‘Carolina Hat’: Vona Groarke's Lament for Art O'Leary

Abstract

Vona Groarke's 2008 version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's famous keen for her husband, Chaoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, features a poetic voice overtly inflected by Irish, English, and American diction and usage. Groarke's poem emphasizes its status as a textual event in more than one time frame as well as another spatial setting. The other time is multiple, including the many translations and discussions of the lament from its eighteenth-century composition until now. The place is also multiple: it might be Dublin or Manchester, Boston or London, or Wake Forest, North Carolina, where Groarke spends part of every year. This new poem stresses the mobility of Eileen's passionate lament: in Groarke's hands, it becomes a poem of the particular place that manages also, intriguingly, to highlight transnational cultural and linguistic implications. This version, another chapter in the history of a work that begins in the fluidity of oral composition and is repeatedly reworked in translations, emphasizes domestic space as generative as well as excessive, the site of desire. Groarke's poem locates itself both inside and, crucially, outside, a place to which one comes ‘carrying nothing’ in order to find, in a seeming paradox, nonrestrictive structures.