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

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

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)