Chapter 13 - Poetry and Place

Summary

Irish poetry’s articulation of and emplotment within a spatial matrix is one of its governing rubrics, whether one tracks a literary-historical genealogy from medieval dinnseanchas poetry or contemporary reflexes of that tradition. This essay considers how Irish poets refract genres of English landscape and pastoral poetry and imagines a map of the island of Ireland as a contiguous or palimpsestic series of writerly domains – with Yeats hovering over Sligo, Ní Dhomhnaill over Kerry, Longley over Mayo, Meehan over Dublin, and so on. The chapter examines the poetics of space and place within particular rural, urban, domestic, or public contexts and reads Irish poetry’s emplacement within a regional, national, or colonial frame. Ireland has a long tradition of pastoral, topographical, and nature writings, but Eric Falci asserts that “this isn’t to suggest that all Irish poetry is topographically minded or concerned to locate itself with geographical precision.” Rather it is a call to recognize that “place” “exists both materially and conceptually in a ceaseless dialectical toggle with ‘space.’”