Copy of Writing Home: Towards a New Poetics of Place in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry

The proposed research will concentrate on the work of major contemporary Northern Irish poets: John Hewitt, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian.
The main purpose is to offer an account of these poets' presentation of themes of place (particularly the home place) and displacement. For an older generation (Hewitt, Montague, Heaney), place has a transcendental reality, and is capable of providing an assuaging vision of continuity and stability. Other poets reject the sacramental or nativist vision of place and embrace notions of modernist exile (Mahon), ecocriticism (Longley), migrancy and diaspora (Muldoon), and those themes, tropes and procedures associated with postmodernism (Muldoon, Carson, McGuckian). 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 study aims to explore how the younger generation of poets - Muldoon, Carson, Paulin, McGuckian - not only introduce new poetic concerns, often based on urban or suburban or domestic experience, but also seem to revel in difference and disjunction, preferring to move between places, or otherwise to distance themselves from, rather than seek identification with, one place. Unitary notions of Ireland and Irishness are dismantled. A poetry of interior spaces and the quotidian erases the obsession with history informing the work of older writers such as Hewitt, Montague and Heaney, and points to new ways of dwelling and being-at-home. This study shows that where the older generation emphasise the value of a sense of historical continuity in dealing with the contemporary world, the younger poets confront the challenge of precisely how to live with an irredeemable discontinuity and displacement.
In highlighting the internationalism of contemporary Northern Irish poetry, the study offers assessment of American influences, Russian and Eastern European connections, classical Greek and Latin dimensions and the importance of translation as an aspect of cultural adaptation and transfer.
While there are several good full-length studies of contemporary Irish poetry, the proposed project concentrates on NORTHERN Irish poetry, and on a specific theme which, though central to all of the poets under consideration, has not yet received focused and sustained critical attention. The work is intended to highlight a move on the part of contemporary Northern Irish poets towards a poetics and politics of displacement in their attempts to re-write the sense of home and identity.