Irish Poet Research Articles

The impact of suicide prevention on experienced Irish clinicians

AbstractBackgroundEmerging research coming from the person‐centred and psychodynamic traditions in the past 15 years has examined the traumatic dimension of suicidal behaviour on clinicians. However, there is limited empirical literature on the impact of suicidality on Irish psychotherapists. In Ireland, it is estimated that 500 citizens die by suicide each year, while approximately 11,000 accident and emergency admissions are the consequence of suicide attempts.AimThis elicits the question, how does suicide prevention impact Irish mental health professionals who work solely with these vulnerable populations?MethodIn this article, the process of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was applied to the narratives of seven experienced therapists.FindingsThe Irish Poet W.B. Yeats coined the famous refrain ‘All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born’ in his poem ‘Easter 1916’ (as cited in Martin, ). This quote aptly encapsulates the reality of seven experienced Irish psychotherapists who work exclusively in the field of suicide prevention. Three salient superordinate themes emerged: (1) Overworking; (2) All changed, changed utterly/identity disruption; (3) A terrible beauty is born/A spiritual practice.DiscussionClinicians were ‘changed, changed utterly’ with identity disruption evident in their self, bodies, intimate relationships and professional identity. ‘A terrible beauty was born’ was demonstrated in the overarching theme of the restorative nature of client engagement in the life of the therapist. This was particularly evident in humanistic practitioners, who were acutely aware of their own sublimation of melancholia.ConclusionMost striking across all seven transcripts was the mix of the corrosive nature of suicide prevention on the self of the therapist, combined with unparalleled opportunities for personal growth and spiritual reformulation.

Punishing the Lyric: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of a Communal Europe

Punishing the Lyric: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of a Communal Europe Margaret Greaves (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 216] Introduction: Heaney, Europe, Genre In 2009, on the heels of the world recession that ravaged the European Union’s economy, an article in the Guardian posed a peculiar question: “Will the future of Europe be decided by the voice of a poet?” (Ash). The piece highlights Seamus Heaney’s “Beacons at Bealtaine,” an occasional poem written for the European Enlargement Ceremony in 2004; it depicts a Europe where “new meanings flare . . . / From middle sea to north sea, shining clear” (“Beacons” 94). When Heaney again read the poem in 2009—this time in a video made to endorse the controversial Treaty of Lisbon—Europe was in crisis. At an economically, socially, and even culturally precarious moment the Treaty of Lisbon proposed greater power for the European Parliament at the expense of national sovereignty. Despite the British Conservative Party’s active opposition, the treaty was ratified on 13 November 2009—an event that catalyzed the recent EU referendum. As a result, the United Kingdom will most likely become the first EU member to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, which lays out the process by which a sovereign state can choose to withdraw from the union. The Lisbon treaty was also contentious in Ireland, where many voters’ concerns about its threat to autonomy echoed arguments for Irish independence a century before.1 But its supporters, Heaney among them, maintained that if Europe were to survive as either idea or political entity, its nations would need more constitutional and [End Page 217] ideological unity. Positioning a lyric poet as the ultimate voice of wisdom on the matter, the Guardian headline declared, “It takes an Irish poet to remind us of the grandeur of the European project.” This headline, no less than the poem driving it, is strange; Ireland (and perhaps especially Heaney’s native Northern Ireland) has more often been a problem than a standard for Europe. The Troubles in Northern Ireland intensified international perceptions of the island as primitive and atavistic, and following the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy in 2008, Ireland became one of the most economically fragile countries in the Eurozone. What did it mean, then, for Heaney to write a poem positioning Ireland as a model for Europe, despite—or because of—its long-standing geographical and cultural marginalization from the Continent? And what did it mean for Heaney, lauded as the greatest Irish poet since W. B. Yeats, to become a lyric voice of and for Europe? This article approaches these questions from a generic rather than a primarily thematic angle. Heaney’s interest in Europe has long attracted critical attention, from heated reactions to the myth-infused northern setting of his volume North (1975) to a burgeoning interest over the past decade in his attraction to Eastern European poetry. Since his death in 2013 Heaney has been remembered as a poet of Europe; in March 2016 the Journal of European Studies published a special issue on the Irish poet featuring essays on his Latin, Eastern European, Scottish, and Irish affinities. Bringing together his interest in Europe with the recent resurgence of genre criticism, this essay contends that reading Heaney in his geographical contexts engages with contemporary debates about the lyric. The conflict between Heaney’s own theory of the lyric and his moment in literary and political history led him to see the intrusion of a collective voice into the lyric sphere as foremost an ethical rather than a generic dilemma. He works through the challenges of writing lyric poems about collective suffering under the guidance of classical and Eastern European poetics, analogically connecting Europe’s southern and eastern reaches with Ireland’s own off-center European position. The despairing picture of Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence envisioned in North morphs, by Heaney’s late poetry, into a model for how Europe in the new millennium might survive through, rather than despite, communal sentiments. [End Page 218] Also at stake in this reading is an understanding of how, in the case of a central figure...

The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics ed. by Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins

The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics ed. by Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins

Introduction: Globalizing the Province: Rethinking Place and Scale

Globalizing the Province: Rethinking Place and Scale Shirley Lau Wong (bio) “The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together.” T.S. Eliot, “What Is a Classic?” (1944) I In a lecture titled, “The Sense of Place,” Seamus Heaney laments what he sees as the diminishing presence of Ireland in the work of contemporary Irish poetry as new generations of poets slowly unmoor their identity from the country’s landscape.1 Replacing the “sense of place” is a deterritorialized perception of Irish identity, according to Heaney. “We are no longer innocent, we are no longer parishioners of the local,” he bemoans, “We go to Paris at Easter instead of rolling eggs on the hill at the gable [...] ‘It’s a far cry from the Moy’” (148).2 While Heaney expresses his concern with some degree of irony, there is nonetheless a zero-sum game at work in his nostalgia: for him, a globalized identity always comes at the expense of a local identity. It seems that the Irish poet cannot have Paris and the Moy, too. A similar story is told in world literature scholarship. In her seminal study La république mondiale du lettres (The World Republic of Letters), Pascale Casanova argues that literary space is rife with power struggles over the authority to dictate the criteria of what’s “modern” and to determine the “very nature of literature” (12). Indeed, such rivalries constitute her concept of the world republic of letters, and works of world literature are marked by their universality or autonomy above political, linguistic, and national divisions. Quoting Valéry Laubaurd, Casanova claims that Paris acts as the “Greenwich meridian of literature” because it can proclaim itself “beyond all ‘local’ politics, whether sentimental or economic” (29–30). Those writers who fail to disassociate from their national or regional identities are consigned to the “hell of minor provincial roles” (23), ghettoized as representatives of peripheral cultures rather than as legitimate participants in the literary sphere: “‘National’ writers [...] whether [End Page 1] they live in central or outlying countries, are united in ignoring world competition (and therefore literary time) and in considering only the local norms and limits assigned to literary practice by their homelands” (94).3 Heaney mourns precisely what Casanova seems to celebrate: the eschewing of “local norms and limits” in favor of the boundlessly and timelessly global. Of course, these two writers could not come from more different perspectives or be guided by more different motivations. Delivering his lecture in 1977 at the height of sectarian violence during the Troubles, Heaney expresses his anxieties under a set of more urgent political pressures. Heaney admits that the so-called “sense of place” (the term he uses to describe the intimate relationship between place and literature) is by no means an exclusively Irish phenomenon, but the poet also observes that the “peculiar fractures in our history, north and south and [...] possession of the land and possession of different languages” have made it a pressing priority at this moment of Irish history (136). Meanwhile, Casanova remains more agnostic to what she assesses as a now centuries-long history of the world republic of letters. Nonetheless, Heaney and Casanova present two sides of the same and now very familiar narrative, which posits globalization as a one-way street that threatens to expunge local and indigenous practices of traditional ways of life. Contrary though their outlooks may be, they nevertheless conceive of the local and global as antagonistic categories of literary identity. But are the local and global as incommensurable as Heaney and Casanova believe them to be? Taking this question as its starting point, this special issue of The Global South interrogates cultural and political representations of “local” spaces and communities, as well as other zones of underdevelopment more broadly. This issue’s essays focus on local, provincial, and regional cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that are shaped by, but also elided from, the perspective of the national and transnational. As has become clear, the scale of literary analysis is no longer stable, especially as the nation-state and world are no longer...

“Modern-Antiques,” Ballad Imitation, and the Aesthetics of Anachronism

Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it. All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings, All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages, Seem to he treasured up here to make fools of present and future. --Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage Writing to the Irish poet and ballad anthologist William Allingham in the summer of 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti explained that he was underwhelmed by the former's poem, Music Master, as it lacked the enticements he expected of ballads: [O]ne can only speak of one's own needs & cravings: & I must confess a need, in narrative dramatic poetry ... of something rather exciting, indeed I believe something of the element, to rouse my mind to anything like the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is shockingly ill-worded, but Keats's narratives would be the kind I mean. (1) One is struck both by the aesthetic feeling that Rossetti attempts to discriminate-the connection he draws between romance narrative and personal emotion-and by the hesitation with which he does so: before he wrote romantic, Rossetti wrote schoolgirl, then crossed it out. The strikethrough has the force of an embarrassed admission about the appeal of ballads to an otherwise high-minded literary reader, particularly when the ballad in question is neither antiquarian artifact nor popular street song but artfully contrived pastiche. This self-conscious mode of genre performance had its roots in such eighteenth-century ballad scandals as Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw's Hardyknute. (2) Ballad forgeries turned eventually to avowed imitations, and, after picking up sentimental, romance, and gothic elements from Thomas Chatterton, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and many others, the literary ballad had thoroughly saturated the literary field by the early decades of the Victorian period. This essay explores the ballad aesthetics inherited by Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites and, more particularly, those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a less-remarked influence on Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. The ballad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was less a stable form than an evolving discourse-an overlapping assembly of ballad collections and antiquarian scholarship that gathered together metrical romances, broadside ballads, ballad romances, hymns, lays, ballad parodies, and lyrical ballads that variously expanded and chastened the idea of the ballad. The ballad's prominence as cultural form has been given considerable attention, though recent work has focused primarily on antiquarianism, popular balladry, or the ballad's significance within print culture and romantic nationalism. (3) Turning to the relatively neglected form of the literary ballad, I am interested less in specifying what this genre was than in exploring what we might call the historical aesthetics of genre-the kinds of feelings and judgments that get attached to a given genre and their role in its style, rhetoric, and form. (4) What language did nineteenth-century readers use to distinguish their impressions of poetic genres, and what relationship can we see in this language between aesthetic judgment and poetic form? How do aesthetic categories shore up, innovate, or otherwise inflect categories of genre? In particular, my discussion aims to uncover the aesthetic and affective dimensions of the stylistic anachronism-Rossetti called his poems, after Walter Scott, modern-antiques-that characterizes the literary ballad in its tendency to evoke without fully inhabiting the conventions of traditional songs and ballads (Correspondence, 1: 389). (5) The subgenre of the literary ballad represents an important aspect and outgrowth of what Albert Friedman has termed the ballad's museum-life, its abstraction within the discourses of antiquarian revival, sophisticated poetry, and historical scholarship (p. …

Noviembre

Furukawa Hideo. Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima. Trans. Doug Slaymaker with Akiko Takenaka. New York. Columbia University Press. 2016. 147 pages. Although the cataclysmic destruction visited upon Japan on March 11, 2011, by an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude and its attendant tsunami still loom large in the national consciousness, it is the nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant that are most painfully seared into the collective Japanese psyche (see WLT, Jan. 2012, 14–18). Furukawa Hideo (b. 1966) has, in Horses, penned a reaction to these events, memorialized as 3.11, that resists facile classification and challenges readers by continually shifting the focus and style of his narrative. The narrative voice, well captured in translation, strains to be “edgy” through disjuncture : sentences compromising clipped clauses, terse fragments, words. The sense of fracture permeates the prose, a relentless reminder of the splintered reality born on 3.11 that has forever altered Furukawa’s relationship with his home in Fukushima. Reacting to and struggling against this overpowering sense of despair and loss finds the author retreating almost obsessively into the minutiae of the present. Reiterated epithets, such as “the car with the Kashiwa license plates,” seek to stabilize the “spirited-away time” that consumes the protagonist, casting him adrift and preventing him from moving forward. We come to realize that such stability is a chimera. Horses is rooted in the “I-novel” tradition that privileges both confession and unmediated writing about the author’s current personal demons. Something akin to survivor’s guilt is the prime force in Furukawa’s case, but that does not stop the author from seeking out myriad alternative modes for expressing his concerns. At one point, Furukawa “beg[s] the reader’s indulgence for [his] dramatic turn of phrase,” yet he asks for that consideration too often and provides little by way of recompense. The long historical digression into the “otherness” of the Tōhoku region and the strained focus on horses as metaphor falter under the weight of the reality Furukawa seeks to process. So, too, does the oblique effort to link 3.11 to 9/11. That this seemingly experimental novel is not terribly effective may be its true strength, for although Horses chronicles the visible effects of the natural disasters, it is of the secondary man-made disaster that Furukawa writes. Like this novel, that disaster resists easy comprehension beyond the most superficial. The translator’s afterword seeks to tame the sense of an inchoate text and, in some measure, succeeds; yet that the novel struggles, absent that contextualization , is a marker of its immanent power. How are we to understand, process, move beyond the devastation of 3.11 and, more importantly, the effects of the silent nuclear reality that will extend far beyond a single day commemorated in a simple number? In this, the subtitle is particularly apposite, for Furukawa, one of the first authors to write of these disasters, offers no solutions and has only scratched the surface of a far more complex and contentious story-in-the-making. The tale is ongoing. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Jorge Galán. Noviembre. México City. Planeta. 2015. 255 pages. On November 16, 1989, the US-trained Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran army broke into the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” (uca) and murdered six Jesuit scholars who had spoken up against social injustices, a university employee, and her sixteen-year-old daughter . The massacre took place days after the Seamus Cashman The Sistine Gaze Salmon Poetry Beloved Irish poet Seamus Cashman turns his poetic gifts toward a meditation on Michelangelo’s masterwork. Drawing together threads of the religious, philosophical, artistic, and technical, Cashman weaves an approachable and altogether human tapestry against which we may appreciate the triumph the chapel frescos represent. Homero Aridjis The Child Poet Trans. Chloe Aridjis Archipelago Books Poet and former ambassador Homero Aridjis pens this intimate glimpse into his childhood, growing up in Michoacán, Mexico. Elegantly translated by his daughter Chloe with language both evocative and sparse, Aridjis recounts his transition from a rowdy boy to a pensive, bookish teen and the horrifying...

Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby (review)

Reviewed by: Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby Thomas Dillon Redshaw Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems, by Frank Ormsby, pp. 192. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, $15.95. Goat’s Milk, Frank Ormsby’s latest collection, offers readers in North America a generous, yet discriminating survey of this Irish poet’s few but always timely collections. And American readers will find Michael Longley’s sweet introduction to Ormsby’s work both pointed and helpful. Indeed, the steady reader of Irish poetry from the mid 1960s on—an arousing phenomenon itself—will be reminded by the poems here of the standard of feeling and invention set by Ormsby’s four prior collections dating from A Store of Candles in 1977. There [End Page 152] Ormsby takes his first hikes into America, as when he ventriloquizes a Basque shepherd in Idaho or Montana drinking alone in a cattleman’s pub: Unbowed I claim my rights—to herd alone,and be accepted. When I skirtthe rim of cattle drives, salute me,and when I come to share your bunkhouse fire,make room. For “Basque,” read “poet” and you will overhear one strand of Ormsby’s allegory. To begin with, Ormsby’s Fermanagh countryside is not Heaney’s, though near allied. In A Store of Candles, Ormsby’s territory is the townscapes of the North summed up in Belfast where each council house, new or old, has a stair cupboard where one can find “a store of candles for when the light fails.” And there you might find, all marked up, a forgotten copy of A Store of Candles, after which Ormsby fell silent. Indeed, between each collection since then has come a pause when Ormsby gave forethought to the new life of each new poem, rather as Elizabeth Bishop did. Like hers, his writing life has had its interruptions. We cannot forget, of course, that Ormsby made and remade his familial and poetic life in the Northern Ireland of the long “Troubles,” in Belfast of the fortified pub and burnt-out row houses. He was there pretty much from the beginning. He was there early and late with his editorship of the Honest Ulster-man, from 1969 to 1989. He was there with anthologies like Poets from the North of Ireland (1979), A Rage for Order (1992), or The Hip Flask (2001). The Northern “Troubles” also provide one reason why Ormsby’s poems can come as such a surprise. The “Troubles” encouraged readers to take Northern poetry as an exceptional tradition whose renovations might assuage decades of social and cultural impasse. Poetry from the North, though, is the Red Branch of Irish poetry after World War II, and especially so when the prestige of Seamus Heaney came to anchor the regional driftings of Irish poetry. In this circumstance, a poet of Ormsby’s temper stands the risk of being noted or footnoted without being read or heard—and that is why Wake Forest University Press deserves a salute for bringing Goat’s Milk to American readers. Looking for direct political engagement or confessional outrage or sociologized good will, American readers will be disappointed. Ormsby is always after elements truer and more difficult than those. Like Ormsby, since the 1970s on the best of Irish poets are after elements in the “Matter of Ireland” that once escaped articulation because deemed “unpoetic” in the way that American critics of the same decades have, for example, find Karl Shapiro’s poetry “unpoetic.” Ormsby addressed these unspoken elements back in 1986 in A Northern Spring by giving voice to the American “invasion” of Northern Ireland in advance of D-Day. Listen to “For the Record” from A Northern Spring (1986): [End Page 153] Cornered at St.-Malouf, I shot my wayto a medal and commendation (posthumous),a credit at last to my parents, whoever they were,and the first hero produced by the State Pen. To that tour de force Ormsby pinned two notable poems pertinent to the “Troubles.” In “The War Photographers,” Ormsby steps back and points out the art in the visible proofs of human cruelty. Anticipating disillusionments North and South, the wry confession “My Careful...

Myth, Land, and History in the Poetry of James Clarence Mangan and Ernest Jones

This essay discusses poetry associated with Irish nationalism and Chartism. Chartism’s eventual de facto leader, Ernest Jones, was an admired and prolific poet; as Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan were helping to forge a new Irish cultural identity in support of Irish nationalism, Chartist poets including Jones were attempting a similar project for a radical British working-class readership. This article undertakes a brief comparative study of the poetry of Mangan and Jones, and finds the points where they converge and differ to be equally illuminating in terms of their mythic representations of the land and the past.

W. B. Yeats and Gordon Craig: Collaborations and rehearsals towards the theatre of the future

The artistic partnership between the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the English set designer and theatre theoretician Gordon Craig, short though it was and limited to only a few collaborations, was important for anticipating some of the principal developments in modern theatre and reverberates until today on the contemporary scene. Although it occurred between 1910 and 1913, and was particularly intense in 1911, when some productions were staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with texts by Yeats and a strong influence from Craig, the partnership was born long before, out of the real friendship between the two artists, and continued long afterwards beyond those joint projects. My objective here is to tell a little of this story, highlighting how Yeats’s absorption of Craig’s ideas had a decisive influence on the development of his play-writing, with the so-called plays for dancers, and, further, how these may be perceived as rehearsals, or laboratory experiments, for the revolution in dramatic practice that was to take place in the theatre of Samuel Beckett. This re-examination of Craig’s project, known as Scene, patented in four countries in 1910 and warmly embraced by Yeats, will also make it possible to present connections with recent manifestations of the contemporary theatre, conceived as the expanded scene, in a frank dialogue with the visual arts. Thus I shall argue that Yeats andCraig, each with their own interests, was a rehearsal, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of practices and proposals which anticipate contemporary theatricality, as seen in the first decades of the twenty-first century.Keywords: W. B. Yeats; Gordon Craig; modern theatre; plays for dancers.

Introduction: Medieval Literature and Contemporary Irish Writing

The invitation to Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Bernard O’Donoghue, and Frank McGuinness to contribute the following set of papers to the Irish University Review was prompted by the 2013 International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) conference in Dublin, organised by Mary Clayton of University College Dublin and Alice Jorgensen of Trinity College Dublin. The conference was the largest ISAS gathering to date, with 210 delegates. Its theme was ‘Insular Cultures’, focusing on the connections between Britain and Ireland in the early Middle Ages. One of the highlights was the reading in the National Museum by Seamus Heaney on 29 July – one of his last public appearances – in which he read translations and poems inspired by Old English and Old Irish poetry, including part of his Beowulf, his very early ‘Trial Pieces’, whose starting point was the Wood Quay excavations of Viking Dublin, his version of the Old English ‘Deor’, ‘Colmcille the Scribe’, and ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’. It was obvious from the reading how steeped Heaney was in the medieval literatures of both islands. Heaney’s Beowulf, like his translations of Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables (2009), owes an obvious debt to the texts of Old and Middle English literature that were standard on university curricula on both sides of the Irish Sea up to recently. Other contemporary Irish writing also bears witness to this influence, such as the many versions of Old English poems by Irish poets in The Word Exchange (2010), edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, which includes translations by Greg Delanty, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Bernard O’Donoghue, and many others as diverse as Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer (2006), Frank McGuinness’s play Someone to Watch Over Me, and Bernard O’Donoghue’s verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In order to mark the occasion of the 2013 ISAS conference, hosted for the first time in Ireland and with its focus on pre-conquest connections and exchanges

The Outnumbered Poet: Critical Prose and Autobiographical Essays by Dennis O’Driscoll (review)

Reviewed by: The Outnumbered Poet: Critical Prose and Autobiographical Essays by Dennis O’Driscoll Daniel Tobin The Outnumbered Poet: Critical Prose and Autobiographical Essays, by Dennis O’Driscoll, pp. 472. Oldcastle: Gallery Books, €17.50. “I was never a great admirer of death.” So the late Dennis O’Driscoll begins his essay “In the Midst of Life,” one of some twenty-five autobiographical and literary essays and reviews collected in the compendious posthumous volume, The Outnumbered Poet. “In the Midst of Life,” a short meditation on O’Driscoll’s move with his wife the poet Julie O’Callaghan to a house backing a suburban Protestant cemetery ends with the figure of an admittedly portentous thrush perched on the boundary wall. More than vaguely salutary to Thomas Hardy, O’Driscoll’s thrush encountered in “the last darkness of the year” prompts the poet to question “Might this be a favourable omen or an ominous one?” “In the Midst of Life,” with its title’s implicit nod to Dante,” is dated February 3, 2001, which only underscores how inevitably even potentially favorable omens turn ominous in relief of any life’s premature curtailment: O’Driscoll died suddenly in December 2012 at the relatively young age of fifty-eight. It is hard, to echo Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” not to see this prominent Irish poet’s end in the beginning of this essay written some eleven years before; hard also not to invoke, however allusively, Auden’s famous literary epitaph to Yeats, for though Dennis O’Driscoll confessed he was no admirer of death he, too, now in death has become his admirers. Born and raised in Thurles, County Tipperary, as a young poet from beyond the literary pale O’Driscoll sent greetings to W. H. Auden, a gesture either unaccountably daring or quietly self-assured, and probably both. The great English poet must have heard something decidedly other than sycophancy in O’Driscoll’s letter, for he responded. As Seamus Heaney reflected in his eulogy for his friend and literary collaborator—only a matter of months before his own untimely death—from such beginnings the poet who “struck a new note . . . in a changing Ireland moving from the age of Sunday Mass to the age of the shopping mall . . . grew into the man who was at the center of his own world wide web of poetry.” If [End Page 155] The Outnumbered Poet attests to anything beyond O’Driscoll’s obvious dedication to the art he loved, and what Heaney deemed his characteristic probity, it is to his simultaneously discriminating and wide-ranging appreciation of notable poets from either side of the Atlantic whose work evinces the sadly waning quality of something important to say—that, and the wry edginess of his wit. Where the short essays of the brief first part of The Outnumbered Poet provide a welcome glimpse of “the working bard’s” life as a suburbanite and civil servant in the Revenue Office, the substantially longer second part demonstrates O’Driscoll’s wide-ranging interests in poets as various and globally distributed as Yehuda Amichai, Julia Hartwig, Anna Kamienska, Miroslov Holub, Douglas Dunn, Alisdair Maclean, Phillip Larkin, Louis MacNeice, and Robert Lowell, among many others. Especially welcome throughout these essays is O’Driscoll’s considerable engagement with contemporary American poets, again as broadly distributed aesthetically as John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Kay Ryan, and Billy Collins. The two essays on Ryan and Collins, in particular, reveal O’Driscoll’s preference for poets and poetry that take reality into consideration along with vitality of language and formal expressiveness. O’Driscoll’s watchword in poetry is clarity, and he is not afraid of offering discriminating observations about the work of even strong poets whose poems at times do not measure up to his standards. For example, in his essay on the early poetry of Yehuda Amichai he urges “more layering of emotion and intensification of language . . . could have transformed his poems, not the least the near misses among those early selections.” He holds himself to those same high standards, of course, in his reflections on making his own Selected Poems. Not surprisingly, O’Driscoll is less appreciative of the empty playfulness, or...

Poetry as an Act of International Diplomacy: English translations of Willem van Haren's Political Poetry during the War of the Austrian Succession

AbstractIn the eighteenth century the worlds of diplomacy and poetry were inextricably connected. This is demonstrated by the work of the Dutch statesman and poet Willem van Haren (1710‐1768), whose political poems played an important role in the negotiations of international political relations during the War of the Austrian Succession. Several poems were translated into English by the Irish poet Samuel Boyse and published in The Gentleman’s Magazine. It is argued that the great interest in Van Haren's work in England can be clarified by the country's positioning in the European conflict, and by Anglo‐Irish relations during the 1740s.

More Human/Humane than Humans: An Ecocritical Analysis of Shahryar's "Hail to Heydarbaba"

Ecocriticism is a rather new insight into the relationship between literature and environment. In recent years, different environmental problems and devastations have led the critics to focus on the ecocritical concepts and terms in order to highlight the environmental challenges in literary works. In Iran, many poets investigate the natural environment in their poems, but still there is not the much ecocritical analysis on them. The researchers have chosen a contemporary Iranian poet, Shahryar (1906-1988), as the central figure of this study and examine his masterpiece, Hail to Heydarbaba, under ecocritical perspectives. This poem is the material of the present study, to which we try to apply the ecocritical terms, such as anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism, ecocentrism, modernization, and place attachment. The writers attempt to settle on the particular aspects of ecocriticism in order to explore the poet's unique expression of ecocentric views for illustrating his appreciation of the non-human world.

“Dolce era la notte.” Iraqi and Iranian Poets in Italy: Metrical-Stylistic Implications of Translingual Versification

The essay that follows is a metrical-stylistic analysis of two anthologies of poetry published in Italy in 1998 and 2000 by poets who migrated from Iraq and Iran to Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, and began to publish poetry in Italian from the mid-1990s: Quaderno Mediorientale I: Iraq and Quaderno Mediorientale II: Iran. Although the two groups are heterogeneous, the authors are united by a common diasporic experience and translingual condition. Moreover, their Italian works are strongly characterized by their native literary traditions. The first section of this essay contextualizes some of the reasons behind the selection of these two corpora. It then describes key aspects of Iraqi and Iranian migration to Italy with reference to the European context. Finally, it provides a brief overview of the writers from the two countries who have produced creative works in Italian. The second section introduces the anthologies through an exploration of their themes and imagery, especially in relation to the representation of space. In the third section, prosodic and stylistic implications are considered with a view to delineating the intermingling of genres, forms, and images that emerge. The essay concludes by highlighting the challenge posed by translingual works for our understanding of the Italian literary canon as well as their aesthetic power and innovatory force in the Italian contemporary poetry scene.

Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope

Bespreking van: Deborah Denenholz Morse,Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope London and New York:Routledge ,2013 9781409456148

Iranian Common Attitude toward Opium Consumption

: Iran is suffering from the 2nd most severe addiction to opioids in the world. While the explanation of this enormous drug problem is refutably related to drug trafficking, the drug dilemma also illustrates the chain reaction of the imposed war with Iraq in 1980 - 88; the problems of poverty, unemployment, urbanization, homelessness, adultery, family crises, divorce, domestic violence, and runaway children. Although opium addiction often linked to these factors, drug use is common among all social classes. It seems that a positive traditional attitude is another reason for widespread raw opium use in this country. A survey in Iranian literature reveals that famous Iranian poets, who have a substantial contribution on cultural attitude formation of Iranian population, have used the phrase “Teriac” (raw opium) as a means of “antidote” a substance that treats every disease. It seems that a concrete deduction from the literature has been leaden to a positive attitude towards opium consumption in Persian culture. Recent research also supports this idea. Many patients use raw opium as a pain killer or for treating hyperlipidemia, hypertension, diabetes and other chronic diseases; most of them had started the use after developing the disease and the remaining had increased the consumption after developing the disease. Regarding this superstitious common belief, drug control headquarters should focus on education and correction of the faulty unhealthy attitude toward opium consumption.

Iranian Common Attitude Toward Opium Consumption.

Iran is suffering from the 2nd most severe addiction to opioids in the world. While the explanation of this enormous drug problem is refutably related to drug trafficking, the drug dilemma also illustrates the chain reaction of the imposed war with Iraq in 1980 - 88; the problems of poverty, unemployment, urbanization, homelessness, adultery, family crises, divorce, domestic violence, and runaway children. Although opium addiction often linked to these factors, drug use is common among all social classes. It seems that a positive traditional attitude is another reason for widespread raw opium use in this country. A survey in Iranian literature reveals that famous Iranian poets, who have a substantial contribution on cultural attitude formation of Iranian population, have used the phrase “Teriac” (raw opium) as a means of “antidote” a substance that treats every disease. It seems that a concrete deduction from the literature has been leaden to a positive attitude towards opium consumption in Persian culture. Recent research also supports this idea. Many patients use raw opium as a pain killer or for treating hyperlipidemia, hypertension, diabetes and other chronic diseases; most of them had started the use after developing the disease and the remaining had increased the consumption after developing the disease. Regarding this superstitious common belief, drug control headquarters should focus on education and correction of the faulty unhealthy attitude toward opium consumption.

Poetic Reflections in a Cemetery: A Comparative Study of English and Persian Graveyard School of Poetry

Abstract. The literature of eighteenth century is imbued with the combination of melancholy and religious didacticism. The Graveyard Poets, known as the founders of the Graveyard School, were a number of pre-Romantic English poets of eighteenth century who emphasized the subjects of death, temporality of life, and sorrow in their poetry. As their group name suggests, they reveled in writing while in cemeteries, and their works portray death’s physical manifestations, and consider phenomena related with death such as darkness, the tomb, death’s odors, and ghosts. While relishing in the images of death and the grave, the poets in the graveyard school sought to depict the trappings of death in a way that the reader would gain an appreciation of death as a transitional phase. The present study scrutinizes the poetic and thematic impacts of English graveyard poetry on Persian poetry, especially in the poetry of Nader Naderpour and Nosrat Rahmani. It likewise demonstrates that these two renowned Iranian poets were under the influence of the English graveyard school of poetry.

Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924 by Matthew Campbell (review)

Reviewed by: Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924 by Matthew Campbell Leith Davis (bio) Matthew Campbell. Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. Pp. 252. US $95.00. The 1801 Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain has been a frequent starting point for critics of Irish literature who focus on the genre of the national tale as expressive of the complicated alignments and disjunctions operating in the Irish political and cultural landscape at the time. In Irish Poetry Under the Union, however, Matthew Campbell considers the “national longing for form” articulated in lyric poetry during the period in which Ireland and Great Britain were politically joined in union (14). For Campbell, the “technical struggle” in a lyric poem can be just as revealing of the complex nature of cultural contact as the marriage plot of the national tale (15). As Campbell indicates, nineteenth-century Irish poetry written in English has received comparatively little critical attention as a genre (with the important exceptions of critics like David Lloyd and Julia Wright), and the criticism it has prompted has tended to read the poetry retrospectively as preparation for the rebellion and political upheavals of the twentieth century. Campbell seeks, however, to tell the story of Irish poetry before William Butler Yeats without assuming the end of the story: “It is one purpose of this book to suggest that there was at least a century of prosodic innovation in Irish-English poetry before the revival” (24). Another purpose of the book is to present the poetry of nineteenth-century Ireland within a larger British imperial context. In addition to considering Irish poets, [End Page 277] Campbell examines the work of English writers such as Matthew Arnold, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins through an Irish lens. This offers a welcome corrective to much nineteenth-century literary criticism that has tended to divide texts down national lines, with critics of Irish literature focusing overwhelmingly on the Great Famine and emigration and critics of English Victorian literature sidelining Ireland. Campbell is also to be commended for a perspective that considers the entire archipelago of the British Isles. As he suggests, a “four nations approach” has tended to fall away in criticism of nineteenth-century Irish poetry, despite the continuing influence on Irish poets of works by James Macpherson and Robert Burns and the cross-fertilization between English and Irish Romantic and Victorian poetry. For Campbell, Irish poets writing in English explore and exploit the different meanings of “originality,” both as point of origin and as unique creative effort. The first five chapters of the book offer a roughly chronological overview of how the “synthetic form” of the Irish lyric poem in English combined Irish and English elements during a period when the Gaelic language and culture were suffering huge losses and when English print culture in Ireland was undergoing a rapid expansion (5). While chapter one serves as a general introduction to the argument of the book, chapter two, “The Ruptured Ear: Irish Accent, English Poetry,” establishes the argument’s own point of origin by tracing “the development of a sophisticated poetic form founded in writing for music” back to the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore (30). Chapter three considers the work of Francis Sylvester Mahoney, who adopted the persona of a parish priest in County Cork, Father Andrew Prout, in order to satirize Moore in Fraser’s Magazine in 1834. Despite Mahoney’s dismissal of Moore as a cultural fabricator, Campbell perceives “links of style and content” between works by Mahoney, Moore, and contemporaries like John Philpot Curran who also experimented with forms of synthesis (60). In chapter four, Campbell examines the translations of the Protestant Unionist writer Samuel Ferguson within the context of a post-Catholic Emancipation but economically depressed Ireland. Chapter five focuses on the “repetitive originalities” of James Clarence Mangan, a mid-century poet who specialized in imitations, translations, admixtures, and reinventions and drew on a range of traditions from the Irish to the Persian (99). As Campbell suggests, Mangan achieves “a remaking of the past in an unrepeatable style” (99). Chapter six shifts perspective in order to consider...

The Impact of the Legendary Love between Yeats and Maud Gonne on Yeats’s Creation of Love Poems

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is an Irish poet, dramatist and prose writer. T. S. Eliot considers him as the greatest English poet in the twentieth century. The classic and legendary love between Yeats and Maud Gonne is greatly well-known in the Western World and permeates from generation to generation. This essay gives a brief introduction to this romantic and sorrowful legend of love and attempt to analyze its impact on Yeats’s creation of love poems in different period of life.