Irish Poet Research Articles

Paula Meehan's Greek journey: environmental footsteps

The article focuses on the most elaborate of Paula Meehan's ‘Greek’ poems, ‘Flight JIK Olympic Airlines 016 to Ikaria, Greece’ (Painting Rain, 2009), inspired by her journey to Ikaria, in the framework of travel writing and ecocriticism. By transforming the matrix of W. H. Auden's ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, and by representing a specific case of ecopoetry, Meehan's text challenges the precepts of footsteps and vertical travel genres. The comparison between the two poems has been contextualized by the Irish poet's environmental, political and artistic concerns, as well as her other poems, essays and travels in Greece.

A Comparative Study of the Anthropocene Factors in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and the Selected Modern Persian Eco-Poems Through Meteorological Hazards

ABSTRACT The Anthropocene is a geological time scale when human beings have taken planet Earth outside of its natural capacity. In literature, this era is represented through the thematic genre known as climate fiction. This type of fiction paves a new path in literary works by imagining possible futures and alternative presents to reconfigure our dystopian eras. This article opens a dialogue between English and Persian literature that enables us to echo our voices, reconstruct the present, reconsider the status quo, and avoid future disasters. By employing the concepts of Das Unheimliche, The Judgement, and The Last Man, this comparative study revolves around the literary portrayal of the symbiosis relationship between nature and human beings in Ballard’s (1930–2009) The Drowned World (1962) and the selected Modern Persian eco-poems from different Iranian poets. Following this approach, the present inquiry proves that despite their uncommon nations and forms, both literatures share a convergent characteristic in unveiling the Anthropocene factors.

Where the Centaur Walks: Psalms and the Poetic Imagination

The ‘redress of poetry as poetry,’ means, according to the Irish poet and Noble Prize winner Seamus Heaney, an awareness of ‘an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.’ Poetry, he asserts, ‘is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.’ The imagination of Psalms poetry needs to be rediscovered. This has begun with the monumental book by Dobbs-Allsopp (2015). Yet, more work is needed. This article explores how the Psalter, being poetry, makes claims to and on the imagination, reality, and the confluence thereof. It is an attempt to see how the redress of Psalms poetry might refine our reading of the biblical book. Psalm 98 serves as key illustration.

Ambiguities and Points of Rupture in Eavan Boland’s Poetry

Abstract This article sets out to explore the ambiguities and points of rupture in the lyrical works of one of the best-known Irish poets of the last fifty years, Eavan Boland. I intend to zoom in on poetic sequences where the text does not flow seamlessly and will try to find possible explanations for these ruptures, illuminating, in the process, the merits of a poet who has tried to recuperate the image of the Irish woman, saving it from stereotypes and cliches. However, I will also shed light on how Boland herself falls prey to more or less the same stereotypes. What the article ultimately does is raise questions which are still waiting for answers.

Handwritten poems of the 16th century Iranian poet of the Ottoman court Hashem (Hashmi) Ajam

Handwritten poems of the 16th century Iranian poet of the Ottoman court Hashem (Hashmi) Ajam

The Slain Birds by Michael Longley

Reviewed by: The Slain Birds by Michael Longley Fred Dings MICHAEL LONGLEY The Slain Birds Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2022. 96 pages. MICHAEL LONGLEY'S new verse collection, The Slain Birds, is mostly a book of miniatures, some poems not exceeding four, five, or even two lines, appearing two per page in eighteen instances; consequently, we read eighty-eight poems in seventy pages. In only a few cases do the poems achieve a length greater than half a page. This matters because, with Longley working in the tradition of poetry being an essential art, it places great pressure on the language to achieve the poetic in a few words. The poet does achieve that benchmark frequently, sometimes as luminously as a dwarf star, but other times, the poems can seem merely notational or observational. The Slain Birds would be a great book if it were edited to 70 percent of its current length, but as such it is only a good book. Patient readers will be rewarded. At his best, Longley uses nuance and carefully selected detail (uncrowded by the inclusion of the superfluous) to attain affecting resonance with few words. Consider the imagery in the following poem, "Agony": "To die like the skylark / parched on a mirage // Or like a tired quail / after crossing the sea [End Page 90] / losing the will to fly and / dying in the first bushes // But not to live lamenting / like a blinded goldfinch." The second image has the pathos of Shelley's "sick eagle looking at the sky." Similarly, what might seem at first like merely descriptive language in "Shell" becomes quickly consequential: "The spring tide keeps us from walking any farther / Towards the sea, so we sit on a reedy bank / And you pick out from wool and seaweed and droppings / A shell and slip into your handbag its spirals / With the fisherman's float I rescued from the lake / Where, more than fifty years ago, we honeymooned. / The ravens in conversation overhead might be / Discussing us or that sheep dead in a hollow / With its yellow ear-tag and delicate black feet." Here, we also hear the powerful influence of that best of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, in "Adam's Curse." In these two examples, then, we hear Longley at his most poetic and in relation to the best in English-language poetry; however, more times than I would like, these poems seem merely descriptive or of little consequence. For example, consider the poem "Dream": "I dreamed I had written a poem / About the beech tree in our garden. / I tried to find it in our notebook, / I sensed the beech tree taking shape, / Three hundred years of summer leaves." Even if the reader summons the frequent appearance of the beech tree in Western literature and perhaps its specific importance in Irish mythology as providing the slices of bark on which Ogma, a god of poetry and writing, wrote, and even if the reader summons the idea of the body of three hundred years of Irish poetry taking leaf in a time of growth and the poet's own season adding to it—even if the reader brings all of this to the poem, is it enough then for this particular poem to attain effective resonance? The problem poses the larger question: Is mere description or mention of cultural symbols enough for a poem? It's a matter of aesthetic value and province, perhaps. The better question might be, Is the language of the poem optimal? When thinking of descriptive poetry and image, I sometimes recall the influence of Rodin on Rilke, and how Rilke sought to write poems that realized the object of their gaze as fully as did Rodin's sculptures. Rilke's object-poems (dinggedichte), poems like "The Spanish Dancer" and "The Panther," find the language, the shape of sound, that brings the objects (and their interiors) optimally and vividly present. Perhaps that is the project at which some of Longley's poems succeed and others don't; however, to end with another example of Longley's success, I quote a two-line poem, "Eyelid," about the poet's daughter examining the dead...

Reason vs. Religion in Medieval India: Mainly from Evidence in Persian

The pursuit of reason may be defined as the drawing of logical deductions from a study of actual phenomena, and thus be essentially confined to the results gained from access to the various branches of science. It was in Greece where, from the fifth century BCE onward, rational thought was deemed to have developed most. Greek texts exercised undeniable influence on early thought in the Islamic world, Alberūnī’s Kitabu’l Hind being a remarkable product of that influence. Muslim theologians mounted a tirade against rationality (‘aql), in which the ṣūfīs joined; but since ṣūfic moral thought often tended to override Muslim theology, there could arise figures (even if partly imaginary) like Rābi‘a of Basra, who stood up against theology and its fictions. The conflict between ma‘qūlāt (reason) and manqūlāt (theology) was duly imported into India, along with the arrival of the Arabic–Persian sciences in the 13th and 14th centuries. Here poetry in Persian also became a major vehicle undermining theology. The tendency is partly present in Amīr Khusrau of Delhi (extolling love above theology!), but especially in the Iranian poet Ḥāfiz Shīrāzī, where the sāqī and ale-house constituted the major alternative to the pulpit and the mosque. In Indo-Persian poetry the same role is often ascribed to the but (idol) and the butkhāna (temple). It was under Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that a detailed inquiry (1574 onward) into Islamic beliefs and the doctrines of other religions led to disquiet about their validity. Abū’l Faẓl (d. 1602) became the leading light of a revival of rationality. Akbar’s own critique of Islam was similarly extended to aspects of Hinduism. ‘Urfī represents best the shift to reason, by the boldness of his poetry, rejecting religion for its inadequacy and looking forward to a just world. The seventeenth century did not fulfil the promise of the 16th. There was continuing interest in religion, shown by Jahāngīr’s formula: Tasawwuf = Vedānta; Dārā Shukoh’s translation of the Upanishads; and Mobad’s unique work Dabistān. But there was no corresponding assertion of rationality, whose votaries were reduced to a small band, last described, c. 1655.

The Entangled Imagination: W.B. Yeats’ “Moods” and the Psychologization of Magic

Among modern practitioners of magic, the “psychologization of magic” has become a common strategy to adapt practices such as rituals of invocation to naturalistic thought. In this article, I discuss what was probably the most elaborate attempt to bridge the gap between the magic of the past and magic suited for the present that took place within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888–1903). Approaching the Order’s teachings through the lens of contemporaneous literary discourse, the Irish poet and magician William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) attempted to consolidate supernaturalist and naturalist understandings of magic throughout the 1890s. In 1892, he made the concept of the “immortal moods” a key to both his poetry and his magical practice. Evoked through symbols in a ritual or a poem, these moods would descend “like a faint sigh into people’s minds” and move them to action, causing “all great changes in the world.” Yeats explored this concept in theoretical writings, poetic experiments, and his ritual practice, finding his own imagination entangled with past imaginations. Serving a brief term as the Golden Dawn’s Imperator and Instructor in Mystical Philosophy in 1901, he condensed the insights gained from this work in the doctrines of the “great mind and great memory.” Presenting a study of Yeats’ psychology of the universal mind, this article shows how his amalgamation of literary and folkloristic theorizing paved the way to connect magical and poetic practice to the emerging psychological discourse.

Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty

Reviewed by: Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty Magdalena Kay WOMEN, POETRY AND THE VOICE OF A NATION, by Anne Varty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 248 pp. $110 hardback; $105 ebook. Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty is a ground-breaking book that engages with the work of four laureate poets of the United Kingdom and Ireland: Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, and Paula Meehan. The book’s discussion focuses largely on the poets’ prose comments and manifesto-style pronouncements, looking at the ways they have made themselves visible in public space. Varty explores how these authors gained access to a poetry establishment dominated by men, how they critique prevailing representations of the home nation, and how they have gone from liminal positions to central ones. It also contains moments of close reading of individual poems in chapters devoted to each poet, as well as a chapter on their negotiations with William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and William Butler Yeats. Although feeling the need to seek permission to use one’s voice is, of course, not unique to female poets— even after winning the Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney speaks of feeling the need to ask permission to undertake his acclaimed translation of Beowulf (1999)—this book centers on a gendered sense of exclusion. Varty does a wonderful job of presenting the foundational energies animating female poets in the twentieth century. The desire to make space for women’s voices is perhaps a given, but the ways in which poets take energy from their re-conceptualizations of the poetic voice is a phenomenon well worth reading about. The notion of “vitality arising from resistance, subversion and opposition” is intriguing (p. 6). Indeed, the book is not unified around any orthodoxy. For example, the question of national identity has the potential to be vexing for women writers who may feel, like the Irish poet Eavan Boland, that their voices are “outside history.”1 Other authors may argue that this issue does not hinge on a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion but rather upon recognition of various modalities for expressing collective identity, which may not hew to heroic or even public models for expressing national belonging. While this book focuses on the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is alive to the fact that influence is transnational. Sylvia Plath is positioned as an enabling voice that allows British women to feel that someone is listening, while the influence of Gary Snyder upon Meehan is sensitively recounted (p. 7). Varty is also aware that some of the poets represented here have a complex relation to the United Kingdom as a multi-national entity (indeed, it is hard to think of Boland or Meehan seeing themselves as poets of the United Kingdom). The book’s interest in laureate positions focalizes these concerns but also runs the risk of attaching overmuch importance to a role that some writers view as near-anachronism. Potential readers, though, may be drawn to this book precisely for its attention to public recognition. [End Page 176] Varty views these poets in terms of their participation in the “creative culture” of their home places, simultaneously recognizing that such culture is not often unitary (p. 94). For a poet such as Lochhead, whose “alignment of Scotland with woman” is widely recognized and serves her purpose of self-assertion, this approach makes sense (p. 104). For Duffy, the approach foregrounds one aspect of her legacy yet runs the risk of scanting her own refusal to engage in identity politics—regarding the identity-driven conversation surrounding the New Generation Poets, Duffy laconically comments, “the whole thing ‘misses the point’” (p. 125). In her chapter on Duffy, Varty recognizes that “the ‘edge’ has been presented entirely in terms of content and identity politics,” yet for practicing poets, their verse-craft may well be the real point, and the poet’s consciousness may not readily ally itself with available labels (p. 126). Perhaps not all the poets Varty studies would agree with the book’s focus on community—a reading of its individual analyses tempts us with the question of whether and when they have ever...

Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena by George Monteiro

Reviewed by: Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena by George Monteiro Silvia Oliveira Monteiro, George. Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena. Tagus Press, 2021. Pp. 210. ISBN 978-I-933227-97-9. Minotaur, Parrot and SS Man: Essays on Jorge de Sena is a collection of essays authored by George Monteiro, professor emeritus of English, American, Portuguese, and Brazilian studies at Brown University, about Jorge de Sena’s work—including his scholarship, poetry, fiction, translation and epistolography—selected and introduced by Francisco Cota Fagundes, professor emeritus of Portuguese at UMass Amherst. The twelve essays were originally published in American academic journals and books “at least from 1980s to 2016” (4), and are presented as chapters of a book that George Monteiro might have composed on Jorge de Sena and Portuguese literature intended for American and international readers. The fact that George Monteiro passed away in 2019, during the organization of this volume published by Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, transfigures the book into an homage to the Portuguese American scholar whose “discreet [End Page 148] charm” (George Monteiro: The Discreet Charm of a Portuguese-American Scholar, edited by Onésimo Almeida and Alice Clemente Gávea-Brown, 2005) profoundly marked Portuguese, Brazilian and Portuguese American studies in the US. The twelve chapters of this book, twelve essays on Jorge de Sena, provide eloquent insights into the image or figura of the Portuguese scholar and poet (1919–78) who was a self-exiled academic in Brazil (1959–65 at Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Assis and Araraquara, São Paulo) and in the United States (1965–78 at U of Wisconsin, Madison and UC Santa Barbara). Monteiro’s assessment of Jorge de Sena’s mythic life in poetry and criticism is precisely put: “Remarkably, on the basis of the published evidence, Sena’s mythic life has a shape and direction that are uncommonly consistent. And because, unlike the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who explained that his late revising of earlier poetry was his way of remaking himself, Sena dated the composition of his poems and other pieces and usually limited revision to polishing (and then apparently not at all extensively), we are safe in looking at texts that reveal their author as he saw and created himself at most of the ages of man” (15). As a scholar of English and American literatures, George Monteiro’s readings of Sena’s poetry, fiction, drama and translation is in essence comparative: considering Sena’s signature poem “Em Creta, com o Minotauro,” which is for Monteiro “one of the strongest twentieth-century poems” (34), he places it with Álvaro de Campos’s “Tabacaria” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“If This Be Treason”); an insight into one of Sena’s most commented short stories, “Homenagem ao Papagaio Verde” takes us on a voyage through the presence and the function of parrots and “other so-called literary creatures of the air” (44) in Anglophone and French literatures. “An ‘Eichmann’ Story” is Monteiro’s masterful analysis—and defense—of Sena’s controversial short story of 1961, “Defesa e justificação de um criminoso de guerra (das memórias de Herr Werner Stupnein, ex-oficial superior das S.S.” In “The Case for Camões” Monteiro gives an account of Sena’s efforts at disseminating information about Portugal’s great poet in the United States and in the English-speaking world, an effort notably sustained and expanded by George Monteiro himself in his 1997 book The Presence of Camões: Influences on the Literature of England, America, and Southern Africa. In “Portugal in figura” Monteiro delves into the historical mismatch between Miguel de Unamuno and Fernando Pessoa, brilliantly framed by an analysis of the two poets’ differing representations of Portugal in their poetry. Jorge de Sena enters this essay only at the closing, by way of his fiction in Novas andanças do demónio (1966), to resolve the poetic match in favor of Don Miguel de Unamuno’s harsh depiction of Portugal. “On American Writing” is a piece on Jorge de Sena’s engagement as translator...

Hidden Harmonies: Manuscript and Print on the North Atlantic Fringe, 1500–1900 ed. by Matthew James Driscoll and Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil

Reviewed by: Hidden Harmonies: Manuscript and Print on the North Atlantic Fringe, 1500–1900 ed. by Matthew James Driscoll and Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil Aileen Douglas Matthew James Driscoll and Nioclás Mac Cathmhaoil, eds. Hidden Harmonies: Manuscript and Print on the North Atlantic Fringe, 1500–1900. Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana 54. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2021. xv + 510 pp. + 65 color plates, 5 halftones, 1 map. €61. ISBN: 978-87-63546881. Introducing Hidden Harmonies, the editors invite the reader to apprehend late manuscript culture in Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands as "a homogenous cultural bloc whose constituents responded to influences from the European 'centre' in similar ways" (ix). The collection of thirteen essays begins with a wide-ranging consideration by Jürg Glauser of the persistence of the "simultaneity of media," of script and print, into the nineteenth century on the "Atlantic fringe." Deirdre Nic Mhathúna follows with a meticulous account of the scribal transmission of the works of the seventeenth-century Irish poet Piaras Feiritéar, whose poems did not appear in print in Irish until 1903. Moving north and west, Gu∂rún Ingólfsdóttir describes the manuscript miscellany of the Icelandic housewife, Gu∂rún Jónsdóttir (1741–96). Significantly, while Gu∂rún owned the manuscript—a medley of devotional materials, useful knowledge, folklore, and songs—it was not in her hand. The essay argues that strong links to folklore, as well [End Page 172] as the absence of devotional materials already printed, distinguish popular manuscripts such as that of Gu∂rún from those of elite women. With Katarzyna Anna Kapitan's essay, the volume moves to consider what she terms "print-based manuscripts" (82). Her fascinating account in "Manuscripts Derived from Printed Editions in the Transmission History of Hrómundar Saga Greipssonar" begins by asking whether the use of a printed text as source led to more conservative scribal copies, and she finds that this is "only partially true," with factors such as the purpose of the copy and place of the copyist (within or outside Iceland) being more influential. Copying from printed sources also features in Liam Mac Mathúna's vivid account of two manuscripts by the Irish scribe Tadhg Ó Neachtain (1671–1752). Mac Mathúna's main emphasis, however, is on the elements of individuality in the manuscripts: the recorded dialogue between Tadhg and his father Séan in National Library of Ireland MS G 198, which allows the warm relationship between the two to emerge, and Tadhg's recording of "major contemporary domestic events" in British Library Egerton MS 198 (139). Margrét Eggertsdóttir's contribution to the volume provides both a useful overview of the genres of seventeenth-century Icelandic poetry and discusses the dissemination, into the nineteenth century, of one of its most famous works, the Hymns of the Passion (Passíusálmar) of Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–74), a clergymember with an eventful early life. Hallgrímur's hymns were first printed in 1666, but the author also made five copies of his hymns that he dedicated and sent to recipients "whom he trusted to judge his work fairly and spread the word" (159). The prodigious life's work of the Icelandic scribe Magnús í Tjaldanesi (1835–1921) is the focus of the contribution of M. J. Driscoll, one of the volume's coeditors. Extant manuscripts by Magnús comprise about twenty-eight thousand pages, more than eight million words, and Driscoll estimates that this is only a fraction of what the scribe produced. Notably, Magnús dedicated himself to "highly popular prose genres—fornaldarsögur, riddarasögur, translations of German Volksbücher," rather than the more usual poetry (189). An unusual feature of his work is that each of the volumes in his collection of sagas, twenty in all, comprises exactly eight hundred pages. Although he adopted certain features of print culture, including prefaces, pagination, and running titles, Magnús appears not to have aspired to print. He did, however, take steps to preserve his work. Driscoll [End Page 173] recounts how, in 1909, Magnús made his one and only trip to Reykjavik to see...

"The Door Left Wide": Irish Poets in Tribute to Eavan Boland

"The Door Left Wide": Irish Poets in Tribute to Eavan Boland

Toasting Friendships, Laying Down Memories in Wexford, Ireland

Toasting Friendships, Laying Down Memories in Wexford, Ireland J. R. Patterson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution IN 1972 THE Irish poet Seamus Heaney drew a line under Northern Ireland, moved south to the Republic, and settled in a cottage in County Wicklow. From his experiences in those first years living on the southeast coast came his book Field Work, an elegiac rumination on loss, friendship, reunion, and country life. During an extended stay with friends in the south-coast Irish town of Wexford, the first poem of that collection, "Oysters," continuously rapped on the doorway of my mind: "And there we were, toasting friendship, / Laying down a perfect memory / In the cool of thatch and crockery." Inclined though I was to stay home, sharing in the local seafood, my friends pushed me outside and onto a bicycle. And so, to North Slob to swim with harbor seals on the strand at Curracloe; to Forth Mountain, our fingers magenta-hued and probing the brambles for just one last blackberry; to a hurling match, the game a maker of champions and heartbreak; to restaurants and opera halls, pubs and castles and fields; always on my lips the sparkling tang of fun and freedom and laughter. The landscape of County Wexford is rolling and bookish. The coast is a recurring setting/nonsetting for the art-writing of John Banville, including his Man Booker–winning The Sea. Colm Tóibín, from nearby Enniscorthy, set his The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship in the inland countryside. Less prestigious but more notable, the original Guinness Book of Records was conceived here, after an argument about the speeds of different game birds couldn't be settled. Banville, speaking of his childhood in Wexford, considered the town "no more than a staging post on my way elsewhere." Like Chekhov's Irina in Three Sisters, he was "immured in the provinces and yearning for the magic of Moscow." Undoubtedly, the provincial is cast in stone here, and cosmopolitan Dublin feels worlds away. Tractors growl through the streets. Pastures grazed by bony Holsteins retain their toehold on the edge of town. Narrow sidewalks and private roads are a problem. And roadside litter implies some delinquent reaction against Wexford's nickname, "the Model County." But there is information in everything, and litter at least tells a little about what people do while out for a stroll. Wexicans seemed to take their air while putting in eye drops, eating pint pots of yogurt, and drinking cans of Dutch Gold lager. In the large, glass-walled library, I found books stuck with beer coasters and unsent letters. More often, when I needed a book, I strolled down to Reader's Paradise or Red Books, where the shelves heaved and the air was tinged with the old-paper scent of vanilla and hay past its due date. Red's proprietor, Wally, had a recommendation for any mood and a good memory for his quarter million books; I came away with Kundera, Sartre, Munro, Rushdie, and Anaïs Nin. Each morning, I woke up glowing. I knew I could count on the certitude of my morning coffee, on the rising pink sky, the warmth around me . . . and all the other necessities of deep leisure; I was immured in a "glut of privilege" and longed for nowhere else. Through it all, "Oysters" whispered in my ear. What to Read along the River Slaney John Banville The Sea Picador Álanna Hammel Cruel & Vicious Red Books Press Nicolas Furlong Young Farmer Seeks Wife Mercier Press Billy Roche The Wexford Trilogy Nick Hern Books Wexford Women Writing Undercover Ed. Deirdre McGarry-Barker Red Books Press [End Page 80] J. R. Patterson J. R. Patterson was born on a cattle and grain farm in rural Manitoba, Canada. He has worked as a farm laborer, factory worker, and writer. He has written for a variety of international publications, including National Geographic, Literary Review of Canada , and LARB. Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Modernity in the Poetry of Nima Yoshij and Baland Al-Haidari A comparative study

This research discusses the issue of modernity in contemporary Persian and Arabic poetry. The researcher chose the Iranian poet Nima Yoshij, who is considered one of the pioneers of modernity in contemporary Iranian poetry, and the Iraqi poet Baland Al-Haidari, who is also one of the pioneers of modernity in contemporary Iraqi poetry.
 Through their poetry, the two poets expressed the themes of modernity that entered the world of poetry and literature, and that are based on modernist concepts with a new and contemporary vision in harmony with their time; The two poets explained their aspirations and hopes, and the hopes and issues of society. The poet is a member of the community who feels his suffering, his concerns and his ambitions and expresses them in the most sincere way. It seems that the poets have benefited from their experiences and their culture of roses in updating the poem in form and content.
 The researcher also chose models from the poems of the two poets (Nima Yoshij and Baland Al-Haidari) that included modern themes through which the two poets dealt with various (new) individual and societal issues and other human issues.

Reimagining the Archive: Where did women's poetry go in Ireland?

When exploring the relationship between her Irish ancestry and her creativity, Roxanne learned that women’s poetry in Ireland was largely obliterated from the literary canon and missing from the archives. Early Irish poetry was often anonymous, and scholars presumed this indicated male authorship even when written with a female persona. However, while women’s poetry may have, as Mary N Harris says, gone ‘unnoticed and unpublished’, the lack of archival evidence does not indicate that women were not composing poetry and an increasing body of academic research supports this argument. The mythological collection makes significant references to female poets, and oral poetry such as the lullaby and the lament commonly went unrecorded. Irish poets, including Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, demonstrate that contemporary poetry can bridge the gap where female poets were actively written out of history to a new understanding of the importance of their contribution.

Poetry as a Sexual-textual Site of Transgression: Some Insights into the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Forough Farrokhzad

This paper explores different representations of female sexuality portrayed in the poetry of a nineteenth-century American poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and a twentieth-century Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967). Their poetry has been largely characterized by an assertion of female sexuality and its impact on female creativity. Their works particularly highlight the ways male sexuality subjugates female sexuality and formulates an androcentric world of creativity. As their poetry postulates, women’s suppressions and sufferings in their personalsexual- textual world can be attributed to the phallocentric world that consists of a myriad of socio-ethico-cultural regimens. The patriarchal world is shaped and continues to be consolidated by gender differentiations or binaries which exalt men as superior beings in everything and debase women through masculine hegemony. Thus, this paper traces the counter-masculine representations of female sexuality and creativity in the poetry of Dickinson and Farrokhzad. Spectrum, Volume 16, June 2021: 173-194

Songs without Sunrise: Irish Victorian Poetry and the Risorgimento

While the Risorgimento had a profound impact on the shape of English literature, this geopolitical crisis did not leave a similar imprint on Irish literature. Historical circumstances can explain why the nineteenth-century struggle for the unification of Italy did not lead to rapprochement between Italy and Ireland: support for the Italian cause put Irish nationalists in opposition with Catholic interests at home, while in the eyes of Italian nationalists the Irish question weakened the function of Britain as a liberalising power. Even so, a few Irish poets did address the Risorgimento. This article shows how poems by Thomas Davis, James Clarence Mangan, Jane Francesca Elgee, and Aubrey de Vere express a variety of positions (isolationism, catastrophism, liberalism, realism) that are informed by a complex constellation of geopolitical factors. By means of a series of close readings, the present inquiry aims to shed new light on the geopolitical form of Irish poetry in the Victorian age.

A Study on Easter, 1916 from the Perspective of the Ideational Function

Easter, 1916 is a classic work of Irish poet Yeats, describing four leaders in Irish raising and expressing Yeats’ complicated attitudes toward the rebellion. Being different from the traditional view of history, the study interprets the poem by analyzing its clauses from the perspective of functional grammar. It is concluded that a large amount of material process are used to represent the experiences of the characters, which realizes the narrative function of a poem. Relational process, the identifying one particularly, highlights the beliefs of revolutionaries and Yeats’ suspicion of their sacrifice. But finally, the mental, verbal and behavioural processes rebuild his support for the uprising and the nationalism represented by it.

Kevin L. Schwartz. Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900

Kevin L. Schwartz. <i>Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900</i>

A Singular Life: The Poet Michael Hartnett

A Singular Life: The Poet Michael Hartnett Theo Dorgan (bio) From The Poets and Poetry of Munster: One Hundred Years of Poetry from South Western Ireland, ed. Clíona Ní Ríordáin and Stephanie Schwerter (December 2022/January 2023). By permission of the editors. all poets are singular, in the sense that we are all singular, bearing the burden of one life and one life only, but also in the sense that no poet can be comfortably placed in a definite lineage, presented to us as a manifestation in one particular line of tradition. Michael Hartnett was more singular than most. He was of Munster, and he acknowledged Munster forebears, but if this was the place he started from, he was unpredictable and cosmopolitan in his tastes and in the company he would keep; nothing in his background could have predicted or predetermined the poetry he would make, the arc his life would take. 1. Birth and a people He was born in 1941, in Croom, County Limerick; he grew up in Newcastle West, in a time of close horizons, small expectations, and apparently narrow minds. In those days, for the children of the poor, the prospects were few; the best hope was emigration, offering what the country could not—work and a living, however diminished. For the waywardly gifted, however, there is always the opportunity to carve out one’s own niche, albeit at the sacrifice of comfort and social place as generally understood. The State was barely thirty years old and had already abandoned the revolutionary promise to cherish its children equally when Michael Hartnett stepped outside the boundaries of class and predestiny to discover himself a poet. He published his first work in a local paper at the age of thirteen, his first poem in the Irish Times when he was still a schoolboy. From the day he left school, he thought of himself first and always as a poet. [End Page 18] 2. A poet of and from a particular place In an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Hartnett says: “I’m the only ‘recognized’ living Irish poet who was born in Croom, County Limerick, which was the seat of one of the last courts of poetry in Munster: Seán Ó Tuama and Aindrias Mac Craith. When I was quite young I became very conscious of these poets, and, so, read them very closely indeed.”1 In small places, folk memory runs deep, and a certain cachet endured in the title “poet,” with connotations of “other,” “different,” “gifted,” and “dangerous.” With the niche already prepared, so to speak, one sees the attraction for a curious young mind, already verbally adept and quick: poetry offered place, ancestry, a degree of acceptance for the chosen path, and open horizons for a young man who had already discovered the power of words. It is hardly uncommon, in a young poet, that she or he would first begin to grow in the shelter of some chosen poet mentor, whose sensibility, or technique, or more usually some amalgam of both opened a road forward in the craft. When Hartnett first sought such a precursor he looked at his immediate local context, and backward into another time and another language. What he found there would make no discernible impact on his craft (he never translated the totem figures, Mac Craith or Ó Tuama) but furnished him with a particular kind of warrant—he could and did think of himself as the favored inheritor of a tradition, and also as one obliged to be loyal to that tradition. This sense of obligation would become the sign and signature of his work. Few Irish poets writing in English would own fealty to the tradition of Irish-language poetry in the way that Hartnett did; his contemporaries and near contemporaries chose figures who were perhaps as close to home but were certainly nearer in time, in language, and in their themes and subjects. His Irish at the time was meager, mostly acquired through overhearing Bridget Halpin, his grandmother, speak at late-night firesides when the child had been safely put to bed. Much of his childhood was spent in her Camas cottage. He would later...