Brian Ó Conchubhair

Jefferson Holdridge

Irish poetry presents various routes into which readers can delve: some depend on gender and questions of the place of women, while others use myth, folklore, and religion; landscape eco-criticism and etymologies of place; and concerns of nation-states, regions, and empire. The work of certain members of the younger generation of Irish poets contains what might be termed a post-national, trans-historical urge, or at least a post-Ireland one. The essays herein, written by established and emerging scholars, recognize both the perpetual search for a sustaining national concept of Ireland, as well as a sense that long-established definitions no longer necessarily apply. The poets discussed herein include those who write in the shadow of Irish history cast by the Northern Troubles and those who feel that connections to a wider culture (poetic and political) are equally, or more, significant. Migration (immigration and emigration, internal and external) continues to be an issue. If Ireland is post-nation, does it look toward Europe? America? Boston or Belgium? As Irish society has changed and continues to change, so too has Irish poetry entered into a time of transition. This volume of essays charts these transitions and sets coordinates for future critical endeavors.

Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry

Post-Ireland?

Since the eighteenth century, landscape has played complex psychological and political roles in the narrative of Irishness, entailing questions of memory, family, home, exile, and forgiveness. In Stepping through Origins, Holdridge explores the interplay of these concepts in literature. For Irish writers from Swift to Heaney, the Irish landscape has remained not only a reflection of Irish troubles but, much like aesthetic experience, a space in which the bitterness of family or national life can be understood, if not entirely overcome. Through deft analysis of works by leading Irish writers including Lady Morgan, Yeats, Joyce, Louis MacNeice, and Elizabeth Bowen, Holdridge expands and enriches our understanding of how landscape has served as a palimpsest for both family and country, connecting personal with collective memory, localized places with their regions, and individual with national identity.

Nature, Home, and Landscape in Irish Literature

Stepping through Origins

The Poetry of Paul Muldoon introduces the student and general reader to the critical discussion surrounding Muldoon’s oeuvre, as well as to his major themes. It examines the poet’s meditations on culture and nature, human and animal, speculations on the act of perception, figures fragmented by the Troubles, and philosophical considerations of colonisation. It then discusses what rank among the most beautiful and intricate elegies of our time. For Muldoon, art’s complicity in suffering is a political, self-indicting question, which his best poems endeavour to answer. If sometimes this Pulitzer Prize winner insists that art has a positive role to play, at other times he fears that it merely feeds off the carnage. This critical book shows how, for Muldoon, art should not merely repeat the devastation of the world - although he is afraid that it does, and engages in bitter moral despair that places his work among the very best any contemporary poet has written. The Poetry of Paul Muldoon unearths difficult questions of form with a metaphysical significance that is suitable to our times.

Jefferson Holdridge

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