A Note Let Go: Introducing a New Generation of Northern Irish Poets

Recently, rewatching The Commitments (which I'd last seen at the tender age of thirteen), I found myself thinking again about what a strange road it has been—for Ireland; for the world. That movie—based on a Roddy Doyle novel about a Dubliner who insists on forming an ill-fated but spirited soul band—came to cinemas in the US two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seven years before the Good Friday agreement, which paved the way for peace in Northern Ireland and Ireland more generally. The Commitments is full of a 1990s sensibility. The city is scarred and there are horses in the vacant lots, but soul music is coming to Dublin. Soul is going to be a new vessel for singing old pain and buoying up joy. The world of the movie is open to heady reinventions, which in its tellings seem somehow more hopeful than mere appropriation, more artful than mere global capitalism. When I first watched The Commitments, in 1991, I had just been liberated from a childhood spent performing Reagan-era arms-race drills by huddling under various elementary-school desks in California. We'd vanquished the Russians and we seemed ready to be done with borders. Our whole world seemed about to tip toward something happier and more international, a high-speed blur which seemed like it might be a good in itself, which might yet lead to peace and prosperity for all. It's worth remembering how parts of the nineties had a kind of blinking freshness to them. Francis Fukuyama told us history was over. We lived in the thrall of possibility.

The Northern Irish poets who were born and grew up in the 1990s came of age amid the relative hopefulness of the Good Friday agreement, which arrived in 1998 and brought the hope of a lasting peace to Northern Ireland. Indeed, the 1990s radically transformed Ireland and Northern Ireland, though at times change came at a snail's pace. It's perhaps a measure of the success of the peace that many Americans these days have forgotten that Ireland and Northern Ireland are actually in separate countries. In the 1990s, we had good reason to remember: For years, the Troubles—essentially three decades of civil war between Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries—had been on. Bombs erupted frequently in Dublin and London, but violence was particularly intense in Northern Ireland, six counties on the island of Ireland that are still part of the United Kingdom; where Protestants (whose history there partakes of a long colonial presence) and Catholics (who have multiple reasons to resent this thousand-year history) have rarely, if ever, lived comfortably together. The roughly century-long presence of two countries on one island has itself been deeply uneasy: After what is now the Republic of Ireland had acquired its own independence following the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), the situation of Catholics in Northern Ireland remained poor. Tensions were high: By the late 1960s, what had begun as a civil rights movement morphed into violence that continued grimly on for decades: bomb by bomb, death by death. To get a sense of how the Troubles felt in 1971, as they were beginning, Seamus Heaney wrote of Belfast:

I am fatigued by a continuous adjudication between agony and injustice, swung at one moment by the long tail of race and resentment, at the other by more acceptable feelings of pity and terror…it hasn't been named martial law but that's what it feels like.

Heaney, of course, is not a soul singer, but is the Irish poet who has most consistently brought Ireland's poetic music to audiences in the US. Even though in 1972 (after a year in California) he moved to Dublin, he was born in the north and began his career in Belfast. In Belfast, Heaney had initiated and been initiated by a remarkable group of poets who continue to forge Northern Ireland's music, to echolocate its struggles in verse. Heaney's work...