‘There’s No Return Route, Is There?’: Conor O’Callaghan’s After-Irish Diasporic Aesthetic

Alexander Wortley

doi:10.3390/h9010008

Abstract

In this article, I examine Conor O’Callaghan’s poetry in the context of post- or after-Irishness and migration. The idea of a traditional Irish national literature has diminished in importance and relevance in recent years. Irish writers are now more sensitized to alternative modes of identification, unbound by the constraints of a singular concept of ‘Irishness’. This is especially significant for migrant writers, who are geographically removed from Ireland. O’Callaghan (born 1968) is himself a migrant: having lived in America, he now lives in England. Drawn from his experiences of transnational migration, O’Callaghan explores the different locales that he has known. He also feels free to write about suburban life, love, and the internet in an often quick-witted vernacular. What then is O’Callaghan’s aesthetic response to the experience of migrancy? Does O’Callaghan’s poetry exhibit an after-Irish diasporic aesthetic? Although O’Callaghan’s poetry is imbued with a diasporic multi-locatedness, both intellectual and geographical, his sense of Irish identity remains strong, and his poetry also often expresses a desire for rootedness.

Highlights

After-Ireland and MigrationFrom Conor O’Callaghan’s second collection, Seatown (1999)—largely centred around his hometown of Dundalk on the north-east coast of the Republic of Ireland—‘East’ is a brilliantly lucid and streetwise meditation on the poet’s modern sense of Irishness
Its second stanza reads: But give me a dreary eastern town that isn’t vaguely romantic, where moon and stars are lost in the lights of the greyhound track and cheering comes to nothing and a flurry of misplaced bets blanketing the stands at dawn is about as spiritual as it gets. (O’Callaghan 1999, p. 42)
‘spiritual’, we have the real life of the ‘greyhound track’

Summary

Introduction

After-Ireland and MigrationFrom Conor O’Callaghan’s second collection, Seatown (1999)—largely centred around his hometown of Dundalk on the north-east coast of the Republic of Ireland—‘East’ is a brilliantly lucid and streetwise meditation on the poet’s modern sense of Irishness. This complicates the view of Seatown as a simple collection of rooted place poems, but in its semi-ironic celebration of Dundalk, it is still, as O’Callaghan has himself phrased it, at least

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Conclusion