The Border Textures of Maurice Riordan’s Prose Poem Sequence “The Idylls”

Abstract

Maurice Riordan’s “The Idylls” is a prose poem sequence in The Holy Land (2007) with few Irish or Northern Irish precursors. As an elegy for his father and his family farm, Riordan resuscitates memory in the companionship of human and non-human ghosts who provide access to a rural Ireland long gone. In this geography, no sustained static border protects a disappearing ecosystem already travelling along an arc of tragic causality. Although Riordan’s subjects repeatedly engage in the act of (re)securing fences, walls, and boundaries, their labours are fruitless against an abundance of border crossers, themselves included, who dash in and out of vignettes that shape each section. Riordan’s enactment of border crossing extends to the various genres “The Idylls” simultaneously inhabits: the eco-elegy, the idyll, the sequence, the prose poem, and the border narrative. The result is a textured and vibrant Irish “borderscape” on ecological displacement.