Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: A Lost Pastoral Rhythm: The Poetry of John Montague -- Chapter 2: "The God in the Tree" : Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition -- Chapter 3: "Love Poems, Elegies: I am losing my place " : Michael Longley's Environmental Elegies -- Chapter 4: Learning the Lingua Franca of a Lost Land: Eavan Boland's Suburban Pastoral -- Chapter 5: "In My Handerkerchief of a Garden" : Medbh McGuckian's Miniature Pastoral Retreats -- Chapter 6: "When Ireland Was Still under a Spell" : Miraculous Transformations in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill -- Conclusion: The Future of Pastoral -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

In Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, Donna L. Potts closely examines the pastoral genre in the work of six Irish poets writing today. Through the exploration of the poets and their works, she reveals the wide range of purposes that pastoral has served in both Northern Ireland and the Republic: a postcolonial critique of British imperialism; a response to modernity, industrialization, and globalization; a way of uncovering political and social repercussions of gendered representations of Ireland; and, more recently, a means for conveying environmentalism’s more complex understanding of the value of nature. Potts traces the pastoral back to its origins in the work of Theocritus of Syracuse in the third century and plots its evolution due to cultural changes. While all pastoral poems share certain generic traits, Potts makes clear that pastorals are shaped by social and historical contexts, and Irish pastorals in particular were influenced by Ireland’s unique relationship with the land, language, and industrialization due to England’s colonization. For her discussion, Potts has chosen six poets who have written significant collections of pastoral poetry and whose work is in dialogue with both the pastoral tradition and other contemporary pastoral poets. Three poets are men—John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley—while three are women—Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Five are English-language authors, while the sixth—Ní Dhomhnaill—writes in Irish. Additionally, some of the poets hail from the Republic, while others originate from Northern Ireland. Potts contends that while both Irish Republic and Northern Irish poets respond to a shared history of British colonization in their pastorals, the 1921 partition of the country caused the pastoral tradition to evolve differently on either side of the border, primarily because of the North’s more rapid industrialization; its more heavily Protestant population, whose response to environmentalism was somewhat different than that of the Republic’s predominantly Catholic population; as well the greater impact of the world wars and the Irish Troubles. In an important distinction from other studies of Irish poetry, Potts moves beyond the influence of history and politics on contemporary Irish pastoral poetry to consider the relatively recent influence of ecology. Contemporary Irish poets often rely on the motif of the pastoral retreat to highlight various environmental threats to those retreats—whether they be high-rises, motorways, global warming, or acid rain. Potts concludes by speculating on the future of pastoral in contemporary Irish poetry through her examination of more recent poets—including Moya Cannon and Paula Meehan—as well as other genres such as film, drama, and fiction.

An examination of the nature and function of pastoral elegies in post-1960 British and Irish poetry.

This book examines how the Irish environmental movement, which began gaining momentum in the 1970s, has influenced and been addressed by contemporary Irish writers, artists, and musicians. It examines Irish environmental writing, music, and art within their cultural contexts, considers how postcolonial ecocriticism might usefully be applied to Ireland, and analyzes the rhetoric of Irish environmental protests. It places the Irish environmental movement within the broader contexts of Irish national and postcolonial discourses, focusing on the following protests: the M3 Motorway, the Burren campaign, the Carnsore Point anti-nuclear protest, Shell to Sea, the turf debate, and the animal rights movement.

This book offers fresh critical interpretation of two of the central tenets of Irish culture – migration and memory. From its starting point with the ‘New Irish’ generation of poets in the United States during the 1980s and concluding with the technological innovations of 21st-century poetry, this study spans continents, generations, genders and sexualities to reconsider the role of memory and of migration in the work of a range of contemporary Irish poets. Combining sensitive close readings and textual analysis with thorough theoretical application, it sets out the formal, thematic, socio-cultural and literary contexts of migration as an essential aspect of Irish literature. This book is essential reading for literary critics, academics, cultural commentators and students with an interest in contemporary poetry, Irish studies, diaspora studies and memory studies.

Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis addresses what is arguably the most crucial issue of human history through the lens of late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century Irish poetry. The poets that it surveys range from familiar presences in the contemporary Irish literary canon – Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paula Meehan, Moya Cannon – to lesser-known figures, such as the experimental poet Maurice Scully, contemporary poets Stephen Sexton and Sean Hewitt, and the Irish-language poets Simon Ó Faoláin, Bríd Ní Mhóráin, and Máire Dinny Wren. Adopting a variety of ecotheoretical approaches, the essays gathered here address several interrelated themes crucial to the climate crisis: the way in which the scalar scope of climate change interweaves local and global, distant past and imminent future, nature and culture; the critical importance of acknowledging the complex kinship of the human and nonhuman; and the necessity of warning against the devastating environmental losses to come while mourning those that already occurred. Ultimately, by envisioning new ways of existing on an earth that humans no longer dominate, this book engages in what the philosopher Jonathan Lear refers to as a process of ‘radical anticipation’.

Poetics of the Local considers contemporary Irish poetry in light of transnational forces of globalization and financialization, showing how these conditions have shaped poetic innovation in Ireland from the 1960s to the present. The book is organized around different sites caught in the growing pains of a rapidly globalizing Ireland—from the "ghost estates," or housing projects abandoned after the economic boom of the 1990s, to the urban "regeneration" of Belfast after the Troubles, to the transformation of Dublin into a hub for creative economy programs like the UNESCO City of Literature. In readings of works by Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Ciaran Carson, Leontia Flynn, Alan Gillis, Sinéad Morrissey, and Paul Muldoon, Shirley Lau Wong argues that the enduring centrality of place in Irish poetry should be seen not as a hangover of nostalgic nationalism but rather as an exploration of the material and emplaced effects of the seemingly faraway processes of global capitalism.

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Daniela Theinová explores the works of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson and Medbh McGuckian, combining for the first time a critical analysis of the language issue with a focus on the historical marginality of women in the Irish literary tradition. Acutely alert to the textures of individual poems even as she reads these against broader critical-theoretical horizons, Theinová engages directly with texts in both Irish and English. By highlighting these writers’ uneasy poetic and linguistic identity, and by introducing into this wider context some more recent poets—including Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Sinéad Morrissey, Ailbhe Darcy and Aifric Mac Aodha—this book proposes a fundamental critical reconsideration of major late-twentieth-century Irish women poets, and, by extension, the nation’s canon.

In the last fifty years Irish poets have produced some of the most exciting poetry in contemporary literature, writing about love and sexuality, violence and history, country and city. This book provides a unique introduction to major figures such as Seamus Heaney, but also introduces the reader to significant precursors like Louis MacNeice or Patrick Kavanagh, and vital contemporaries and successors: among others, Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. Readers will find discussions of Irish poetry from the traditional to the modernist, written in Irish as well as English, from both North and South. This Companion, the only book of its kind on the market, provides cultural and historical background to contemporary Irish poetry in the contexts of modern Ireland but also in the broad currents of modern world literature. It includes a chronology and guide to further reading and will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.

Although current environmental debates lay the focus on the Industrial Revolution as a sociopolitical development that has led to the current environmental crisis, many ecocritical projects have avoided historicizing their concepts or have been characterized by approaches that were either pre-historic or post-historic: while the environmental movement has harbored the dream of restoring nature to a state untouched by human hands, there is also the pessimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, exhausted by humanity’s consumption of natural resources. Against this background, the decline of nature has become a narrative template quite common among the public environmental discourse and environmental scientists alike. The volume revisits Antiquity as an epoch which witnessed similar environmental problems and came up with its own interpretations and solutions in dealing with them. This decidedly historical perspective is not only supposed to fill in a blank in ecocritical discourse, but also to question, problematize, and inform our contemporary debates with a completely different take on “nature” and humanity’s place in the world. Thereby, a productive dialogue between contemporary ecocritical theories and the classical tradition is established that highlights similarities as well as differences. This volume is the first book to bring ecocriticism and the classical tradition into a comprehensive dialogue. It assembles recognized experts in the field and advanced scholars as well as young and aspiring ecocritics. In order to ensure a dialogic exchange between the contributions, the volume includes four response essays by established ecocritics which embed the sections within a larger theoretical and practical ecocritical framework and discuss the potential of including the pre-modern world into our environmental debates.