Essay

At the Island’s Edge: Some Notes on Irish Poetry Now  

By Ciarán O’Rourke

In a world on fire, poetry, along with much else of value in our society, can seem vulnerable to the flames and powerless before their might. And yet, more and more, in recent years I’ve found myself turning to poets for consolation, provocation, and the hard truths needed to navigate contemporary history. They’ve become my guides, restoring my belief in poetry as a small, often fragile, but still durable counterweight to the inhumanity that so wracks our ailing planet. Even the most abstruse, solitary, or despairing of poems presumes the presence, somewhere, of other people with the capacity for recognition and understanding. It’s possible that our collective future as a species-in-nature will come to depend on the existence of exactly this kind of community.

It was partly in the hope of testing and exploring such questions that I decided, in 2018, to set up Island’s Edge Poetry, an online archive of in-depth conversations with Irish poets: speaking about their work and craft, as well as some of the political beliefs and personal fascinations that aerate and enliven their poems. Island’s Edge now features over thirty interviews, with more planned for the future.

When I started the website, the motivating idea was to try to create a collective memoir of Irish poetry now, as narrated by some of its foremost practitioners. In many ways, of course, this was an impossible task: I didn’t have the time or energy to interview every poet in Ireland, and even if I had, my own concerns and (occasionally fruitful) biases tend to affect the flow of the conversations when they happen. As a reader, for example, I’m consistently curious about the overlap between form and content, aesthetics and politics, in a manner that others may find tiresome. My own feeling is that poets do not, and cannot, live only in their poems – that they belong to the world and are enriched by their engagement with it – and this filters my approach as an interviewer. As Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin suggests in our exchange, “poetry both frees us to find words in unexpected places, and imposes a duty of using them in as truthful a way as we can”. There is an ethical dimension to our search, in verse, for “truthful” utterance, and the “duty” Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin identifies in her own working practice may well be an intrinsic element of the craft in general. “Suppleness of eye & mind is my ideal avenue of pleasure in art”, replied the late Maurice Scully, likewise, when I raised a similar question with him, adding that the “‘flow of the poem’”, in his experience, was often “energised by where it was made & when.” For one of Ireland’s most radical modernist experimentalists, it seems, poetry and history were – not unhappily – intertwined.

Five years on from my first interviews (with Jane Clarke and Jessica Traynor, respectively), I’ve now had the pleasure of corresponding with a wide range of poets, from relative new-comers – like Molly Twomey and Kevin Graham, who had yet to publish a first collection when we spoke – to acknowledged masters of the craft. Although far from complete, whatever that might look like, the archive also spans Ireland’s ‘spoken word’ and ‘printed page’ poetries, which are often presumed – mistakenly, in my opinion – to be mutually at odds. And so, intrepid memorialists of modern life (such as Peter Sirr and Harry Clifton) share a space with proletarian prophets (like Karl Parkinson), as well as queer- and feminist-influenced prophets (from Sarah Clancy to Mary O’Donnell), and others, whose rich back-catalogue of poetic testaments and innovations perhaps eludes any of those specific categories. One of the great delights of compiling Island’s Edge, in fact, has been to encounter this democracy of the voice as it emerges over the interviews in their entirety: to hear wordsmiths of various political and literary dispositions letting rip, contradicting me and one another, with a fierce and sometimes fractious eloquence all their own.

In their own way, the conversations shed light on the changes that have been wrought and won in Irish society over the past decade or so. Grace Wilentz recalls coming into a sense of herself as a poet against the backdrop of the gathering grassroots movement for abortion rights, in the lead-up to Ireland’s 2018 referendum on that issue, “taking helpline calls from women who needed to access abortion services abroad” while trying, in her work, to “bear witness to all that unnecessary suffering”. Relatedly, Ailbhe Darcy discusses her continuing efforts, as writer and academic scholar, “to raise awareness in the poetry scene of the continued marginalisation of women’s work.” From a different vantage-point, Mary O’Malley, referring to her home-landscape of Connemara, describes the strange feeling of having been “reared in a place that has undergone a second wave of colonisation, this one by tourism.” 

As such comments imply, the interviews also provide a glimpse into areas of social and cultural life that are still in need of reform or redress, including in the arts sector, which has witnessed a number of campaigns in recent years highlighting imbalances and alleged abuses of power. In the interviews, these issues frequently have a personal weight. Jean O’Brien remembers being told by a “young man [speaking] with the supreme confidence of young men, ‘Your poems are for women, I write for everyone.’” Annemarie Ní Chuirreáin, meanwhile, relates the generative struggle between speech and silence in her work to “the ways in which women and children have been made vulnerable by institutions of the Irish State” over the past century. Dave Lordan discusses poetry explicitly as a “call-to-battle, which is meant to lift people’s hearts so they can go on living and fighting for a better situation”.

Environmental anxieties stalk the archive. Why write (and how do we live) in the face of ecological catastrophe and potential extinction? Catherine Phil MacCarthy’s answer is a reflection on the “ginko tree”, which was “the only form of life to survive the [nuclear] bombing” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. “Having written a series of very gloomy ‘end-of-the-world’ poems”, Geraldine Mitchell admits, “I am now thinking that a celebration of what we are set to lose might be a more effective way of working.” “Literature”, we’re informed by the inimitable apocalypticist, Patrick Chapman, “needs to be obscene in order to reflect the world with any degree of accuracy.” Hope and horror seem to exist in dialectical tension, in the words and works of many of Ireland’s poetic luminaries.

Even as the website has expanded, I’ve found myself lamenting the gaps and omissions that populate it. Bombarded by a volley of (perhaps too-earnest) questions, not all of the many poets I’ve approached have been available to participate in the interview process, for a range of reasons. And there have been others whom I would have loved to speak with, but could not: Dermot Healy, for instance, whose collection The Reed Bed was a formative book in my own poetic education; or Derek Mahon, whose late work, intriguingly, explored a range of anti-capitalist positions and philosophies, in opposition to what he called, in his collection Against the Clock, “the bedlam of acquisitive force / That rules us, and would rule the universe”; or Eavan Boland, who consistently bore witness to the credo, as she put it in A Journey with Two Maps, that there can be “no meaning to an art form with its grand designs unless it allows the humane to shape the invented, the way gravity is said to bend starlight.” These figures have now departed, each of them “no more a person / now” – to quote W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” – “but a whole climate of opinion // under whom we conduct our different lives.”

Island’s Edge, then, is lit by loss and absence, just as much as it serves as a partial repository for the energies and intricacies shaping Irish poetry today. In a certain respect, the archive – forever growing, forever unfinished – exists in a similar state of process and formation to that of the world it comes from. There is, of course, inspiration to be found in this seeming paradox. As another luminous ghost, the late Brendan Kennelly, put it, in his poem “Begin”:

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending

that always seems about to give in

something that will not acknowledge conclusion

insists that we forever begin.

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