Faultlines, limits, transgressions: a theme-cluster in late twentieth-century Irish poetry - Critical Essay

   Lines of history
   lines of power ...

   Lines of defiance
   lines of discord
   under Walker's arm
   brisk with guns
   British soldiers
   patrol the walls
   the gates between
   Ulster Catholic
   Ulster Protestant....

   Lines of loss
   lines of energy ...

John Montague, The Rough Field

These are the incantatory openings of various strophes in John Montague's The Rough Field, taken from the section of that sombre poem called "A New Siege" (1974:74,77). Looking back now, nearly thirty years after it was written, it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that much Irish poetry since 1972 has taken a kind of inner direction, an urgent prompting, from Montague's fierce but elegant analysis of the reemerging Troubles in Ireland in that intensely orchestrated long work. The volume is a formal meditation that brings together history, memory, politics, the cascade of events as they unfold in the disparity of crisis, biography, and family history. Montague's poem creates the "rough field" of living history by means of an individual conscience trying to negotiate its terrain, which is on the one hand as familiar as a townland, but on the other as strange and terrifying as the places and landscapes of nightmare. In its nervous syntax, its curt lines stripped down to a kind of bardic economy, The Rough Field registers the reopening of old wounds, old faultlines in the Irish psyche, while recognizing too that these cuts and tears are not unconnected to other fissures and cracks opening up in Europe and America in the late 1960s and early 1970s:

   streets of Berlin
   Paris, Chicago
   seismic waves
   zig-zagging through
   a faulty world (1974:76)

It is one of the achievements of Montague's poem that these broader issues of political and social fissure are integrated into a series of biographical and familial explorations, so that the genealogy of public rifts and disruptions is given a personal and intimate stress, a felt interiority. The faultline is not only between different communities in Northern Ireland, between North and South, Ireland and Britain, Teague and Prod; it is also within communities, within families, within the Montagues themselves whose townland is the Rough Field of the title, Garvaghey (Mod. Ir. Garbh Achadh, literally 'rough field'). And it runs, this fault, from father to son, from James Montague, estranged from his Tyrone family while he works behind a grille in the New York subway, to John Montague, who grows up to be very like his father, "the least happy / man I have known" (1974:47). This is candidly, bravely recorded in "The Fault":

   When I am angry, sick or tired
   The line on my forehead pulses,
   The line on my left temple
   Opened by an old car accident.
   My father had the same scar
   In the same place, as if
   The fault ran through
   Us both: anger, impatience,
   A stress born of violence. (1974:45)

Montague goes on remorselessly to describe the kind of sound a wound makes, this time the historical wound of the defeat of Irish civilization in the century following Kinsale:

   Who knows
   the sound a wound makes?
   Scar tissue
   can rend, the old hurt
   tear open as
   the torso of the fiddle
   groans to
   carry the tune ... (1974:46)

The consciousness of loss, the avid and tormenting awareness of it, rises up in bitterness, accusation, anger, and hatred. Montague owns up to the lot in verse dignified but also shocking in its candor:

   This bitterness
   I inherit from my father, the
   swarm of blood
   to the brain, the vomit surge
   of race hatred,
   the victim seeing the oppressor ... (1974:46)

This is what erupted during the Civil Rights March to Burntollet; on Bloody Sunday in January 1972; and in more recent times, before the cease-fires, at Greysteel. It was at Greysteel on Halloween 1993 that Robert Torrens McKnight from Macosquin, with others, walked into the Rising Sun overlooking Lough Foyle, said "Trick or Treat?" and sprayed the bar with automatic tire, killing 13 people. It is what awoke at Drumcree in summer 1996, when the lines "of history" and "of power" stood off against each other, the Orange Order insisting that it follow the old line of its march down a road that (eerily) is called the Garvaghey (i.e., 'Rough Field') Road. Right down to 2002 David Trimble was still, drearily, attacking nationalists and republicans, while Gerry Adams accused Trimble of trying to wreck the peace process. Meanwhile a kind of standoff still persists at Drumcree, and the Orange Order still waits to march down the road called after the rough field.

The tense and brilliant force of Montague's 1972 poem entered into the fissure opening in Irish life again after more than forty years of uneasy but relatively stable peace. The poem's sinuous movement back and forth between public and private carried authority because its attention never wavered; its morality convinced because it worked as testimony and record, rather than accusation; and the chastity of its diction was a kind of earnest of its clarity and virtue, weighing every syllable. We may say that Montague's writing questioned "the distempered part," in T.S. Eliot's phrase (1963:201), where the distemper was in fact the old wound; he went into the fissure, even re-creating out of historical memory and linguistic genealogy the gaps cut into the tallysticks as a whole people moved across the rift between Irish and English in the nineteenth century. This was not just a scar, a cut; Montague's image for this change was the "severed head" trying to speak. Although the lines are familiar, it is worth quoting them again, so ablaze are they with shame:

   (Dumb,
   bloodied, the severed
   head now chokes to
   speak another tongue:--

   As in
   a long suppressed dream
   some stuttering garb--
   led ordeal of my own)

   An Irish
   child weeps at school
   repeating its English.
   After each mistake

   The master
   gouges another mark
   on the tally stick
   hung about its neck ... (1974:40)

Surely it is possible that a society as much as an individual can suffer trauma? And surely it is possible, as is the case with individuals, that if the trauma does not surface to consciousness, it may fester, diversify, and undermine the entire collective health? May it not also be the case that the loss of a language brings about a profound alienation, an alienation all the more devastating for being scarcely recognized on the grounds that, to common sense, language is no more than a utilitarian means of communication? But common sense fails in the presence of stress and distress. And language is more than a means of conceptual exchange: it carries the living and changing diversification of culture in its most delicate, most atomic differentiations.

The Rough Field, with the crisscrossings of faultlines all over the contours that Montague's poetry inscribes, announced a cluster of concerns that were to dominate Irish poetry in English (and also in Irish) for the next thirty years. In the sociopolitical sphere these concerns have to do with questions of identity and the form or forms of government, representation, and legislation appropriate to a highly contested set of mutually opposed convictions within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between Britain and Ireland. Who speaks for whom and of what? This question maintains its relentless interrogative behind every serious poem written in Ireland since 1972. Never mind if the poem or the poet pretends that this contemporary equivalent of "MacDonagh's bony thumb"--Yeats's metonymic evocation of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising (1983:182)--isn't there: it is. The fault is inescapable. It isn't just that recent Irish poetry (and recent Irish writing in general) is influenced by Montague's slow, almost syllabic, tracking of this faultline. It is also the case that The Rough Field and the crisis that it registers restored a sense of danger to language, because language must be forensic in its caution as it approaches these "lines of power" and "history."

Thus, the second cluster of concerns that was inaugurated around these reopening faultlines of trauma and memory had to do with language itself. A sense of trouble gathered around utterance, speech, and writing, arising from a particular set of circumstances in the Irish context with its special sensitivity to cultural identities and the discourses they employ, recall, and invent. This cluster of fear, anxiety, risk, even insecurity as to whether language may be said to have a sponsor at all, thickened just at the time when critics and philosophers such as Michel Foucault had undertaken profoundly unsettling inquiries into meaning, language, and the sign. They used terms like "transgression" to describe the nature of a contemporary philosophy that knowingly sought to subvert categorical ways of thinking in order to bring into play a much more fluid, hectic, and exacting method in relation to language and its connections with being. In other words the faultline opening in Irish poetry from the early 1970s onward was a risky linguistic activity entirely consonant with strange and difficult murmurings in French and German post-Heideggerean philosophy that represented a radical departure seeking to destabilize meaning itself, fixity, and logocentrism.

Contemporary Irish poetry (more than contemporary English poetry, for example) lives along the ruptures and fissures that constitute the intellectual and moral challenges of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century existence. French philosophers such as Foucault had, in a mixture of delight and terror (delight in daring to take thinking about language and its relationship with origins and death, for example, so far; terror at what they were saying, which seemed to set all normal categories on their heads) thought their way to a pitiless condition of transgression and boldness. In Ireland in the political sphere, meanwhile, such extremism manifested itself in ever more ferocious confrontations, while the poets bore witness to what was unfolding before them with wide-awake integrity. They had an instinct that told them that language was the crux, with all of Brian Friel's dramatic work even circling one way or another around the issues of language, communication, and meaning, asking who speaks for whom and of what. Put simply, Irish poetry of the last thirty years represents a high achievement because it has not shirked either danger or responsibility. Its language, therefore, is mobile, sudden, shocking, and full of surprises, full of cut and thrust, in the strongest sense of these words. Montague epitomizes this kind of probing elegance and finesse, strengthened by a strict and avid intellect that keeps him from rhetoric and fulmination. An aesthetic rigor gave him the technical capacities to approach the faultlines opening up and to throw the rope ladders of his craft across the abyss of "fuming oblivion" (Montague 1995:132). As a poet his method is to work his way through a landscape of memory and trauma as the reality of dispossession enters the soul. The landscape, he writes in "A Lost Tradition," is "a manuscript / we had lost the skill to read" (Montague 1982:108).

In the 1970s it became perfectly clear that whatever interpretation one might make of the Irish revolutionary effort of Pearse and 1916, as well as the founding of an Irish state, the fact of the matter was that Ireland had ceased to be a cultural entity with any secure retrospective continuity. Synge's Mayo, Hyde's Roscommon, Yeats's Sligo, and Lady Gregory's Galway all retained in the first quarter of the twentieth century live connections with a nineteenth-century Gaelic world that itself preserved many practices, concepts, and habits of mind that went back hundreds and maybe even thousands of years. But by the last quarter of the twentieth century, this way of life was going and, indeed, was mostly already gone. The heart-lifting, staggering ambition and vision of Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival sought to connect a new and vigorous Ireland to its old energies in folklore, music, myth, and magic, and thereby to transform Ireland itself. They sought to bring about a new kind of cultural polity vested with dignity, power, and authority.

It didn't happen, but as the Irish state (the twenty-six counties of it) strove in the second and third quarters of the last century to consolidate, improve, educate, invest, diversify, and modernize, it retained a consoling image of itself as a place apart, enjoying a vital spiritual life, performing modestly on the economic front but possessed of a powerful imaginative authority deriving from a Gaelic past, all the more alluring for being shrouded in vagueness. Yeats and others had provided a vital service for the Free State and for twentieth-century Irish nationalism: they disseminated an attractive set of cultural images based on the nobility of the Gaelic world. It's entirely irrelevant that this immensely popular and flattering self-image was a very partial rendition of Yeats's vision and that it had only the slightest connection with the harsh geometry of Yeats's exacting thought on culture and politics: it was a convenient and reassuring stereotype. But by the 1970s the stereotype was cracking up, and the major factor in its disintegration was the reawakened nightmare in the North. Whatever business had been transacted in 1916, whatever settlement was arrived at in the Better Government of Ireland Act (1920) that paved the way for partition, the story was not over.

It had, of course, to be the North where the faultline opened again, because that was where the problem was located. Internal pressures in the emotional economy came out. When poetry is functioning in its most characteristic mode, it is always searching out privacies and hidden dimensions in personal matters and in public affairs. In a sense all poets are public poets, because their special responsibility in relation to language is to try unceasingly to make it correspond with the actual nature of situations as they emerge in the cascade of lived events. This is not to say that the function of poetry is to be clear and dutiful--it may mean the opposite--but it must attend to what is happening. Thus, it had to be the case that for a time, indeed for most of the last thirty years, the center of gravity of poetry in Ireland moved north. That this is now beginning to change only confirms the North's preeminence over the recent period.

Montague's depictions of the resurrection of the Irish conflict in the North in The Rough Field and in subsequent collections, such as Mount Eagle (1989) or Border Sick Call (1995), are carried out in an exact and formal syntax of curt utterance. His philosophical mood is one of resigned acceptance of what he calls the "structure of process" in The Dead Kingdom (1984:18). Races and nations are each "locked / in their dream of history" (1984:18), while generation after generation go to meet their fate of failure, extinction, and oblivion. Montague has learned from Beckett; in both there is the iron resignation and sadness of a Roman patrician, a Cicero, or, better perhaps, a Seneca. There's no point in protest or in prayer, longing and hope are futile, and Montague's verse eschews the comforts of outrage and the satisfactions of blame. This is the way things are, the Tyrone man seems to be implying, and you can't change them by wishing otherwise.

If Tyrone gave the Northern trouble a Senecan stoic, then South Derry gave it a Pythagorean or Plotinian oracle in the form of Seamus Heaney. However, Heaney's oracular skills are not intent on transmitting closed and fixed verities; his writing is entirely in touch with the risky and transgressive openings that were disclosing themselves in the work of Foucault, for example. In Foucault's dazzling and baffling essay entitled "Transgression," written in 1963 in homage to the outrageousness and daring of the French eroticist Georges Bataille, the philosopher hammers out a defiant sentence describing the kind of philosophy he wishes to practice, a philosophy which is

   an affirmation that affirms nothing ... a philosophy which questions
   itself upon the existence of the limit [and] is evidently one of the
   countless signs that our path is circular and that, with each day,
   we are becoming more Greek. (1977:36-37)

Heaney's poetry returns again and again to limits, lines, the question of the origin, faults, tracks, footpaths, the straight line of a thatcher's cut, and to Greece. At the heart of all these lines and pathways, "stations," turning-points, and demarcations, there is an open space, a clearing, a clearance, as in "Station Island" (1984). Such ideas are returned to in "Clearances" in The Haw Lantern (1987), which picks up and transforms lines from the earlier poem:

   I thought of walking round and round a space
   Utterly empty, utterly a source
   Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
   In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
   The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

   Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
   A soul ramifying and forever
   Silent, beyond silence listened for. (1987:32)

Here is an openness and intransitivity, an attentiveness that is both alert and unfixed, the "radical break with transitivity" that excites Foucault in the Bataille essay and that he characterizes as "Greek" (1977:37). A source that is like "the idea of sound" (Heaney 1984:68) is not a closed origin, the end of a line; it is a crisscrossing of lines, an original that continually restarts, a paradoxical interanimation of opposing forces. This deepening of the stress-line takes the fault that opens into the underpaths of consciousness itself to a realm well below that of the politics of persuasion or amelioration, to the seminary of the real. This isn't "poetry of the troubles," as a journalist might have it; it is poetry of trouble, a whole and affirmative response to the fears and fissures of history, of being alive. This opening rupture is everywhere in evidence in Heaney, but one of its most potent manifestations occurs in "Kinship," a poem at the heart of Heaney's great collection North (1975). In this poem the Derry Pythagorean takes up the caduceus of Hermes and carries it back into a complex dark to point it toward the furled and furrowed origins, the "nesting ground," the "outback of [the] mind" (1975:35). Here is the caduceus, masquerading as a turf spade sunk in wet green moss and bracken. He lifts it and the faultline starts open. Something inaugural and dangerous and transgressive (in Foucault's conception of that word) is going on:

   I found a turf-spade
   hidden under bracken,
   laid flat, and overgrown
   with a green fog.

   As I raised it
   the soft lips of the growth
   muttered and split,
   a tawny rut

   opening at my feet
   like a shed skin,
   the shaft wettish
   as I sank it upright

   and beginning to
   steam in the sun. (1975:35)

Heaney "grew out" of all of this, in both senses of growing out, of course, in that it sustained him and nurtured him, but also in that because of it he can more onward, not get stuck in that "tawny rut." He tells us he was

   like a weeping willow
   inclined to
   the appetites of gravity. (1975:37)

Pause for a moment and delight in the lovely notation in that last line, where "appetites" friskily dances with the somberness of "gravity," the words performing a little grace note that subtly invokes the big interchanges going on between surface and depth, intellect and unconscious.

The sunk turf-spade is a sign, a caduceus, that he lifts in order to show that his attention is fixed on opening a line to plumb depths where reside forms and animations like "the idea of sound." This place is dangerous but also intensely exciting. It is where the fairies gather, but also where the goodness of angels may be signalled, invoked. It is the limit against which Heaney's intelligence and craft press, and across which he transgresses, but it is always there. It is there in "Keeping Going" from The Spirit Level (1996), a collection named after an instrument used to ensure that lines are aligned and level. The poem is dedicated to Heaney's brother Hugh, a farmer, who, when they were kids, used to pretend to play the bagpipes with a kitchen chair upside down on his shoulder, keeping the drone going through his mouth in spite of nearly bursting with laughter. The drone is the idea of sound underneath the appearances, the dark emptiness that groans out of the fault, the opening, that Heaney, now the mature, oracular Nobel Laureate, approaches with his caduceus. And what is it in the poem, the caduceus? What does this Pythagorean from South Derry wield?

   The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing
   On the back of the byre door, biding its time
   Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket
   And a potstick to mix it in with water.
   Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled
   A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.
   But the slop of the actual job
   Of brushing walls, the watery grey
   Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out
   Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.
   Where had we come from, what was this kingdom
   We knew we'd been restored to? Our shadows
   Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered
   The full length of the house, a black divide
   Like a freshly-opened, pungent, reeking trench. (1996:10)

Brimstone, burning, the actual job, magic, the kingdom restored, the shadows on the wall, Plato, Plotinus, the Greeks, Hugh his brother, the idea of sound, then the tar, the black divide, the pungent reek of the opened faultline, the wound, the exhilaration of the opening. It's all there, in the black line along the full length of the house. The architecture is solid and compliant with the actual because of the dark line drawn in tar. It is not as if Heaney is offering any gaunt declaration or anxious solution. He has registered the divide, the problem; he has vitalized it, turned it toward the dark spaces, the clearances, the gulfs, the ruts that are everywhere in his vision. He makes the scene resonate with a live animation responsive to "how it is," "comment c'est," in the words of Beckett's titles. We may recall that Beckett's sentences also weave and unweave these dark spaces, these gaps, as the pitiful trajectories his creatures take open up the faultlines of pain and terror, anticipating what was to emerge most emphatically throughout the West in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It is Heaney's "pungent, reeking trench," trench being an old English word for 'a cut'.

We can discern traces of Platonic or Neoplatonic shadows on Heaney's whitewashed wall. In two other younger Northern poets, each of them inspired by both Montague and Heaney, we see a Lucretian or Ovidian transformative energy. For example, Paul Muldoon's The Annals of Chile (1994) opens with a version of a passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book VI. It tells the story of Leto, how she cursed the peasants of Lycia when she arrived there with her newborn twins on her breast, tired out and exhausted from the heat, her breast milk dried up. The Lycians are cutting osiers by a pool and will not let her drink the water; indeed to make sure she cannot refresh herself, they stomp around in the mud, stirring up the silt on the bottom out of pure spite. Her curse turns them into frogs, and the pool becomes their trench:

   now, as ever,
   they work themselves into a lather
   over some imagined slight; since they continually curse
   and swear their voices are hoarse
   while their necks, in so far as there's anything between
   their heads and shoulders, are goitred; with their yellow
   paunches set off by backs of olive-green,
   they go leaping about the bog-hole with their frog-fellows. (1994:5)

It would be painful to moralize this scene too strictly, but it must be evident that Muldoon here is mischievously, but also with more than a touch of outrage, mocking those who stir up muck, who revel in the collusions, angers, slights, spite, and nasty triumphs that a fissured society begets. He is also glossing Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist." And there is a hint, too, in Muldoon that hankering after the bog-hole of authenticity or preventing generous access to all who come seeking refreshment from this source is an affront to humanity that must and will be paid for, terribly.

Indeed, much of Muldoon's work involves a kind of incisive cut into the reeking wounds of hate, malice, platitude, and self-regard. His work is always cutting into bodies or material, encrustations of calcified opinion, the rigor mortis of received wisdom and history, whether in the philosophic festivity of Madoc (1990) or in the wild exercises of wit and eroticism in "Yarrow" from The Annals of Chile. His poems are lancings, cleansings, of impacted repression and tension. Here he is on Yeats's Rose, having a go at Yeats's nastier, more brutish side, in the poem "Hound Voice":

   "How dare you suggest that his 'far-off, most secret,
   and inviolate rose' is a cunt:
   how dare you misread

   his line about how they 'all gave tongue';
   how dare you suggest that Il Duce of Drumcliff
   meant that 'Diana Vernon' and Maud Gonne gave
   good head." (1994:145)

Muldoon's world is an open space, where the lines of his inquiry can run anywhere, crisscross themselves, turn spiral loops of inventive mischief and interrogation. It is a kind of otherworld of the utterly contemporary: sadomasochism mixes with Padraig Pearse, Sylvia Plath and Charles Manson cross over each other.

From The Irish For No (1987) onward, Ciaran Carson's world is immersed in Belfast and the limits, lines, crossings, interrogation points, secret meeting places, and conversations of that city which transgress what should be said between people. There is an Ovidian transformative flow in Carson's poetry, and, like Muldoon, he has transformed Ovid into his own crammed syntax. Carson's version of Ovid's Metamorphoses XIII in First Language (1993), an account of the birds of rage that materialize out of the black smoke off Memnon's burning body, conveys the bleak urge to kill and hurt, so that the memory of offence, of wrong done, can be recalled and revenged. The birds metamorphose out of the smoke, and, in Carson's abrupt and ferociously urgent delivery, they break up into opposing lines of force across an empty division of hatred. They become Stuka dive-bombers, Prods and Taigs, Celtic loops and spirals:

   ... They
   wheeled
   In pyrotechnics round the pyre. The Stukas, on the third
   approach, split
   In two like Prods and Taigs. Scrabbed and pecked at one
   another. Sootflecks. WhirlWind.
   Celtic loops and spivals chawed each other, fell down
   dead and splayed.

   And every year from then to this, the Remember Memnon
   birds come back to re-enact
   Their civil war. They revel in it, burning out each other. And
   that's a fact. (1993:59)

The "Remember Memnon" birds are Belfast squabs, exploding into stereotypical division out of the reek of the filthy smoke. In the poem "33333" in The Irish For No, someone is trying to negotiate streets where everything can become foreign and suddenly dangerous if you cross the wrong line. The urgency, threat, energy, and, yes, excitement are there in the bleak vernacular of the transgressor, whoever he is, whatever side he's on. One thing is sure, he has crossed over into somewhere he shouldn't be:

   I was trying to explain to the invisible man behind the wire-grilled
   One-way mirror and squawk-box exactly where it was I
   wanted to go, except
   I didn't know myself--a number in the Holy Land, Damascus
   Street or Cairo?
   At any rate in about x amount of minutes, where x is a small
   number,
   I found myself in the synthetic leopard-skin bucket-seat of a
   Ford Zephyr

   Gunning through a mesh of vamps, diversions, one-way
   systems. We shoot out
   Under the glare of the sodium lights along the blank brick wall
   of the Gasworks
   And I start to ease back: I know this place like the back of my
   hand, except
   My hand is cut off at the wrist. We stop at an open door I
   never knew existed. (1987:39)

The passenger carries the absent sign of Ulster, the Red Hand, the severed hand. As Derrida has implied, "nothing can be anywhere simply present or absent ("the play of differences supposes ... syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment ... that a simple element is present in and of itself," 1981:26), so the sign operates to represent the present in its absence. Belfast is a city of signs, in which that which is absent is continually referred to, until suddenly what is absent is no longer so, but ferociously present. The open door leads to where? A Romper Room--the terrifying name given by the Shankill Butchers to the room where they tortured their victims before cutting them up? Or an unlooked-for escape? A sign resides on the opening line, the rupture, between what is absent and what is not. (1)

It is time to travel south. Shortly after Montague published the faultline opening to The Rough Field, he moved to Cork to teach at the University College there. He encountered in Cork an extraordinary phenomenon, one that no one could have expected or predicted. I mentioned earlier that this period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, was a time when it became clear that a profound severance had taken place between Irish society as it was then (registering, albeit distantly, the seismic tremors of radical change taking place in Paris, Berkeley, Berlin, and also absorbing the opening faultlines in the North), and the vastly different, idealized Irelands of Yeats and Pearse. One clear indicator of that severance was the evident failure to realize an official aspiration of the Irish state since its foundation: the reestablishment of the Irish language as a widely used medium of communication in society. By then it was also as plain as could be that years of emigration and neglect had all but drained the Gaeltacht areas of the western seaboard of their native population. The Blaskets were empty; Dun Chaoin was full of ruined cottages; in the Gaeltachtai of Donegal, Connemara, and Mayo, many people still lived in what were little better than hovels.

And yet, the entirely unpredictable thing that Montague encountered when he went to Cork was a school of Gaelic poets, some city-bred, others from Anglophone parts of Munster, writing fresh, vigorous, and uncompromisingly modernist contemporary poetry in Irish. These were the Innti poets, called after a magazine founded by Michael Davitt, Gabriel Rosenstock, Liam O Muirthile, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. There can be little doubt but that these younger writers were inspired by the example of two Cork poets of an earlier generation: Sean O Tuama, a brilliant, acerbic, sophisticated Professor of Irish Literature, and the poet on whom he gave seminars, Sean O Riordain. Both O Riordain and O Tuama have a trace back to Daniel Corkery, exponent of the Gaelic tradition of eighteenth-century Munster and Professor of English at Cork.

What is truly remarkable about this flowering of young talent in Irish in Cork in the 1970s is that just when it seemed as if the Gaelic tradition had reached an impasse, suddenly it became alive with new energies. Davitt and Rosenstock were reading e.e. cummings, Kerouac, Zen, Bengali love poetry, Beckett, and Ionesco. Ni Dhomhnaill was reading these too, along with Jung and Gaelic folklore. Unlike the other Innti poets, Ni Dhomhnaill was reared in the Kerry Gaeltacht, and she makes of its folklore, its heritage of stories, and its customs an entire psychomachia of danger, trauma, and challenge. Her poetry engages with a nexus of concerns--feminism, gender, anorexia, power, sex--but dominating all is a sense of dismay, rupture, and vulnerability. This version of the faultline in Irish life is connected to the gulf between the world of the Kerry Gaeltacht, which she grew up in before it began, finally, to founder in the 1960s, and the modern European Ireland that was emerging. But it also has to do with the ferocious anxieties and problems nagging and tearing away at the repressed consciousness of women and men in capitalist society, and the demands and requirements of duty, routine, work, earning a living, and keeping the deepfreeze well-stocked. (2)

Ni Dhomhnaill is a poet who confronts the repressed, and it may be that women in our time suffer from the results of repression more than do men, although perhaps there's not much to choose between them. "An Crann" ("The Tree"), from Fear Suaithinseach (Marvellous Grass, 1984), is about paranoia, and it explores the theme through a savage collision between folklore about fairies and fairy raths, and Black & Decker chain saws. The shock of the collision is registered as a kind of numbing paralysis. I think we can all recognize this condition of exhausted defeat, but the poem goes to these limits and carries us across a threshold of worry and fret by its own brisk and daring energy:

   Do thainig bean an leasa
   le Black & Decker,
   do ghearr si anuas mo chrann.
   D'fhanas im oineach ag feachaint uirthi
   faid a bhearraigh si na brainsi
   ceann ar cheann.

   Thainig m'fhear ceile abhaile trathnona.
   Choniac se an crann.

   Bhi an gomh dearg air,
   ni nach ionadh. Duirt se
   "Canathaobh nar stopais i?
   no cad is doigh lei?

   Thainig bean an leas thar n-ais ar maidin.
   Bhios fos ag ithe mo bhricfeasta.
   D'iarr si orm cad duirt m'fhear ceile.
   Durtsa lei cad duirt se ...

   "O," ar sise, "that's very interesting."
   Bhi beim ar an very.
   Bhi cling leis an -ing.
   Do labhair si ana-chiuin.

   lion taom anbhainne isteach orm
   a dhein chomh lag san me
   gurb ar eigin a bhi ardu na meire ionam
   as san go ceann tri la.

   The fairy-woman carne
   with a Black and Decker.
   She cut down my tree.
   I watched her like a fool
   cut the branches one by one.

   My husband came in the evening.
   He saw the tree.
   He was furious--no wonder.
   He said: "Why didn't you stop her
   what's she up to?"

   She came back the next morning.
   I was still breakfasting.
   She asked me what my man had said;
   I told her....

   Oh," she said, "that's very interesting."
   with a stress on the "very"
   and a ring from the "-ing,"
   though she spoke very quietly.

   A weakness came over me
   that made me so feeble
   I couldn't lift a finger
   for three whole days.

  (Ni Dhomhnaill 1988:92-95, trans. Michael Hartnett)

That's it: the terror of the gap between a world of feeling, fear, anxiety, and the terrible remorselessness of the demands of morality. And the poem crosses over, transgresses, the limits of morality to reveal a sorrowful emptiness.

There is no explicit mention of the Northern "problem' in Ni Dhomhnaill's poetry; however, that is not to say that it isn't at work in the shifts, abrupt transitions, violence, and extremities that characterize her writing. The Northern faultline is absorbed into the psychic turbulence that is everywhere in evidence. In her case a voice is raised for the victims of suffering, for those who are put upon; alongside this cry there emerges a powerful energy that is driven by a female rage at the assaulted places, the warped privacies of what is precious and small and hidden. We may prolong the classical conceit we indulged in with relation to Seneca, Pythagoras, and Ovid with reference to the male Northern poets and think of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill as a kind of contemporary Sappho, bearing witness to the unvisited landscapes of the mind that haunt our contemporary nightmares. The remarkable quality in her work is the clarity with which she outlines haunting narrative pictures. "An Bad Si" ("The Fairy Boat") from Feis (Carnival, 1991) describes a mysterious vision seen by certain women gathering dulse on a shore in Dun Chaoin of five or six men in a boat "putting in at the Women's Cliff" ("ag dul isteach go Faill na Mna"):

   Do lius is do bheiceas feachaint
   isteach faoin bhfaill car ghaibh an bad.
   Chonaic triur iad is ni fhaca an triur eile
   in ait chomh cung na raghadh ach ron.

   I shouted out to look below
   under the cliff where, by my soul
   at least three of us had seen them go
   through a place so narrow only a seal

   might pass.

But not a trace of them is to be found again:

   na fearaibh ar na maidi ramha,
   seaiceidi gorma orthu is caipini dearga
   ag dul isteach go Faill na Mna.

   the men rowing for dear life
   with their blue jerkins and red bonnets
   putting in at the Women's Cliff.

   (Ni Dhomhnaill 1992:60-63, trans. Paul Muldoon)

They have disappeared in the rift, the fissure in the landscape, the Women's Cliff. The poem refrains from explanation to give the color of the fear. Something awesome is registered and stated, something terrible but complete in itself.

It is evident that this account of certain themes in late twentieth-century Irish poetry--themes of the cut, the thrust, the split, the opening, and the related concerns of lines and limits, transgressions, crisscrossings--neglects many aspects of the poetic achievement of Ireland over the past thirty years. There are, for example, the rapt nightmares of Thomas Kinsella; the wounded openness of Brendan Kennelly; the Zen-like balancings of Michael Longley, with his cool and studious appraisals of atrocity and his appreciation of the warmth of the natural world. There are the bizarre and often searing parables of Paul Durcan; the gnomic and brooding intimacies of Medbh McGuckian; the collaboration between fragility and strength in Eavan Boland; the coloratura of perception and the abrupt suddennesses of Vincent Woods; the solar energy and ready Franciscan sweetness of Pearse Hutchinson; the dignified and sad elegance of Thomas MacCarthy; the ambuscades of terror and delight in Eilean Ni Chuilleanain; and the varied energy and clear humanity of Greg Delanty.

What gives all of this poetry its strength, I believe, is the way it utterly lives out its contemporaneity. It faces the nature of the faults that are surfacing now and that have been surfacing for the past thirty years in Northern Ireland, in Ireland, and everywhere. It is a poetry that confronts borders, crossings, and limits, all the more forceful in that it has an actual context of a border. It responds to a faultline in Irish society that had been to a degree filmed over by a tissue of lies for a long time, masking the true reek of its corruption and, yes, evil. Now the line opens again and the poetry goes about its business of transgression, going where it shouldn't go, to sense or reason, but where it must go if poetry is to retain its healing function. Again Foucault is illuminating here:

   The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a
   simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses
   a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short
   duration.... [T]hese elements are situated in an uncertain context,
   in certainties which are immediately upset so that thought is
   ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them.... In our day,
   would not the ... play of the limit and of transgression be the
   essential test for a thought which centres on the "origin" ...?
   (1977:34, 37)

W.B. Yeats remains right about many things, of which two are relevant here. He said, "we sing amid our uncertainty" (1959:331), and that is utterly true of recent Irish poetry. He also made a prediction; he said that Irish thought would, in a generation or two, become druidic, which he defined as "flowing, concrete, phenomenal" (1961:518). That prophecy surely is accurate when we consider the kind of thinking done in recent Irish poetry. The faultline opened in Irish poetry in the 1960s, with the reawakening of the unsettled question of Irish governance and Irish identity, raised in the emotional and psychological spheres, as much as the civic, the question "who speaks for whom and of what?" What sponsors utterance, what gives it authority and validity? Such questions reside at the heart of the so-called Troubles of the past eighty years. Because writing, if it is serious and intent on its purpose, must speak of those tensions that are most contorted, those emotions that seem implacable, those stand-offs that seem utterly resistant to compromise, then inevitably it needs must find images and rhythms for secrets entrenched in the fissure, the fault. And that is what Irish poetry especially has done in the past thirty years. That is what gives it its pained authority, its mobility; its sense, sometimes, of dealing with emotions and psychology not quite licit; its wit; and even its eloquence. And perhaps, also, because in a situation that since the mid-1980s is beginning to become post-conflictual, it is necessary to develop a mobile and open receptivity to different modes of operating, new voicings of governance, a more unfixed way of regarding tradition. Yeats's idea of a reality that is phenomenal, fluid, and concrete may not be too wide of the mark.

(1) Here we should remember the sadness of Derrida, his sorrowful acknowledgment of the darkness of our time, expressed, for example, in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1989:5-6).

(2) She has, incidentally, a superb and harrowing poem, "Dipfrios," about the chilling plenitude and horn of plenty and terror that a freezer is (1991:27; 1992:36-37).

WORKS CITED

Carson, Ciaran. 1987. The Irish For No. Dublin: Gallery.

--. 1993. First Language. Oldcastle: Gallery.

Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

--. 1989. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eliot, T.S. 1963. Collected Poems, 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Heaney, Seamus. 1966. Death ofa Naturalist. London: Faber and Faber.

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Kennelly, Brendan. 1991. The Book of Judas. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books.

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Montague, John. 1974. The Rough Field. 2nd. ed. Dublin: Dolmen.

--. 1982. Selected Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

--. 1984. The Dead Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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--. 1995. Collected Poems. 2nd. ed. Oldcastle: Gallery.

Muldoon, Paul. 1990. Madoc. London: Faber and Faber.

--. 1994. The Annals of Chile. London: Faber and Faber.

Ni Dhomhnaill, Nuala. 1984. Fear Suaithinseach. Maigh Nuad: An Sagart.

--. 1988. Selected Poems: Rogha Danta. Trans. Michael Hartnett. Dublin: New Island Books.

--. 1991. Feis. Maigh Nuad: An Sagart.

--. 1992. The Astrakhan Cloak. Trans. Paul Muldoon. Oldcastle: Gallery.

Yeats, W.B. 1959. Mythologies. London: Macmillan.

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ROBERT WELCH is professor of English and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster, having taught previously at the University of Leeds and the University of Ife (Nigeria). A novelist and poet as well as a scholar and critic, he edited The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature 0996). Other books include Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (1980), Changing States (1993), The Kilcolman Notebook (a novel, 1994), Secret Societies (poems, 1994), Groundwork (a novel, 1997), The Blue Formica Table (poems, 1997), and The Abbey Theatre 1899-1999 (1999).

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