Modern Irish Poetry: A New AlhambraOUP Oxford, 2001 M01 25 - 246 pages Recently, chapters on individual Irish-language authors have formed part of publications regarding modern Irish art and culture in general. Such chapters are welcome but they have excited the curiosity of readers to the degree that longer, more detailed works are now required to put writing in Irish into perspective. In this study of four modern poets (two each from two generations), Sewell attempts to illustrate not only the accumulative but the transformative nature of tradition. Chapters 1 and 2 turn from the mid-20th century master Seán Ó Riordáin to the contemporary poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh because the comparison and contrast highlights significant aspects of the amazing development of Irish poetry and, indeed, society in the period. Here, importantly, the word 'development' is meant in a neutral way - the image used is that of a zig-zag movement in the pattern of the continuing Irish tradition. Chapter 3 returns to the slightly earlier, major Irish-language poet Máirtín Ó Direáin. In doing so, it returns home (from the internationalism of the previous chapter on Searcaigh) to Ireland - a major focus and concern for the more solely traditionalist Ó Direáin. This switch back (in time, geography, social mores or outlook) fits and illustrates Sewell's concept of the zig-zag movement of a country's culture as it proceeds from generation to generation. The positioning, therefore, has a thematic purpose. The fourth and final chapter focuses on the contemporary poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill who has managed to synthesise tradition and modernity (central concerns of this book) and who, in doing so, has become the current trail-blazer of Irish poetry in either language. |
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Contents
Zigzagging All Over Creation | 54 |
Departures You Cannot Go Back On | 104 |
Journeying to the Shrine | 149 |
A Polish Perspective | 199 |
Bibliography | 216 |
Index | 229 |
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agus appears Aran artistic become believe Book called collection comes contemporary critic culture dark death Dhomhnaill's Direain Dublin English example experience Faber fact fear feel fein female final Heaney human Ibid imagination individual Ireland Irish island Joyce keep land language light linguistic literary literature live London look male means mind Monsters Morna mother move native nature never Nf Dhomhnaill Nuala Nf once original past perhaps play poem poet poet's poetry present Press quoted reader refers Riordain Sean Searcaigh seems Selected sense SP/TD suggests things thought tongue tradition transformed transgressive translation true Tuama turn University vision volume woman women writing
Popular passages
Page 134 - All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Page 57 - The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile.
Page 55 - Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play.
Page 97 - I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Page 60 - All the facts in natural history, taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus...
Page 76 - Face to face with her was an education Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate — One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones Between two whitewashed pillars, where you could see Deeper into the country than you expected And discovered that the field behind the hedge Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.
Page 56 - Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.
Page 55 - The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play.
Page 173 - Western culture has maintained for so long - without any sense of the impropriety of 'thoughtlessly adding to language a word which surpasses all words' or any clear sense that it places us at the limits of all possible languages - a singular experience is shaped: that of transgression. Perhaps one day it will seem as decisive for our culture, as much a part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier time for dialectical thought.