Changing Places: Locations of Contemporary Irish Poetry

The sense of place in Irish poetry used to be one of its pleasures and an identifying mark of what was Irish about Irish poetry. That sense of place, though, almost always used to refer to rural landscapes and settings, from Yeats's Sligo, to Kavanagh's Monaghan, Montague's Tyrone, and Heaney's County Derry—all of which in their different ways have fed into the discourse of the nation, and what Benedict Anderson, in his classic study of nationalism, would call the "imagined community" of Ireland.¹ Indeed, the names of places have long played an important role in combining Irish landscape, language, history, and mythology, and established a continuity between literature in Irish and English. The Irish-language genre of dinnshenchas (the lore associated with places) was assimilated to modern Anglophone poetry most notably in Yeats, Kavanagh, Montague, and Heaney, and became the central trope of Friel's controversial play, Translations (1980).² Whether in literature or painting, the depiction of place is an essential aspect of imagining the nation; landscape is, as the post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha puts it, "the inscape of national identity," and so it has been in Ireland.³

But something has happened—at first gradually and then, it seems, all at once—to this connection between place and ideas of the nation. If the lyric is the sundial of history, as Theodor Adorno put it in "On Lyric Poetry and Society," the contemporary Irish lyric registers the time of the postnational, the time of late capitalism in its phase of globalization and consumerism, and consequently the place of Ireland begins to look like everywhere else, a disheveled urban landscape dominated by the corporate logos of consumerism and international finance.⁴ No doubt there are poets writing in Ireland now in both English and Irish whose work does not quite fit that matrix. No doubt, too, the discussion that follows privileges poetry in the North, and a conservative, academic poetic. But it does seem that the center of gravity in contemporary Irish poetry has shifted, and its dominant character has indeed changed from what it was a generation ago. Even the work of Nuala Ní Dhomnaill, a poet writing in Irish and accessing Gaelic myth and folklore in what seems like a timeless landscape, is most famously translated by Paul Muldoon into the postmodernist mode, which, according to Frederic Jameson, is precisely the cultural expression of late capitalism.⁵

One can locate the beginnings of the rupture between literature and the nation­state in the aftermath of World War II, and the shock given to the idea of European culture and civilization by the atrocities of totalitarianism. Adorno pondered whether it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, and Eric Auerbach—one of European culture's greatest admirers, and the author of the monumental study of realism, Mimesis (2003)—foresaw the emergence of a literature in the world, as opposed to a continuing Eurocentric idea of world literature.⁶ Auerbach wrote in "The Philology of World Literature" that "Our philological [cultural] home is the Earth; it can no longer be the nation. … The most precious and necessary thing that philologists [critics] inherit may be their national language and culture. But it is only in losing—or overcoming—this inheritance that it can have this effect."⁷ Even Anderson recently conceded the shortcomings of his methodology in Imagined Communities: "using the nation and nation states as the basic units of analysis fatally ignored the obvious fact that in reality these units were tied together and crosscut by global intellectual currents … as well as vast religious networks and economic and technological forces."⁸

In Ireland, a new and different subjectivity, shaped by a different social experience than that of writers for whom the postcolonial is the defining template, conceives of place and setting in quite different ways. Geopolitical change in the form of globalism has surely played a role in shaping the distrust by contemporary Irish writers of the previously accredited discourse of the nation and postcoloniality. From about 1990 on, moreover, a number of scholars and critics associated...