Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry by Julia Obert (review)

In the Telemachus episode of Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus walks along Sandy mount Strand, experimenting with means of perception. He orders himself to "Shut your eyes and see" and contemplates the "ineluctable modality of the audible. … Rhythm begins, you see. I hear." Stephen may contemplate the unavoidable aural mode of perception, but Julia Obert's Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry suggests that critics of Irish poetry have long ignored this central perceptual force. The possibility that soundscapes more accurately create a sense of place in Northern Ireland is the premise behind this study. In chapters on Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon, and in a coda on "the New North," Obert traces the presence of the aural and audible as a strategy for shaping a postcolonial sense of home.

What happens when you close your eyes and try to describe your world? Does your map of space change? The possibility for different maps and a more integrated or inclusive sense of place underscores Obert's phenomenological framing in the book, and allows her to turn our attention from the critical myopia of "the eye as a primary conduit to place" and instead call attention to sound's fundamental importance in our stable sense of our world. Obert outlines recent work on phenomenologies of sound and the "affective turn" in literary criticism, and convincingly articulates a need to move from a visually oriented understanding of our world and its cultures—an approach that has "impoverished Western approaches to perception"—and pay attention to poetry's "engagement with environmental sound—poetry nourished by the choppy drone of helicopter rotors, the clanging of cranes, the caws of gulls, the cadences of pub talk." Even more significant, Obert suggests that "acoustic phenomenology" can be an integral "counterweight to Northern Ireland's apparent 'unhomeliness.'"

In bringing together strands of postcolonial theory and phenomenologies of sound, this study proposes that the work of Carson, Muldoon, and Mahon undoes some of the visible destruction of Troubles-era Belfast through re-imagining "home beyond visual coordinates as a series of aural cues." Obert avoids proposing that such attention to soundscape could be wholly compensatory for the loss of a sense of place warfare engenders, nor does she ignore the fact that sound often signifies conflict and danger, as the drone of helicopter rotors surely indicated during the Troubles. But Postcolonial Overtures suggests that to overlook the presence and importance of aural signifiers in contemporary Northern Irish poetry is to ignore the fact that "sound can be a salve for those otherwise out of place" and shape a community of belonging that crosses visual and political borders. The central unifying argument is that all these poets "source a sense of place from aural cues, promoting sound as a register in which belonging and community-building might be productively reimagined."

Obert does not limit her study to the political or even the environmental elements of sound, but also gives attention to sound's "formal possibilities." The author argues for the temporal and the rhythmic value of sound and the recursive haunting endemic to poetry's cultural and political work, exploring both formal and environmental soundscapes in the work of all three poets. Yet underlying all of her arguments is the particularity of a "(post)-colonial acoustic of contemporary Northern Irish poets" in which the "perceptual turn … is part of a shared post-partisan politics: a common conviction that poetry can contribute, however modestly, to Northern Ireland's peacebuilding process. This contribution relies on poetry's capacity to tap into forms of community that go beyond physical proximity." It is through shared acoustic space, Obert argues, that Muldoon, Mahon, and Carson offer a sense of home: "a sentiment that goes against the grain of the country's mutually exclusive visual cues."

In chapters devoted to the work of Ciaran Carson, Obert first outlines the deep...