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

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

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)