Chapter 9 - Refuge and Domestic Space in Northern Irish Poetry, ca. 1940–Present

Summary

In this chapter Adam Hanna notes that “From the lonely farm-redoubts of John Hewitt, to the flooded demesnes imagined by Seamus Heaney to, more recently, the imperiled familial spaces that appear in the work of Sinéad Morrissey, the homes and other refuges of Northern Irish poetry have often been isolated, watchful, and precarious ones.” Apart from the threat of political violence arising from the Troubles (1968–98) in Northern Ireland, Hanna detects a complex dialogic between domestic spaces (which are immediately beholden to local pressures) and the wider environment (which is endangered by rising seas, violent storms, and overflowing rivers). Hanna deconstructs this interplay between the effects of climate change and the “discourses about both the established order of the province and the subversive energies that might undermine this order” and defines a distinctive “Northern Irish ecological poetics” in which “global anxieties and local pressures entwine.”