“Her songs are raised like fists”: The Caoineadh Tradition in Paul Muldoon’s Lamentations

Abstract

Throughout Lamentations (2017), a volume of translation from Irish as well as original compositions, Paul Muldoon reworks the poetics of the traditional Irish caoineadh (keen, lament). Ranging from a cry of the grief-stricken woman that nevertheless celebrates life in the case of "The Lament for Art O'Leary," to a self-elegiac song of protest in "Songs from Typhoid Mary," all the way to a keen over the collapse of an individual caught in the throes of a crisis-ridden country, thematized in "Ólagon," Muldoon shows the enduring applicability of the genre to address the oppression of an individual by systemic forces.