Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008Ideas of home, place and identity have been continually questioned, re-imagined and re-constructed in Northern Irish poetry. Concentrating on the period since the outbreak of the Troubles in the late 1960s, this study provides a detailed consideration of the work of several generations of poets, from Hewitt and MacNeice, to Fiacc and Montague, to Simmons, Heaney, Mahon and Longley, to Muldoon, Carson, Paulin and McGuckian, to McDonald, Morrissey, Gillis and Flynn. It traces the extent to which their writing represents a move away from concepts of rootedness and towards a deterritorialized poetics of displacement, mobility, openness and pluralism in an era of accelerating migration and globalisation. In the new readings of place, inherited maps are no longer reliable, and home is no longer the stable ground of identity but seems instead to be always where it is not. The crossing of boundaries and the experience of diaspora open up new understandings of the relations between places, a new sense of the permeability and contingency of cultures, and new concepts of identity and home. Professor ELMER KENNEDY-ANDREWS teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ulster. |
Contents
the lie of the land | 1 |
rooted men and nomads | 21 |
global regionalist? | 53 |
omphalos and diaspora | 83 |
Padraic Fiacc and James simmons | 118 |
michael longleys Ecopoetics | 137 |
An Exile and a stranger | 155 |
dwelling without roots | 180 |
the new urban Poetics | 203 |
the lyric of gendered space | 225 |
new Voices Peter mcdonald sinead morrissey Alan gillis and | 249 |
| 287 | |
| 297 | |
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Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews No preview available - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic American becomes begins Belfast belonging Book calls carson catholic close collection concept constructed contemporary continuity culture dark death described English essay exile existence experience expression Faber feeling female figure forces gerald dawe give going ground heaney’s hereafter hewitt human idea identity imagination incorporated ireland irish John kind land landscape language light lines literary living london longley look lost macneice mahon mcguckian meaning memory montague montague’s move Muldoon narrative native nature never northern notion origins particular past Paulin play poem poet poet’s poetic poetry political possibility present Press Protestant question reality references relations represents rooted says seamus heaney sense Simmons social sound space speaker suggests symbolic takes things thinking thought tion traditional ulster vision voice whole writing