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.”

This chapter builds on the pioneering work of John Wilson Foster (‘Encountering Traditions’, in Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, ed. John Wilson Foster (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997) and John Waters (‘Topographical Poetry and the Politics of Culture in Ireland, 1772–1820’, in Romantic Generations, ed. Ghislaine McDayter, Guinn Batten, and Barry Milligan (Lewisbury: Bucknell University Press, 2001)), both of whom considered the ways in which English-language poets of the eighteenth century wrote about Irish land and landscape. The essay looks at poems written to celebrate the world of English-speaking owners of Irish farms and estates – vistas and pleasure gardens for instance – and poems about activities taking place in the countryside – gardening, farming, hunting, and team sports. Verses praising the wildness of untamed nature are also considered as are poems on violent events such as storms and extended frosts. The poems raise practical, theological, and aesthetic issues in both pastoral and mock-pastoral modes as well as in the emerging genre of ‘picturesque’ poetry. The chapter also considers popular poetry, such as demotic verse about country life, and indicates that, for some poets – Goldsmith and Laurence Whyte for instance – life in rural Ireland was not always idyllic.