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

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Robert Welch

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.