"When Ireland Was Still Under a Spell": The Poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

In the Southern Review's 1995 special issue on contemporary Irish poetry and criticism, a recurring theme is the woman poet's continued efforts to focus attention on the place of women in Irish culture. That effort has often entailed rejecting the traditional iconography employed by male poets in favor of incorporating women as symbol—Mother Ireland, Queen Medbh, Grainne O'Malley, the Hag of Beare—and imaginatively restoring their presence to the Irish landscape. The Southern Review includes a "comhrá" or conversation featuring McGuckian and Ní Dhomhnaill, in which both discuss their relation to landscape, to language, and to the worldview of Irish mythology. McGuckian attempts to characterize the human relation to the natural world in the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill:

What I find most valuable and authentic is Nuala's relationship to nature. Nature is part of this Platonic ideal for Heaney and others, but Nuala is the only poet in the world, except for Tsvetaeva . . . who has the same dynamism and the same feeling of being at one with the world. Not an observer of it but having it . . . being a microcosm, so that when you talk about the sky or the sea or a tree or vegetation, you've been inside it or it's been inside you. The whole reciprocity there is very, very different from Yeats's "When my arms wrap you round I press/ My heart upon the loveliness" of the world. . . . We are the world that the poem is celebrating, but we are also the poem and we are also the celebration. ¹

Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland discusses the way in which postcolonial writers have deemed it necessary to reject classic realism in order to distance themselves from the standards by which their countries' colonizers had designated them as "other." Citing Salman Rushdie's search for a form that would "allow the miraculous and the mundane to coexist at the same level," Kiberd examines how writers of the Irish Literary Revival sought to find this form by drawing on Irish folklore and religious beliefs, as well as how writers like Joyce gradually shifted from classic realism to portrayals of a more subjective reality. ² Stephen Slemon argues that the formal technique of magical realism, which characteristically mixes the fantastic and the realistic, allows for the creation of works that encode within themselves "a residuum of resistance toward the imperial center and its totalizing systems of generic classification." ³

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's rendering of nature, with its emphasis on the reciprocity of landscape and self, human and animal, sacred and mundane, fantastic and realistic, may be viewed as an attempt to revive the Celtic worldview as reflected in Irish poetry that predates English colonization. By privileging that traditional Irish worldview, Ní Dhomhnaill's poetry implicitly challenges the colonizer's worldview. Her poetry tacitly assumes not only that Ireland is far more than the sum of the natural resources extracted for centuries by its colonizers, but also that the Irish worldview comprehends more than the Western one, with its emphasis on the rational and on a rigid distinction between the objective and subjective.

By returning to ancient Celtic traditions—which embody a close relation between woman and land portrayed in the figure of the all-powerful earth mother—Ní Dhomhnaill simultaneously reclaims power for women. Just as postcolonial writers invite their readers to look beneath the surface of the power structure, Ní Dhomhnaill continually reminds us that there is more to the feminine than meets the eye. Thus, Ní Dhomhnaill's gender as well as her nationality figure into her persistent claim that the subjective reality of her poetry is as valid as the ostensibly "objective" reality of classic realism. ⁴

Moreover, Ní Dhomhnaill's decision to write and publish in Irish Gaelic is integral to her effort to convey the simultaneous existence of the other-worldly and the...