his important service to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Longley, after all, supported the reading tours of Ulster in the early 1970s and edited Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (1971). Clark's attention to Longley is well warranted. Dating from No Continuing City (1969) to his Collected Poems (2007), Longley's poetry has lacked the critical attention it deserves, especially in North America. Her portrait of the personal and writing life of the Belfast Group in The Ulster Renaissance provides an essential context for reading Longley's poetry from the start up through The Echo Gate (1979).

Clark signals one facet of that lack of attention by referring only to Dillon Johnston's Irish Poetry After Joyce (1985) and by...

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