Contemporary Irish Women Poets

Front matter

ee Cini emporary Be irish Women

Lucy Collins

A

Chapter 2 Between Here and There: Migrant Identities and the Contemporary Irish Woman Poet

Chapter 3 Private Memory and the Construction of Subjectivity in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry II Achievements Chapter 4 Eiléan Ni Chuilleandin’s Spaces of Memory Chapter 5 Medbh McGuckian’s Radical Temporalities Chapter 6 Catherine Walsh: A Poetics of Flux

Chapter 7 Vona Groarke: Memory and Materiality Conclusion: Memories of the Future xi

Acknowledgements

This book has been the product of a long period of reading and thinking about contemporary women poets and I would like to thank those who have supported this project. I am grateful to the following libraries for access to materials: the British Library, the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Library and University College Dublin Library. Thanks to my colleagues at University College Dublin for their comradeship and encouragement, especially John Brannigan, Danielle Clarke, Sharae Deckard, Fionnuala Dillane, Anne Fogarty, Jane Grogan, Margaret Kelleher, Gerardine Meaney and Tony Roche. Emilie Pine’s work in the field of Irish Memory Studies has been an inspiration and this book has benefited greatly from her initiatives. To Catriona Clutterbuck I owe a particular debt of gratitude for her interest in all things poetic and for her generosity. Other friends and colleagues both in Ireland and abroad have spurred me on: Rebecca Barr, Matthew Campbell, Patricia Coughlan, Alex Davis, Gerald Dawe, Eric Falci, Borbála Faragó, Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias, Neil Hegarty, Peter Kuch, Lucy McDiarmid, Jody Allen Randolph, Hedwig Schwall, Moynagh Sullivan and James Woolley. I am grateful to colleagues at UCD Library and Special Collections for their work with the Poetry@UCD initiative, especially Ursula Byrne, Evelyn Flanagan and Eugene Roche. My students, past and present, test my ideas on poetry. I would like particularly to thank recent and current graduate students Jaclyn Allen, Amanda Bell, Paola Benchi, Colleen English, Ken Keating, Aoife Lynch and Jacqui Meisel for their enthusiasm and conversation. At Liverpool University Press, Anthony Cond and his team have been very supportive of the project and the readers of the initial manuscript offered many insights and suggestions from which the book has benefited. Thanks to Rachel Adamson and Lucy Frontani at Carnegie Book Production for their attention to production and design; I’m especially grateful to Irene Barry for permission to use her work on the cover of this book. My greatest ix debts are to my family — to my father and my sisters for their interest and support, as well as their patience. Andrew Carpenter has, as usual, worked harder than anyone to bring my scholarly planets into alignment. This book is dedicated to him.

Earlier versions of some sections in this book have appeared as: ‘A Way of Going Back: Memory and Estrangement in the Poetry of Paula Meehan’, An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts 5.I-2 (Spring/Fall 2009), pp. 127-39; ‘Joyful Mysteries: Language and Spirituality in Medbh McGuckian’s Recent Poetry’, in Elke d’Hoker, Raphaël Ingelbien and Hedwig Schwall (eds), Irish Women’s Writing (Berne: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 41-56; “What She Lost and How: Eavan Boland’s London Childhood’, in Thomas Herron (ed.), Irish Writing London, vol. 2, Post-War to the Present (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 33-46; and ‘Being in Span: The Space of the Subject in Catherine Walsh’s City West’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 5.2 (2014), pp. 31-46.

For permission to quote the work of these poets, thanks are due to the following publishers: Carcanet Press for permission to quote from the work of Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, Sinéad Morrissey and Mary O’Malley. Dedalus Press for permission to quote from the work of Eva Bourke. Gallery Press for permission to quote from the work of Sara Berkeley, Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin, Vona Groake, Medbh McGuckian and Paula Meehan. Pan Macmillan for permission to quote from the work of Colette Bryce. Random House for permission to quote from the work of Leontia Flynn. Invisible Books and Shearsman Press for permission to quote from the work of Catherine Walsh. Wild Honey Press, Publishing Genius and Miami University Press for permission to quote from the work of Mairéad Byrne. W. W. Norton and Company for permission to quote from the work of Eavan Boland.

FRT

HTL

IEMT

Abbreviations

Medbh McGuckian, The Book of the Angel (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2004)

Mary O’Malley, The Boning Hall: New and Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002)

Sinéad Morrissey, Between Here and There (Manchester: Carcanet, 2.002)

Mairéad Byrne, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (Baltimore, MD: Publishing Genius, 2010)

Medbh McGuckian, Captain Lavender (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1995)

Catherine Walsh, City West (Exeter: Shearsman, 2005) Paula Meehan, Dharmakaya (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000) Leontia Flynn, Drives (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008) Vona Groarke, Flight (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2002)

Medbh McGuckian, The Face of the Earth (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2002)

Medbh McGuckian, The Flower Master (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1993)

Colette Bryce, The Full Indian Rope Trick (London: Picador, 2.005)

Colette Bryce, The Heel of Bernadette (London: Picador, 2000)

Medbh McGuckian, Had I a Thousand Lives (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2002)

Catherine Walsh, [dir Eatortha and Making Tents (London: Invisible Books, 1996)

xi

SPD

TFV

Eavan Boland, The Journey and Other Poems (Galway: Arlen House, 1986; Manchester: Carcanet, 1987)

Vona Groarke, Juniper Street (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2006)

Mary O'Malley, The Knife on the Wave (Galway: Salmon Press, 1997)

Paula Meehan, 7he Man Who Was Marked by Winter (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1991)

Leanne O'Sullivan, Zhe Mining Road (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2013)

Mary Dorcey, Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers (Galway: Salmon Press, 1991)

Mairéad Byrne, Nelson and the Huruburu Bird (Bray, Co. Wicklow: Wild Honey Press, 2003)

Vona Groarke, Other People’s Houses (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1999)

Eva Bourke, Piano (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2011)

Paula Meehan, Painting Rain (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012) Paula Meehan, Pillow Talk (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1994)

Sinéad Morrissey, Parallax (Manchester: Carcanet, 2013) Medbh McGuckian, Shelmalier (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1998)

Vona Groarke, Spindrift (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2009)

Vona Groarke, Shale (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1994)

Colette Bryce, Self-Portrait in the Dark (London: Picador, 2008)

Sara Berkeley, Strawberry Thief (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2005)

Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin, 7he Second Voyage (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1986)

Sinéad Morrissey, There was Fire in Vancouver (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996)

Eva Bourke, Travels with Gandolpho (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2000)

Mairéad Byrne, Talk Poetry (Oxford, OH: Miami University Press, 2007)

xii

ABBREVIATIONS

Eavan Boland, Jn a Time of Violence (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994)

Mary O’Malley, Valparaiso (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012) Sara Berkeley, The View from Here (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2010)

Medbh McGuckian, Venus and the Rain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1994)

Paddy Bushe (ed.), Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2010)

Colette Bryce, The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (London: Picador, 2014)

Vona Groarke, X (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2014)

xiii

Memory, Estrangement and the Poetic Text

For Irish women poets, past and present exist in thematic and aesthetic alignment, making their treatment of memory of enduring importance to readers. Since the process of remembrance reveals as much about present needs as it does about past events, its conceptualization in the work of women poets reflects contemporary critical debate, as well as issues around the formation of Irish poetic traditions. In this way, to remember is to engage with a process of cultural evolution, perhaps even more than with calculated political change: ‘Images of the past change or remain the same [...] to the degree that they fit into a changing or stable culture, a process that calls our attention away from cynical manipulations to an analysis of culture sui generis.! This study of contemporary women poets explores the function of memory in their work, examining the impact that both individual and cultural memory has on their creative processes. Their handling of poetic temporalities is of fundamental importance in exploring, whether obliquely or directly, their place in the tradition. All these women acknowledge poetic precursors and their work engages with earlier poems — their own and the work of others — in ways that constitute acts of textual memory. In this sense the book also considers the broader temporal framework within which the poetry must be read, in both political and aesthetic terms. Literary memory prompts exploration of the relationship between poet and reader, as well as of the larger critical contexts that support and impede the production of creative work. This study is concerned with issues of tradition and innovation as well as with the negotiation of public and private roles for these poets.

From these binary states emerge questions of belonging and estrangement which continue to shape women’s perceptions of their relationship to Ireland’s culture and its languages. The generation of Irish women who began to publish in the 1960s were the first to attract a wide readership both in Ireland and abroad yet their work remains alert to marginal states, to the silences at the edge of tradition. In their poetry the relationship between self and other is frequently interrogated, highlighting not only the place of the poetic subject but the process by which subjectivity itself is expressed in language. Julia Kristeva sees art, religion and psychoanalysis as the three main ways in which we try to understand our encounter with the other, but poetry is another important form through which ideas of the strange can be explored.” By challenging unitary perspectives, many of these poets confront their readers with an experience of estrangement that simultaneously probes cultural exclusion and emphasizes the incongruity of language itself. In this way, the dynamics of private and public remains at the heart of the poetry explored here.

The development of memory studies in the Irish context has drawn attention to the relationship between individual and shared versions of the past, and this difference has significance for the ways in which literary tradition is perceived, especially by groups who have not had an established role to play in these debates. Increasingly we come to view our engagement with the past through the lens of memory. For Barbara Misztal, since the end of the cold war there has been:

a newly important politics of identity, which proclaims memory as the basis of the collective identity of a community and sees memory as a resource for the construction and defence of cultural identities. Memory is used strategically: not merely to explain the group past but also to transform it into a reliable identity source for the group present.3

From an academic perspective, Memory Studies has brought the disciplines of history, politics, literature, art history and sociology into close proximity, as well as interrogating the relationship between scholarly approaches in the sciences and humanities. More recently, scholars of Irish history and culture have found this field to offer useful ways of engaging with the continued importance of the past in contemporary Irish cultural and political life. The Irish Memory Studies Network, founded by Emilie Pine, has fostered debate in the field among Irish and international scholars and arts practitioners. Memory Ireland, a four-volume collection of essays edited by Oona Frawley, also demonstrates the broad spectrum of scholarly interest in this area, as well as highlighting the significance of key historical moments in the formation of modern Irish memory.4

This study of contemporary Irish women poets does not posit the direct intervention of poets in these debates. Instead, it explores their continuous engagement with the processes of remembering, both individually and collectively, in their work. Their attention to the moral, political and aesthetic dimensions of past, present and future overtly and implicitly critiques received versions of history as well as problematizing simplified acts of remembrance. As Charles Maier has recently argued, the current interest in memory studies is not evidence of historical confidence but rather of a retreat from transformative politics, a concern to mediate the present through reflection on the past.> For contemporary women poets this means that the role of memory acquires political significance, given the uneasy relationship between women’s place in Irish history and their current position in literary culture. The period from 1980 has seen a significant rise in the publication and reading of poetry by women and a corresponding evolution of styles and themes in their work. Although the most important sources for the study of cultural memory have historically been letters and diaries, literary texts offer specific insights into the how cultural memory is produced and understood.§ In light of the evolving role for women in Irish culture, their poetic mediation of the past is of considerable significance. It has also deepened our scrutiny of the relationship between the politics of writing and its forms.

The concept of memory has come to indicate a wide range of applications — as Geoffrey Cubitt notes, “Memory” may be mental or physical, natural or artificial, conscious or unconscious, individual or social: it may be embodied in animal instinct, or in cultural programming, or in electronic systems’? Mieke Bal has gone on to define memory as a ‘travelling concept’, one that moves between disciplines and periods as well as between geographical locations; definitions of memory are further extended by these different applications. This breadth of inference can create critical problems: in this book the application of memory acknowledges its relevance for the individual as well as the group and considers its function in contexts beyond the island of Ireland. Yet the treatment of memory here remains firmly grounded in its relevance to literary production, as well as its specific potential to extend our engagement with and understanding of poetic texts. The first part of this study explores some of the key ways in which poetry’s relationship to the past has been mediated by women poets. Eavan

Boland is a key figure in this respect and the opening chapter is devoted to an exploration of the dynamics of personal and cultural memory in her work. Her interrogation of the place of the woman poet in the Irish literary tradition has set the terms for these debates in recent decades and has proved foundational to the study of gender and Irish poetry. These issues of identity and tradition are also relevant to the study of migrant poets, whose mobility challenges our sense of a unified literary tradition. Women poets born in Ireland but living abroad, together with those who have moved to the country from elsewhere, have extended our sense of the poetic past in important ways. Their work, explored in Chapter 2 of this book, raises key questions concerning the unifying function of memory. Next the role of private memory in constructing subjectivity, and in changing the relationship between self and other, is explored. For many poets the traumatic past is shown to link personal and collective experience in key ways, so the debates in this chapter have an important resonance for the study as a whole. In the second part of the book, four individual poets are explored in detail. Here there is a growing emphasis on the relationship between memory and aesthetic judgment in the works of these poets, and the extent to which the textual past shapes their current practice is of central importance. This trajectory demonstrates the necessity for examining individual responses to memory and estrangement, as well as considering the shared dynamics that these writers exhibit. The study as a whole confirms the importance of sustained close reading in exploring the unique and considered engagement of each poet with private and public pasts.

Remembering Place

In any study defined by concepts of a national tradition, attention is immediately drawn to the role of place and belonging in how identities are formed. The experience of space may be our first entry into temporality and, some have argued, our predominant means of remembering the world.? Both Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora have signalled the importance of spatiality in the shaping of collective memory, and, for the individual too, place may prove inspiring or inhibiting to creative expression. Engagement with both public and private spaces is an important characteristic of work by contemporary Irish women poets. Some are explicitly identified with particular locations: Paula Meehan with Dublin; Mary O’Malley with Galway; Sinéad Morrissey with Belfast. Some draw creative sustenance from other cultures as does

Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin from Italy. These complex interrelationships indicate the importance both of imaginative freedom and of creative and critical space for the production of original work. The space of the Irish tradition has not always been hospitable to women and this feeling of estrangement has been recorded by many of those who feature in this book.!© Under these conditions, women found it difficult to be easily assimilated into groups or movements within the larger poetic tradition, leading them to emphasize their individuality, rather than their feeling of belonging. Even poets who identify with specific group identities can never be seen as simply representative but rather as individuals working within the compass of their own experience to explore more public roles. Eavan Boland is the first poet of the older generation to draw repeated attention to the important relationship between place and writing. She uses memories of growing up in London and later New York as the experiential foundation for an enquiry into the concept of belonging, both personally and culturally, to a particular place. Boland’s interrogation of the role of the woman poet in the Irish tradition is directly related to her engagement with the processes of memory and to her deepening awareness of the exclusions practised within Irish literary culture. Boland understands her experiences outside Ireland to be formative of her later stance on this issue; in other instances, too, the diaspora has clearly influenced the kinds of literature, in both form and theme, which have been — and continue to be — produced by Irish writers.

For diasporic women writers the dynamics of exclusion are formative. The crossing of boundaries that bilingual poets and immigrant poets must enact fundamentally questions the relationship between self and other. Poets are confronted with the notion of the stranger within — with the extent to which their own creative self encompasses opposing perspectives. Identity debates are also shaped, at least in part, by those who live — or have lived — outside Ireland. Justin Quinn has noted the importance of childhood to these writers and problematizes the role of memory in retaining a connection to that earlier self11 Women poets featured in this study respond to this issue through the evolution of their craft: Dublin-born Mairéad Byrne has lived in the USA for most of her adult life; for her the geographical move offered opportunities to extend her poetic practice beyond the lyrical into performance and electronic modes. Other poets have spent shorter periods abroad but their work has been shaped in important ways by the experience: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey and Catherine Walsh are just three poets whose work explores personal memories of other countries as well as the larger implications of this boundary-crossing for their creative process. All reflect on the heightened relationship between self and other that such experiences generate — Groarke and Morrissey by deploying different forms of poetic sequence to record the experience; Walsh by extending the inclusive shape of her experimental texts to facilitate a movement between geographical locations. All these poets reflect deeply on the relationship between individual and shared pasts and on the ways in which different cultures and new experiences may suggest familiarity as well as estrangement.

For other women the space of the past is shaped by the language question. Poets who have travelled to Britain or to America experience no linguistic barrier. However, for those spending time in non-Englishspeaking countries (such as Sinéad Morrissey in Japan), the journey is not only geographical but also linguistic. Likewise, poets born outside Ireland but making their home there must choose their creative language. Eva Bourke, for example, publishes originally in English though she carries with her the rich heritage of her upbringing in Germany. Though they are not the specific focus of examination here, Irish-language poets such as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Celia de Fréine must also consider the past in relation to its linguistic expression. For these and other writers in Irish the importance of that language tradition in shaping the relationship between past and present draws attention to the role of folklore and myth in the Irish tradition. Cultural memory, then, is deeply implicated in the language in which the remembering is done.

Memory and History

The relationship between memory and history is a significant one and is often conceived in oppositional terms: a historiographical process entails a systematic examination of evidence in the pursuit of understanding, while memory remains subjective and loosely formed. The contrast can also be imagined in temporal terms — as material passes from living memory it becomes subject to archival process and historical study. Yet this transition is not an unproblematic one. Pierre Nora has argued that the archive is associated not with remembering but with forgetting: once the material has been deposited it can be eliminated from personal memory.!2 In the same way, once the sites of memory become history, rather than part of living commemorative experience, they cease to be fully meaningful. For marginalized groups, such as women, this process is a significant one since it affirms the important role of intervention in the processes of cultural formation.!3 It also marks a specific disjunction between the material of everyday life and that of narrative history — a division more profound in the experience of women than of men.

The complex relationship between remembering and forgetting reminds us of the contingent nature of memory practices. The importance of forgetting can also be demonstrated in the larger cultural arena, especially where the handling of traumatic political pasts is involved:

Every act of remembrance, whether individual or collective, necessarily involves selective, partial, or otherwise biased forms of forgetting [...] The problem which is posed does not take the form of a clear choice for either remembering or forgetting. Instead, we are faced with concrete choices about when, how and which events of the traumatic or guilty past will eventually be recalled and faced by individuals, community and state.14

In the Irish context there are a number of historical events that have been subject to this difficult dynamic of memory and forgetting. The Northern Irish Troubles is among the most recent, and prominent, of these. Much research has been done in this area — since it is within living memory there is ample opportunity for oral testimony as well as detailed documentation of events. This memory-work has been influenced by other models, such as South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and takes account of the important role of individual as well as of collective memory. The important ways in which these two are intertwined is reflected in the work of poets who had direct experience of the Troubles, such as Medbh McGuckian, Sinéad Morrissey and Colette Bryce. Yet their poetry also demonstrates that the violence in the province did not affect everyone in the same way, or for the same duration. Each of these three women responds to the events in strikingly different ways, from McGuckian’s explicit commemoration of earlier revolutionaries to Bryce’s memories of childhood encounters with members of the British Army. Even when expressing states of collective consciousness, the poets acknowledge the importance of private perspectives on events of enduring historical importance.

‘The versions of the past that emerge from such situations of violence and trauma may be closely linked to the formation of the nation state and to its cultures of memory. Eberhard Bort has commented thus on the multi-layered purpose of the practices of remembrance: ‘Commemorations may serve competing goals — to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved, and to incorporate mourners’ individual memories into a larger political discourse’.15 The last of these aims has been the most contentious, especially in its tendency to reduce the significance of individual experiences that may not serve this larger narrative. Women poets are especially attuned to the effects of exclusion from commemoration and, conversely, to the powerful impact that recognition — however belated — may have.!6 Seamus Deane was a prescient critic of the commodification of Irish history while more recent work by Guy Beiner has explored the problematic intersection between contemporary political discourse and the public commemoration of Ireland’s past.!8 From the end of the nineteenth century the rise in nationalism demanded an increased emphasis on the concept of a shared history, including the deliberate elision of elements that would prove disruptive to idealized unity. The practice of popular commemoration was designed to enhance this development.!? As Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have argued, the legitimization of existing class structures in the face of a rising proletariat necessitated the invention of traditions that would emphasize a shared history.2° While Ian McBride has problematized any simplistic reading of this tendency, it helps to situate Irish state formation in a larger political context, and to see the place of women in this dynamic as historically determined, at least in part.?! It also sheds light on how the discipline of history intersects with the process of cultural formation, confirming Ernest Renan’s contention that historical study poses a threat to nationality by revealing differences between shared memories and actual events.?2

For women this process of elision has had serious consequences. As well as confronting the same difficulties as other citizens of the newly independent nation state, women faced a form of cultural marginalization that quickly became an integral part of Irish identity-in-process: ‘Womanhood and Irishness are metaphors for one another’, Eavan Boland would later declare, ‘there are resonances of humiliation, oppression and silence in both of them’23 Yet the relationship between political challenge and a politically engaged poetics is not a straightforward one. As Guinn Batten has pointed out, an emphasis on representation of the revolutionary spirit may prevent the actuality of revolution.24 For this reason there is little direct correlation between a feminist aesthetic and specific activism.

Boland’s insistent return to the concept, as well as to the material, of history, signals its importance for the construction of female subjectivity among Ireland’s writers. Boland detects a moral difference between the male-determined histories and the kind of history that women will write. Women, as they move from being objects within poems to being authors of poems themselves, raise questions of poetic motive and ethical direction.2> Gerardine Meaney takes this issue further:

Anxiety about one’s fitness for a (masculine) role of authority, deriving from a history of defeat or helplessness, is assuaged by the assumption of sexual dominance.

Women in these conditions become guarantors of their men’s status, bearers of national honour and the scapegoats of national identity. They are not merely transformed into symbols of the nation. They become the territory over which power is exercised.?6

As this comment reveals, the woman writer must renegotiate her position within the national imaginary with care. Perhaps for this reason Boland’s poetry is more responsive than her prose to the ambiguities of this dialogue. As her poem “Outside History’ suggests, the process of connecting with something beyond the self is crucial, even though this connection may deepen the subject’s awareness of the significance of individual perspectives. This testing of association has important implications for the exploration of shared memory and for the creation of imaginative worlds that will be open to a wide range of readers. The biases of history are inevitable results of the subjectivity of all narrative acts, yet the imbalances are clearly not confined to gender issues: racial identity and class affiliation also influence representation crucially. Many women poets address these issues directly in their work both in their rewriting of historical material and in their recognition that their encounter with the past is often through texts which, by their very nature, must cause women to question their relationship to tradition. This is especially true for Irish-language poets and for migrant writers.

It is important to recognize that memory is historically embedded and is shaped by the expectations of its own time and place. In this way, memory can tell us as much about the conditions for those remembering as it can about the past. Women poets writing in Ireland since 1980 have witnessed the most far-reaching changes in the lives of women in this century. The significance of Ireland’s modernization — its movement away from the conservative Catholic past towards a liberal European future — is an important part of this transition. The generations of women considered in this book, from those who paved the way, such as Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin, to younger poets including Colette Bryce and Leanne O'Sullivan, reveal the remarkable transition in the role and the expectation for women both in Ireland and abroad.

Cultural Memory and the Irish Woman Poet

‘Memory is more than the act of recollection by recollecting persons’, writes Edward Shils, ‘memory leaves an objective deposit in tradition’.27 It is this continuing role for memory within the dialectic of past and present that is most significant in the study of contemporary poetry in Ireland. Halbwachs’s views on the transformation of social memory within a group confirms that this memory is always in danger of erosion, whether by the loss of members or by conflict amongst them. He argues that past events and people are not forgotten due to indifference but because the group remembering them fade away.?8 This notion of shared or collective memory, while foundational to modern memory studies, is also controversial. Critics have argued that Halbwach’s concept of collective memory limits the role for the remembering self — a significant limitation when reading poems that, for the most part, present complex individual responses. Wulf Kansteiner is among those who have suggested other ways of understanding the relationship between the individual and the group here: he distinguishes between ‘collective memory’ and ‘collected memories’ — the former are shared communications, the latter ‘an aggregate of individual memories which behaves and develops just like its individual composites’29 This dynamic permits us to address productively the complex relationship between the individual poet and the term ‘Irish women poets’. This study does not attempt to create a unified sense of this term, nor does it argue that all the women whose work is explored here prioritize gender as a shaping force on their work. What it does suggest, though, is that all these poets write with some awareness of the Irish tradition — and of the woman poet’s place within it — and in this way are implicitly in dialogue with writers and readers on these terms. Some of the figures explored here are conscious of the implications of writing out of a shared context for women’s experience: Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin explores the relationship between individual and community especially in a religious context; Catherine Walsh’s innovative poetics challenge our perception of the boundaries between self and other. Even poets from the younger generation are concerned with the networks of belonging that shed new light on contemporary individualism.