Telling Lives: Irish Poets in the Archive

Abstract

In recent years there has been a significant rise in the publication of Irish documentary poetry, and an increased number of poets engaging with archival materials as part of their creative practice. This is linked to state commemoration processes and the light these have shed on questions of inclusion and remembrance. Archives play an important role in mediating challenging episodes in our history, and in affording space to the marginalised. In this essay I will focus on the systematic exclusion of the experiences of women from national narratives, and the subsequent erasure of their voices from both commemoration of, and creative engagement with, the past. In different ways, Julie Morrissy’s Radical!: Women and the Irish Revolution and Vona Groarke’s Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara explore archival materials and their role in helping to re-imagine the lives of previous generations of Irish women.