Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambraby Frank Sewell;Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics 1949-1999by Ray Ryan

Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra by Frank Sewell; Writing in the Irish Republic:Literature, Culture, Politics 1949-1999 by Ray RyanReview by: Peter DenmanIrish University Review, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2001), pp. 512-516Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25504897 .

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

him as a late twentieth-century writer in its essentially postmodern and

unquantifiable quality. Longley's intensely autobiographical concerns

inform poems like 'In Memoriam'. His statement in interview ? 'You

have got to bring your personal sorrow to the public utterance' to avoid

the 'deadly danger of regarding the agony of their suffering as raw

material for your art....' ? should serve as a backhanded defence against the kind of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney, as the most visible

of Irish poets today. The pressures for the poet to write of war have, Brearton argues, never been quite so strong in the English-speaking world

since the Great War as it is in Northern Ireland today. Having brought his 'personal sorrow to the public utterance' in more than one poem,

Heaney should perhaps be considered a poet who has comported himself

with sufficient honour in that regard. Brearton traces the evolution of

Heaney's stance on war through his critical writing, and then locates a

trail of landscapes scattered with Great War 'debris' in his poetry from

the start, which emerges as a controlling force especially in Field Work, and is strongly influenced by Heaney's reading of Ted Hughes.

This book is beautifully written, and offers a complex, subtle, and

original perspective. I would have liked Brearton to examine the under

lying reasons for the frequency of Homeric parallels in the poetry of the

Great War and also that of Yeats, MacNeice and today's Northern Irish

poets, a thread which could have been woven successfully into her

thoughtful narrative. This study is an impressive contribution to the

criticism of twentieth-century literature against the backdrop of one of

its most profoundly formative events.

CHRISTINA HUNT MAHONY

Frank Sewell, Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000. x + 234 pages. No price given.

Ray Ryan (editor), Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics

1949-1999. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000. x + 290 pages. No price given.

Frank Sewell's book offers an informed and discursive introduction to

four twentieth-century poets who wrote in Irish. He chooses to con

centrate on Sean 6 Riordain and Mairtin & Direain from the nineteen

fifties and nineteen sixties, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Cathal

6 Searcaigh from the later decades. The appendix gives English versions

of the principal poems discussed. The four poets chosen cover a geo

graphical spread within Ireland. 6 Searcaigh is from Donegal, and the

Ulster Gaelatacht; 6 Direain was from the Aran Islands, and used

Connemara Irish. Both (3 Riordain and Ni Dhomhnaill are associated

with Munster Irish. Sewell concedes at the outset that he has omitted a

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number of poets?he mentions Maire Mhac an tSaoi, Eoghan Q Tuaraisc, Michael Davitt, Biddy Jenkinson, and Liam (3 Muirthile. His concen

tration on just four figures is a critical decision that enables him to give a considered appraisal of each. But what is lost as a consequence is not

just a roll-call of other poets who might have been discussed; lost also is

the full sense of the context in which the poets were writing. One might get the impression that (3 Direain and (3 Riordain were solitary voices,

writing out of the poetic silence that Thomas Kinsella has identified as

the condition of the latter-day Irish writer. Historically, they had a difficult

national and social context which must have informed their writings, and their work offered astringent commentaries on the culture in which

they lived. The notion that they were poets in a vacuum is signally countered by Sean (3 Tuama's ground-breaking anthology Nuabhearsaiocht in 1950. Sewell mentions this anthology as giving a platform to three

individual voices: to t) Riordain and 0 Direain as well as to Maire Mhac an tSaoi. But the existence of the anthology indicates that there were

other poets whose work provided some sort of milieu for these egregious voices, poets such as Liam Gogan, Seamus <5 Neill, and Seamas 6 hAodha. The contemporary poets considered here, ?) Searcaigh and Ni Dhomhnaill, have emerged from a situation where numerous collections of poems have been published. The context of their writing life is very different to

that of the earlier generation. Coisceim, CId Iar Chonnachta, Cork

University Press, even Gallery Press, have all published poetry in Irish; there are more readings, broadcasts, periodicals, travel opportunities, translations and prizes, all of which have contributed to a very different

environment.

Sewell, while not altogether ignoring these factors, rather avoids

contextualizing the four poets within a specifically Irish literary and

historical framework. He seeks to extend the contextual boundaries

beyond the obvious links to the major poets in English. Instead, he reaches

out to a European tradition, looking particularly to Polish poets, or

contrasting (3 Riordain's career with that of Marc Chagall. Sewell sees t)

Riordain's work as constituting a diminuendo, with the successive

collections, from Eireaball Spideoige through to the posthumously

published Tar ?is Mo Bhds, becoming less forceful. He twice borrows

Muldoon's phrase in 'Mules', 'Neither one thing nor the other', to

describe Q Riordain's position between the two languages of English and Irish. 0 Riordain's poetic language and methods were clearly affected

by his knowledge of English. The question arose as to whether this was

to be seen as enrichment or contamination. Similar questions might be

put nowadays regarding the prominent part translation into English has

played in Ni Dhomhnaill's work especially. It is a pity that Sewell does

not follow this up. The interesting issue would not centre on the reception of her work ? whether the translations are primarily responsible for

513




making her poetry more visible ? but on its production. How does the

knowledge that one's poems will rapidly be made available to their

majority readership in English translation condition the writing of poetry in Irish?

The title's curious reference to 'a new Alhambra' is based on a passage from Joep Leersen about the need to 'acknowledge the difference between

present-day Ireland and its pre-nineteenth-century roots. The only simile

I can think of is the Alhambra destroyed and the same rubble used to

rebuild a different building according to a different architecture'. Sewell

goes on to use this figure with particular reference to his own subject: Tf one uses the same rubble to re-build, then one builds anew the Alhambra

which, as a metaphor for Irish art, was never (I believe) completely

destroyed. This 'Alhambra' was sometimes obscured and/or went

unrecognized; all along, however, it expanded because generations of

Irish artists kept extending it in their own fashion'. This metaphorical move is emblematic of Sewell's approach generally, in which there is a

constant endeavour to relate the poems under discussion to a wider

international context. American, Russian, and, in the conclusion, Polish

writing are brought into play to provide an imaginative context as if to

compensate for the diminished historical and textual emphasis. It is a

bold but not wholly convincing stratagem. Stretched comparisons with

examples from the further reaches of the republic of poetry, rather like

the oft-repeated insistence that Irish offers the oldest continuous literary tradition in Europe, may serve to impress us with the poems' associative

worth but diminishes their current intrinsic merit as utterances for the

here and now. The associative reach sometimes diverts Sewell from a

steady treatment of the subject in hand. Introducing his discussion of Nf

DhomhnaiU's poetry, he comments that her rise 'coincided with two

major cultural movements to which she naturally belonged: the women's

movement; and the "bright new wave of Irish language writers who

produced or at least contributed to the magazine INNT1"'. 1NNTI has

been very significant to those of us who read poetry in Ireland, but his

casual implication that its emergence is somehow equivalent to the rise

of the twentieth-century women's movement as a major cultural event

suggests a temporary loss of perspective. Ni Dhomhnaill did not appear in the first INNTI, published in March

1970. The twelve contributors (0 Direain and t) Riordain among them, as well as Pearse Hutchinson and Tomas Mac Sfomoin) were all men, as

it happened. In pride of place was Padraig (3 Fiannachta, the Irish scholar at Maynooth who is Ni DhomhnaiU's uncle, and whose publishing

imprint An Sagart was later to publish the books by Ni Dhomhnaill that

Sewell considers: Fear Suaithinseach and Feis. The second INNTI appeared a year later. Again, it had twelve contributors, but their average age was

now much lower. Ni Dhomhnaill contributed one of the two poems by

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BOOK REVIEWS

women writers. She had five poems in the third INNTI in 1973, which

drew on a broad range of contributors. The periodical did not resume

publication until 1980. The core INNTI poets were principally Michael

Davitt, the founder and editor, and with him Liam 0 Muirthile and

Gabriel Rosenstock, in that they were founding contributors. Ni

Dhomhnaill's poetry was to be the magazine's major find in its early manifestation. I mentioned at the outset the importance of a context for

individual voices to emerge. While INNTI provided such a context for

Ni Dhomhnaill, productive and necessary elements of the context that

had produced the INNTI poets in UCC were Sean 6 Riordain and, as for

the Nuabhearsaiocht generation in 1950, Sean 0 Tuama. The Cork INNTI

poets were nearly all students of ?) Tuama in the Irish Department. 0 Riordain had a very part-time attachment to UCC?a visionary initiative,

long before the writer-in-residence became a commonplace fixture on

Irish campuses. Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra is a serious, thoughtful and

informed account of four poets; it offers us an opportunity to engage in

a critical discussion of an essential strand of Irish poetry. It is the most

developed account in English that we have of twentieth-century poetry in Irish, and it adds significantly to the corpus of such criticism in English,

building on books and essays available from 6 Tuama and Declan Kiberd.

Our absolute need for books such as SeWell's is resoundingly

exemplified by Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics

1949-1999. It is breathtaking to find that in its 280 pages ? half of them

devoted to sections on 'Literature' and 'Culture' ? there is no consider

ation of writing in Irish. Of Sewell's four poets, the three men remain

invisible; Ni Dhomhnaill is mentioned a few times, mostly in passing as

a woman poet and as a lead-in to a more extensive consideration of Eavan

Boland. Jonathan Allison, considering anthologizing decisions in his

essay 'Poetry and the Republic of Ireland since 1949', moves on from

Paul Muldoon's re-run of the mismatch between MacNeice and Higgins to discuss Kinsella's wish to give prominence to translations from the

Irish, and seems to stigmatize or at least repudiate any desire to revive

or maintain an Irish Language poetic heritage as a 'mentality'. The absence of any consideration of Irish would be less regrettable

were it not that the standard of the essays gathered here is generally

high. In the section on 'Politics' there are essays by Tom Garvin, Colin

Coulter, Tony Canavan and John Horgan on, respectively, the remaking of political culture in Ireland, Unionist attitudes to the Irish Republic, historical narratives, and the media. The concluding essay by Cormac (3

Grada examines how the policy initiatives of the past five decades have

contributed to the eventual spectacular growth of the Irish economy.

Following an introduction by the editor, Ray Ryan, the collection opens with four articles on 'Literature'. Catriona Clutterbuck's essay 'Irish

515




Women's Poetry and the Republic of Ireland: Formalism as Form' is an

examination of the interaction between poetry by women and concepts of poetic form. It is a scrupulous piece of work, but ultimately does not

fully break free of the agenda set over a decade ago by Eavan Boland.

Ryan himself in his essay 'The Republic and Ireland: Pluralism, Politics, and Narrative Form' takes issue with the Republic's attitude to liberal

post-nationalism as exemplified by Colm Toibin. In a lively article Chris

Morash reassesses Irish theatre in the Ernest Blythe era. In the section on 'Culture' Michael Cronin and Barbara O'Connor write jointly about

the interactions of Irish tourism and modernity, and Patrick Hanafin

looks at 'Legal Texts as Cultural Documents: Interpreting the Irish

Constitution'. Richard Haslam's 'Irish Film: Screening the Republic' is a

survey that covers an impressive amount in a brief compass. The most

far-reaching of the essays in the collection, Joe Cleary's 'Modernisation

and Aesthetic Ideology in Contemporary Irish Culture', also takes film as its starting point, before moving on to look at fiction (Amongst Women) and drama (Dancing at Lughnasa). He offers these as exemplary of recent

Irish narratives, in that they 'depict a crepuscular Irish world about to

be pulverized by the arrival of industrial modernity'. One of the most

telling passages in his authoritative essay is a disquisition on Marshall

Berman's ideas on modernity, using them to complicate notions of the

Irish revival as being characterized by a nostalgia for an imagined past.

Cleary suggests that the nostalgia 'for some sort of pre-capitalist golden age passes through a passionate rejection of present capitalist and

industrialist society which amounts to more than simply a rejection of

modernity. The nostalgia for the past does not disappear, but is projected towards a post-capitalist future/ This section does, incidentally, provide one tenuous instance of overlap with Sewell's book: both Cleary and

Sewell draw on Marshall Berman's work. Our critics should be in

dialogue with each other.

PETER DENMAN

Desmond Egan, Music. Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 2000. 60 pages. No price given.

Dedicated to the great Swedish pianist Hans Palsson (who has played in Ireland on several occasions), Desmond Egan's latest volume of poetry

brilliantly captures the essence of music in words. The types of music

involved are those rated highly by Egan ?

classical, jazz, traditional

Irish ? and there is nothing on pop or rock music, which he regards as

'a dead-end'. He is on record as stating that '[i]f I had another existence

I think it might be as a musician', and that 'music continually runs

through my head'. But this task of capturing music in words is no easy one. As George Steiner points out, music 'is brimful of meaning which

516

