?That Blank Mouth?: Secrecy, Shibboleths, and Silence in Northern Irish Poetry

Abstract

Xhe poetry of contemporary Northern Ireland has been among the most highly praised and widely read of any in English since the emergence in the 1960s of the generation of writers that includes Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon. All are complex, allusive poets who have achieved popular readerships despite the presence in their work of much that resists being easily understood by readers who stand outside their poetry's densely local, mythic, and, on occasion, private references. This aspect of their style is particularly evident in the work of writers such as John Montague, Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Ciaran Carson, whose roots lie as much in the Gaelic as in the English-language tradition. Writing on the proliferation of cloaked references to Gaelic culture or Irish history in modern Irish writing in English, Dillon Johnston identifies two kinds of unstated or suppressed references: