Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry by Jefferson Holdridge Brian Ó Conchubhair (review)

Abstract

always been here’. The context is his introduction to John Scotus Eriugena’s homily on the prologue of St John’s gospel. The Christ who was to come was present to the people of Ireland in their solidarity with creation and in their contemplation of the cosmos. Perhaps that’s why Christianity was accepted in this far-flung island without the martyrdom that accompanied the advent of Christianity in other lands. Eriugena states: ‘In all human beings, indeed to put it simply, in the created universe as a whole, the Word is true light that subsists now and always has because it never ceases to subsist in all things’ (Prologue, XVIII). While concepts like deep pneumatology and deep Christology were unknown to this ninth-century Irishman, we already find the seeds of a Celtic tradition of creation that is both cosmic and eschatological in its scope and that finds a fresh articulation over a millennium later in Lane’s reflections. Lane’s style is often lyrical. The text is liberally laced with poetry by Heaney, Eliot, Wordsworth and Tennyson, to name a few. This book reads as a canticle to the creation that it embraces. It is a meditation on the ingenuity of the Triune God who draws all that exists into an eternal communion of life and love. Monsignor Liam Bergin, who holds a doctorate from the Gregorian University, has been teaching theology in Boston College since 2011. He was previously rector of the Pontifical Irish College in Rome. Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair (eds), Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry (Winston Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2017), 416 pages. A little book by Austin Clarke published in 1951, entitled Poetry in Modern Ireland, attempts within its 80 or so pages to review and to reflect on the poetry of the country for the previous 70 years. It is exciting about the early years of the new twentieth century and its expectation of a new era and guides us masterfully through those years of revival, our pre-occupation with mythology, our place on the edge of the romantic movement (‘a leakage from the pre-Raphaelite school’), and the wrestling of poetry with rhetoric which had been central to the best and the worst of the era. While Clarke’s book is an attempt at a synthesis by one mind and one Winter 2020-2021: Book Reviews Studies • volume 109 • number 436 474 poetic sensibility, the current book is one that is ‘all over the place’. I use this phrase in both its good and in its scattered sense: it is ‘all over the place’ in being wide-ranging, eclectic and doing its utmost to be comprehensive, but also in its other sense as it does not pretend to any conclusion, any great statement, any landing which can allow us to say, ‘Yes, this is what Irish poetry is about now!’ I take it that this is the reason for the title itself of ‘Post-Ireland’. An essay by Justin Quinn with the title ‘The Disappearance of Ireland’ is referenced several times as a kind of hook to this book, and the obvious connection is that Ireland (now more commonly referred to as ‘the island’ with much cultural cringe) has been expunged from the concerns of poets. The hidden question revolves around the unspoken conundrum of whether there is anything distinctive about Irish poetry any more, or is it just another shard of the many splinters of the Anglosphere? Many of the contributors struggle with this. Of course, it is unlikely that we will ever see again any serious references to ‘pearl-pale hands’ and ‘candlelike foam’ from the ‘dew-dropping sky’ with ‘milky wavings of neck’ in ‘sleepy song’ while ‘silky footsteps’ homely tread. The editors rightly point out that there has been a ‘disappearance of a certain vision of Ireland’, a point which would be difficult to dispute. On the other hand, is there anything to take its place in the ‘white noise of twentieth century life’? The simple answer is, no, there isn’t. Poets never had to conform to anything, and there was never a requirement to write yet again and once more about...