In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh suggests that literary fiction has difficulty representing the Anthropocene, the epoch of irreversible human impacts on the planet, because the Anthropocene “consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel – forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space.” This chapter investigates how poets from Ireland have been making the Anthropocene imaginable over the past two decades by rendering “unbearably intimate connections” in lyric forms. Reading Moya Cannon alongside Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Sinéad Morrissey, the chapter spotlights poems in both English and Irish that look beyond Ireland – to Africa, the Americas, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Arctic – to arrive at a recognition not just of the human-centered globe, but of the Earth system or planet. These contemporary poets’ work makes visible how language and technology, including writing, mediate human efforts to represent the climate crisis. Their poems challenge us to develop a mode of reading that emerges from the interface of the global with the planetary.

Irish poetry has often inhabited a condition of ontological doubleness. Existing between two languages allows for both stereophonic and transgressive qualities not available on the monoglot plane. The poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, best known from bilingually presented volumes, has benefited hugely from this paradigm, as it enters into dialogue with a host of translators including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon. Permeability and slipping across boundaries becomes an enabling aesthetic. The work of Celia de Fréine too engages with translation to destabilise hierarchical binaries, and challenge deep-rooted concepts of originals and translations in the reception of the Irish poem. The work of younger poets, such as Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, and Aifric Mac Aodha, builds on the achievements of these writers, while engaging with the rapidly changing linguistic environment (and poetic culture) of Ireland today.