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

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

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.