LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY and CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN POETS: MEDBH MCGUCKIAN, MOYA CANNON, and VONA GROARKE by KACIE HITTEL (Under T

Home , Burns Blue, David Wheatley (poet), Gerry Smyth, Medbh McGuckian, Right Action, Snowdrop (game engine)

LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN POETS:

MEDBH MCGUCKIAN, MOYA CANNON, AND VONA GROARKE

KACIE HITTEL

(Under the Direction of Nicholas Allen)

ABSTRACT

Place and the past have often been taken for granted or understood as static, but to take up place and contemporaneity is to recognize a far more complex spatiality, composed of relations with implications that are material, textual, and lyrical. This dissertation expands the conversation of Irish poetry by women to push past a strictly national reading. To examine new approaches to understanding place is to confront issues of indeterminacy, positioning local and situated observations within scales that extend around the world. Many of the poems addressed in this dissertation investigate miniatures whether of domesticity, museum objects, paintings, landscapes, or words. What these poems do so effectively is notice, calling attention to details and locating the speaking figure within space. The effect is a constant navigation of scale which emphasizes that depictions of place in lyric poetry are a matter of looking in, around, and out.

Specifically, this dissertation investigates the works of Medbh McGuckian, Moya Cannon, Vona

Groarke, Kerry Hardie, Sara Berkeley Tolchin, and Michelle O’Sullivan. Examining space and place highlights the subtle and evocative ways that these poets are confronting what it means to be “here” and “now.”

INDEX WORDS: lyric; place; poetry; Irish literature; women authors; topography;

topographical poetry; McGuckian, Medbh; Cannon, Moya; Groarke, Vona

LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN POETS:

MEDBH MCGUCKIAN, MOYA CANNON, AND VONA GROARKE

KACIE HITTEL

B.A., Belmont University, 2007

M.Phil., Trinity College Dublin, 2010

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2018

Kacie Hittel

LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN POETS:

MEDBH MCGUCKIAN, MOYA CANNON, AND VONA GROARKE

KACIE HITTEL

Major Professor: Nicholas Allen Committee: Susan Rosenbaum Adam Parkes

Electronic Version Approved:

Suzanne Barbour Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2018

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Nicholas Allen who has provided equal parts encouragement and criticism.

Our conversations on these poems and landscapes have been some of the best experiences of this project. Susan Rosenbaum and Adam Parkes provided detailed commentary and support. In giving their time, thoughts, and energy, my committee instilled in me a sense of what is possible, an immense gift. The errors that remain are my own. Thanks also to Lainie Pomerleau and Holly

Fling, my comrades, confidants, and friends. Moya Cannon and Vona Groarke were very generous to speak with me via email and in person, and I am grateful for the insight from these conversations. Previous professors and mentors have also given their time and criticism in ways that continue to challenge and sustain me, and I would especially like to thank Lucy Collins and

James McClung. Thanks also to the English Department and excellent faculty at UGA, the UGA at Oxford program, the Willson Center for the Humanities, and Winnie Smith.

To those others without whom I would not have made it through: Mike and Iliza Butera,

Eric and Megan Wilkey, Jessica Selfe, Michaela Markova, Ivy Calgaard, and Henna Messina.

Thanks to my family whose immeasurable support, affinity for adventure, and lessons in persistence have led me here: Glenn and Maryellen Hittel, Ashley Hittel, Julie Hittel and Ben

Silver, Erwin and Judy Hittel, Kevin and Sharon Tam, Lisa, Scott, and Evan Paterson, and Colin

Tam. Special thanks to my parents and sisters who taught me to notice small things and put them in a big picture so that I could learn to care about things both big and small. For unmatchable loyalty, thank you to Ginny and Humble. My deepest gratitude to my partner, Justin Wade Tam.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENT S ...... viii

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY ...... 1

2 WRITING IN PLACE:

MEDBH MCGUCKIAN AND MARCONI’S COTTAGE ...... 35

3 LANDSCAPE WITH SEA PINKS AND COCCOSPHERE: CURATION

AND ORIENTATION IN MOYA CANNON’S LYRICS OF PLACE ...... 78

4 “THIS WHERE I AM”:

VONA GROARKE’S RELATIONAL POETICS...... 149

5 THE CONTEMPORARY TOPOGRAPHICAL POETRY OF KERRY HARDIE,

SARA BERKELEY TOLCHIN, AND MICHELLE O’SULLIVAN ...... 213

6 CONCLUSION: FIGURES IN THE LANDSCAPE ...... 262

WORKS CITED ...... 265

CHAPTER 1

INTRODCUTION: LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY

Life, the story goes, Was the daughter of Cannan, And came to the plain of Kildare. She loved the flat-lands and the ditches And the unreachable horizon. She asked that it be named for her. The river took its name from the land. The land took its name from a woman.

A woman in the doorway of a house. A river in the city of her birth.1

So begins Eavan Boland’s poem “Anna Liffey” from her 1994 collection In a Time of Violence.

In characteristic fashion, Boland draws on myth to write back to the literary tradition she inherited, finding a way to write herself and other women into the Irish poem. The focus in this initial stanza is on naming and plays on the tension between the word “life” and the name of the

River Liffey that cuts through Dublin. The stanza consists of mostly single syllable words with a careful patterning of two syllable words, emphasizing the unusual fifth line which contains two three syllable words “unreachable horizon.” The effect is a sense of expanse of place, vision, and opportunity held in balance by the speaker’s attempt to relate. Using the past with its mythic associations and writing them into the speaker’s present observations, Boland enacts a process of place making that has a long tradition in poetry, especially in Irish literature. “Anna Liffey”

1 Eavan Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), 199.

1 blends myth, memory, and observation to articulate the complex ways we situate ourselves in place.

The conversation about poetry and place is a long one. We are accustomed to discussing stanzas as rooms and investigating implications of nationalism, domesticity, and memory. Much critical thought has addressed these themes, providing an interesting and diverse foundation from which to continue examining poetry and place together. This dissertation continues that work by demonstrating the importance of investigating the terms place and lyric for contemporary Irish poetry by women. Critical conversations of Irish poetry and place have been dominated by discussions of nationalism and images of rural life that are often idealized; these “romantic perceptions of landscape are informed by the ideals of nationalism, which located the national essence in the rural world … to forge an obstinate discourse of permanence and belonging in the face of evident signals of change and estrangement.”2 While one strain investigates idealism, another takes up a critique of the ideal to show the falsity of painting a picturesque landscape, obscuring the labor of working the land and the reality of the land itself. Increasingly, poets are complicating the dual tradition of lyric and place, demanding new ways of framing how we discuss form and conceptions of orientation.

Since Boland wrote “Anna Liffey,” contemporary poets in Ireland are examining the present and future as much as the past, just as they are offering perspectives on place that are localized and framed by global interactions. Indeed, their work is diverse, engaging, and thriving, so to offer any totalizing summation would be to do it an injustice. As Vona Groarke says, writing in a special issue on poetry by Irish women, “There is no convergence of subject-matter,

2 Manuela Palacios González, “Landscape in Irish and Iberian Galician Poetry by Women Authors,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13, no. 5 (2011): 3, Purdue University Press.

2 no orthodoxy of theme or tune, no received notions of what is appropriate of what is beyond our reach.”3 Such variety provide critics and readers with the opportunity to explore associations that have long been read through a determined lens. Place and the past have often been taken for granted and cast as static, but to take up place and contemporaneity is to recognize a far more complex spatiality, composed of relations with implications that are material, textual, and lyrical.

This idea of relationality is at the heart of this dissertation. My project aims to expand the conversation on Irish poetry by women to push past a strictly national reading in drawing attention to the nuanced situating that poets are enacting within their lyrics and the manner in which they build networks in a globalizing age. Examining space and place highlights the subtle and evocative ways that these poets are confronting what it means to be “here” and “now.”

When Boland writes, “A woman in the doorway of a house. / A river in the city of her birth,” she seeks to locate herself in space and time within the place and the poem. These acts of situating shape much of her lyric poetry, and the concern for situating is shared by other contemporary Irish poetry by women. Writing in Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination,

Gerry Smyth contends that we must follow J. Hillis Miller in acknowledging that “[t]here is always a figure in the landscape.”4 He adds,

That figure, moreover, is always modifying the landscape in some way, always doing somethings with, to or on it: crossing it, admiring it, fighting for it. Even the attempt to “conserve” a landscape or a cityscape in some supposedly better or more authentic form

3 Quoted in David Wheatly, “Irish Poetry into the twenty-first century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 261. Catriona Clutterbuck provides a brief history of poetry by Irish women in “New Irish Women Poets: The Evolution of (In)Determinancy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, eds. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 651-667. 4 Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 22.

3 represents human agency undertaken in the name of some narrative of how space is or should be.5

In taking the figure in the landscape as inspiration, I argue for a lyrical topography by which I want to suggest that space, place, and lyric can be understood relationally. Space and place are co-constituted by all the elements that meet just as the lyric explores the speaker’s relations to herself, environment, and others. Relationships and connections are central to this understanding of place and lyric, which emphasizes the contemporaneity of places as “stories-so-far,” always in the process of becoming and so always in the process of changing, opening to future possibilities.6 Such a reading shows that the works of the poets discussed here move through minutiae to local and global associations. This constant navigation of scale from the microscopic to the telescopic demonstrates that understanding place is now a process that involves highly localized objects, events, and memories together with globalized objects, associations, and connections. The poems themselves become local sites that reach ever out.

The concept of relationality also offers potential for expanding conversations on lyric form as it highlights the central features of lyric poetry: how words relate, how syntax and diction draw disparate ideas together through metaphor, for example, becoming a spatio- temporal process both textually and imaginatively every time the work is read. Specifically, I address the poetry of Medbh McGuckian, Moya Cannon, Vona Groarke, Kerry Hardie, Sara

Berkeley Tolchin, and Michelle O’Sullivan. McGuckian serves as a transitional figure, moving the critical lens from the ways contemporary Irish women poets have been read according to gender and nation to the possibilities that lyrical topography provides. Moya Cannon is one of the most under-appreciated contemporary poets published today whose work is more complex

5 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 22-23. 6 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 189.

4 and provocative than most critics recognize. Vona Groarke has rightly received praise for being one of the leading poets of her generation, and her work actively reframes interaction with the world. These three form the central chapters of the dissertation and their work demonstrates the different ways women are responding to place and writing lyric. The final chapter turns to Kerry

Hardie, Sara Berkeley Tolchin, and Michelle O’Sullivan whose work offers further exciting possibilities. This dissertation explores how each poet expands what can be imagined spatially through her art.

Place and Irish Poetry

The two poets who have critically dominated conversations of place in Irish poetry are

W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. In poems such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by Yeats, the incantatory nature of the poem shows the pull of the speaker to go live a life of simple husbandry and peace where “midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, / And evening full of the linnet’s wing.”7 Tim Wenzell reads this poem as “[bemoaning] the loss of nature within the confines of a paved civilization; the narrator’s arising and going is an attempt to take action in a manner that will bring that nature back.”8 Such a reading centralizes the exchange and codependence of rural and urban, imagined and lived, and humans and the nonhuman environment.

The binaries are the creative tension for the poem. Yet Yeats did not go and build his cabin on

Innisfree, so the poem is also one of physical stasis in contrast to imagined and poetic flight. He did spend time at Lady Gregory’s Coole Park and later purchased Thoor Ballylee, a tower house

7 W.B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990; reprint, London: Everyman, 1994), 60. 8 Tim Wenzell, “Ecocriticism, Early Irish Nature Writing, and the Irish Landscape Today,” New Hibernia Review 13, no. 1 (2009): 125, Project MUSE.

5 in County Galway that was originally a Norman keep. The tower would become a powerful symbol for Yeats, representative of what he considered the real Ireland: West, heroic, ancestral, mythological, and spiritually inspiring.9

Seamus Heaney’s “Bogland” compares the Irish landscape to the prairies of North

America, signaling a difference in land, landscape, and geography. America’s plains are suggestive of openness, power, and expanse. In Ireland, “Everywhere the eye concedes to /

Encroaching horizon,” so the landscape is one that narrows the vision and experience of place.10

Heaney catalogues the items that have been found in bogs and concludes the poem noting how bogs preserve and build layer upon layer: “The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet centre is bottomless.”11 Marjorie Howes and Kevin O’Neill read this poem as an investigation of

Irish history and geography; they remark that “history is not made up of reliable facts, events, or narratives; it is not finished or located securely in the past. Rather, it is embodied by the soft, shifting, ill-defined contours of the bog itself, a history whose uncertainties, present implications, and potential dangers are infinite.”12 They expand their reading to note that Heaney’s geography is not one solely of land, but of water, suggesting wider possibilities in archipelagic relations.

“Bogland” is a reflection of the past and a means of understanding “the contemporary,

9 See Irene Gilsenan Nordin, “The Place of Writing in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh,” Nordic Journal of English Studies 13, no. 2 (2014): 43-56. 10 Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 41. Edna Longley notes that the poem is “not only dedicated to [the painter T.P.] Flanagan … [but] resulted from Heaney watching Flanagan at work in Donegal”; see Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Hexam: Bloodaxe, 1994), 237. There is a direct comparison between Heaney’s “encroaching horizon” and Boland’s “unreachable horizon” from “Anna Liffey.” 11 Heaney, Opened Ground, 41. 12 Marjorie Howes and Kevin O’Neill, “Introduction: Towards a History of the Irish Landscape,” in Éire/Land, ed. Vera Kreilkamp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 14.

6 globalizing forms of the present and future.”13 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de

Certeau says, “every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.”14 Heaney’s “Bogland” demonstrates how lyrics can also become forms of spatial practice. The poets whose work I discuss do so differently, but take up the challenge of creating a three-dimensional representation of space from the flat page of the lyric. Theirs is one that accommodates the past, but remains oriented toward present and future. Their works take up the instability of Heaney’s “Bogland,” the shifting boundaries and landscapes of the contemporary places they live and visit, while also insisting on lines of connection, relationships, and responsibility.

The concept of what is left out of the landscape and the narratives we construct around it has been taken up by poets and critics such as Eavan Boland. To list the names of Eavan

Boland’s works is to gesture to many of the ways that Ireland, women, poetry, and place have been critically discussed: New Territory, In Her Own Image, The Journey, Outside History, In a

Time of Violence, Object Lessons, A Woman Without a Country, Domestic Violence, The Lost

Land, A Journey with Two Maps. In these collections, Boland explores her experience of writing poetry as a woman in Ireland, staking her claim by highlighting the absences of women in recorded history and as authors. Object Lessons, Boland’s memoir, documents her growth as a poet and the exclusion she experienced both from the literary establishment and from an Ireland in which she could participate. She writes, “It was that being a woman, I had entered into a life for which poetry has no name.”15 Partly, her response has been to the way that Ireland has been treated in poetry. In “Mise Eire,” she takes up Patrick Pearse’s poem to write against the Ireland-

13 Howes and O’Neill, “Introduction,” 23. 14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 115. 15 Eavan Boland, Object Lessons (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 18.

7 as-woman trope, a staple of the aisling tradition.16 Her work seeks to name what has been lost to history, to acknowledge that “no page / scores the low music / of our outrage” and to find and document “a way of life / that is its own witness.”17 Her poetry centers women as subjects, not objects of poetry, which forces readers to contend with the exclusions that nation, art, and perspective entail.

Criticism followed this lead from the 1980s though the early 2000s, providing much needed complications of hegemonic and canonical discourses. Boland has been criticized for what some see as a relentless, played out poetic program, a program she frames in “Anna Liffey” as a necessary “Usurping of a name and a theme”; yet she remains dedicated to her task of writing women into history and poetry.18 As her recent editorial for Poetry Ireland Review claims, there is still a need to recognize and support the growth of diversity for poetry in Ireland.

She presses her readers to recognize that it is not only about social change, but “formal and artistic renewal” and asks readers to welcome new critiques that may help us see “the past is a safe place; the future is a far more unsettled one.”19 The work of contemporary poetry by women has expanded from Boland’s central focus. As Pilar Villar Argaiz observes, “until very recently,

Irish women’s poetry has been defined by its relentless struggle with a potentially problematic culture in which literature, subjects, and symbols have already been predominately defined by

16 Eavan Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), 102. The aisling is a poem coming out of the Irish bardic tradition; it is a dream vision in which a woman who represents Ireland appears to the sleeping poet and appeals to him to restore her rightful place. See Bernard O’Donoghue, “The Aisling,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012), 428 and C.L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature 1880-1935 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994). 17 “It’s a Woman’s World” and “Domestic Interior” respectively in Boland, Collected Poems, 80, 98. 18 Boland, Collected Poems, 201. See Longley, The Living Stream, 186-192 for a critique of Boland’s single nationalism. 19 Eavan Boland, “Editorial,” Poetry Ireland Review 125 (2018): 5, 6.

8 men.”20 Boland’s poetry was largely backwards looking so that a new future could be imagined.

She has been joined in these efforts by poets Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin,

Medbh McGuckian, and Paula Meehan and critics such as Edna Longley, Ailbhe Smyth,

Catriona Clutterbuck, Guinn Batten, and Lucy Collins.21 Catriona Clutterbuck helps to gloss what centering women as subjects has meant for Boland’s generation of writers who “themselves emerged during the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—a time when Ireland was exposed to an era- transforming series of political, economic, and cultural crises, most involving open and often bitter conflict.”22 What this meant was “[e]ven though a broad liberationist ethic informed or arose from many of these crises, the movements involved tended to remain reliant on fixed idea of the female: woman functioned to represent the various principles of freedom concerned, rather than to herself enact, interrogate, and benefit from those freedoms.”23 The older generation to which McGuckian belongs and Cannon, to an extent, “recognized almost from the outset that poetic transcendence would be meaningless without acknowledging the claims of the situated

20 Pilar Villar Argaiz, “Between Tradition and Modernity: Twenty-First Century Ireland in Recent Work by Irish Women Poets,” Nordic Irish Studies 7 (2008): 117. 21 For more on gender and nation in Irish literature please see Longley, The Living Stream; Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, Women Creating Women (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Heather Ingman, Irish Women’s Writing: From Edgeworth to Enright (Sallins, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2013); Alexandra G. Gonzalez, ed., Irish Women Writers: An A to Z Guide (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006); Justin Quinn, Gerrards Cross, and Colin Smythe, eds., Irish Poetry After Feminism (Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures 10, 2008). Longley writes of women and some of the issues between women writing in Northern Ireland and the Republic; she criticizes Boland for a limited and exclusive vision of nation. Haberstroh conducts detailed readings of women poets arguing for their creation of poetic selves as against a patriarchal traditions. Gonzales collects biographies, reading notes, and select bibliographies of Irish women writers, demonstrating their breadth and influence. The published lectures in Irish Poetry After Feminism contends with the legacy of feminism in Irish literature as a tool for reading poetry. 22 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 652. 23 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 652.

9 body,” including gender and within culture, history, and place.24 Boland’s opening to “Anna

Liffey” demonstrates such a consideration, claiming a position from which to speak.

Discussions of Irish poetry and place typically adopt a few approaches.25 One approach takes up Irish nature writing, for example. Lucy Collins and Andrew Carpenter in The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics discuss and collect Irish nature poetry. The range of 1581-1819 is a long one, and so the manner in which nature is addressed is varied. Carpenter and Collins point out political associations, idealizations, pastoral practices, and the influence of science and philosophy. In charting the changing cultural practices of the periods and poets’ relationship to the natural world, they aim to demonstrate the importance of the environment in shaping Irish poetry, a force co-equal with political and cultural ones. They acknowledge place can be imagined, desired, threatening, and laborious, but that it has a profound effect on Irish writers. Indeed, the natural, which here means nonhuman, influence is evident in “Anna Liffey,”

There, in the hills above my house, The river Liffey rises in rush and ling heather and Black peat and bracken and strengthens To claim the city it narrated. Swans. Steep falls. Small towns. The smudged air and bridges of Dublin.26

In reflecting on the river, Boland documents specific elements with which the river interacts throughout its journey. In using both present and past tense, Boland lends a sense of continuity, one that acknowledges the longevity of the river and emphasizes its role in shaping the city. The

24 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 652. 25 Of course, the very act of naming Irish poetry denotes a place. 26 Boland, Collected Poems, 199.

10 repetition of h and s sounds contribute to a sense of movement as they mimic the noise of water.

Here, humans and nonhumans frame each other.

Another argument concerning poetry and place is driven by nationalism, one of the elements that Boland addresses in her poetry and Heaney too in “The Sense of Place” that can also be read in a larger postcolonial context.27 In Ireland, the Revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries encouraged such a national approach; anthologies such as The Field

Day Anthology of Irish Writing and even books such as Writing Home: Poetry and Place in

Northern Ireland, 1968-2008 have investigated issues associated with nation and identity.28 In combination with the national tradition, Irish poetry has been associated with the pastoral. Donna

Potts in Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition draws this link in her investigation of six Irish poets. She focuses on depictions of landscapes and the tensions between the human and nonhuman, often emphasizing ecocritical and sometimes post-pastoral tendencies.29 She charts the pastoral back to Theocritus’ Idylls and then investigates the use of pastoral in John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Medbh

McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Moya Cannon, and Paula Meehan. Ultimately, she claims the pastoral as a continuing genre:

Pastoral poetry seeks to depict the human relation to the natural world, emphasizing the harmony between nature and human nature, the contrast between city and country, and the underlying tension between civilization and nature. The pastoral poet selects details from rural life, enhancing and reordering them “to create a world of the imagination, invested with urban ongoing for an ideally simple life in nature.” All pastoral implies an

27 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). 28 Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. I-III (Lawrence Hill, Derry, Northern Ireland: Field Day Publications, 1991); Elmer Kennedy Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968-2008 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 29 Donna Potts, Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

11 “awareness of two opposed worlds: country and city, simple and complex, imaginary and real.”30

Potts’ nuanced readings of each poet demonstrate the various ways that contemporary Irish poets have responded to ideas of Ireland and the pastoral. She observes that the pastoral can emphasize a “retreat [as] an end in itself” as well as a “retreat [as] a means to an end—one that leaves the reader ‘changed and charged upon return for more informed action in the present.’”31 Potts reads such potential for change as possibility for environmental action, which we might extend it to emphasize our responsibility to all that we meet within places: cultures, landscapes, nonhumans, localities, and global influences.

Twinning the pastoral and memory studies, Oona Frawley’s Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature is concerned with exploring how landscape serves as a signifier for history and culture, so that nature is directly associated with nostalgia. While place often features in these studies, it takes a secondary position to time. Frawley begins with Irish literature from the early Medieval period through the bardic poets and then focuses on the twentieth century in her sweeping view of pastoral poetry and nostalgia. She contends that the colonial state and post-colonial state influence how cultures interact with place, shaping the way that landscape is understood.32 Her aim is to demonstrate that “so intimate are nature and nostalgia as themes, in fact, that Irish literature’s use of nature is characterized by a continual heightening over time of the nostalgia present in the traditional pastoral mode derived from

Theocritus and Virgil, resulting in what I will call the nostalgic mode, or, more simply, the Irish

30 Potts, Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, 2. She is quoting David Young, The Heart’s Forest and Sukanta Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments. 31 Potts, Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, x. 32 Oona Frawley, Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (Newbridge, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2005), 1.

12 pastoral.”33 As a result, Frawley contends that “[n]ostalgia for landscape and natural beauty has consequently become focused, more often than not, on the lost possibility of the rural ideal.”34

Frawley’s investigation of the pastoral has influenced my approach; yet, the manner in which these contemporary Irish women address issues of landscape and place deserves a more nuanced and expanded reading. Ireland has changed as a result of increased globalization and modernization so that “younger poets have emerged in a changed world, one where human lives are subject to seemingly unstoppable forces of globalized markets, technology, and resurgent religious and national fundamentalism, to a point unimaginable in the 1970s and 1980s.”35

Certainly all of the poets in this dissertation seem to be wary of any “rural ideal.”

The significance of memory Lucy Collins pursues in her study Contemporary Irish

Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement. This excellent investigation of contemporary poets takes up their relationship to personal memory as well as collective memory: “Their attention to the moral, political and aesthetic dimensions of past, present and future covertly and implicitly critiques received versions of history as well as problematizing simplified acts of remembrance.”36 Place is a component of her analysis as “the experience of space may be our first entry into temporality and, some have argued, our predominant means of remembering the world.”37 Collins acknowledges the ways that places have been understood as inviting or excluding, and the poets’ physical, emotional, and psychological proximity to places real and imagined. Personal and collective memory are implicated in place, as they are in history and the

33 Frawley, Irish Pastoral, 4. 34 Frawley, Irish Pastoral, 136. 35 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 653. 36 Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 3. 37 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 4.

13 body, two additional focuses of Collins’ work. As these overviews demonstrate, conceptions of place have been central to criticism of Irish poetry.

Towards a Lyrical Topography

This dissertation has emerged out of the long conversations regarding poetry, Ireland, and women. I am interested in how women writers are confronting ideas of place, specifically their cataloging of minutiae within places and the ways through which they challenge perception. It seems that there is an acknowledgment of the nation and an acknowledgment of gender, but that what is going on is more complex and interesting than an investigation under either of those guises would allow. As Clutterbuck writes, for poets whose work has

emerged since the mid-1990s … the situation is different. Most of these poets are of the generation of women for whom “unquestioned personal independence was … the norm.” The groundwork of protest regarding gender inequality having already been effected by their foremothers, they have been able to take for granted the fact that their female identity can be integrated with their witness to political, social, and personal experience: their major early focus instead has been on accessing, in their different ways, the freedoms of transcendence and indeterminacy.38

To examine new approaches to understanding place is to confront these issues of indeterminacy, positioning local and situated observations within scales that extend around the world. The writing of the women included in this dissertation is concerned with politics at some level; after all, the study of relationality is intimately bound to conceptions of politics and living together.

Many of the poems addressed in the following chapters take up details and investigate miniatures whether of domesticity, museum objects, paintings, landscapes, and words. There are gendered implications in these preoccupations both in their size and associations.39 What these poems do

38 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 652. 39 Susan Rosenbaum offers a detailed investigation of miniatures in her discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III, noting that “[a]ttention to detail, born of gendered confinement,

14 so effectively is notice, calling attention to details and in so doing, locate the figure within a dynamic and changing space. The effect is a constant navigation of scale which emphasizes that depiction of place in lyric poetry is a matter of looking in, around, and out.

These are movements of orientation and spatialization. When I use the term spatiality, I mean to indicate the negotiation of location which entails investigating proximity, boundaries, and what is missing. This negotiation happens on a physical level of the body in space, but it also happens on a metaphorical level through its treatment of ideas and culture, and on a textual level when discussing lyric poetry. At a textual level, it gestures to the first two, but also contends with the placement of words on the page, the formal components of the poem, and the relationship of poems to others within the collection and between publications. The term spatiality stresses the inevitable and unavoidable connections that the poets or speakers make. For example, in “Anna

Liffey” the speaker records observations of the elements of place and seeks to locate herself geographically and culturally through these observations:

The seabirds come in form the coast. The city wisdom is they bring rain. I watch them from my doorway. I see them as arguments of origin – Leaving a harsh force on the horizon Only to find it Slanting and falling elsewhere.40

In the above stanza, the seabirds are both city and sea inhabits, as the speaker situates herself in relation to city and river. In addition, she situates her observations within cultural norms and folk

suggests that it is a representational strategy imposed as much as chosen. … Like sewing, amateur watercolor painting is an art of detail, and as such, female artists were able to practice it with propriety”; see Susan Rosenbaum, “Bishop and the Miniature Museum,” Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 2 (2005): 79, Project MUSE. 40 Boland, Collected Poems, 202.

15 beliefs. Such situating and re-situating continues throughout the poem and highlights the importance of recognizing and investigating relations.

Relationality of place moves us towards a dynamic, topological understanding of place.

Human geographer Doreen Massey contends that place is “a constellation of processes rather than a thing” by which she means that the economic, cultural, and political contexts of humans are “co-constituted” with the geologic, meteorologic, and life cycles of nonhumans.41 These influence each other within specific locales and also indicates that the connections and influence occur between places. Massey’s proposal of relationality and the “throwntogetherness” of place offers a productive means of engaging with poetry and place.42 Such meetings are confronted in

Boland’s “Anna Liffey,”

A river is not a woman. Although the names it finds, The history it makes And suffers – The Viking blades beside it, The muskets of the Redcoats, The flames of the Four Courts Blazing into it Are a sign.43

The lineation of this section of the poem suggests a river’s movements, curling around river banks and shaping the landscape. Yet water and earth are not the only forces that meet. Here, the river has been influenced by Viking and English invasions, by violence of revolution. Drawing, while resisting, the equation of woman with the river questions women’s associations with water

41 Massey, For Space, 141. This approach to place stands in contrast to earlier contentions that place was static, simplistic, essentializing and secondary to time and space. Space has traditionally been understood as the masculine, free flowing, wider world, while place has been relegated less significant and feminine. Massey complicates this relationship demonstrating how both are co-constituted and the product of interrelations. 42 Massey, For Space, 140. 43 Boland, Collected Poems, 201.

16 and as representations of Ireland. It both establishes and undercuts their shared associations with violence, perseverance, and silence. What this section demonstrates is that places are constituted by what meets, influenced by past events while also recombining to make new. Boland’s suggestion is that these meetings are what constitute people, too.

Recent criticism in sociology, geography, and philosophy has elucidated a relational understanding of place.44 In Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, Gerry Smyth charts the philosophical influences that have shaped recent developments. Although not without complications, Martin Heidegger has been one philosopher to challenge the way we understand place. He explains how being is related to dwelling in “Building, Thinking, Dwelling” and claims that to “dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving.”45 Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault have altered our understanding of space and place as lived experiences and opportunities for critique and resistance. Smyth claims that it is inevitable that old spatial practices undergo change; what is exciting are the “more contestable (and thus potentially more interesting) feelings of attraction, repugnance, and all points in between.”46 Recognizing these contestations enables a reading of poetry that considers issues of space together with issues of time, which dominated critical conversations in the twentieth century.47 By claiming that both space and place are constructed

44 This statement builds on the critical work of philosophers and theorists such as Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault, for example. Within the last ten years, critics such as Doreen Massey, Karen Barad, and Thomas Rickert have advocated for such an approach. In a specifically Irish context, critics Ian Davidson and Gerry Smyth have focused on the intersection of poetry and place. 45 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstrader (New York: Perennial Library, 1971), 149, emphasis in original. 46 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 22. 47 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 22.

17 and must be understood relationally, we complicate the binary of space versus place and “combat localist or nationalist claims to place based on eternal essential, and in consequence exclusive, characteristics of belonging: to retain, while reformulating, an appreciation of the specific and the distinctive while refusing the parochial.”48 It is a challenge to reassess our active participation in and responsibility to the world, especially when we understand world as the social and ecological spheres, as well as contemporary and immediate experience.

When thinking place, Catriona Clutterbuck introduces an important caveat for the poets in this dissertation whose work belongs to two generations, with McGuckian in one, Groarke,

Berkeley Tolchin, and O’Sullivan in the other, and Cannon and Hardie bridging the two.

Clutterbuck writes that “[for] both generations of women poets … women’s assumed immersion in sensual bodily life and grounded self-presence has had to be interrogated as a restrictive block to their full self-enablement.”49 In discussing poetry by women and place, care must be taken not to re-inscribe the essentialist and gendered associations that have been drawn between Irish women and landscape, sensory experience, and language.50 Topography implies land, but the sea and skies have their own topographies as well. Ailbhe McDaid reads water as “a means of circumnavigating the masculine topographical tradition of poetry rooted in Ireland,” especially for Irish women poets in America, with water’s “inherently feminine principles of fertility and fluidity [that] propose alternative modes of engagement while the significance of water to the

48 Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004): 6, JSTOR. 49 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 653. 50 See Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature; Boland, Object Lessons; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “What Foremothers,” in The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, ed. Theresa O’Connor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); Leontia Flynn, Reading Medbh McGuckian (Sallins, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2014).

18 migrant consciousness retains its historical relevance.”51 McDaid offers some interesting implications for the freedom and nostalgia water’s associations contribute to the migrant experience, but it seems necessary to caution against a simplistic equation of women with water as a response to the traditional equation of women with land. In taking up topography, I hope to complicate instead of reinforce any gendered dualisms. To confront relationality and connectivity means questioning what it means to be human, where, and how do we respond to the others we meet.52 Such approaches can do much for opening up possibilities in poetry. They help in examining the context and objects of the poems themselves, investigating how the poets conceptualize place and its many negotiations. Doing so allows for a more situated knowledge of self-in-world, complicating an anthropocentric perspective. The approaches are also a way to consider the formal implications of boundary building in the poetry I examine in this dissertation, which complicates each poet’s use of lyric forms.

Lyric

Boland plays with form in “Anna Liffey.” S sounds continue to mimic the river’s noise and movement even when the poet turns her attention from topographic description:

Dusk is coming. Rain is moving east from the hills.

If I could see myself I would see

51 Ailbhe McDaid, “‘I Mean It As No Ordinary Return’: Poetic Migrancy in the Poetry of Vona Groarke and Sara Berkeley,” Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 13 (2013): 49, Humanities International Complete. 52 The number of publications that deal with these themes continues to grow, as do the conferences (take, for example, the 2015 American Conference of Irish Studies’ theme: Irish Speculations: Space, Time, History). Adam Hanna’s recent publication Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) is just one example that shows the continued engagement with space in Irish literary studies.

19 A woman in a doorway Wearing the colours that go with red hair. Although my hair is no longer red.53

An ageing woman Finds no shelter in language. She finds instead Single words she once loved Such as “summer” and “yellow” And “sexual” and “ready” Have suddenly become dwellings For someone else – Rooms and a roof under which someone else Is welcome, not her.54

Again, the stanzas consist of mostly single syllable words balanced with two syllable words so that “suddenly” is emphasized by its length. Here, too, Boland confronts what has been omitted from lyric poetry, ageing women who are not hags awaiting transformation. The words playfully nod to the constraints of the lyric and stanzas’ association with room. Words are “dwellings” except their occupants are being ousted. Thus Boland questions what role lyrics play in exclusion.

To begin to define the lyric may be more complicated than establishing the theoretical lens for space and place. The lyric is the dominant form within which Medbh McGuckian, Moya

Cannon, and Vona Groarke write. When we discuss the lyric, we often begin with an understanding that it developed out of songs composed for accompaniment on a lyre. Heather

Dubrow demonstrates how the lyric has had changing definitions in “Lyric Forms.”55 Some critics have attempted to define the lyric through formal qualities, others through its relationship

53 Boland, Collected Poems, 199-200. 54 Boland, Collected Poems, 203. 55 Heather Dubrow provides a concise, but insightful overview of these various approaches in “Lyric Forms,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 114-128.

20 with temporality. Still other critics have emphasized the isolation of the speaker or the relationship between speaker and audience, and feminists have used the lyric to explore social constructions. Most critics agree that definitions of the lyric must be historically specific and must allow for nuances and multiplicity.56

Still, the emphasis on feeling has continued. John Stuart Mill helps to shape how we discuss lyric in “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” when he argues,

that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.57

Mill advocates for a familiar version of the lyric, one in which the individual experiences a self- imposed isolation, turning his back on society.58 The focus of this kind of lyrical categorizing is on the “I,” the speaker of the poem. Attending to the “lyrical I” and Adorno’s contention that the lyric is social are components that I investigate.59 As Juliana Spahr maintains, “The lyric space of intimacy has the potential to be an exemplary space for examining political intimacies, race and gender intimacies, and community intimacies in addition to its relentless attention to more

56 Dubrow, “Lyric Forms,” 114. 57 John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 1833, https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/jsmill/diss-disc/poetry/poetry.s01.html. 58 In Mythologies, Yeats writes, “We make out of the quarrel with other, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry”; see Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 331. 59 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 339-350.

21 personal intimacy.”60 If place is always multiple, always becoming, then what is the lyric and what happens to the lyric voice when situated in and engaging with place?

Jonathan Culler in “Lyric, History, and Genre” argues, there is “always a ‘you’ in the lyric.”61 Whether the other is a past or present self, a lover or child, a house or place, an unanticipated reader, the lyric poems in this dissertation are an address to others. Allen

Grossman maintains that there must be the “mutually honorable reciprocity of both” reader and writer. And that “[i]n the matter of poetry, everybody is trying to say the same thing. Your business and my business is with the commonplaces, helping one another to the world. … The important thing is to be faithful to the event.”62 Inherent in this versioning of the lyric are attentiveness, connectivity, and responsibility. An I-Thou relationship is established from the beginning, whether the addressee is human, god, or an element. Therefore, the address to the natural world aligns with the agency ascribed to the entities in the theoretical framework I laid out for place above. Understanding the lyric as a process with a speaker and an addressee emphasizes the importance of responding and acknowledging central to the understanding of space and place as relational. Lyric practice makes central an active relationship with the world.63 Ian Davidson illuminates some of these same relationships in Ideas of Space in

Contemporary Poetry and claims, “The poem is constructed through the inclusion of context not

60 Juliana Spahr, “Introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 565. 61 Jonathan Culler, “Lyric, History, and Genre,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 75. 62 Allen Grossman, “Summa Lyrica,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 423. 63 Lyn Hejinian also maintains this perspective: “Poetics is not personal. A poetics gets formed in and as a relationship with the world”; see Lyn Hejinian quoted in Spahr, “Introduction,” 561.

22 its exclusion, and through an engaged and embodied involvement in the world and everyday life rather than isolation from it.”64 Lyrics emphasize relationships through careful patterning of words, sounds, and images. What this multiple lens leads to is a lyrical topography: a way to question the address of the lyric and to observe the sensorial qualities of the poems, while investigating the spatiality of the lyric contextually and aesthetically.

Ecocriticism and Poetry

Writing in “An Irish Georgic,” Eavan Boland continues an inquiry she began more than fifty years ago in the late 1960s. She presses on the ideas of poetry, place, and women—how the three intersect in particularly Irish terms. The speaker pulls together threads from Dublin, Virgil, and the River Liffey. She remembers the flooding and damming of the river and the “dissembling” in

“the years of greed” which leads her to question who reads the classics and “who cares / whether a georgic works.”65 After citing part of Virgil’s invocation to the gods, Boland claims the necessity of the georgic, saying, “If there is an ethic to georgic / let it be the down to earth and literal, / sifting, critical and absolute devotion to a way of life.”66 The pastoral, whose origin is traced to Theocritus, praises the country, the lives of shepherds, and mourns their loss, while the georgic descends from Virgil and is an instructive poem. The priorities and values of a society are in place, and the georgic is means to demonstrate how individuals can achieve them. In that way, it can also serve as a warning that the audience must not fail to care for the resources

64 Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (London: Palgrave, 2007), 80. 65 Eavan Boland, A Woman Without a Country (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014), 55. Peter Fallon has published a translation of Virgil’s Georgics; see Virgil, Georgics, trans. Peter Fallon (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009). 66 Boland, A Woman Without a Country, 54-55.

23 necessary for life and livelihood.67 Such devotion is the focus of Boland’s poem, and she probes the ways is might help:

Surely the hope is a story can stay open with its anthem of small details singing, its cup still on the dresser

and all of it unfinished in this form that needs little enough to become a hymn to the durable and daily implement, the stored possibility of another day. And nothing more.68

Boland takes up the georgic as she has done with the pastoral to resituate the tradition and accommodate for her experience as an Irish woman and poet. “An Irish Georgic” suggests that the small details of life and the working through those details in poetry is a means of living responsibly. The “ethic,” then, is that a georgic can turn into an ode of praise by honoring the life lived, the place in which that life unfolds, and being open to an unknown futurity. Boland’s poetry has made central the interlinking of history with the present, attending to particular places.

There has been a more recent turn to situate Irish poetry in an ecocritical context looking toward ecology to read Irish literature of multiple periods. Christine Cusick’s edited collection

Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts is evidence of this turn, as is James

McElroy’s article “Ecocriticism & Irish Poetry: A Preliminary Outline.”69 The goal of ecocriticism is to “evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as

67 See Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form (New York: Ecco, 2017), 293-301, 335-343. 68 Boland, A Woman Without a Country, 55-56. 69 Christine Cusick, ed., Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010); James McElroy, “Ecocriticism & Irish Poetry: A Preliminary Outline,” Estudios Irelandeses 6 (2011): 54-69. In more general terms, ecocriticism is explored in Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: women and the environment (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995); Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Justyna Kostkowska, Ecocriticism and Women Writers: Environmentalist Poetics of Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).

24 responses to environmental crisis.”70 Gerry Smyth maintains that “geography must reawaken the notion of a situated humanity and its attempt to dwell on and with the earth” since humans are inherently bound within its relations.71 These approaches examine the importance of the environment and the independence of nonhuman things. Since the 1990s, the move to investigate the relationship between people, writing, and the environment has been the focus of ecocriticism in its many variants. Ecocriticism may now encompass a variety of approaches, but its most well-known and inclusive definition is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”72 In an Irish context, these studies build out of an appreciation and recognition of Irish poetry on nature, to which the Irish claim a special affinity. As Heaney writes in “The God in the Tree,” “early Irish nature poetry registers certain sensations and makes a springwater music out of certain feelings in a way unmatched in any other European language.”73 He goes on to quote Kuno Meyer’s assessment that early Irish nature “poems occupy a unique position in the literature of the world. To seek out and watch and love Nature, in its tiniest phenomena as in its grandest, was given to no people so early and so fully as the

Celt.”74 While a bold, and perhaps specious, claim, Meyer’s stance is nonetheless picked up not only in Heaney’s work but in Carpenter and Collins’ insistence on the centrality of nature in Irish poetry.

To speak of place and nature in Irish poetry is also to acknowledge the history of dinnseanchas or poems of place, which I take up in more detail in the fourth chapter. Heaney

70 Kerridege and Sammells quoted in Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 7-8. 71 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 8. 72 Cheryll Glotfelty quoted in Lawrence Buell, “Ecocritism: Some Emerging Trends,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 88, JSTOR. 73 Heaney, Preoccupations, 182. 74 Quoted in Heaney, Preoccupations, 182.

25 defines them as “poems and tales which relate the original meanings of place names and constitute a form of mythological etymology.”75 Dinnseanchas combine real and folk history, mythology, ideas of loss and preservation, landscape, and land as a script to be read in poetry. As

John Wilson Foster acknowledges,

Named places, sometimes defined and identified by a natural feature (a mountain, a bog, a strand, a river, a natural well, etc.), did not generate simply local lore, but also a topography intimately bound up with families, ownership, genealogy. … Places, place lore, place-names: the landscape of Ireland was seen and read by the Irish through powerful cultural lenses.76

The act of reading and describing landscape falls within a wider tradition of topographical poetry. The topographical poem is a local poem of place, a scenic poem that “aims at describing specifically named actual localities.”77 They flourished in the eighteenth century, long after the dinnseanchas tradition began, and have continued to the present. Of these poems, John Barrell notes they “attempt to give a sense of the individuality of the place being described,” emphasizing the importance of particularity and perspective.78 While many critics have disparaged topographical poems as merely scenic descriptions, the mode has continued to be used by poets writing in English.79

Lucy Collins and Andrew Carpenter recognize the history of the topographical poem in their introduction to The Irish Poet and the Natural World and use Samuel Johnson’s definition to delineate the mode as “a species of composition … of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishment as may

75 Heaney, Preoccupations, 131. 76 John Wilson Foster as cited in Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 47. 77 Robert Aubin quoted in Stephen Burt, “Scenic, or Topographical, Poetry,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 598. 78 Quoted in Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 599. 79 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 598.

26 be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation.”80 For Irish poetry in the eighteenth century, this link between landscape, history, and judgement “offered suggestive possibilities at a time of revolutionary renewal.”81 Since morals were read in the landscape, and the places most often mentioned held cultural significance, the topographical poem allowed the poet to interpret moral messages which emphasized transformation as well as harmony.82 Collins and Carpenter also note that “from the early years of the nineteenth century, landscape poetry became less a representation of a static space and more a reflection of the poet’s personal perspective.”83 They draw links between landscape and topographical poems, which are

“associated, through particularity of place, with ideas of regional and national formation. In this respect it calls attention to the human gaze—the subject who is observing and interpreting the landscape and, to an extent, controlling it.”84 Gerry Smyth, along with John Wilson Foster, notes that the impulse towards harmony, in an Irish context, produced an attempt “to find an artistic solution to the reality of ‘discord, excess and imbalance.’”85

To read the topographical poem in Irish literature is to link it to a larger conversation of

Irish nature writing. Speaking of dinnseanchas and early Irish nature poetry, Seamus Heaney notes a “surge towards praise, this sudden apprehension of the world as light, as illumination, this is what remains central to our first nature poetry and makes it a unique inheritance.”86 Many

80 Quoted in Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins, “Introduction,” in The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 43. 81 Carpenter and Collins, “Introduction,” 43. 82 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 64. 83 Carpenter and Collins, “Introduction,” 44. 84 Carpenter and Collins, “Introduction,” 43-44. 85 Gerry Smyth along with John Wilson Foster in Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 64. 86 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations, 189.

27 topographical poems can also highlight the difficulty of the poetic process and the gap between what language accomplishes and of actually being somewhere: “The harder a modern topographical poem (and not only a poem about ‘nature’) works to capture the experience of a place, the more it may alert us to the aspects of such experience that both precede, and evade, language, the aspects for which you just have to be there.”87 Contemporary topographical poetry and poetry of place takes up creating “versions of the ‘here’ and ‘now.’”88 Sight and perception are central to topographical poems which can show an “‘evenhanded, instantaneous and outward-looking flow of attention’ to ground and air, sight, sound and scent, by which ‘we are connected to the people and things around us—as part of a family, a crowd, a community, a species, the biosphere.’”89 This sense of place as dynamic, experiential, local, and discursive forms the basis for the readings that follow. So too does the sense that recognizing place means coming to terms with the connections that inhere within it.

Topographical poetry in Ireland was shaped by social, political, economic, and linguistic contexts. John Waters points out that many Anglo-Irish topographical poems are thus failures of the genre. Instead of invoking harmony, they demonstrate disorder and discontinuity.90 His reading of the topographical poem emphasizes the difference of the Irish landscape from the

English, seeing in it regional and national formation. Waters acknowledges that “Irish places … disclose more than one story about more than one culture, so that to invoke one always risks invoking another.”91 He goes on to demonstrate how some topographical poetry of Ireland in

87 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 610. 88 Stewart quoted in Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 612. 89 Tony Hiss and Stephen Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 602. 90 John Waters, “Topographical Poetry and the Politics of Culture in Ireland, 1772-1820,” in Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Rebert F. Gleckner, ed. Ghislaine McDayter, Guinn Batten, and Barry Milligan (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 224. 91 Waters, “Topographical Poetry,” 227.

28 stabilizing the landscape, attempts to stabilize an idea of the Irish nation.92 Throughout the twentieth century, the form and approach of the Irish topographical poem continued to alter.

W.B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Coole Park” could be included in the mode as well as work by Patrick Kavanaugh, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, and Ciaran Carson; and much of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry addresses elements of place, belonging, and vision inherent within the topographical tradition.93 Topographical poetry has a wide presence in English and American poetry as well, although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to investigate all of it permutations and parallels. Contemporary topographical poetry takes up both real and imagined places. These poems through formal practices challenge perspective making nuanced situating and orientation practices central components of the work. Explaining what it is to be “here, now” means that contemporary poets attend to the relationships established within and between places as well as within and between poems. What is exciting about pursuing contemporary topographical poetry are the potentials it offers to reconceive landscape, the local and global, personal, and communal, human and nonhuman, and lyric.

The Figure in the Landscape

There is now A woman in a doorway.

It has taken me All my strength to do this.

92 Waters, “Topographical Poetry,” 237, 241. 93 Eric Falci provides an overview of what he calls poems of place, including references to the development of Irish poems of place, in “Place, Space, and Landscape,” in A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, ed. Nigel Alderman and C.D. Blanton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 200-220.

29 Becoming a figure in a poem.94

As Boland’s “Anna Liffey” shows, the idea of the topographical poem offers a return to the image of a figure in the landscape. Actively situating, challenging, and resituating that figure are the actions that the poems included in this dissertation depict. As readers, then, we engage with their immediate focus while also acknowledging our own positions and reading practices. The subsequent chapters investigate perception, exploring the relationship of lyric form and the speaker’s situated experience of just having been “there.” The first chapter reads three of Medbh

McGuckian’s poems about her seaside home, Marconi’s Cottage. In highlighting the particularities of the place and suggesting the connections beyond the site through Marconi’s use of the telegraph, McGuckian demonstrates a dynamic understanding of place. Further, the chapter explores how McGuckian engages in networked lyrics through her process of collaged palimpsests. Chapter two expands the idea of networks to address Moya Cannon’s curation and orientation. These relationships consist of geographically and historically linked places often signified by found objects. Cannon considers a variety of objects, and her poems act as display cases for readers to contend with minutiae, complicating the objects’ positions. Cannon’s reaching out to other objects, people, times, and places aligns with Vona Groarke’s investigation of houses and relations in the third chapter. Framing and perspective are vital to Groarke’s poetry so that speakers and readers are confronted with particular images and situated descriptions that offer momentary and fragmented experiences of belonging before giving way. Many of the poems in the fourth chapter do the same, seeking to distill place and experience while recognizing that it is always changing according to our movements, interactions, and memories.

The figures in these poems are located in place and address localized issues, images, and

94 Boland, Collected Poems, 201.

30 experiences. Yet what each also contends with are larger networks of connection and topographic relations, making for an engaging poetry always in the process of investigating scale.

As lyrical topography centers issues of place and lyric practice, one of the important elements to take into consideration is position and orientation. As the OED confirms, orientation means to use landmarks in order to determine a relative position.95 What is implied in the definition, but important to draw out here, is that orienting involves being embedded in place, being aware of the relationships that constitute it, and being flexible with the possibilities created in the places we encounter. To orient, then, becomes a means of negotiating one’s own challenging positioning and responding to the people, creatures, and features of landscape.

Human geographer, Doreen Massey is again helpful here. She claims that

what is special about place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or of the eternity of the hills. Rather what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and a geography of thens and theres); and a negotiation which must take place within and between both human and nonhuman. This in no way denies a sense of wonder.96

Massey calls this re-conceptualization the “event of place.”97 To think of these entangled trajectories is to experience a “here” and “now” through human and nonhuman interactions, the then-and-there of history, and the sense of wonder in poetry. Place, then, is inherently relational, calling into question boundaries and their ethical implications.

Places and lyrics, then, are formed through relationships which construct and challenge borders. There are many boundaries in Boland’s “Anna Liffey”: seasons, weather, gardens, city

95 See The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “orientation,” Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com. 96 Massey, For Space, 140. 97 Massey, For Space, 140.

31 limits, landscapes, countries, and bodies. As the poem details,

Autumn rain is Scattering and dripping From car-ports And clipped hedges. The gutters are full.

When I came here I had neither Children nor country. The trees were arms. The hills were dreams.

I was free to imagine a spirit In the blues and greens, The hills and fogs Of a small city.

My children were born. My country took hold of me. A vision in a brick house. Is it only love That makes a place?98

The poem frames the borders by alternating parallelism and dependence. The above stanzas are acts of balance as the poet pursues her relationship to “children” and “country” as well as the relationship between “children” and “country.” To balance these two, the stanzas consist of twos:

“The trees were arms. / The hills were dreams” and “In the blues and greens, / The hills and fogs.” Even the syntax Boland employs creates a rhythm of doubling, which leads readers to emphasize the question “Is it only love / That makes a place?” The elements listed above put tension on this question as trees, hills, and houses are named elements of the places Boland records. Yet the question centers the concept of perception, of being embedded in and

98 Boland, Collected Poems, 203-204.

32 responding to places, a response that is inevitably shaped by our loves as well as by our fears.

Whatever those relationships are, they help to construct place.

Such questions of interrelatedness are explored in an essay called “The Mesh” by

Timothy Morton. His term mesh is useful because it “can mean both the holes in a network and the threading between them. It suggests both hardness and delicacy. … By extension, ‘mesh’ can mean ‘a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled; a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or circumstances; a snare.’”99 There is not an outside from which to gain an absolute perspective nor is there an absolute center. There is, however, immense potential in such an attentive, entangled approach. As Edna Longley writes, “[t]he image of the web is female, feminist, connective—as contrasted with male polarization. So is the ability to inhabit a range of relations rather than a single allegiance.”100 What is exciting is that the throwntogetherness of place demands something from each of us: that we negotiate, that we participate, that we “respond to our temporary meeting-up” which is grounded in “a world which demands the ethics and the responsibility of facing up to the event; where the situation is unprecedented and the future is open.”101 If we work to understand the event of lyric and place and their reliance on both human and nonhuman actors, then discussion of poetry and place can become even more interesting than looking at the divides reinforced in pastoral poetry between city and country, ideal and real, or the dualisms reinforced in postcolonial studies between center and periphery, one nation and another, physical borders and imagined ones. Instead, we can take into account all of these elements and how they meet in place in complicated ways. What I hope

99 Timothy Morton, “The Mesh,” in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (New York: Routledge, 2011), 24. 100 Longley, The Living Stream, 195. Longley seems to imply that this claim is universal, although she applies it to poets from Ireland. 101 Massey, For Space, 141.

33 lyrical topography can help us to do is to reconceive of ways to talk about spatiality in poetry.

Forms matter; borders matter; places matter. Participating in place demands response at levels we are both aware and unaware of. It demands ethical engagements as we interact and make decisions. The poets discussed in the chapters that follow are engaged with webs of connection and influence that demonstrate what it is to be “here, now.”

CHAPTER 2

WRITING IN PLACE: MEDBH MCGUCKIAN AND MARCONI’S COTTAGE

Medbh McGuckian has written prolifically and published more than twenty volumes since

1980.1 Born in 1950 in Belfast, her name is often associated with poets from the north of Ireland, including Seamus Heaney, who was her lecturer at Queens University and whose work

McGuckian admires. She has also been read together with Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní

Chuilleanáin, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill as poets responding to the traditionally male Irish literary canon. Her work addresses issues of domesticity, bodies, and women’s experiences, threads that continue throughout all of her collections. In addition, the poetry takes up political events, historic and contemporary, to investigate ideas associated with the Irish nation, prisoners, and violence. Her most recent collections combine these threads while marking a return in emphasizing women’s experiences. She works by creating active collages at once layered and allusive, but particular in her deployment of language. A word or phrase inspires a parallel word or phrase and then continues expanding and resonating within the poem and between collections.

As a result, her works ask for active engagement from readers whose collaborative efforts help to create moving and challenging texts. Taking up the concepts of collage and cartography is to find

1 The wide breadth of these collections demonstrates a dynamic development. The poems addressed in this chapter come from Marconi’s Cottage (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1991; reprint, Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2001), afterwards indicated in-text as MC; The Currach Requires No Harbours (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2006), afterwards indicated in-text as TCRNH; and My Love Has Fared Inland (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2008), afterwards indicated in-text as MLHFI.

35 complementary ways of reading McGuckian’s poetry.

Sarah Fulford asks a related question in her chapter “Medbh McGuckian’s

Disidentification”: “What kind of maps are McGuckian’s poems providing, what are the politics of her poetic cartography and does this constitute a critical geography?”2 This question aligns with an inquiry into lyrical topography and raises additional questions: are McGuckian’s locations no-places or, rather, how are McGuckian’s places constructed to engage with a poetic praxis and respond to issues of locality, connectivity, creativity, and community? “If we think space relationally,” as Doreen Massey argues, “then it is the sum of all our connections, and in that sense utterly grounded, and those connections may go round the world.”3 McGuckian’s poetic practice filled as it is with allusions, convergences, and dissolutions enacts a critical and engaged response to the world. Her poetry negotiates between private reflection and public representation, creating a synesthetic collage. As she says,

I never write just blindly. I never sit down without an apparatus. I always have a collection of words – it’s like a bird building a nest – I gather materials over the two weeks, or whatever … I never sit down without those because otherwise you would just go mad, trying to think of words.4

McGuckian’s collage practice demonstrates the complex negotiations and networks that frame our lives. Osip Mandelstam wrote, “Every poet is a ‘disturber of sense’—that is, instead of repeating the ready-made opinions of his time, he extracts new sense from his own understanding of the world.”5 McGuckian’s poetry is one of sense and simultaneity, collapsing

2 Sarah Fulford, Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Literature (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), 184. 3 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 185. 4 Quoted in Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 141. 5 Cited in Shannon Hipp, “‘Things of the Same Kind that Are Separated Only by Time’: Reading the Notebooks of Medbh McGuckian,” Irish University Review 39, no. 1 (2009): 145, JSTOR. Hipp uses this quotation as a parallel for McGuckian’s work.

36 and expanding time, while it investigates what we can know.

Difficult as the poetry can be, it nonetheless demonstrates a deep engagement with a complex construction of space that is not reductively national nor strictly personal. It is one that is deeply concerned with drawing connections textually, geologically, culturally, historically, and personally. In this chapter, I examine three poems by McGuckian: “Marconi’s Cottage,” “The

Muse of Electricity,” and “South of Mars.” Each of these poems reflects upon McGuckian’s seaside house in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim. With nearly twenty years between writing the first poem, “Marconi’s Cottage,” and the others, the selection demonstrates her prolonged engagement with a single site and provides the opportunity to read her cartographic and critical geographic practice. Taking up three of the poems McGuckian wrote about the cottage, this chapter explores their relation to space. Ultimately, McGuckian’s lyrical and topographic practices center on convergences and connections between ideas, states of being, and language.

Much criticism has focused on the associations of gender, nation, and poetry in

McGuckian’s work, as is evidenced by Patricia Boyle Haberstroh’s chapter on McGuckian in

Women Creating Women.6 As Elmer Kennedy-Andrews notes, “McGuckian … is more properly to be seen as engaged in a process of (self-)discovery. It is a mark of the ambition and audacity of the poet that, setting herself in adversarial relationship with the hegemonic discourses, she should undertake a project of no less moment than that of reinventing the world.”7 Criticism of

6 Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, Women Creating Women (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996). See also Guinn Batten, “Boland, McGuckian, Ní Chuilleanáin and the Body of the Nation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Mathew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 169-188; Clair Wills Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Leontia Flynn, Reading Medbh McGuckian (Sallins, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2014). 7 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968-2008 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 226.

37 McGuckian’s work considering gender and nation highlight how McGuckian’s textual practice and subject matter center the body, women’s experiences, the disenfranchised, and create space outside of hegemonic narratives. We must take care, however, when reading McGuckian’s work not to (re)inscribe a critical practice of investigating the contours of one self-centered individual.

For while McGuckian’s poetry may be complex, her aesthetic practice, as her diaries indicate, is intimately bound with a continuous negotiation of the world: other writers, diverse interests, wide-ranging experiences, objects, environments, and relationships.

This reinvention of the world in her poetry has also necessitated a reinvention of poetic practice. More recently, critics have focused on the process of McGuckian’s allusive, layered, image driven work. One of the critics most engaged with McGuckian’s textual praxis is Shane

Alcobia-Murphy who has written extensively about McGuckian’s use of source texts, crafting her poems from words and phrases gathered from disparate, often obscure, and unacknowledged material.8 Since she uses unacknowledged source material and combines it with her own words, we might say that McGuckian takes up Emily Dickinson’s charge to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”9 Such truth telling can, at times, be difficult. Alcobia-Murphy’s main aim in Medbh

McGuckian: The Poetics of Exemplarity is to demonstrate the usefulness of reading

McGuckian’s poetry in light of her source texts. He argues that doing so offers the potential for

“intertextual relations [that] can provide meanings which readers might otherwise miss and

8 Of her practice, McGuckian says, “You must respect the word. Each individual word has to be accountable. … [But] I like to find a word living in a context and then pull it out of its context. It’s like they are growing in a garden and I pull them out of the garden and put them into my garden, and yet hope they take with them some of their original soil, wherever I got them”; quoted in Helen Blakeman, “‘I am listening in black and white to what speaks to me in blue’: Medbh McGuckian Interviewed by Helen Blakeman,” Irish Studies Review 11, no. 1 (2001): 67, emphasis in original. 9 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Back Bay Books, 1961), 506.

38 resolve some of the reviews’ confusion about the texts’ intelligibility, all without closing off the texts from further analysis.”10 Yet tracking down the source texts means scholars might get lost in warrens of their own making. Kennedy-Andrews notes that “McGuckian’s favored prior texts are out-of-the-way essays and biography which are not at all part of the common cultural currency” and can result in readers feeling “some resentment at being excluded from what is in effect a private language.”11 Some critics, then, have read McGuckian’s poetry as obfuscation, the ultimate lyric practice of being confessional and decodable only by the poet. McGuckian in interviews has sometimes only helped to encourage this approach.12 Needless to say, reception of

McGuckian’s work has been mixed; many praise its newness, sensuality, and textual splicing, while others condemn or dismiss it for its obscurity.13 What these conflicting responses point to is the position and role of the reader in confronting McGuckian’s poetry. Her very practice makes reading the work a textual, spatial, and timely negotiation. It offers the opportunity for different strategies of response. These strategies must embrace McGuckian’s approach to language and composition, which will not be pinned down, in order to follow the suggestiveness and expansions that her collages offer. Understanding McGuckian’s textual practice illuminates the lyric process, and locating source texts, when possible, can shift the way readers engage with the poems. Even when source texts are unknown, however, the poetry can still be revelatory. I

10 Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Medbh McGuckian: The Poetics of Exemplarity (Aberdeen: AHRC Center for Irish and Scottish Studies, 2012), 3. 11 Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home, 235. This framing of readers, however, seems to eschew their responsibility, good will, and honest engagement with texts. 12 She says, “I don’t think it matters if that comes over to the reader, because the personal message that I have to give to myself is the most important for me, and the poem may drift away”; see Medbh McGuckian quoted in Blakeman, “‘I am listening,’” 64. 13 Patricia Boyle Haberstroh’s Women Creating Women is a good place to begin for a sense of this mixed response. See also Borbála Foragó’s, Medbh McGuckian (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 5-9.

39 raise the issue of source texts not to revisit an old argument, but to press upon the ideas of lyric and relationality. Textually, it makes the mise en page a location for the convergence of voices:

“McGuckian’s is a poetry which invites (though not without anxiety) the intrusion of others, and welcomes as a source of inspiration the ‘fragmentation’ which results from full interaction with others.”14 The splicing within and between poems places McGuckian within a network beside other writers, not before nor after. The shifting, liquidity, soundscapes, and images of

McGuckian’s poetry reveal an ongoing network of interconnection tied together through synesthetic associations opening out possibilities for wider implications of a lyrical and topological practice.15

Mappa Mundi

In My Self, My Muse, Patricia Boyle Haberstroh collects a poem and prose piece from contemporary Irish women poets in order to demonstrate the relationships between the poets’ lives and their work. The responses are all varied and demonstrate different engagements with the creative process, becoming a poet, and fixing experience in lyric form. Haberstroh in editing the collection sought to mediate between how poets’ lives and works have been read: “[at one point] poetry has been read as confessional, where the boundary between life and poem is sometimes blurred; at the other, readers challenge the concept of any subjective voice, obliterating perceived links between poet and persona.”16 For the collection, Haberstroh asked

14 Sarah Broom quoted in Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 148. 15 Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home, 228. Flynn in Reading Medbh McGuckian discusses the poetic process and its implications at length. 16 Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, ed., “Introduction,” My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 3.

40 the poets included to consider the “ideas associated with the words woman, Irish, and poet.”17

Medbh McGuckian’s response to the prompt was her poem “Crystal Night” and a prose piece:

“Rescuers and White Cloaks: Diary, 1968-69.” The curated selections display pieces of

McGuckian’s diary entries from her late teenage years and begin to demonstrate how her work has considered the points identified by Haberstroh. This practice of keeping a diary means that we can situate McGuckian in a larger context of women’s writing, especially one that seeks to

“[mediate] their public and private identities.”18 Virginia Woolf in a diary entry from April 1919, reflects on what keeping such a record enables her to do:

I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously, and scrupulously, in fiction.19

Woolf used her diaries to experiment with form as well as document her life and reflections.

McGuckian’s early diary entries demonstrate this same negotiation and begin a writing practice that will continue, shaping the formal practices of her poetry.

The diary entries in “Rescuers and White Cloaks” are relatively brief and encompass personal reflection, quotidian notations, political and social events, together with considerations of poetry, prose, and the writing life. In this context, McGuckian reads George Eliot, Charlotte

Mew, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, John Donne, and Edith

Sitwell, among others. The sometimes oblique, elliptical, and allusive style that McGuckian develops to such great effect in her poetry is also evident here, as thoughts splice onto one another and she cites others’ works. The diary entry for August 1968 places McGuckian at

17 Haberstroh, “Introduction,” 15, emphasis in original. 18 Meg Jensen, “The Writer’s Diary as Borderland: The Public and Private Selves of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa May Alcott,” Life Writing 9, no. 3 (2012): 316, Taylor and Francis Online. 19 Quoted in Jensen, “The Writer’s Diary as Borderland,” 317.

41 Ballycastle in the north-eastern tip of Northern Ireland. She records what she’s reading in the entry, citing J.M. Synge:

The poetry of exaltation will always be the highest, but when men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life, and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exultation. … In these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good, but it is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.20

The sampled poems and prose serve as guideposts for the young poet, although she rarely offers commentary on the excerpts. In her later notebooks, context is stripped even further. Shannon

Hipp explains how the fifty-four notebooks held at Emory University in the McGuckian archive are “completely filled, margin to margin, with her cursive script. The entries are undated, though changes in pen color and type as well as occasional horizontal lines across the page may indicate various sittings.”21 The notebooks contain fragments and lines that will later find their way into her poems, although only a small percentage have been identified. Hipp contends that even though the notebooks are available, there is still a gap in creating an easy correspondence from notebook to poem.22

Nevertheless, the notebooks display a dual reading and writing practice. They are filled with lines McGuckian has pulled from her varied readings, lines that she later takes to rearrange, re-contextualize, and realize the forms of her poems. The result, as Hipp argues, is that the

“annotations reveal McGuckian’s writing as originating in a transformative linguistic work that uses selected English phrases and images to forge a new language that makes her poetry

20 Quoted in Medbh McGuckian, “Rescuers and White Cloaks: Diary, 1968-69,” in My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art, ed. Patricia Boyle Haberstroh (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 143-144. 21 Hipp, “‘Things of the Same Kind,’” 130. 22 She says, “the density of the handwriting within each notebook seems a conscious effort on McGuckian’s part to obscure her notebook’s contents”; see Hipp, “‘Things of the Same Kind,’” 130. I will return to this point of obscurity later.

42 possible.”23 Her poetry is a sensuous, image driven, and associative practice that unsettles while affirming the power of the lyric. It is for this reason that pronouns in McGuckian’s poetry can be especially tricky; how to read the “lyric I” is a continuous negotiation. As Lucy Collins points out,

[t]his debate is one of not little significance for women writers, whose struggle to establish a voice is inextricable from the reader’s willingness to engage seriously with it, whether singular or multiple. McGuckian’s complex use of the voice is what makes her work so important in any study of poetry by women because it enacts the shifting and often unfathomable aspects of identity politics in immediate ways.24

McGuckian’s use of source texts, their stripping of context, and then rearrangement offers exciting potential for readers and scholars. Instead of casting McGuckian’s practice as evasive, singularly personal, or even as plagiarism, her poetry “offers creative freedom to the reader.”25

Read as an invitation, Wendy Eberle proposes that the “language of McGuckian’s poems involves an often quite gentle breakdown of the expected barebones of referentiality in favour of a more fluid blending of light and dark, land and language, and male and female.”26 Such fluidity and sensuality is at the heart of this chapter.

In the same entry from August 1968 in “Rescuers and White Cloaks,” McGuckian says,

“There is awful poetry in me, I know, a small molten drip in a wet sea cloud, but I cannot find it.”27 While writing is difficult, McGuckian recognizes her affinity for the place, her beloved

Ballycastle, “Food tastes so alive here. Like heaven out of death, I watch the swirl of the sea with a lover’s greed.”28 Taste, sound, sight, the sea, women, and writing: within this brief entry are

23 Hipp, “‘Things of the Same Kind,’” 131. 24 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 152. 25 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 141. 26 Wendy J. Eberle, “Painting a Pictographic Language, Beyond Sound Boundaries: Medbh McGuckian’s Poetic Making,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 22, no. 1 (1996): 61, JSTOR. 27 Medbh McGuckian, “Rescuers and White Cloaks,” 143. 28 Medbh McGuckian, “Rescuers and White Cloaks,” 143.

43 ideas and textual practices that McGuckian continuously visits in her work. Eberle reflects that

“McGuckian’s language is compelling in good part precisely because of its ability to unsettle fixed definitions, origins, and traditions, without negating or denying them. McGuckian’s naming of point and places is at once both specific and open-ended. … Any given place becomes

… at once both ‘nowhere’ and ‘anywhere.’”29 It is necessary to also add that McGuckian’s places are “somewhere” and “here.” While the inexplicable and unbearable may be at the heart of McGuckian’s poetry, so too is place and the experience of bodies.30 Her poetry takes fragments from unacknowledged source texts combined with her own words to create collaged palimpsests that require reading and re-reading, offering new and varied responses with each.

McGuckian’s is a sometimes-bewildering lyric; yet all the fractures, voices, perspectives, allusions, and ambiguity are a means of knowing and understanding the world. Her lyrical topography is concerned with qualities of light and ways of seeing landscape, borders, inequalities, everyday objects, and the possibilities of poetry related to their representation. With their eye on perspective, McGuckian’s poems are concerned with navigation and placing, attentive to being located in space and appreciative of particular places.

Not only is the lyric under contention in McGuckian’s work, spatially, its geographic, material, and cultural aspects are pressed and questioned as well. In The Currach Requires No

Harbours, McGuckian has a poem titled “Mappa mundi” that considers medieval maps of the world. Most mappa mundi are circular to convey the roundness of the globe and are then divided up according to different perspectives. Some demonstrate different climates. Some, called “T-

29 Eberle, “Painting a Pictographic Language,” 62. 30 “Poetry for me is a way of dealing with the unbearable. … The fact that maybe someone else can click into it and get some sense of relief is a beautiful thing to have”; see Medbh McGuckian quoted in Elin Holmsten, “Double Doors: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian,” Nordic Irish Studies 3 (2004): 95, JSTOR.

44 O,” are organized to demonstrate the, then, three known land masses, Europe, Asia, and Africa; the landmasses were depicted within an “O” and separated by the shape of a “T,” although by contemporary standards the cartographers were not concerned with accuracy. Perhaps the most popular mappa mundis are those which take up the “T-O” scheme and elaborate, providing intricate depictions of the landmasses beside pictures of places, images of creatures, and mythological and biblical references. The largest of these is located in Hereford, England spanning 5’2’’ by 4’4’’ and depicting in detail approximately 500 pictures of cities, people of the world, animals real and imagined, stories from the Bible, and incorporating sites of myth.31 It is a fascinating and creative interpretation of the world and demonstrates that mappa mundis were not used for navigation, but for teaching and illustrating various principles. Studying them reveals the priorities of their creators, how they processed and made sense of the world.

If we take this sense that a mappa mundi is less concerned with providing the means of navigation and more concerned with demonstrating relationships between many different peoples, places, creatures, and stories, all co-existing pictorially together, compressing time and space into a five foot or less sphere, then we have an appropriate and productive image of what a visual and a lyrical topography might look like. In titling the poem “Mappa Mundi,” McGuckian gestures to the object as a sign and symbol of power, but also adopts that power to reposition women as integral actors. The juxtaposition between the various images and components of

31 Hereford Cathedral hosts the largest preserved mappa mundi. Its website contains an interacive map as well as general information on mappa mundi; see Mappa Mundi: Hereford Cathedral, Mappa Mundi Trust, https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/. There are also wonderful images of different mappa mundi at “Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection,” Cornell University Library Digital Collections, Cornell University, https://digital.library.cornell.edu/?_=1449595775653&f%5 Bcollection_tesim%5D%5B%5D=Persuasive+Maps%3A+PJ+Mode+Collection&per_page=50& range%5Blatest_date_isi%5D%5Bbegin%5D=0&range%5Blatest_date_isi%5D%5Bend%5D=1 799&search_field=dummy_range&sort=latest_date_isi+asc%2C+title_tesi+asc&view=gallery.

45 mappa mundis, their ability to capture different relations and configurations of the world, are a productive parallel for McGuckian’s poetic practice. What these maps illustrate are the “stories- so-far” of places, depicting some of their trajectories and some of their connections.

“a human star”

Perhaps the place that has most influenced McGuckian, aside from Belfast is Marconi’s Cottage, located on the coast in Ballycastle an hour or so north of Belfast.32 From the coast, Rathlin Island and, on clear days, the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland are visible. McGuckian visited the area as a child, and the visits continued into her adulthood when she purchased Marconi’s Cottage. She claims to be drawn by the place’s sense of expanse. In a conversation with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,

McGuckian explains part of the appeal:

I don’t like water surrounded by land at all. I can’t stand the thought of it for some reason. I like a lone stretch of land breaking up the sea in front of you, like the view from County Down, where we went on holidays as children. From Marconi’s Cottage you can see Rathlin Island, which is now ablaze with light after electrification, but when we first moved there only the light of the lighthouses was to be seen. What I like about Marconi’s Cottage is that it has nothing—it was built in 1720 and has no running water—and it has the feeling of being way back in your ancestors’ time.33

Elsewhere, she says that it is “[v]ery close, but very far in time and very distant emotionally. I think it restores me when I’m near the sea in this particular place; I feel I’m rejuvenated and inspired.”34 Adam Hanna claims that the house “symbolizes liberation” even while embodying

32 Two of McGuckian’s collections are On Ballycastle Beach (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1995) and Marconi’s Cottage. 33 Medbh McGuckian quoted in Laura O’Connor, “Comhra, with a foreword and afterward by Laura O’Connor,” The Southern Review 31, no. 3 (1995): 581-614. Adam Hanna picks up on this ancestral link and also the importance of the location’s connection to McGuckian’s father (it was, as she says, her “father’s world”), which he ties to the dream houses Bachelard describes; see Northern Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 127. 34 Medbh McGuckian quoted in Michaela Schrage-Früh, “An Interview with Medbh McGuckian Conducted by Michaela Schrage-Früh,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 1 (2005): 5.

46 “precariousness” in part due to its location.35 Hanna describes the cottage:

it stood on a very isolated spot, at the end of a long coastal road with a steep hill behind it. In front of it lay a broad bay bounded by tall headlands. The sense of solitude was increased by the presence of a high wall that concealed it and its garden from the road on one side and protected it from the salt spray of the Atlantic on the other.36

The combination of wildness, openness, freedom, and vulnerability provided a productive creative space for McGuckian that Hanna says allowed for a “different, or perhaps an augmented, self” and was where she could imagine an alternate life, one aside from quotidian domesticity.37

McGuckian’s treatment of Marconi’s Cottage is reminiscent of Michael Longley’s

Carrigskeewaun, which he writes of memorably in “Carrigskeewaun,” “Remembering

Carrigskeewaun,” and “The Leveret.” Echoing here too is Louis MacNeice’s “The Sea”: 38

Incorrigible, ruthless, It rattled the shingly beach of my childhood, Subtle, the opposite of earth, And, unlike earth, capable Any time at all of proclaiming eternity Like something or someone to whom We have to surrender, finding Through that surrender life.39

MacNeice emphasizes the dichotomies between land and sea, and the earth bound and the eternal. As Robert Macfarlane notes, the coastal routes were means of connection with many places making the sea a source of possibility, exchange, commerce, and colonization.40 It is also a source of possibility in the imaginative freedom sighting the sea provides, freedom from

35 Hanna, Northern Irish Poetry, 125. 36 Hanna, Northern Irish Poetry, 125. 37 Hanna, Northern Irish Poetry, 126. 38 Hanna also notes the parallels; see Northern Irish Poetry, 125. 39 Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. Michael Longley (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2009), 142. 40 Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (London: Penguin, 2012), 14.

47 geographical and cultural restrictions. Invaders may travel by sea, but intrusions do not always come from outside the island. Fulford points to the sea’s association with the unconscious, feminine, and semiotic, as well as highlights James Joyce’s view of the sea as female.41 She concludes that the “sea can be understood in terms of shifting, indeterminate meanings or waves of alterity. Regarding Irish history, the sea is a place of escape from violence on land, a place from which the colonizers come and a place from which a connection with France or America or

Rome can be established. The sea is also associated with the strange or unknown.”42 The exchange with the sea goes both ways, bringing invaders as well as hope. Its power to destroy, as

Tim Robinson’s book on the Aran Islands vividly indicates, is not to be underestimated.43

McGuckian is aware of the historical associations and connections between Ireland and the sea, and it seems that it is this sense of both/and instead of either/or that makes the seaside a productive creative locale.44

Marconi’s Cottage is the title of McGuckian’s 1991 collection, centering around experiences of motherhood and artistic creation; both violence and struggle coexist with creation and hope. Poems such as “No Street, No Numbers” and “Sky-Writing” explore writing poetry.

“Sky-Writing” gestures to the image of a plane crossing the sky, while also recalling the

41 Fulford, Gendered Spaces, 187-188. 42 Fulford, Gendered Spaces, 188. Hanna notes the importance of the sea as well: “the cottage connects McGuckian to the space and freedom of the sea, to Ireland’s last peoples, to a sense of other ways of being that are outside her roles of wife and mother”; see Northern Irish Poetry, 128. 43 Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (Mullingar, Ireland: Lilliput Press, 1986; reprint, New York: New York Review Books, 2008). 44 In later chapters, I will highlight the impossibility of the boundary of the sea, a boundary that McGuckian’s work also contemplates.

48 speirbhean.45 These are varied and moving poems, ones that, as David Heard says, “achieve their meaning by a process of unfolding that will not be glossed, but insists on being heard in its own voice.”46 Clair Wills notes the volume’s connections to both Irish and other traditions with

McGuckian’s references to Patrick Kavanagh, Sylvia Plath, and Rainer Maria Rilke.47 These connections show McGuckian reaching out so that the poems in this collection are continuously situated not only in private experience but in a dynamic material and literary world. “Marconi’s

Cottage” is one of these poems and invites as the cottage invites McGuckian. How much credence readers should give to the actual place named in the title, however, has been debated.

Fulford, for example, distances the poem “On Ballycastle Beach” from the beach where

Marconi’s Cottage was located, pointing out that “there are a number of Ballycastles in Ireland” and asserting that the “sense” is one of “indeterminate place.”48 Fulford’s argument in part depends upon this sense of distance and can even be supported by McGuckian’s hesitation to name poems and collections after actual locations well-known to her.49 Still, at some level, readers must take the poet and lyric speakers at their word. To title the poem after the cottage asks readers to engage with the name, its associations, relationships, and with the place itself.

Material engagement, while not always emphasized in McGuckian’s elusive work, has consequences.

Shane Alcobia-Murphy reads the poem as a response to McGuckian’s need for

45 The speribhean means sky-woman and is a stand-in for Ireland in the aisling tradition. See Bernard O’Donoghue, “The Aisling,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 428. 46 David Heard, “Other Rooms – Marconi’s Cottage by Medbh McGuckian,” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 127 (28 August 1992): 36. 47 Clair Wills, “Making Waves,” Times Literary Supplement (10 July 1992): 23. 48 Fulford, Gendered Spaces, 186. 49 See Sawnie Morris and Medbh McGuckian, “Under the North Window: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian,” The Kenyon Review 23, no. ¾ (2001): 69.

49 foremothers, the inspiration and models that they provide. He notes that the source text for

“Marconi’s Cottage” is Anne Stevenson’s biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame: A Life of

Sylvia Plath. One of the ways that the poem can be read, Alcobia-Murphy argues, is to identify the addressee “as Plath herself with the poet learning to use her ‘wildness’ in her own work.”50

Approaching “Marconi’s Cottage” as a negotiation between two poets provides for a rich intertextual relationship that reshapes the romantic or idealized reading of the final stanza, making it a different kind of possession and appeal: one that looks to other women writers for inspiration and one that balances that inspiration with the independence of creation and composition.

Erin Mitchell points to how “some of McGuckian’s poetic houses offer entry-ways, windows, and walls that do not clearly demarcate where outside ends and inside begins.”51 She sees “Marconi’s Cottage” as one of these, since “radio waves render walls permeable,” and the cottage “is not owned by any host” instead remaining “a serene, unthreatened, inviting, and inspiring space.”52 Waves and water permeate the walls too. Marconi’s Cottage is situated in

Northern Ireland, but by nature of the history of the location and the experimentation that occurred there, it is a place opening ever outward. It is connected to the politics of the region, but also connected to Europe and America through radio transmission. McGuckian’s address to the cottage suggests that poetry, like the cottage, can combine its influences and allusions to reach out, investing and creating meaningful lines that illuminate and sustain. Eberle notes that “[f]or

50 Alcobia-Murphy, Medbh McGuckian, 12. 51 Erin Mitchell, “Slippage at the Threshold: Postmodern Hospitality in Medbh McGuckian’s Poetry,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 17, no. 2 (2006): 145. 52 Mitchell, “Slippage at the Threshold,” 145. Mitchell situates her conversation within the discourse on McGuckian and Northern Ireland and McGuckian as a feminist writer, but her investigation of hospitality may be extended.

50 McGuckian, houses can live and breathe; they interpenetrate their human occupants and the surrounding land. But they are also human creations, evolving and changing in response to the colorations of the surrounding poetic atmosphere.”53 Just as the cottage has more than one meaning for more than one person, the poem carries multiple meanings and strategies for understanding. McGuckian’s poetic practice which includes the paralleling of images and sensations creates a dynamic, evolving, felt experience of language and place.

Reading the poem through the lens of lyrical topography, the possessive proper noun of the title gestures to a number of relational components that I began to draw out in the introduction. On one level, it locates us as readers, and McGuckian as a writer, in a specific locality. The locality also has a particular history. Guglielmo Marconi, remembered as the inventor of the wireless telegraph, has numerous connections to Ireland. As Wills summarizes,

Marconi’s “mother was half Irish, and he married an Irishwoman, but more importantly, in 1898, in a two-roomed rudimentary cottage in Ballycastle, on the North Coast of Ireland, he experimented with sending radio waves across the sea to Rathlin Island. The cottage, then, is not symbolic but real, and McGuckian really owns it.”54 Following experiments at his cottage,

Marconi would go on to make the first transatlantic telegraph transmission.55

At the heart of the collection, then, is a necessary understanding of the co-constitution of space. Wills suggests that “[m]uch of the symbolism in this book involves images of seas and houses: chaos and nature as opposed to civilization, order, art and meaning. Marconi’s harnessing of electromagnetic waves suggest a means of communicating between these two

53 Eberle, “Painting a Pictographic Language,” 68. 54 Wills, “Making Waves,” 23. 55 See Paddy Clarke, “Marconi’s Irish Connections Recalled,” in 100 Years of Radio 5-7 (1995): 20-25.

51 principles, as also between body and spirit, and from soul to soul.”56 While the waves cannot be seen, their movement through space results in communication between different individuals in different localities. Suddenly, then, the world is rendered differently, and we must contend with the people, politics, cultures, geographies, and weather patterns of distant places affecting our own. The result is that what we know is refracted. In McGuckian’s work, as Wills says,

“ordinary objects and everyday events [translate] into an ‘otherworldly’ realm. Not only the poet’s body, but the objects with which she engages (which she mirrors) are given back to the world as strangers.”57 McGuckian’s lyric is a means of coming to terms with such strangers whose radical difference must be acknowledged and whose presence shapes our own understanding and experiences.

Marconi’s Cottage is an appropriate site for experimentation with new communication strategies and methodologies, an experimentation that McGuckian adopts and converts into her poetic practice. It is also appropriate for the possibilities it provides to expand our understanding of a complex and vital topography.58 McGuckian’s continued use of Marconi’s Cottage subtly nods to the dinnseanchas tradition of place names and lore.59 Here the location carries traces of its previous inhabitants and their feats, rewriting the geography and cultural associations of the area. Keeping these elements in mind demonstrates that the places we know and love have been

56 Wills, “Making Waves,” 23. 57 Wills, “Making Waves,” 23. 58 Michaela Schrage-Früh also notes the importance of the cottage for McGuckian’s life and writing practices, serving as both a retreat and a means of “long distance communication”; see Michaela Schrage-Früh, “‘My heart beats as though it were / Hers’: Medbh McGuckian’s Intertextual Dialogues with Women in Marconi’s Cottage,” Nordic Irish Studies 8 (2009): 45. The essay investigates McGuckian’s relationship with other women writers, reading “Marconi’s Cottage” as a potential search for the “otherness” of foremothers (46). 59 One of the great examples of dinnseanchas is Acallum na Senórach; see Tales of the Elders of Ireland: A new translation of Acallum na Senórach, trans. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

52 shaped by previous inhabitants. Indeed, those interactions of bodies continue so that the places we know are never static but constantly in the process of being constructed according to what meets, when, and how. It is also these meetings that indicate our responsibility, the difficult but necessary responses we must make to those things we meet whether human or nonhuman.

“Marconi’s Cottage” at first seems to distance McGuckian from the house. Yet what the title emphasizes is that there are multiple bonds and attachments. The house holds more than one significance for more than one person. Emphasizing the ownership might initially seem to prioritize the human within place, but the poem undoes this assumption. House, lover, poem slip into and out of each other. The poem begins with a description of the cottage, “Small and watchful as a lighthouse,” that characterizes its steadfastness and attention before turning to the elusiveness of the place, “a pure clear place of no particular childhood / it is as if the sea had spoken in you / and then the words had dried” (MC 103). Since McGuckian did not spend her childhood frequenting the cottage, the house is free of these particular associations. Yet, the suggestion that it is a “pure clear place of no particular childhood” also opens the cottage out to the possibilities inherent within the childlike discovery of places—their secrets, their strengths and flaws, their imaginative possibilities, their ability to provide refuge and be invaded by elements of the world. These associations open up the potential for a Bachelardian phenomenological understanding of place, making the materiality of the house a potential for imaginative creation.60 To call the cottage a “pure clear place” does not indicate its emptiness, but its potential for associations, for seeing in and through. The speaker has the opportunity to tease out already existent associations while also writing her own, emphasizing the personal experience of her space and time.

60 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

53 The cottage is characterized as steadfast, but already overtaken by the elements of the sea—“it is as if the sea had spoken in you / and then the words had dried”—for it feels as if the sea has taken up residence, pervading both house and poem, leaving a residue of salted words.

This image of the words spoken by the sea and then dried is evocative, conjuring an image of a fine layer of salt that is left on a window, for example, after a storm has passed. To run your finger over the area is to feel the grittiness of the salt that is also, somehow silky, opaque, and telling. That speech is associated with the sea and salt, endows both the house and the sea with animate qualities. It also suggests that language has preservative qualities and that the written word together with the traces we leave of ourselves alter places and future interactions. Moya

Cannon’s poem “Our Words” is an evocative parallel, as she describes the effects of colonization on native languages, particularly English’s influence on Irish. The poem mixes critique on the violence of conquest, both physical and linguistic and also manages delicacy and gratitude, for these words are “ground down to pillow talk” and shape the way we conduct our daily lives and our loves.61 “Our Words” ends with a metaphor that words keep “the tongue salt,” enhancing our taste and preserving our lives. Such speech in a seaside cottage is also taken up in Michael

Longley’s “The West” in which the speaker says, “I listen for news through the atmospherics, /

A crackle of sea-wrack, spinning driftwood, / Waves like distant traffic, news from home” and finds his “way for ever along / The path to this cottage, its windows, / Walls, sun and moon dials, home from home.”62 Each of these poems present what it is to trace place, its particularity, elusiveness, and influence.

The images of salt, preservation, discovery, and the sea shape the cottage. The poet notes

61 Moya Cannon, Carrying the Songs (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), 16. 62 Michael Longley, Collected Poems (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2007), 69.

54 that where it sits it is “Bitten and fostered by the sea / and by the British spring” so that it confronts both harshness and hope, forced by different kinds of pressures (MC 103). The British spring is suggestive not just of the changing seasons, but of the history of Ireland and especially the north as it has been shaped by invasions, conquests, and wars. Its unique characterization leads McGuckian to claim, “there seems only this one way of happening, / and a poem to prove it has happened” (MC 103). The poem thus becomes the site for preservation and proof of a place’s real and imaginative potential. It honors the wonder of place and demonstrates one means of coming to terms with the event of place.63 The poem is both an approach to the cottage and an address. The third and fourth stanzas read:

Now I am close enough, I open my arms to your castle-thick walls, I must learn to use your wildness when I lock and unlock your door weaker than kisses.

Maybe you are a god of sorts, or a human star, lasting in spite of us like a note propped against a bowl of flowers, or a red shirt to wear against light blue. (MC 103)

That the walls are castle-thick describes the rock used to build the cottage, while suggesting an impregnable fortress. The structure can, seemingly, only be breached through invitation or conquest. Yet the speaker’s possession of the key puts her in control of access and makes her a primary participant in the knowledge of place. Still, while castle-thick implies a kind of safety, the poem demonstrates how easily the walls can be crossed, not least by the technology that

Marconi developed. The imagery of embrace lends the openness that engaging with place requires. It also shows the intimacy that the speaker feels in relation to the cottage. Certainly, we may read the poem as an address to a lover, as the poem gestures to a romantic partner and

63 See Massey, For Space, 140.

55 adopts the pose of both longing for the lover and the aubade. What is interesting is how the classifications of human and nonhuman slip into one another so that it is difficult to distinguish which takes precedence, which is subject or object, which has power to act and influence.

Ultimately, the poem allows both to have power. The associations of intimacy are tied to the interweaving of cottage and lover, lover as reliable as the cottage, cottage as desired as a lover.

The elevation of the cottage to “a god of sorts / or a human star” designates an importance that directs the speaker’s life. The grandiosity of these images is balanced then by the understated and quotidian note, the casual, though careful, selection of what to wear.

“Marconi’s Cottage” is a series of observations, an attempt to articulate a place while allowing for its unknowability and its own power. Continuing the twining of both human and nonhuman objects of adoration, McGuckian uses the language of meteorology to make her descriptions. She writes, “The bed of your mind has weathered / books of love” so that the mention of weathered returns readers to the second stanza and the cottage’s shaping by external forces (MC 103). The fact that the cottage weathers indicates a productive meeting of both time and space. The weathering in this stanza is also internal in the “bed of your mind”; the intimate space of rest and love has been shaped by “books of love” and language’s central role is revealed. McGuckian recognizes the distance and unknowability between herself and her subject, even in light of the intimacy they share. This distance, however, enables appreciation, acknowledging the singularity of entities as well as their inevitable codependence: “you are all I have gathered / to me of otherness; the worn glisten / of your flesh is relearned and reloved” (MC

103). While McGuckian’s actions of gathering may be contested, the otherness of the loved place is praised, as it positions speaker and object in relation to one another and the world. The attempt to hold otherness is impossible, but continuously approaching it is an ethical engagement with

56 the people, places, and things with which we share the world.64 Such continuous approaching feels, in this poem, like a kind of collecting together, a curation that demonstrates the deference necessary for intimate and impossible knowledge. McGuckian’s willingness to “relearn” and

“relove” the “worn glisten” of flesh is part of deference, care, and active engagement in meeting.

“Marconi’s Cottage,” also expresses how difficult it is to grasp time, as “Another unstructured, unmarried, unfinished / summer, slips its unclenched weather / into my winter poems” (MC 103). The repeated prefix establishes what summer is only through what it is not.

The evasiveness contrasts with the seeming stability of the cottage in the beginning of the poem.

Its evasions “[cheat] time / and blood of their timelessness” (MC 103). Yet there is a need to resist opposing the solidity of place with the evasiveness of time—both time and place change and are codependent on one another. Ultimately, this penultimate stanza brings a circularity to the poem, so that time and place, cottage and lover, speaker and object, poem and reader, form a web whose intersecting points are dependent upon one another, some meeting up and some taking precedence over the others. The final stanza makes a passionate appeal:

Let me have you for what we call forever, the deeper opposite of a picture, your leaves, the part of you that the sea first talked to. (MC 103)

Combining the techniques McGuckian has used throughout “Marconi’s Cottage,” the final appeal asks for a continued relationship. It is a relationship that is contingent upon time and space—“what we call / forever” cannot be forever, for we are each embedded in a place and

64 As Diane Davis says, “to address ‘you’ in writing or speech … is already to touch the limit; and to be addressed, to ‘receive’ an address, is first of all to be exposed to that exposedness. … Writing and speaking are functions of this inessential solidarity, expositions not of who one is (identity) but of the fact that ‘we’ are (relationality)” in Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 16.

57 moment. Combined with the prefixes of the prior stanza, “the deeper opposite of a picture” suggests the negatives used to make prints. However, it also indicates that the two-dimensional capturing of an image cannot convey the felt experience of place. Something different is needed, something like a poem, perhaps, so that the “leaves” of the cottage with its “books of love” continue to be marked by the speaking sea.

In “Marconi’s Cottage,” the otherness of the desired is reasserted to enforce its independence; the result is that the human and nonhuman desired ones slip into one another without eradicating or subsuming the other. Syntactically, the stanzas are each complete sentences. The meter of each line varies, and some stanzas use end-stopped lines while others employ enjambment. The effect is to make each stanza a unit with which readers must contend, pause, and proceed. Because of the syntactical separation of the stanzas, each one also tends towards a particular discursive strategy so that the poem moves through description, then observation, then the relationship of speaker and object, back to description, observation, an aside, and appeal. The poem moves through a series of emotional levels that reflect different types of engagement.

Consistent throughout the poem are the hard p and b sounds balanced by repeated s sounds, which create complex and effective patterns of internal rhyming within and between stanzas. The final stanza, recorded above, demonstrates McGuckian’s use of aural repetitions.

The first line offers the alliteration of “what we” which blends easily with one another and rushes the rhythm of the line so that the pause between “call” and “forever,” while enjambed, is emphasized. The last syllable in “forever” is picked up in “deeper,” as the ps in “opposite” are picked up in “picture.” The last two lines form a kind of couplet, both six beats and end-rhyming.

The penultimate line harkens back to the first line of the stanza with its bookended “your” with

58 “you” and “part” gesturing to the previous line. “Leaves” finds a companion sound in “sea” which dominoes into “first talked to,” combining the sounds of its preceding and following words and “talked to” ending in an alliteration that mirrors the alliteration of the first line. The final rhyme of “you” and “to” is ultimately satisfying, while also emphasizing the relationship between parts by ending with a preposition. The internal rhyming, the complex mirroring, help to shape the poem as “the deeper opposite of a picture” and, indeed, show that a poem may be a way “to prove it has happened.” The formal structure of the poem complements the synesthetic and sense driven phrases that make “Marconi’s Cottage” an associative text.

The Cottage in “The Muse of Electricity”

Marconi’s Cottage is addressed again in My Love has Fared Inland, McGuckian’s 2008 collection, which begins with an epigraph from George Santayana: “It is when sound abandons the servile function of signification, and develops itself freely as music, that it becomes thoroughly vital and its own excuse for being.” The epigraph seems to suggest a desire to escape burdens of signification. As Eberle writes, in McGuckian’s poetry “the one-to-one expected referential relationship between names and things is opened up to a far broader cast of associative possibility.”65 The epigraph and Eberle’s comment point to the way McGuckian’s poetry combines associations, creating a sensational poetic space. With its sounds, smells, images, and memories, the poetic space embraces the felt experience of language and offers a dynamic understanding of place.

The collection continues an inward turn begun in The Currach Requires No Harbours

65 Eberle, “Painting a Pictographic Language,” 63.

59 after McGuckian’s more overtly political collections.66 As Katharina Walter observes in her review of the text, “these poems often strike the reader at a visceral level, and their physiognomy is produced as much by their content as by the sounds and rhythms of the sequences of words that constitute each individual unit.”67 Walter’s choice of description centering the response to

McGuckian’s work in the body is apropos, and she balances the dichotomy of sound and signification introduced in the epigraph. What is arresting about McGuckian’s work is the felt experience of language and life. The collection exemplifies McGuckian’s “deep attentiveness to the delicate balance between the interior and exterior of self, language, and nature.”68

“The Muse of Electricity” resumes McGuckian’s reflection on the cottage. Written after she has given the house up, the tone and context of the piece differ from those of its predecessor.69 The “I” of the first stanza might be the speaker surveying the house and landscape or could be the house itself: “I exist on a stony beach / which lowers itself in waves / towards a protective ocean” (MLHFI 55). This first stanza contains repetitions of c and s sounds that mirror the sound patterns of the shore on a calm day so that the poem begins with a protective possibility even though “Two mountainous shadows / loom over me” (MLHFI 55). The poem is concerned with light, as the title would suggest, and details the ways in which light illuminates and obscures our visions. Assessing the interior the speaker notes, “In the bright, unoccupied room, / tables have nothing, / but an underside,” lines that speaks to the way that bright, direct

66 Borbála Foragó reads My Love has Fared Inland as a “journey toward the author’s locus of creativity which is driven by readerly love, suffering and authorial anxiety” in Medbh McGuckian, 154. 67 Katharina Walter, “Review of My Love Has Fared Inland,” Nordic Irish Studies 8 (2009): 159. 68 Heather Bryant Jordan, “The Horizon is in Danger,” Irish Literary Supplement (Spring 2012): 9. 69 In an interview, McGuckian told Adam Hanna that she sold the house due to its “cost and impracticality,” and in 2009, it was subsequently torn down; see Hanna, Northern Irish Poetry, 125, 164.

60 light can reflect off surfaces so intensely that it is their shadows we see (MLHFI 55).

As in “Marconi’s Cottage,” the entities that meet in place have trajectories of their own.

Here,

Doors and windows swap places, the three walls that had their wallpaper changed over and over and the wallpaper-covered door turn with quick, tinkling pulses towards the dawn. (MLHFI 55)

Such life is tuned to itself and its location. The elements of the house move of their own volition while the speaker’s memories put them together, weigh their significance, and consider each other’s relation. The speaker notes time passing and dust accumulating as “snow on the furniture” (MLHFI 55). The poem describes a “little house” itself “built on to the back of the house / embedded like a great anchor,” which “violates the Coastal Act / with its pirated electricity, its piped Mozart” (MLHFI 55). The reference points to the wider world within which the speaker and cottage interact. The implication is that the construction of this house including its acquired electricity may not meet regulations. Further still, it indicates one means through which lyric occurs, recognizing and inscribing those things that precede the poem. Here, the

Coastal Act, electricity, and Mozart all have their own associations and topographies; the effect is that their inclusion in the poem opens both poem and location out towards other places and associations. While the house acts as an anchor, tethering the speaker to an idea of herself and to the place, it also participate in a network of associations continually affronting the speaker’s sensations.70

Deference and care for the home are maintained by “Continual repair, gradual / piercing

70 Anchor might also suggest a weighing down, as the cost of the cottage would later do.

61 of the dark” (MLHFI 56). Yet that care, while “gradual,” gets carried out forcefully, as

“piercing” implies a puncturing and wounding so that a difficult sharpness must be contended with. The cottage’s “pirated electricity” and the speaker’s tending reveal “a light” that

… shone shiny as wine from just one window of this strangely unfinished house: as if an ordinary person has been lost in it,

quietly smoothing his bed, as a harbor disappears with the silting of the coast. (MLHFI 56, 55, 56)

The repetition of s sounds continues and emphasizes qualities of light, otherness, and sensation.

While the images are elusive, it is as though the cottage becomes a lighthouse with its single illuminated window. The syntax throughout the poem draws parallels between unexpected images. Here the house is conflated with an unknown person and the changing coast. The effect of the sliding syntax is to heap image upon image, submerging the reader in the environment of the poem, disorienting a single narrative thread, but inviting engagement and connection.

McGuckian’s critical geography can be charted through sensory and imaginative map making. The sensuality written into the fabric of the home is represented in the sensory experience of McGuckian’s language. There is an ephemerality to the cottage and place; as the speaker reflects,

On land that has been mined houses cave in, abysses open up, streets rupture with a scented warning, landscape quivering with the coming of spring. (MLHFI 56)

The ephemerality of the places we know and love, together with our own lives, frame our appreciation. That which we assume or hope to be stable can “rupture” and “cave in”; as

62 Marconi’s Cottage was subject to the harsh seafront, so too are our lives and the structures we build subject to all number of unlooked for changes. The tone is slightly different from that of

Sara Berkeley Tolchin’s “Emergency Chocolate,” which begins with the observation: “Our house is falling into the sea / The slide, we saw it coming, is irreversible.”71 The poems consider the inevitable destruction of human habitation, but McGuckian places more distance between speaker and subject. Nevertheless, the threat of the loss of comfort, a way of life, and the reality of a changing environment persist in both.

Spring, here rhymed with “quivering,” is paralleled with earth moving events, disrupting readers’ expectations for a normally welcomed season. Spring comes after harsh decay, and its fecundity can be overwhelming even while the season offers a promise of continued life. The words in the above stanza pick up on the harshness suggested by the “piercing of the dark.” The words “mined,” “cave in,” “abysses,” “open up,” “rupture,” “quivering,” and “coming” echo geological movements but are also physically charged. The effect is that the stanza shifts and shakes open a spectrum of movement. Each term offers a perspective of depth so that readers contend not only with a topographical view of landscape, but must acknowledge a geological striation, an opening downwards that mirrors Heaney’s bottomless center and “Atlantic seepage.”72 The depth is at once physical, geological, and mental.

This depth and movement has been a quality of McGuckian’s since her early work. As

Lucy Collins notes, the trope of movement can be seen in “the house, with constantly shifting perspectives; the garden, together with more extensive natural imagery; motherhood and child

71 Sara Berkeley Tolchin, What Just Happened (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2015), 55. 72 “Bogland” in Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 41.

63 rearing; crafts of making.”73 Additionally,

the juxtaposition of inner and outer spaces means that houses and landscape are rendered simultaneously, making the boundaries between them hard to read. As imaginative creations of place, they distort the function of memory by permitting no fixed point of recall. Further, the identification of material elements with complex emotional states means that such shifts in spatial representation—or the evocation of a range of disconnected objects—also trace the mutation of feeling and perception in the poem[s].74

McGuckian offers a lyrical rendering of topography that complicates a simplistic summation of place and Marconi’s cottage. The speaker’s sensations are written onto the cottage and landscape while the preceding elements of place inevitably influence, heighten, and alter the speaker’s state of mind. Just as the speaker must contend with the “ruptures” so too must readers sit within the disconnections, the “abysses,” and the potentialities of a “quivering” landscape and lyric.

The speaker’s concern for location is apparent as she looks to settle what claiming a

“here” and “now” might be. The process is as slippery as Heaney’s eels or otter, and embraces movement:

When someone leaps out of turbulent water, waving his arms, leaving a perfectly smooth surface behind him, a place that was there changes into here, less isolated, less complete, a river taken on its own whose name translates as ‘out of the dark’ (MLHFI 56)

While a river named “out of the dark” suggests Joseph Conrad, it also points to phrases in

Heaney’s poems, such as in “Glanmore Sonnets II” when the speaker comments on writing:

“Sensings, mountings from the hiding places, / Words entering almost the sense of touch, /

73 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 145. 74 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 145.

64 Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch.”75 To write and to define a place is difficult. Just as

McGuckian hints at a possible naming, the identification erodes away. Readers are left with a partial meaning and not the word itself. The translation also points to some of the anxieties that surface throughout the poem. In this stanza, the water is turbulent and more threatening than the water in the first stanza, taking on the looming nature of the initial shadows. Emerging from the water suggests Massey’s event of place.76 Knowledge of place, the lived experience that transforms a “there” to a “here,” comes from attentive response and quotidian engagement. The lines demonstrate an intimacy that does not foreclose change. The speaker, too, is coming out of the dark with a sense of electricity and light through which she returns to the house. She

… would slip a good twenty-five times out of my house to walk around my future home and count the footsteps I needed to do that. (MLHFI 57)

Her pacing becomes an intimate practice, a means of knowing a place materially, physically, and imaginatively, until loved by rote. The activity offers assuredness, as the repeated walking is a path making, a means of understanding and knowing the world.

As in “Marconi’s Cottage,” “The Muse of Electricity” also seems seems to consider the love of place. Heather Bryant Jordan suggests that this poem is about the relationship of the poet to her object, a reading that seems relevant here, particularly in light of the title.77 Muses, for

McGuckian, are important. Often, “[t]he muse is a person, a real human being, but the muse

75 Heaney, Opened Ground, 157. For “The Otter” see Heaney, Opened Ground, 167, and for “Eelworks” see Heaney, Human Chain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 27-31. 76 Massey, For Space, 140. 77 Jordan, “The Horizon is in Danger,” 9.

65 energy is very mobile. The muse is always so unattainable.”78 The muse’s energy infuses the poem so that it seems to be both animate and inanimate. McGuckian in conversation with Ní

Dhomhnaill has said her muses have “the same dynamism and the same feeling of being at one with the world. Not an observer of it but having it … being a microcosm, so that when you talk about the sky or the sea or a tree or vegetation, you’ve been inside it or it’s been inside you.”79

To the extent that there is “reciprocity … We are the world that the poem is celebrating, but we are also the poem and we are also the celebration.”80 It seems that McGuckian is explaining not only her muses, but her lyric practice as well. The poems create a world by engaging with the world and the many networks within which the poet lives. For McGuckian, to speak of the sea and of Marconi’s Cottage is to have been there, so there is a locality and physicality to the poem.

Yet linking the lyric with inspiration and celebration also bridges the sensory experience of being in the world and writing of the world.

McGuckian’s is a felt topography whose lyric practice, in layering images and voices, helps foster a capacity to care in spite of, or perhaps because of, loss. The poem ends with a final image, slanted with its gesture to time,

Through flower and song I know the difficulty of keeping watch. As one second must be able to stretch itself out, I will sit on a cliff, looking out over the bay. (MLHFI 57)

These lines evoke the writing process and the resolution of the poet, gesturing to her previous poems that address both flowers and songs. The landscape view circles back to the first lines, but

78 McGuckian quoted in Kimberly S. Bohman, “Surfacing: An Interview with Medbh McGuckian,” The Irish Review 16 (1994): 104. If source texts are later located for this poem, then a different appreciation of the muse will be possible. 79 Medbh McGuckian quoted in O’Connor, “Comhra,” 599. 80 Medbh McGuckian quoted in O’Connor, “Comhra,” 599.

66 also suggests that there are places where we are productively and imaginatively located. The textual representation allows us to bring together the images and multiple spaces so that the lines work towards Massey’s “attempt to urge an understanding of this place as permeable, to provoke a living of place as a constellation of trajectories, both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural,’ where if even the rocks are on the move the question must be posed as to what can be claimed as belonging.”81

“The Muse of Electricity” lights and obscures itself. It suggests a way to interact and exist with an appreciation and deference to that which we witness and what a lyrical topography can do.

The syntax of the lines “As one second must be able / to stretch itself out” provides a sense of expanse even while readers acknowledge the timely impossibility. The juxtaposition encompasses a vision of the landscape and also the associative possibilities of lyric poetry.

“Send me news” in “South of Mars”

Also included in My Love Has Fared Inland is a goodbye to the cottage, “South of Mars.” If

“Marconi’s Cottage” is a love poem, “South of Mars” is a breakup poem. The poem takes up letting go of a particular loved place and the possibility of continued artistic expression. The title also gestures to “Marconi’s Cottage” and the configuration of the house as “a god of sorts / or a human star,” suggesting an astronomic location in the night sky and indicating the power and guidance it has provided the speaker (MC 103). The cottage has been the means of an important orientation. Even if it was only momentary as the title of Belinda Cooke’s review, “The Path of

Comets,” might suggest, its blaze has influenced the thoughts and negotiations of the speaker.82

81 Massey, For Space, 149. 82 Belinda Cooke, “The Path of Comets,” Poetry Ireland Review 101 (July 2010): 80-83. McGuckian did own the cottage for years, so momentary implies a span of time that is, perhaps, too brief.

67 To think of this northern location as south also resituates the emotional and physical geography, although it is true that leaving the cottage and returning to Belfast places McGuckian south of her once coastal home. As Mars is the Roman god of war, there is a sense of orienting the speaker, house, and loss in terms of their relation to conflict. The political implications of this reading, however stretched, continue to highlight concerns explored throughout McGuckian’s career. Her attention to binary tensions may also be united under the image of a human star and the stable presence such a star presents. Within Mars is also the first syllable of Marconi, so

McGuckian’s love of word play must also be considered.

The poem begins matter-of-factly and with an uncharacteristic direct statement: “It’s over now,” which conveys a sense of acceptance or resignation, then turns to examine what is completed: “Part of the story / has disappeared, into the void / of something that has ended forever” (MLHFI 71). A deep sense of loss pervades the poem even while the speaker is coming to terms with it. She shows her mourning and affection through the attention she pays to the particulars. After all, she “know[s] the exact place, behind the house, / a place where waves can be counted” that keep her forever tied to the location even if she will never visit again (MLHFI

71). The speaker’s reference to counting recalls the counting of footsteps around the house in

“The Muse of Electricity” and reveals a formal attentiveness. The counting of waves will be ongoing as there were waves before the speaker’s arrival and will be waves after her departure.

The phrase thus highlights a period of time and enables larger connections to be drawn. Leaving a place well-known and loved means that place will shape through memory instead of active engagement. What is lost then is not only a place, but stories that will not come to be since certain futures are foreclosed. That the poem begins with a sense of forever also picks up on the conclusion of “Marconi’s Cottage” where the speaker asks, “Let me have you for what we call /

68 forever,” binding her reflections to human conceptions of time while framing those perceptions within a much wider scope.

The possible loss is heightened by the intimate knowledge of the place. McGuckian is often at her best when she attends to the seascapes that compel her, and the following stanzas demonstrate a calm reflection of what she knows:

Undreamt of blues and marvelous greys set up a background, a flat light and a mask of ocean salt, for a sea full of inlets, harbours and ravines, shipwrecks and sudden green splendors: green, I want you, green, I am half-full of seawater

through far, far from the sea, and the smoothest stone is a freshwater myth. A cool oval breeze reaches me from the sea, birds can fly in it, and every half-minute comes the smell of the sea, newly cleaned, like a loaf of silver. (MLHFI 71)

Here, the vitality of the sea is depicted with a painter’s eye. The blues and greys of sky and water mingle with the spray of salt, providing the palette that shapes the sea and its pathways. The water meanders with a strength that carves out the land while it hides things beneath its surface.

Thinking of the colors of the sea and its environs, the speaker stops at “green splendors” to exclaim “green, I want you, / green,” and then acknowledges the pervasiveness of the place

“half-full of seawater / / through far, far from the sea.” Ophelia like, the image of being half-full of seawater is both the sense of drowning as well as being submerged in the place, forever haunted by the depth of experience there. These stanzas are composed of layered images that reach out and revise one another, and the effect is synesthetic: sight, sound, smell, and touch coalesce.

69 The poem expresses a desire for creativity and life.83 Sara Broom observes that

“McGuckian seems to believe in and strive for an intrinsic unity of experience; her poetry is reaching for the transcendent, but only through a full experience of the actual world.”84 The space created and presented in the poem is one seeking a unified field through layered trajectories. Writing of “The Keeper Ring,” Hanna argues that absent of a coherent narrative, the images that follow one another “all communicate convergence, patterning, and a sense of the drunkenness of things being various.”85 MacNeice’s “Snow” suggest a parallel to the speaker’s discovery in the Marconi cottage poems.86 These “convergences,” “patterns,” and “sense of drunkenness” are within the three poems discussed at length here. What is revealed is the complex practice of responding to the spaces that we know, how those spaces interact with others, how each is created by varieties of interactions some of which we can see and other of which we cannot, and how being present in places requires ethical engagement and response.

The sound and taste, the smell and sight of the sea are imprinted upon the poem as they are imprinted upon the cottage and McGuckian’s memories. The sea seeps into the poem; the sight and sound of it fill the page, and the difficulty of letting go is palpable. Characteristic of

McGuckian’s poetry, the syntax parallels associations that suggest and skew relationships. Still, the speaker’s sense of loss is deep and abiding:

When you’re all in the door of your house with that sense of Saturday and garden gate

83 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 4. If the womb is equated to the sea, then the speaker’s desire to give birth becomes evident. Yet, the speaker is past childbearing age, so the life that she can give is through her poetry. Perhaps there is a mourning for lost parents as well, since James Joyce’s “snot green sea” ripples at the edges of the poem. 84 Sara Broom, “McGuckian’s Conversations with Rilke in Marconi’s Cottage,” Irish University Review 28, no. 1 (1998): 135. 85 Hanna, Northern Irish Poetry, 132. 86 MacNeice, Selected Poems, 24.

70 you’ll know there’s no place I’d rather live to finish out the summer, the last days of August and the blessed September, above all, waking up, and finding that.

Send me news how the sea is doing, wave-like wheat and wheat-like wave. Remember me when you are at the beach, in that yacht with the name of an island — I would like the water to grow calm for you and send blue telegrams. (MLHFI 72)

The reference to summer here recalls summer holidays at the seaside, while the desire for news and promise of telegrams gestures to “Marconi’s Cottage” and the sense of communication that is capable in lyric poetry. These stanzas also mark a shift as the speaker introduces the second person you. The addressee or referent is not named and, as in “Marconi’s cottage,” may be read as an unnamed person, the cottage, or otherwise.87 McGuckian’s characteristic blue surfaces here, linking “South of Mars” to her long writing relationship with the color.88 The stanzas also point to changes in perspective, comparing the sea to fields of wheat is reminiscent of Heaney’s comparison of prairies in “Bogland.” These shifting perspectives reveal sensory associations, as one experience or word links to another and continues to expand rippling outward like the sea or radio waves. While not a strict linearity, these are nodes to which the speaker returns.

The poem is an effort to let go and to process the grief of leaving a loved place. The speaker tries to console herself:

But anything is better than to remain seated in the window looking at the same landscape and its surprises.

87 As I noted with “The Muse of Electricity,” tracking down source texts may expand this reading. 88 McGuckian uses colors as tropes throughout her work. Blue frequently occurs and seems to align with the power of poetry and creativity, especially of women. See Faragó, Medbh McGuckian, 133, 143, 150.

71 The sadness that slackens electrical lines can lengthen the radio waves of its golden poverty. Perhaps what we thought would cast a thick shadow

will cast none at all. And thirty Aprils traced by your fingers will sit down in the shadowless nudity of the last lamps, letting the things themselves decide where their shadows fall, the cool shadow of that blood, watching all things take flight. (MLHFI 73)

Borbála Faragó claims that this poem is evidence of deep loss while arguing that the poem is also evidence of “passivity, failure and futility.”89 Certainly there is loss, but we must be cautious when equating loss with passivity. The speaker in “South of Mars” acknowledges the independence of things and actively works through thirty years of associations with a loved home as well as the continued practice of writing poetry. Indeed, Jordan suggests, “If the natural world is always moving, changing, and renewing itself, so too can the poet.”90 The speaker remembers, appeals, notes change, resolves, and enacts a continued engagement, not least, with the poem.

As with “The Muse of Electricity,” “South of Mars” is concerned with light and observation. In an interview with Shrage-Früh, McGuckian relates Marconi’s Cottage to the writing locations of other women: “all those women who struggled to be free and have a voice and define beauty. The qualities of light and air and landscape there [at Marconi’s Cottage] are very uncivilized and primitive and it seems wild and untamed as those women’s imaginations strove to be.”91 Thus women, light, and topography continue to intertwine in McGuckian’s work.

89 Faragó, Medbh McGuckian, 153. 90 Jordan, “The Horizon is in Danger,” 9. 91 Quoted in Michaela Shrage-Früh, “‘My Heart Beats as Though it Were/Hers,’” 46.

72 The final two stanzas, quoted above, repeat a variation of the word shadow four times, recalling the shadows in “The Muse of Electricity” as well as the photographic “opposite of the picture” in

“Marconi’s Cottage.” The shadows are ephemeral markers of existence and are indicative of the things that haunt us, that we sometimes do not see or are impossible to grasp. They are evocative, too, of McGuckian’s poetic practice, as she works to complicate simple subject and object distinctions. The deep sense of loss is called into question by the speaker’s claim that “anything is better than to remain” as well as the proposition that what we think will impact us may not.

That the landscape is still capable of “surprises” together with the implied material importance of “thirty Aprils / traced by your fingers” calls such a dismissal into question. The speaker continues to treat her material with deference, acknowledging the necessity of “letting the things / themselves decide where their shadows / fall.” The line breaks emphasize the things as well as their interaction with light, imprint, and where they fall, much as McGuckian explores the idea of falling out of ownership of the cottage. The “cool shadow of that blood” recalls stanza five where the speaker contemplates the house, which may be happier without the “warm blood” of smoke. McGuckian’s synesthetic style mixes of body and image.

The final stanzas refer to ideas associated with Marconi, most significantly radio waves.

As Schrage-Früh observes, “Marconi’s Cottage, then, is at once the site of long distance communication and an isolated refuge” and, as “a space the poet has appropriated in the most literal sense,” is a source for McGuckian to engage with the world.92 Devoid of the place,

McGuckian must create different centers from which to write, ones that allow for the simultaneous withdrawal and outreach that the cottage enabled. The desired place may no longer be accessed, yet the possibility for continuous connection and creativity reside in the final lines

92 Schrage-Früh, “My heart beats as Tough it Were/Hers,’” 45.

73 of the poem. Marconi’s Cottage is a site for McGuckian’s lyrical topography to be realized. It has real material consequences and a history that influence McGuckian’s work, and it is also a site that McGuckian revisits and rewrites, creating ever more trajectories for possibility and connections.

“Relearn” and “Relove” through a “Mappa Mundi”

What these poems illustrate are the “stories-so-far” of places and lyrics. In mapping the contours of time, recalling intimate space, and weaving associations, McGuckian demonstrates the dynamism of Marconi’s cottage and her lyric practice. In “Mappa mundi,” the speaker seems to have lost herself, triply lost in her identification as Irish, Catholic, and a woman. The final two stanzas offer her reconfiguration of a map and of one of the primary organs we use to apprehend the world, the eye:

If the eye consists of a million worlds, to show how the earth is a house exchanged for three tulip bulbs, first define the eye,

this perforation, that wells up as spring melt, or celandine, the red stone growing in the stomach of the swallow. (TCRNH 17)

Here, as Elke D’hoker and Raphaël Ingelbien note, McGuckian suggests that the world is apprehended differently by every entity; indeed, our own vision and perspective is liable to change as well.93 Many different kinds of drawings compose a mappa mundi just as the world

93 Elke D’hoker and Raphaël Ingelbien, Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 69.

74 composed of many different elements: people, places, buildings, animals, plants, the exchange of capital, myths, and stories. Reading McGuckian’s poetry as practices of such mapping emphasizes the networks that each of us and each lyric poem participate in. Mappa mundi are objects, but they are animated by the networks and connections between the images on their surface. McGuckian’s poetry is also animated by the connections that inhere within. The poetic process of collaged lyrics, developing out of her diaries and notebooks, means that the lines of each poem are in conversation with others. She has herself made mappa mundi within each poem, each collection, and reverberating between. The sensory repetitions, images, and tropes that she returns to time and again are means of demonstrating the many lines of connections we encounter. As “Mappa mundi” and McGuckian’s poetry shows, this earth we apprehend in our partial manner is “a house” that we must share.

Yet McGuckian pushes our understanding of sight; she says if it is true that we perceive the world differently, we must “first define the eye” which is a “perforation,” an opening that

“wells up as spring melt.” The stanza is difficult to parse and there are multiple ways that we might read the final few lines. Perhaps the perforation is also like “celandine, the red stone / growing in the stomach / of the swallow,” or perhaps it is the celandine that we must also seek to define. If that is the case, it might be poetry, connection, or love, all of which require a vulnerability, being open and attentive to the world. As celandine is noted for its healing properties, primarily its ability to help heal sight, seeking to define it is an ethical response to fully engage with place and all those we meet within it.94 To work to define what can heal our

94 Celandine comes from the Greek word for swallow, since the appearance of the flower coincided with the arrival of the swallows and lasted until their departure. See The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “celandine,” Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com.

75 vision, what can help us to responsibly respond to one another is to answer the ethical imperative of lyrical topography. This action must happen in place and within the specific cultural contexts that shape us and that we shape. McGuckian’s gesture to the many and multiple ways that we apprehend the world, and our perforations which are bodily and metaphorical, are a means through which we can we configure our worlds and chart our own mappa mundi. Such mappa mundi are provocative and productive possibilities that assert the central role of women and nonhuman entities in the ethical engagements that form the world we constantly come to know.

To think of this poem spatially and through the lens of lyrical topography challenges the safe containment of the lyric form; a single speaker, a single addressee, a single interpretation is abandoned in favor of multiplicity, complication, and even contradiction. Readers find no easy summary nor comforting resolve. Indeed, within the space of the lyric, the “stories-so-far” of place and experience play out, interacting with and influencing one another. Yet multiplicity results so that readers must confront their own interpretation of the poem. The engagement is spatial-temporal in the materiality of the text, opened and closed, read in different locations at different times and in McGuckian’s gathering of source materials integrating diverse voices, creating a layering that is impossible to ignore and to simplify. McGuckian’s spatial practice disorients readers, setting us adrift so that we may come to terms with our own perceptions, assumptions, pitfalls, and strengths. The transformative landscapes maintain their imprint, and our returns are marked differently for we find, as Massey says, that “the truth is that you can never simply ‘go back,’ to home or to anywhere else. When you get ‘there’ the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this of course is the point.”95 Such shifting and changing is at the heart of McGuckian’s poetry, making it a sometimes elusive, but

95 Massey, For Space, 124.

76 always productive engagement with the material and imagined worlds we must negotiate, ultimately revealing the power of the lyric to act as an orienting practice.

CHAPTER 3

LANDSCAPE WITH SEA PINKS AND COCCOSPHERE:

CURATION AND ORIENTATION IN MOYA CANNON’S LYRICS OF PLACE

The exchange between landscape and language is central to Cannon’s poetry; it is also the intersection that has formed the core of criticism regarding Cannon’s work. Eamonn Wall writes that Cannon “has been best able to connect the human body to the body of the land and to the animal, plant, and geologic worlds,” thereby exploring “ways in which all living beings are connected and interdependent.”1 Connected and interdependent describe not only Cannon’s lyrical impulses, but the manner in which space is constantly constructed and negotiated.

Cannon’s focus on connection also emphasizes her mnemonic relationship to the land; as

Christine Cusick claims, the “national and political expression are secondary, if at all present, to the unruly pervasiveness of the natural terrain. Yet, while Cannon’s poetry clearly positions nonhuman nature at the forefront of her subject matter and as a participant in the experiences of her poetry, these gestures do not necessarily diminish or devalue the process of writing.”2 In her review of Hands, Cusick points to Cannon’s affinity for light, life, and for creating “a humble map for the work of being in, and paying attention to, this material, storied world.”3 Cusick’s work highlights some of the important issues upon which this chapter is based, namely Cannon’s

1 Eamonn Wall, “Books of Celebration,” Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 2008): 23. 2 Christine Cusick, “Our Language was Tidal: Moya Cannon’s Poetics of Place,” New Hibernia Review 9, no. 1 (2005): 74, Project MUSE. 3 Christine Cusick, “Review of Hands,” New Hibernia Review 17, no. 4 (2013): 152, Project MUSE.

78 relationship to land and lyric, and serves as a signpost for this discussion of accumulations and orientation.

This chapter takes up Cannon’s poetry to extend the conversation of place within her work in a way that contends with geography, landscape, and ecology. By also considering ideas of space, the chapter explains how Cannon employs the short lyric to demonstrate complex relationships. Cannon’s poetry does so, pushing readers to acknowledge the things of the world, things that shape our lives and over which we have no control. Since lyrics are composed of feet, their movement is always, in part, spatial, and Cannon’s poems are orientation practices.

Orientation focuses on negotiating an environment from an embedded perspective. We are in the landscape; we interact with it; we must respond to the material forces that we meet; we use the landmarks, tools, and skills that we can access to navigate. Working with and within are orientating practices. In what follows, I investigate some important charts in Cannon’s work.

Cannon’s poetry continues the attentive work of Irish naturalists in her curatorial impulses and investigates the relationship between human and nonhuman things.

Reading Cannon’s collections is an act of confronting accumulations: reflections of natural objects she has discovered, narratives of museum pieces, and descriptions of places she visits and remembers. The result is that Cannon’s poetry is a curatorial practice, one that catalogues, prioritizes, and comments. I explore this practice in the first part of the chapter. The curatorial impulse leads to the continuous orientating that is at the heart of her work, a continuous re-visiting of objects, ideas, and spaces. Explained in the latter half of the chapter,

Cannon’s lyrics are spatial narratives of negotiation, ones that demonstrate how the lyric helps to shape and serve as a way of knowing the world. Her affinity for curation and orientation are grounded in her concern for patterns and the qualities that patterning entails: shape, forms,

79 repetitions, and breakages. Ultimately, her poetry becomes a way of embracing a kind of futurity that affirms the openness of space.

Curating, orientating, and patterning may be linked to a wide tradition in poetry that takes up the parallel concerns of human and nonhuman interaction within an environment. Ecocritism has pressed for an understanding of linked fates, which Lucy Collins examines through melancholia in “Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven.” She notes how feminists have been “wary of linking female experience to the natural world” because of the ways both have been denigrated to emphasize the superiority of the rational, (male) human centered experience. Yet ecology and lyric share a concern for relationships, which means teasing out patterns, connections, and responsibilities. As Collins argues, “Writing is more than a record of experience; it is itself a form of experience. The creation of a poem from an encounter with nature both recognizes the significance of this engagement and recalibrates the relationship between woman and environment, to facilitate renewed understanding.”4 Just as with the lyric form, deep ecologists are concerned with the balance between private and public and the privileging of a subjective position. Claire Wills challenges this stance:

it is not that “expressive” poetry naively falls back on a stable individuality, and experimental work explores the radical absence of subjectivity. Both are responses to the reconfiguring of the relationship between public and private spheres which makes the “private” lyric impossible, and in effect opens it out towards rhetoric.5

Situating Cannon’s work in this conversation demonstrates her deep concern for probing the relationships between the humans and nonhuman, while also indicating how her lyric practice has been insistently pressing for critique and engagement with the ecosystems in which we live.

4 Lucy Collins, “‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven’: Contemporary Women Poets and Environmental Melancholia,” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 5, no. 1 (2017): 7, Open Library of Humanities. 5 Quoted in Collins, “‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven,’” 7.

80 It connects her work to natural history through the interests and practices she shares with figures such as Maud Delap. It also shows that while Cannon’s poetry has been too often ignored by critics, her work has been an ongoing part of the creative and critical conversations regarding poetry, place, ecology, and responsibility, as publication in ARCHIPELAGO confirms.

In “The Poetry of What Happens,” Cannon discusses how she came to write. Her verse is created, she notes, “under pressure” as “poetry is in some sense a function of chaos, or at least a function of contradiction.”6 Donna Potts has claimed that there is something spiritual about

Cannon’s poetry in “the synthesis of sound and rhythm which could alert or disarm the heart, which could acknowledge depths of passion, moments of candor” and so is “in some sense miraculous.”7 Cannon believes “that there [are] some areas of life which reason [can] never comprehend or honor, which [will] turn to dust if approached analytically, but which [can] be honored in literature or in art generally—certain areas which [can] be better elucidated by rhyme than by reason.”8 As these positions indicate, Cannon’s poetry emphasizes additional ways of knowing the world. After all, “scientific data must be balanced by narratives of feeling, which not only confront the unprecedented threat to ecosystems, but also record the experience of living in these times.”9 Not all of Cannon’s poetry takes up ecological concerns, but the majority of her work centers issues of embedded engagement with the world.10 Cannon’s poetry

6 Moya Cannon, “The Poetry of What Happens,” in My Self, My Must: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art, ed. Patricia Boyle Haberstroh (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 126, 124. 7 Donna Potts, “Water from Stone: The Spirit of Place in Moya Cannon's Poetry,” An Sionnach: A Review of Literature & Culture & the Arts 3, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 46-54, Literary Reference Center. See also Donna Potts, Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011). 8 Cannon, “The Poetry of What Happens,” 130. 9 Collins, “‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven,’” 8. 10 Cannon’s collections include Oar (Knockeven, Ireland: Salmon, 1990); The Parchment Boat, (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1998); Carrying the Songs (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007);

81 demonstrates what Collins claims familiarity can do: “become more attentive to the power of feeling to deepen our reflection on ecological threat.”11 Cannon’s concern for formal patterns, her curatorial practices, and the centrality of orientation reveal her dedication to recognizing subjectivity as existing within complex networks of negotiations. Her poems probe personal and ecological concerns while drawing on sensory experience and deep reflection. Thus, Cannon constructs a poetry committed to puzzling through situated worlds.

Cannon came to poetry after a childhood spent in Dunfanaghy in Donegal, growing up between two languages and at the edge of land and sea.12 She studied politics and history at

University College Dublin and Cambridge University, during which time she discovered many writers who would provide a lens for her own poetry and models for her aesthetic practice. As she often notes, she “[grew] up in a spectacularly beautiful part of the world and [is] ever grateful for it. … The influence [of place] is so all-pervasive that it is almost impossible to get a focus on.”13 It may be an understatement to say her poetry is often defined by the importance of places. Cannon’s poetry is also sometimes marked by wonder at what she observes, what is beautiful, and what grips her beyond comprehension. These things, for Cannon, are truth, just as there is “a truth in the resonance of certain words—bread, water, fire, love—evidence of a shared humanity, of shared need, shared desires, shared delights.”14 Such wonder does not come with

Hands (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011); Keats Lives (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015). Citations from the collections will be given in-text with the following abbreviations: Oar (O), The Parchment Boat (PB), Carrying the Songs (CS), Hands (H), and Keats Lives (KL). 11 Collins, “‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven,’” 2. 12 Cannon does not write in Irish, although Irish words sometimes appear in her poems and titles. Nevertheless, the relationship of the Irish language to the land, her family, and Irish history is evident within her work. 13 Irene Glisenan Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention’: Landscape and Place. An Interview with Moya Cannon,” in Urban and Rural Landscapes in Modern Ireland: Language, Literature and Culture, ed. Carmen Zamorano Llena and Irene Glisenan Nordin (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 160. 14 Cannon, “The Poetry of What Happens,” 131.

82 certainty. Cannon’s poetry is not pedantic nor didactic, but questions the world and her engagement with its multiplicity. Sometimes this wonder is so arresting that Cannon asks, “What could I do?” as in her poem “Night” in The Parchment Boat (CS 110). She is so struck by the

“arc of darkness,” so disturbed by “the frost-hammered stars” that she pulls her car over twice in order to safely look up at the night sky (CS 110). Cannon’s poems balance moving through landscape, through places, and pausing to observe, comment, and orient. Her poems are not without loss and longing too, as Collins links these feelings to the intimate connection between human and nonhuman ecological fates.15 Such wonder in recognition of loss makes for an attentive poetry, one that presses her readers to consider how humans, stars, and stone are connected and what a response to the world might be.

Although Cannon has been publishing since 1990, she has only released five volumes of poetry to date, a fact that may contribute to the slim bibliography of criticism associated with it.

Nevertheless, she has been awarded the Brendan Behan and O Shaughnessy Awards for poetry, been a member of Aosdána since 2004, been nominated for the 2012 Irish Times/Poetry Now

Award, held a visiting position at Villanova, and has been editor of Poetry Ireland Review. Of the existing criticism, much attention has been paid to Cannon and landscape. In this vein,

Eamonn Wall has been a helpful critic and admirer of Cannon’s work. In a 2008 review of

Carrying the Songs, he notes that Cannon’s poetry is central to contemporary Irish poetry and worthy of more study since it does something slightly different: it “asks us to look in other directions—to the region rather than the nation, to the individual rather than the citizen—and to explore such new linkages that are easily traceable between poetry and science and poetry and

15 Collins, “‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven,’” 1-21.

83 ecology, for example.”16 Wall’s critique draws out Cannon’s unique positioning to bridge science and literature in ways that are provocative for both the study of Cannon’s work and for contemporary Irish poetry.

Writing in “The Poetry of What Happens,” Cannon admits that “almost from the start the metaphors available to me related to landscape, language, and place-names, that most tangible of etymologies, the interface between language and landscape.”17 Her father loved dinnseanchas, or place-lore, whereby stories are associated with local places so that each location has a collection of local legends that write themselves onto the landscape and are re-inscribed with each repeating. She writes of how a name comes to mark a place and marvels that, as in poetry, “it is the salient description which sticks, as if somehow the land has colluded in writing the poem of itself and the people who lived on it.”18 Cannon’s discussion of place names finds a dramatic parallel in Brian Friel’s Translations. His play takes up the history of the Ordinance Survey and the repercussions of its mapping for a community in Donegal.19 Coming to terms with naming, the specificity and violence of the act, is a shared theme of their work. The geography of places is important too, as topographic elements often feature in and contribute to the unfolding of stories as well as act as stimuli that recall stories for continued telling.

Cannon’s mother was also drawn to nature and turned her daughter’s attention to flowers and shells, passing on a concern for minutiae. In her conclusion to “The Poetry of What

Happens,” Cannon says, “Language and stones have been very kind to me and have led me to many rich encounters. I can only ask that they continue to do so.”20 Perhaps this is why, as

16 Wall, “Books of Celebration,” 23. 17 Cannon, “The Poetry of What Happens,” 128. 18 Cannon, “The Poetry of What Happens,” 128. 19 Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981). 20 Cannon, “The Poetry of What Happens,” 132.

84 Patricia Boyle Haberstroh has noted, “Cannon’s images are elemental: water, light, stones, birds, sea life, mountains, seasons: she is at heart a nature poet whose probing of this landscape reveals both her own attachment to it and a continuing fascination with the illumination it provides.”21

While Eavan Boland claims to be an “indoor nature poet” when she take up the interior spaces of suburbia, Cannon may well be called a nature poet of scope and scale. She is a ready collector of elemental images and is a keen communicator on the exchange of inner life and the environments she negotiates.22 Cannon’s poetry focuses on Ireland, but also takes up locations as far flung as Brazil, Spain, and America. The result is that her poetry has both a grounded and global view, a view that has continued to expand with her later collections. The geographic expanse also parallels with the poems’ openness to futurity, which challenges the continuous backwards look of the dinnseanchas tradition.

To claim Cannon has a curatorial and orienting practice is to situate her work within a tradition of Irish archives and natural history. R. Lloyd Prager dates the beginning of this tradition to Augustin in the seventh century and through Giraldus Cambrensis’ Topographia

Hibernia to the twentieth century.23 The nineteenth century saw a boom in the natural sciences and the strength of Irish research, as the Irish Naturalists’ Journal makes clear.24 Both professionals and amateurs participated in the study of the natural sciences, while tourism,

21 Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, “Women Poets of the West: Moya Cannon and Mary O’Malley,” Nua: studies in contemporary Irish writing 2, no. 1-2 (1998): 182. 22 Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence (London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2007): 50-51; Moya Cannon, “Reassembling the Broken Jar,” New Hibernia Review 15, no. 1 (2011): 9-15. 23 R. Lloyd Praeger, Some Irish Naturalists: A Biographical Note-Book (Dundalk: Dundalgen Press, 1949), http://www.botanicgardens.ie/herb/books/irishnaturalists.htm. For a start on conversations about Cambrensis’ complicity in colonialism and a stance on his fictive approach, see John Brannigan, “‘A Particular vice of that people’: Giraldus Cambrensis and the Discourse of English Colonialism,” Irish Studies Review 6, no. 2 (1998): 121-130, Taylor and Francis Online. 24“About,” Irish Naturalists’ Journal, http://irishnaturalistsjournal.org/about/.

85 leisure, and the desire for intellectual improvement combined to create a surge in field work pursuits: collecting, cataloguing, and writing.25 Women were involved in such work as collectors, assistants, and amateur scientists with at home laboratories. As Nessa Cronin points out, women helped to progress scientific advancement.26 In doing so, they challenged easy divisions between public and private or masculine and feminine work and space. Studying Maude Delap, Cronin demonstrates her influence and contributions to the Natural History Museum in London, the

Dublin Natural History Museum, and various experts through her publications and specimen contributions; she even has a sea anemone named aver her, Edwardsia Delapiae.27 Cronin’s argument is that we must “[rethink] the borders of the study of natural history” as we consider

“the spatiality of science,” including where it takes place, and question a natural, national history.28 Ultimately, Cronin shows that knowledge making is a complex web that women have long participated in.

Cannon’s poetry extends this work, albeit in a different discipline, by continuing to direct attention to the natural world. Cronin argues for the importance of recognizing place and a marginal island’s influence, an argument that also applies to Cannon’s poetry as she continues to highlight the significance of often undocumented spaces and things. Cannon, Cronin, and

Hadjafxendi and Plunkett all emphasize the importance of coastlines in this archival process as well. Perhaps coastlines have been spaces of investigation since they “[trigger] the imagination”

25 Kyriaki Hadjafxendi and John Plunkett, “Science at the Seaside: Pleasure Hunts in Victorian Devon,” in Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, ed. Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 181-203. 26 Nessa Cronin, “Maude Delap’s Domestic Science: Island Spaces and Gendered Fieldwork in Irish Natural History,” in Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, ed. Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 161-178. 27 Cronin, “Maude Delap,” 165. 28 Cronin, “Maude Delap,” 177.

86 as “the mental construct of the horizon … draws us outward into a time and space of the beyond.”29 “Here” and “beyond” call for an attentive orientating, a need to “[know]-your-way- around.”30

More recently, the importance of attending to landscape and language, especially the west coast of Ireland, has been the focus of Tim Robinson who draws on the traditions of naturalists in

Ireland as well as dinnseanchas and phenomenology. Robinson’s work is a complement and counter to the depiction of the west coast in the twentieth century, mined as it was by W. B.

Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge for mythic and nationalistic material. In Stones of Aran:

Pilgrimage, Robinson acknowledges these elements of place while also emphasizing the geography, botany, and cartography of the Aran Islands.31 His moving writing is a means of taking “the good step.”32 To cross place is to move

across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera, … [which] trips us with the trailing Rosa spinosissima of personal associations. To forgo the dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry.33

Within this contradiction, Robinson undertakes to move with “the adequate step” and, in so doing, recognizes the particularity of place and experience while also emphasizing the

29 John R. Gillis, “Afterward,” in Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, eds. Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 265. 30 Bjønar Olsen, “Reclaiming Things: An Archaeology of Matter,” in How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies, ed. Paul R. Carlile, Davide Nicolini, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 181. 31 Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (Mullingar, Ireland: Lilliput Press, 1986; reprint, New York: New York Review Books, 2008). In other works, he explores the Burren, and Connemara; see, for example, Tim Robinson, My Time in Space (Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, Ireland: Lilliput Press, 2001); and Tim Robinson, Connemara: Listening to the Wind (London: Penguin, 2006). 32 Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 19. 33 Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 20.

87 relationality of place and its implications for ethics.34

In a similar vein, the British writer Robert Macfarlane has compiled a series of works that explore ideas of nature and human interaction with it. In Landmarks, he seeks to compile “a

Counter-Desecration Phrasebook” calling attention to how language is important for understanding, seeing, and interacting with landscape, as well as how landscape influences language.35 He aims to show that “there are places and things which make our thinking possible, and leave our thinking changed.”36 Such a language of precision would help “encourage responsible place making.”37 Both Macfarlane and Robinson link such attentive practice to poetry. As Robinson says,

I find that in a map such points and the energy that accomplishes such fusions [of experience] (which is that of poetry, not some vague ‘interdisciplinary’ fervour) can, at the most, be invisible guides, benevolent ghosts, through the tangles of the explicit; they cannot themselves be shown or named.38

Macfarlane notes that precise, “tactful language, then, would be language which sings (is lyric), which touches (is born of contact with the lived and felt world), which touches us (affects) and which keeps time—recommending thereby an equality of measure and a keen faculty of perception.”39 For both prose writers, poetry, specifically lyric poetry, is a means of responsibly engaging with the world in all its particularity and complexity. Yet both writers also uphold traditional notions of, a largely male, exploration of the natural world. The figure in the landscape is male and seeks to understand, which sometimes involves subsuming or overtaking elements of landscape and the nonhuman. Macfarlane, especially, can fall into the trap of trying

34 Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 364. 35 Robert Macfarland, Landmarks (London: Penguin, 2016), 31. 36 Macfarlane, Landmarks, 33-34. 37 Macfarlane, Landmarks, 32. 38 Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 18. 39 Macfarlane, Landmarks, 35.

88 to take an authoritative position.

Cannon’s poetry is marked by exploration and being-in-place, but situates itself to sit in the discomfort of incomprehension and partial vision. Her inclusion in the literary magazine

ARCHIPELAGO is evidence of her participation in these wider aesthetic and ethical conversations. The editor of the magazine, Andrew McNeillie, makes the aim of

ARCHIPELAGO clear.40 Written for the “common reader” the Editorial proclaims the magazine’s focus: “Extraordinary will be its preoccupation with landscape, with documentary and remembrance, with wilderness and wet, with natural and cultural histories, with language and languages, with the littoral and vestigial, the geological, and topographical, with climates” and all “as metaphor, liminal and subliminal, at the margins, in the unnamable constellation of islands on the Eastern Atlantic coast.”41 Cannon’s poetry has made its way into

ARCHIPELAGO’s pages, and so she is in conversation with Robinson, Macfarlane, and these ideas. Her poem “Bees Under Snow” was published in the seventh edition of the magazine, the

Winter 2012 issue, and appears alongside poetry by Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney and the prose of Tim Robinson, Katherine Rundell, and John Elder.

“Bees Under Snow” describes the hives that the speaker can see “In a field beside the dark wood.”42 While looking, the speaker remembers that “Last winter, under a foot of snow, / they were square marshmallows in a white field.”43 Yet she knows that within the hives the bees

“hovered in a great ball / shivering to keep warm” and thinks that this fighting is “part of their lives,” “As much as their hunt for sweetness / or their casual work of fertilizing the world’s

40 Andrew McNeillie, “Editorial,” ARCHIPELAGO 1 (Oxford: Clutag Press, 2007), vii. It was begun as an “occasional magazine” in 2007. 41 McNeillie, “Editorial,” vii. 42 Moya Cannon, “Bees Under Snow,” ARCHIPELAGO 7 (2012): 43. 43 Cannon, “Bees Under Snow,” 43.

89 petalled, coloured, scented flowers,” which ensures “fruit for all earthbound, airborne creatures.”44 The poem concludes with an appreciation “of shivering, of bee-faith,” which indicates the importance of bees to the stability of their environment and extends their significance to human survival.45 “Bees Under Snow” claims that the bees as mattering both for themselves and for how they influence human and animal life. The poem is situated between Tim

Robinson’s reflection on place names and his effort to create a database to encompass them and

John Elder’s paralleling of the ecological conditions and their dire circumstances in Connemara and Vermont.46 Arranged between these two investigations, the effect is that the poem shows the interdependence of elements within place and acknowledges the import of continuously questioning our perspectives, responses, and responsibilities. Seeing Cannon’s poem in

ARCHIPELAGO helps to re-contextualize ways to read her poetry and account for the larger networks she recognizes.

Cannon’s Curatorial Practice

There is a myth, as related by Hyginus, of the role that Cura (care, worry) played in humankind’s creation. In it, Cura crosses a river and sees some clay from which she forms a human being.

While contemplating her craft, Jove arrives and Cura asks him to grant the form life. Jove readily agrees, but baulks at the proposition that Cura might give her name to the now living being. The situation is complicated further by the arrival of Tellus, earth herself, who asserts that as the new being is formed of her clay, it should bear her name. Just in time, Saturn passes by and must

44 Cannon, “Bees Under Snow,” 43. 45 Cannon, “Bees Under Snow,” 43. 46 See Tim Robinson, “The Seanachaí and the Database,” ARCHIPELAGO 7 (2012): 28-41, and John Elder, “Foregone Hills,” ARCHIPELAGO 7 (2012): 44-58.

90 arbitrate between the three. Saturn determines that Jove will be granted the being’s spirit after death, and Tellus will then receive the body. Cura will have charge of the being, homo from humus, during its life.47 There are several interesting elements of this myth: that three gods contribute to creating humankind, that the debate becomes one of possession and naming, that it is Cura who tends to humankind in life, and that humankind comes into being in and through care. Her duty binds the material and spiritual, and Cura is thus evidence of the tension between our understanding of care: it is worry or anxiety and protection, cautious observance, and considered attention.

To curate comes from Cura and means to “look after and preserve”; it is most often associated with someone “who has the care or charge of a person or thing.”48 A curator is in a position of power to collect, interpret, arrange, decide, and display. Most often, the term is associated with museums and galleries, although there can also be an association with the spiritual as curates are charged with the care of their parishioners’ souls.49 To define a curatorial practice then, means attending to these actions: looking after, preserving, caring, but also worrying and wondering. In claiming that Cannon has a curatorial practice, I am nodding to the tradition of Irish natural history as well as to the multiple positions of her poems; she is sometimes a tourist, at other times a researcher or accidental discoverer, sometimes a recorder of family history, and collector of shells, among others. As Wall says, “Cannon’s interest in place

47 Hyginus, Fabulae, trans. Mary Grant, Classical Texts Library, www.theoi.com/Text?HyginusFabulae5.html; see also William F. Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 479-481. 48 The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “curate, n.,” The Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com; The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “curator, n.,” The Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com. 49 The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “curate.”

91 and her sense of the landscape as a sacred space is cautionary and prophetic: she is providing an inventory of an endangered world.”50 Throughout her collections there is continuous exchange between discovery and preservation, what remains and what has been lost. Wall emphasizes the sensory sketches that Cannon’s poetry creates so well, but those sensory sketches must be understood as responding to the aesthetic and geographic forms that she sees. In creating a sensory experience of those forms, Cannon calls attention to the structure of lyric and draws out implications for the identification of patterns.

The exchange between preservation and loss, as well as what can and cannot be said, is at the core of many of Cannon’s poems. In “The Patched Kayak” from The Parchment Boat, the speaker reflects upon an exhibit that she saw in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. The brief poem is composed of three succeeding questions and a sentence fragment that refuses to answer them:

Who made the parchment boat? Who bent and bound ribs of drifted wood to a long clean frame? Who stretched sealskins, plaited sinew, stitched the stitches? Which mapped the making, which mapped the wounds, which curved along the edges of the lives of seals, the edges of the lives of women, the edges of the lives of men. (CS 91)

The speaker, gazing at the kayak, exhibits one of the central issues with curation, which is a distinguishing features of archives: their fragmentary natures. Archives are only ever partial in the material that they include due to the limitations of the technology used to construct them and the physical integrity of the items. The fact that archives are fragmentary is frustrating, but also,

50 Wall, Writing the Irish West (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 175.

92 as Sarah Mills acknowledges, makes them “enchanting, mysterious, seductive and addictive.”51

To participate in archiving or to return to the archive is a means of processing and narrativizing these fragments, so that the archive is always in a process of becoming.52 Eric Ketelaar, writing about the potential of archives as spaces of memory and reconciliation, recognizes the constellating nature of archives. He notes that every interaction with the archive or an archived item is an act “of co-creatorship determining the record’s meaning.”53 To responsibly approach an archive whether natural or of human history, as Cannon does, is to recognize that what we find are items and documents or “stories caught half way through: the middle of things: discontinuities.”54

For Cannon curatorial practice and spatial practice are bound. Whether walking through an exhibit, handling items in an archive, or placing findings from the morning walk on the kitchen window sill, the curatorial practice is one that emphasizes both sensory and psychological experience. As in “Patched Kayak,” the experience within the museum collides with the imagined construction of the boat through the material object. In his introduction to The

Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, Jean-Paul Martinon provides an inclusive definition of the curatorial:

The curatorial is a jailbreak from pre-existing frames, a gift enabling one to see the world differently, a strategy for inventing new points of departure, a practice of creating allegiances against social ills, a way of caring for humanity, a process of renewing one’s own subjectivity, a tactical move for reinventing life, a sensual practice of creating

51 Sarah Mills, “Cultural-historical geographies of the archive: Fragments, objects and ghosts,” Geography Compass 7, no. 10 (2013): 703, Academic OneFile. 52 Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9–25, Project MUSE. 53 Eric Ketelaar, “Archives as Spaces of Memory,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 29, no. 1 (2008): 12, Library, Information Science & Technology. 54 Carolyn Steedman quoted in Maria Tamboukou, “Archival research: Unravelling space/time/matter entanglements and fragments,” Qualitative Research 14, no. 5 (2014): 619, Sage Complete.

93 signification, a political tool outside politics, a procedure to maintain a community together, a conspiracy against politics, the act of keeping a question alive, the energy of retaining a sense of fun, the device that helps to revisit history, the measures to create affects, the work of revealing ghosts, a plan to remain out-of-joint with time, an evolving method of keeping bodies and objects together, a sharing of understanding, an invitation for reflexivity, a choreographic mode of operation, a way of fighting against corporate culture, etc.55

To curate is “to enact the event of knowledge rather than to illustrate those knowledges.”56

Cannon’s collections demonstrate an affinity for objects, artifacts, and things; her poetry curates these objects in a manner that acknowledges their alterity and affect; her return to objects situates them in a poetic exhibit that allows for them to influence one another, but also allows them to disrupt what we think we know; and the poems themselves become curated objects. Along the lines of Jane Bennet’s “vibrant matter,” Cannon’s curatorial practice recognizes that “things, too, are vital players in the world” and have an “ability to make things happen, to produce effects.”57

The curatorial instinct is a spatial, ethical practice that challenges human interaction with the world and others in it. It also shows Cannon’s concern for patterns and framings. “Patched

Kayak,” in wondering who constructed the boat, attends to the edges, the way the curve of the kayak parallels the curves of people’s lives. In noting the absences of the archive, the poem also notes the framing of our lives and how closely each life is aligned to an other and to death.

Attending to the frame, “Patched Kayak” gestures to the skeletal nature of the lyric brought to life by language and connections, highlighting the relationships between objects, the boundaries we draw, and the meanings that we make from our various orienting projects. Cannon’s is a

55 Jean-Paul Martinon, “Introduction,” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean- Paul Martinon (London: Bloomsbury: 2013), 4. 56 Iris Rogoff, “The Expanding Field,” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean- Paul Martinon (London: Bloomsbury: 2013), 45-46. 57 Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 4, 5.

94 curatorial practice that documents the archives of our daily lives.

Nests

One of Cannon’s first nest poems is simply called “Nest” and describes “A brown wheel of reeds and broken willow” that “turns somnolently in a corner above the weir” (CS 77). The first two lines of the opening quatrain displace readers’ expectations of nests as secure and protective.

Instead, it seems the reeds and willow are in a precarious position, careless in their somnolent state. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard notes that nests are “precarious thing[s],” constructed out of what is to hand; yet we associate nests with “daydreaming of security.”58

While the nest is a “poor image” and it is absurd that we “attribute human qualities” to it, there is nevertheless “extraordinary significance … attached to nests. We want them to be perfect, to bear the mark of a very sure instinct.”59 The poem challenges readers’ desires and expectations for nests as the speaker wonders, “How long will that current hold it / before the flow sweeps it over?” (CS 77). The question situates the anticipated moment in an endless futurity, a sweeping over that is always coming to displace the river-made nest. The following couplet requires a reconsideration of the wheel of reeds and willow, as “Two Coke cans and a fast-food carton / are wound into the heart of it,” and so the Anthropocene enters more fully into the poem (CS 77).

The nest of litter, not a typical image for protecting future life, causes pause so readers consider how long it will take not only for the objects to be flushed out to sea, but how long it will take for them to break down.

The influence of modernity and how contemporary obsession with convenience results in

58 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 102. 59 Bachelard, The Poetics, 92-93.

95 waste is reminiscent of Derek Mahon’s poetry and prose. In “Rubbish Theory,” Mahon responds to Michael Thompson’s book of the same name to point out what has been most often omitted from the conversation: the “unsalvageable junk, the forlorn thing with no hope of ever being antiques or even relics of contemporary material culture.”60 Even still, “the discarded stuff lives on …; there’s a dark energy in the dustbins of history, or potential use in some future ecological dispensation. Nothing is ever completely lost, energy can’t be destroyed but only changed from one form to another.”61 The possible ecological implications of this inanimate nest, the contents of which could cause future harm, is juxtaposed with nests’ association with homemaking and well-being. Although the refuse lives on as it is washed out to sea and inscribed in the poem, the speaker is more optimistic. The final couplet asks readers to reconsider the possibilities since

“Out of habit, / god goes on making nests” (CS 77). The lines express some hope: no matter the material, something can be built, something even promising protection for future life. The hope may seem naïve, so it is held in conjunction with the unexpectedness of humankind’s impact on nest building. Perhaps, too, “Nest” demonstrates the haphazard construction of all nests and challenges readers to question privileging one type over another, since all nests are created out of what is to hand.

It is difficult not to draw comparisons between nests and houses as occurs in “Crow’s

Nest,” which immediately follows “Nest” in Oar.62 In three stanzas, the speaker tells of coming

“upon a house, / the roof beams long since rotted into grass,” “On St. Stephen’s day, / near the cliffs on Horn Head” (CS 78).63 Outside of the house, “a little higher than the lintels,” she sees “a

60 Derek Mahon, Olympia and the Internet (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2017), 25. 61 Mahon, Olympia and the Internet, 25. 62 Bachelard goes so far as to call nests “nest-houses”; see Bachelard, The Poetics, 99. 63 St. Stephen’s Day in midwinter is December 26th just after Christmas and informs the reading of the poem as there is hope in the season. In addition, there is a tradition recognizing the 26th of

96 crow’s nest in a dwarf tree” (CS 78). The nest is a mixed composition: “heather sinew, long blades of grass, wool and a feather”; it is “a great tangled heart” and was “wound and wrought / with all the energy and art / that’s in a crow” (CS 78). This nest is of a more typical construction, its parts selected and shaped by the crow that built it, formed with “active pressure.”64 For all its shapeliness, however, Cannon wonders why the nest was built so low and if the nested pair or, for that matter, the pair who built the house a “step up from the bog,” were “deranged” (CS 78).

The last word skews the poem, casting a surreal light upon the speaker’s walk and discovery. It distracts readers from the sight of the nest, as derangement offers associative possibilities, casting doubt on the ability to keep house. As the act of keeping house has been a largely female task, there is an unresolved and uncomfortable motion to gendered expectations for dwelling.

As with Cannon’s other poems, contemplating the crow’s nest leads her to consider the parallels for human housing. Megan Buckley writes of Cannon’s dwelling places through a

Heideggerian, ecopoetic lens, claiming that the breaking down of manmade houses is what reveals the importance of the landscape and allows one to more fully dwell within it.65 Whatever the likelihood of either couple’s derangement, the placement of the nest leads the speaker to ask,

is there no place too poor or wild to support, if not life, then love, which is the hope of it,

December as Wren Day when boys, called wrenboys or mummers, would hunt for wrens, catch or kill the birds then tie them to a pole or holly bush and process around town singing. The tradition is rarely practiced anymore, and its origins are obscure. See Rose Eveleth, “The Irish Used to Celebrate the Day After Christmas by Killing Wrens,” Smithsonian.com, 26 December 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-irish-used-to-celebrate-the-day-after- christmas-by-killing-wrens-172713515/. 64 Bachelard, The Poetics, 101. 65 Megan Buckley, “‘Feeling that the Room Had No Walls’ Ecopoiesis and Moya Cannon’s Dwelling Spaces,” The European English Messenger 17, no. 2 (2008): 37-41, Humanities International Complete.

97 for who knows if the young birds lived? (CS 78)

Granting the crows love anthropomorphizes them, but as Jane Bennet maintains, to anthropomorphize is not necessarily a violent act. It can be one that helps to “uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances” that make for more engaged, ethical living.66 To allow for the possibility of love or something like it in the careful construction of a nest—evidence of future-looking against odds that cannot be anticipated—is to choose to recognize and accept being in place. Even in the face of death that comes to all living things, to support life is to be present and make do with the bits of material we can collect to create our own “great tangled heart[s].”

Notably, Cannon’s poems of nests are absent of life; they focus on the form, the shaped roundness, and the implied boundaries. In a way, they are suggestive of life that has been or might be. The nest poems would seem to support a reading that Cannon’s lyrics follow a contained, self-expression, a turning away. Yet despite the absences, there is a continued engagement that extends back to the world, pushing her lyrics into a dialogic conversation. This dynamic holds true for the poem “Nausts.”67 The opening quatrain is split, setting the first line on its own: “There are emptinesses which hold” (H 29). The line and caesura stall the reader. As the weir-made nest and the crows’ nest have anticipated, here is reference to the emptiness at the heart of all nests. In directing her readers attention to emptiness, Cannon reveals her pull to boundaries and the shapes things take. To attend to the nests’ and nausts’ rounded hollows is to gesture to an architectural and sensual experience of the world. The poem embraces a

66 Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter, 99. 67 A naust or noust is “A place where a boat can be hauled up and kept ashore; spec. a scooped- out trench at the edge of a beach surrounded by a shallow wall of stones”; see The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “noust, n.,” Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com.

98 contradiction. Composed of words, it is anything but empty, and the turn to emptiness is a turn to form. Cannon then directs her readers to particular absences: “the leveret’s form in spring grass; / the tern’s hasty nest in the shore pebbles; / nausts in a silvery island inlet” (H 29). The leveret’s form suggests Michael Longley’s long attention to the young hare as in “The Leveret.”68 Both

Longley and Cannon are concerned with defining the impossible boundaries of hollow and home.

The nausts in Cannon’s poem are “Boat-shaped absences” lined up along the beach and composed of “a mooring stone, fore and aft, / and a flat stone high up, to guide the tarred bow” of the boats returning from sea (H 29). As they may be “a hooker, púcan, or punt,” Cannon locates her boats and poem in the west coast of Ireland; the three boat types are most closely associated with Galway, Connemara, and the Aran Islands, although they are used along the coast as well (H 29).69 As with “Crow’s Nest,” the emptiness itself maintains a promise of the safe return of the boat and of a way of life continuing. The poem ends with the promised return of the boats, coming in at high tide; then as the water recedes, the boat remains “tilted to one side, / in its shingly nest” (H 29). The s, st, es sounds repeat throughout the poem, sounding like a boat coming to rest on shingle. Like the boat nuasts, the poems that Cannon writes are nests to hold ideas. Her lyrics, then, take an environmental impression and turn inward only to

68 Michael Longley, Collected Poems (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2007), 327. Longley considers the west coast of Ireland and makes careful studies of the nonhuman world in “Remembering Carrigskeewaun,” when he considers the hearth and the leveret, snipe, and porpoises and thinks, “Home is a hollow between the waves, / A clump of nettles, feathery winds,” considering that which holds and protects; see Longley, Collected Poems, 170. 69 Tim Robinson recalls a practice on the Aran Islands, specifically in Gort na gCapall, where “The currachs used to be kept propped upside-down on little piles of stones on the wide expanse of flat rock behind the storm beach called Creig na gCurachaí, the crag of the currachs, and here they were regularly re-coated with tar, which left each currach’s resting-place outlined on the smooth rock in black, and this curious after-image of the vanished fleet still persists”; see Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 79.

99 demonstrate that there must, and always will, be an outward turn. Cannon’s Bachelardian move to recognize the power and potential of the nest image centers questions of well-being. Her nests consider placement, what protection might look like, and the hope that we derive from a sense of protection, however precarious or misplaced. With Bachelard, she seems to acknowledge that we need to have access to spaces both lived and imagined from which we can venture. The very emptiness of nests tells us where we are and what we hold on to.

Shells

For centuries, shells have been collected for decoration, adornment, tools, and study. They are carefully arranged and classified in cabinets of curiosity, museums of natural history, and textbooks. Shells have provided a means of meditation for Cannon in nearly all her collections.

Beginning with “Foundations” in Oar, for example, Cannon considers a shell midden uncovered when a new foundation for a kitchen is to be laid. Looking at the pile of shells, she thinks of what “was once called ‘kitchen’— / poor man’s meat, salty, secretive, / gathered at low spring tide” and the difficult task of collecting and eating mussels (CS 81). “How many were consumed?” she wonders, as the barrowloads are removed and the “builder goes home, joking that he’s found gold”; it is the color that the “last shovelfuls turn” in the evening light of summer

(CS 81). The pale brilliance sparks a recognition:

They speak in silent sympathy with all that has been exiled, killed and hidden, then exhumed, vulnerable again in the air of another age. (CS 81)

The silent sympathy is broken, however, as Cannon recounts what the shells say. While implied in the penultimate stanza, the final stanza imagines the collective voice of the uncovered shells: they are a reminder that human life “no less than ours, / is measured by the tides of the sea / and

100 is unspeakably fragile” (CS 81). The unearthed shells maintain their stories of the tide so that even after years of burial, they continue to bring together and blur the boundaries of land and sea. They are also suggestive of the people who, though unmentioned, haunt the poem and the place with evidence of their former lives.

Shells are fascinating as they are “highly intelligible; and it is the formation, not the form, that remains mysterious.” 70 Spatially, shells offer apt parallels for lyric poetry. They are at times living and then not; they are opened and closed, mobile and immobile, aesthetic and utilitarian, fragile and strong; and they take time to form. Indeed, shells are an interesting spatial dialectic.

They also stand as emblems for lyric expression, as with Yeats’ “echo-harbouring shell.”71

Building upon Yeats’ poem where the shell symbol is appropriated to represent the artistic expression of the poet, Cannon’s shells give voice to all that has been dispossessed and so writes them into the tradition of lyric poetry, such as Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill who give voice to those outside history.72 While the shells’ speech is the weakest part of the poem, it nonetheless presses readers to consider the title. The shell midden was discovered while digging a foundation for a house expansion, and so Cannon subtly nods to the economic developments that alter landscapes, local and global. Readers are encouraged to think further about what is foundational. The voice of the shells says one such foundational element is a shared fragility. The

70 Bachelard, The Poetics, 106. 71 Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990; reprint, London: Everyman, 1994), 34, 33-35. “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” and “The Sad Shepherd” from Yeats’ 1889 collection Crossways both take up the emblem of the shell. 72 Eavan Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcarnet, 1995), 160; Eavan Boland, Object Lessons (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006); Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “What Foremothers,” in The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, ed. Theresa O’Connor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, The Astrakhan Cloak, trans. Paul Muldoon (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1992). .

101 suggestion is also that humans have a responsibility to protect, even as we acknowledge that we do not have ultimate control over that fragility. Stripping a house down to its foundations seems to gesture to the same architectural concerns of the lyric that the poems of nests investigated.

The potential for shells as repositories of the imagination is exhibited in “Oysters.” Here,

Cannon asks what can be known of a stone, a lark, or “the rumination of the oyster” (PB 20). She wonders if “it dreams away its years?” or whether it is “hard, / this existence where salt and river water mix?” (PB 20). What we do know of oysters is their “endless filtering / to sustain a pale silky life, the laboring to build a grey shell” (PB 20). While there is acknowledgment of the oyster as an organism alone, Cannon pushes the image of the oyster’s secrecy to draw parallels to human experience. She is willing to note that “Perhaps the oyster does not dream or think or feel at all,” an acknowledgment that is immediately qualified: “but then how can we understand / the pull of that huge muscle beside the heart / which clamps the rough shell shut” (PB 20). The ability to protect itself is balanced with the oyster’s need to open “to let in the tide” (PB 20). The parallels here of protecting the human heart and body while simultaneously knowing when to open are equal parts of survival for both oysters and humans. “Oysters” is still structured within the frame of human time, thought, and feeling. Nevertheless, Cannon’s acknowledgment of the oysters, her willingness to reflect on and imagine their lives and question human perception make this a poem with a lyrical topographical conscience. Cannon’s “Oysters” is more subtle in its sensuality and violence than Heaney’s poem that shares its title. Yet Heaney too parallels the oysters with “poetry or freedom.”73 In Cannon’s poem, the implied vulnerability highlights the importance of shared spaces and ecologies and pushes readers towards an ethical response.

“Oysters” also suggests what the lyric might do, enclose and protect. It is this quality that

73 Heaney, Opened Ground (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 139.

102 suggests Leslie Wheeler’s reading of H.D.’s “The Walls Do Not Fall” in which the image of the shell allows H.D. to explore the idea of protection and enclosure, “whether they can ‘contain without confining.’”74

“Shells” recounts Cannon’s memories of beach combing on the Silver Strand. The memories of many hours of walking and searching here coalesce to express a continued sense of wonder and an ecological awareness, as with Macfarlane, Robinson, and Longley. The beachcombers “hunker” much like the shells they search for after a storm; they also hunt and hoard, expressive verbs whose shared sounds ground the poem as well as suggest the beachcombers are embedded within the environment (CS 41). The poem is intent on its catalogue, hoarding the treasured images of one desired shell after another. “The pink, furled nuggets” of cowries75

… were stored in jam jars, hoarded in jacket pockets, on windowsills, with pelican’s feet, razor shells, scallop shells, turret shells and the rare, white wentletrap. (CS 41)

The beachcombers’ actions of hunkering and hoarding also gesture to a history of exoticism in

74 Leslie Wheeler, The Poetics of Enclosure: American Women Poets from Dickinson to Dove (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 77. 75 Cowries carry multiple associations as they have been used aesthetically and as currency. They can be considered both colonial objects and resistance to colonial standardization; see Ingrid Van Damme, “Cowry Shells, a Trade Currency,” National Bank of Belgium Museum, https://www.nbbmuseum.be/en/2007/01/cowry-shells.htm and The British Museum, “The Wealth of Africa, Money in Africa,” The British Museum, http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/MoneyInAfrica_Presentation.pdf. Derek Walcott uses cowries memorably in “The Sea is History” in which “the white cowries clustered like manacles / on the drowned women,” depicting the horrors of the slave trade and what counts as history, memory, and myth; see Derek Walcott, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

103 the capturing and collecting of specimens, and there is a darker history too as cowries were used as monetary units in Africa and for the slave trade. These echoes are uncomfortable and point to the way that aesthetic objects have been simultaneously associated with violence and beauty.

Listing the common names of the shells, poet and reader may hold each in mind, seeing it momentarily on the sill, feeling its weight in the pocket, and remembering its indentation on the beach. In his gathering of place words, Robert Macfarlane includes, “Glassel (n.): A seaside pebble which was shiny and interesting when wet, and which is now a lump of rock, but which children nevertheless insist on filling their suitcases with after a holiday.”76 Shells can have this effect too, and their form, perhaps, continues to hold our interest after the water has dried. The shells are not described in detail, only named, but the naming is a kind of incantation, one that

Vona Groarke uses to great effect. Adding to the effect of incantation is the repetition of sounds: the alliteration of j’s, s’s, r’s, w’s, and the repetition of the word shells.

The shared experience of incantation and discovery provides opportunity for the exploration of the aesthetic geometry of the shell and its imaginative potential. The final stanza reads:

Ignorant of how Venus had sailed ashore, we were already intrigued by all the felt asymmetries of the small sea-beats’ growth, all the dizzy architecture of the first flesh. (CS 41)

The speaker emphasizes her affinity for the real and felt geometry of shells in rhyming

“intrigued” with “asymmetries,” even before her impressions are influenced by mythologies and symbols. In fact, the amazement beachcombers experience is the sense that extraordinary and

76 Macfarlane, Landmarks, 7-8. Macfarlane’s projects have pursued in prose what Cannon has accomplished in poetry. Landmarks, for example, provides glossaries of place and landscape words combined with memoir and literary criticism.

104 large things can come from small spaces and the reverse. Cannon’s gesture to myth reveals humankind’s compulsion to craft origin stories: “first flesh” is erotic and suggestive not only of myth but of Eden and gender. The image of Venus in a half shell, sailing to shore, is reminiscent of the nests in the previous section, and calls for a re-evaluation of nurturing and holding. Calling attention to the “dizzy architecture” of the shells shows their position as aesthetic objects as well as lyric objects and gestures to Bachelard’s observations that for shells “life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself.”77 This turning upon itself is also what the poet does, except that centering the image of the shell stresses the tension of the lyric poem of enclosing and opening.

The hunkering, hunting, and hoarding of the beachcombers carries on a tradition that is widespread, as Macfarlane’s definition of glassel points out, but that is also associated with scientific pursuits in the nineteenth century.78 There is a subtle gendered implication here of women’s participation in scientific discoveries as collectors, benefactors of natural history collections, and scholars. More directly, the associations with Venus and “first flesh” parallel women’s bodies with shells as beautiful and mysterious. The subtly erotic language seems to point to, not only the shell’s form, but the discovery of their own bodies that the beachcombers will experience. There is a hint of pleasure and, in the images of the shells, contours of intimacy.

In highlighting these implications, Cannon manages to skirt limiting both the shells and women as aesthetic objects. The poem also seems to echo Marianne Moore’s conclusion in “The Paper

Nautilus” which describes the creature’s hatching eggs and proposes they “wound themselves as if they knew love / is the only fortress / strong enough to trust to.”79 The speaker’s positioning in

77 Bachelard, The Poetics, 106. 78 Hadjafxendi and Plunkett, “Science at the Seaside,” 181-203. 79 Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (London: Penguin, 1982), 122.

105 Cannon’s poem shows that engagement with the natural world is a means not only of appreciating beauty but of coming to terms with the self in relation to the world.

The archeological impulse extends throughout Cannon’s poetry, especially in her walking poems. Many of these are located on the coasts of Ireland, but there is a wider distribution at she considers experiences in places from England to Brazil. “Survivors” follows “Shells” in

Carrying the Songs and describes another beach combing experience where Cannon happens upon sea-potatoes on Catherine’s Island. The sea-potato is the common name for Echinocardium cordatum, a sea urchin whose hard shell, called a test, encircles the softer organs of the creature.

Generally, sea-potatoes bury themselves in the sand, but can be dislodged during violent storms or tides.80 The poem highlights the dialectics of the shell—inside and outside, smooth and rough, durable and fragile—as Cannon notes how she picks them up to admire their “pinpoint symmetries” only to have them fall apart in her hand (CS 42). When their spines have been worn off, the sea-potatoes have wonderful designs; lined pairs of parallel dots decorate the creature in half moon shapes. What is remarkable is the way that “yesterday they rode out a North Atlantic gale,” which “swept them up here, on tufts of foam”; it is “an impossibly safe landing / for frail coats of bone” (CS 42). The final half-rhyme connects the last lines of the fourth and fifth stanzas, rhyming foam with bone, and pointing to the coexistence of delicacy and resiliency.

In correspondence, Cannon has suggested to me that the sea-potatoes remind her of human fragility.81 She wonders how humans can survive such trauma as the sea-potatoes survived the storm and recognizes, too, that sometimes there is only the appearance of survival

80 Damian Gayle, “Sea Potatoes Wash Up en Masse on Cornish Beach,” The Guardian, 19 August 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/19/sea-potatoes-urchins- wash-up-en-masse-on-cornish-beach. 81 Moya Cannon, email to author, 27 March 2015.

106 that covers a fragile interior. Cannon’s attention to detail acknowledges the nonhuman in each entity’s own right and also demonstrates, through the composition of the poem and the framing of beach combing, the shared experience of place. Such accumulations may cause us to pause because they show us the porous nature of the rather haphazard boundaries that we draw—here between land and sea. They also demonstrate that places are constantly being co-constructed, and it is an open construction, not foreclosed, so our responses within place must be to read and acknowledge, responding to the best of our abilities within the time and space that holds us.

Cannon’s curatorial practice extends threads throughout her collections so that returning to the poems is a continuity of accumulated reflections on similar things. In this way, her lyrics become repositories themselves for daydreams and reflections, offering to the reader what shells first offered to her. “Sea Urchins” extends Cannon’s attraction to the dialectic of shells and sea creatures. The poem addresses the sea urchins that can be found in many coastal regions. As she describes their “coats of brown spines,” there is a respect for the creatures, “distant cousins of starfish” (H 25). She thinks of them “dug into their hard honeycomb above the tideline,” where they create nooks, holes, and paths as they “eat limestone” (H 25). Sea urchins chew up rock, grinding it not for food but as a means of creating protective homes.82 Cannon’s inclusion of limestone is also associated with the Burren and west coast of Ireland, associations developed further in the poem “Consider the Cocosphere.” Like the limestone they burrow through, the urchins have “splendid, symmetrical carapaces” (H 25). Once again, the speaker pauses to note the geometry of the urchin, marveling at its aesthetic construction as well as its tough spines and

82 Alexis Rudd, “The Sea Animal So Tough It Eats Rocks for Breakfast,” Scitable, 15 August 2013, http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/saltwater-science/the_sea_animal_so_tough; “True Grit: How Sea Urchins Carve Hiding Holes in Limestone,” Science Daily, 13 May 2009, Weizman Institute of Science, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090504094304.htm.

107 ability to transform rock.83 Cannon’s appreciation asks why something is made so aesthetic: both strong and fragile. The urchins are not invincible; their shells can easily break apart after the urchin has died and the spines have fallen off. What is as remarkable as the urchins’ ability to

“eat limestone” is the gentle capacity of the sea to “occasionally / deliver to us intact— / unbleached, rosy sea-lanterns” (H 25). Sea urchins have often been associated with lanterns.

Aristotle wrote of them as such, and for years, their feeding mechanism was known as Aristotle’s lantern. It is now understood that Aristotle referenced the test of the urchin, and it is the latter that Cannon also describes.84 These sea-lanterns, however, refuse to shed light. Instead, they are marvelous for their agency: the way they craft the limestone into intricate honeycomb formations.

The suggestion of limestone and sea creatures is also present in “Consider the

Cocosphere,” dedicated to Tim and Mairéad Robinson. The poem attends to the microscopic coccolithophore and the coccoliths that form the coccosphere that protects it. This dedication to minutiae and its reverberations reflects the same attentiveness that is found in Tim Robinson’s writing. The coccosphere has an interesting construction. It is formed of calcium carbonate “plate armour,” Cannon calls it: “paired porcelain cartwheels / interlock to form the sphere / which encloses this minute life form” (H 50).85 Robert Macfarlane collects the definition of coccoliths,

83 Writing of Pollna bPéist or The Worm-Hole near Port Bhéal an Dúin, Robinson says, “the rock underfoot here is inhabited by countless purple sea-urchins, each of which has excavated a hole an inch or two deep for itself, and the population is so dense that the rock surface is reduced to a layer of fantastically fretted, brittle spikes”; see Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 82. 84 Eleni Voultsiadou and Chariton Chintiroglou, “Aristotle’s Lantern in Echinoderms: An Ancient Riddle,” Cahiers de Biologie Marine 49, no. 3 (2008): 299-302. 85For more information on coccoshperes see, for example, Aubry Marie-Pierre, “A Sea of Lilliputians,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 284, no. 1-2 (December 2009): 88-113, Science Direct; B.N. Jaya et al., “Coccosphers Confer Mechanical Protection: New Evidence for an Old Hypothesis,” Acta Biomaterialia 42 (September 2016): 258-264, Science Direct. Following these sources, I use the spelling coccosphere.

108 “individual plates of calcium carbonate formed by single-celled algae,” in Landmarks.86 What

Macfarlane omits is their size. The individual coccospheres are so small that the naked eye cannot distinguish them: “light is too crude a medium / to relay to us / the absurdly beautiful structure” of the organism, and yet, the blooms it forms just under the surface of the sea “may be seen from space,” turquoise swirls scattered throughout the world’s oceans (H 50). Cannon’s topographic scope is evident here as she moves from the view through the microscope to the satellite.

Coccospheres composed as they are of calcium carbonate call to mind the rocky limestone landscapes that Robinson is known for so carefully exploring and cataloguing. Writing of limestone, Robinson says, “This bare soluble limestone is a uniquely tender and memorious ground. Every shower sends rivulets wandering across its surface, deepening the ways of their predecessors and gradually engraving their initial caprices as law into the stone.”87 For Cannon, this porousness means something different. “Consider the Cocosphere” highlights that speaker and readers cannot see such intricately constructed organisms without aid. Cannon composes the poem in second person and the phrase “you will never see” in the first line of the poem is repeated in the first line of the final stanza (H 50). Dedicated to the Robinsons, the “you” has a direct reference, yet Cannon’s larger reading audience is implicated too as the title invites readers to “consider” this tiny creature, even though “electrons are needed / to divine the form / of each individual design” (H 50). The language of religious texts makes clear the amazing intricacy that seems both exquisite and extraneous, “a beauty gratuitous, / as the upper, outer roofs / of cathedrals or mosques” (H 50). Each of these is “painstakingly decorated” even if only “for the

86 Macfarlane, Landmarks, 281. 87 Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 9.

109 eyes of steeplejacks / and of gods” (H 50).

To “Consider the Cocosphere” is to consider the aesthetics of geometry and nature to which Cannon is so drawn. For her, they are evidence of the power of creative forces and serve as a parallel for lyric poetry. The carefully constructed coccosphere encloses as the lyric encloses and uses form for its function. As it cannot be easily seen or appreciated, calling attention to it places the speaker in a position to observe nature. While using the language of science and appealing to scientific techniques for understanding, Cannon’s suggestion is that some things evade total comprehension. She gestures to a larger scheme of understanding but resists a full explanation of intricacy.88 In terms of ecological representation, Cannon’s curatorial practice shows that things are subject to human observation and language or, here, human imagination and language. In essence, what Cannon proposes is an archive of ecological awareness: ways of seeing, what is worthy of considering, and what gets put in language. Robinson says,

Such are the links, as a geologist has explained them to me, between these mamillated surfaces and the cliffs that overhang them, between the earth-movements of the Carboniferous era and a story of O’Flaherty’s—links not in any simple “chain of being,” but in the network of being, which consists of tangle within tangle within tangle, indefinitely, but of which nevertheless we can tease out a thread or two here and there.89

Cannon’s poetry teases out a thread or two; and her exploration of shells looks to what can

“contain without confining.”

88 Lucy Collins, “Clearing the Air,” in Ireland: Revolution and Evolution, ed. John R. Strachan and Alison O’Malley-Younger (Oxford: Peter Lang: 2010), 205. 89 Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 47.

110 Objects

Objects are material things that can be touched and apprehended, but in their discreteness can be in the way, an interruption or disturbance that calls for re-evaluation.90 Writing in “Reclaiming

Things: An Archaeology of Matter,” Bjønar Olsen takes up Henri Bergson and Edward Casey to explore the importance of recognizing things, their agency and influence:

Our everyday perception of things is intimately related to those potential actions—and reactions—created by the contacts, interfaces, and spaces between bodies and things. As noted by Henri Bergson, things act on us, they “indicate at each moment, like a compass that is being moved about, the position of a certain image, my body, in relation to the surrounding images.” This enmeshment produces a material habitual competence and spatial knowledge, a “knowing-your-way-around-somewhere.” This competence is a knowledge for “how to go on” in a landscape, a city, or a house.91

Cannon’s engagement with objects or things enacts a spatial and historical practice of “knowing- your-way-around.” Her poetry as an exhibit of objects and artifacts offers the opportunity for her readers to also learn-their-way-around through acknowledging and negotiating the objects that shape our lives unseen and those that disrupt our daily patterns and demand re-seeing. At the heart of her curatorial practice is a concern for orientation: geographic, lyric, ethic.92 Cannon’s archivist’s approach is evident in her earliest work; she turns to the archive of natural and human history, taking a minute to study the object she has found and reflecting on the moment of discovery.93 This practice enables Cannon to contend with and challenge structures of power both social and natural; in doing so, she investigates what remains. The documents and the

90 The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “object, n.,” Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com. 91 Olsen, “Reclaiming Things,” 181. 92 Seamus Heaney is also famous for the objects of memory in his poetry. See Stephen Regan, “‘Things Remembered’: Objects of Memory in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney,” Éire-Ireland 49, no. 3 & 4 (Winter 2014): 320-336, Project MUSE. 93 We can read it in “Shards” or “Patched Kayak” from her 1997 collection The Parchment Boat, as well as in poems such as “Foundations” and “Carrying the Songs” from Oar and Carrying the Songs, respectively.

111 objects, some of which belong to formal archives and museums while others belong to the informal archives of our daily lives, become a complex network that complicates our understanding of space, place, time, and experience. The sense of loss, often associated with archival work, is present, but there is also joy, hope, and tenderness.

Traditionally, curating archives means collecting important documents, legal, civil, and cultural. Such an impulse imposes order, which also imposes certain structures of power. Cannon takes up this form of archive and its technological progress in “www.annalsofulster.com.” The poem occurs midway through her collection Keats Lives and recounts the speaker’s experience of visiting the Annals of Ulster website. She recalls,

When my O Canannain ancestor pillaged the sanctuary of Lough Derg in the eleventh century and carried off its gold vessels, he could hardly have foreseen that letters put down carefully by some tonsured scribe would light up on a screen a thousand years later. (KL 39)

The poem dramatizes the now widespread phenomena of using the internet and digitized records to trace family history.94 A solemn tone emphasizes the speaker’s responsibility in acknowledging how she came to be in Donegal, as the poem questions the history of migration and plantation that Kerry Hardie also takes up.95 The Annals of Ulster as an important historical

94 It seems most likely that she is referring to the eleventh entry for the year 1070: “Termonn Da- Beóc was plundered by Ruaidrí ua Canannán, and God and Da-Beóc took vengeance before a year was out.” The Annals may be found online at The Annals of Ulster, CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts, University College Cork, 2000, https://celt.ucc.ie/published/T100001A/index.html. 95 In Kerry Hardie, “At St Laserian’s Cathedral, Old Loughlin,” Selected Poems (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2011), 32-33; and Kerry Hardie, “Letter from the Old World,” The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2012), 14-15.

112 document is being digitized, and so the record continues to go through more permutations, participating in a reciprocal process of influence. Cannon’s measured recounting of her web search resonates, perhaps, with her contemporary reader’s knowledge of and likely access to similar resources.

This reporting of fact serves to initially obscure the subdued amazement with which

Cannon’s poem presents the discovery of a family ancestor whose questionable actions were recorded. The second stanza of the two-stanza poem is a single question:

How could he have divined the power of an inked feather, of the quartz seam ticking under the heather? (KL 39)

The poem decreases in line lengths as the speaker moves from retelling the story of her ancestor to questioning the power of the record. There is a nest-like weaving or shell-like turning in these lines that has the effect of narrowing as if the very lines are being knit closer together. It creates a tightening that is palpable and speaks to the response the speaker has at the foregone conclusion she finds in the Annals. As the experience is distilled, the rhyming increases so that “heather” looks back to “feather” and “power.” Perhaps more interesting is the rhyming of “foreseen” with

“screen” and “seam,” as these links suggest how easily information can be lost or recalled, depending on what is recorded. The instruments that allowed for the initial recording in the

Annals were once as unimaginable as the metal and plastic and the complex coding that now constitute our own devices. The words “foreseen,” “screen,” “seam” also reverberate with words not used: scream, seem, or scene. For such an understated poem, there is a lot of feeling wound up.

“www.annalsofulster.com” complicates the poet’s relationship to the past, a relationship

113 companionable with, but slightly different from Heaney’s “Digging” and bog poems.96 Returning to the archive is not just a looking back or out; it is a looking within so that times and places coalesce, even momentarily. The lingering question posed by the final stanza asks readers to consider the inscriptions that we make as well as the inscriptions that we find. It recognizes that the two are inextricably linked. Cannon points to the power of the record to act as an orienting guide, even when we dislike what we find. 97 As a woman writer taking up her troubled inheritance through the record of the church and men, Cannon also reconceptualizes who speaks, as did Boland, and what questions are asked. The implicit ethical imperative is to record, good or ill, and to respond. Inevitably, stories, especially origin stories, are wound in the space between what is recorded and what is unknown. Geological evidence tells about the various cycles the planet has experienced as written records relay the information of human history. In acknowledging that all records are only ever partial, we also acknowledge that records participate in structures of power. Cannon is drawn to both kinds of inscription: the signs in rocks and shells that tell of the earth as well as signs of human history. Certainly, visiting the

Annals website means mining the archive, an act of pulling something to the surface for investigation. While the Annals and Cannon’s reflection of her discovery participate in the act of narrativizing and historicizing, the engagement with the record is also a means, as Ketelaar claims, “to prevent denial.”98 Instead of shying away from the uncomfortable information that she finds, the speaker foregrounds it in the poem.

96 Heaney, Opened Ground, 3, 108-114. 97 Cannon returns to the influence of language throughout her collections: “Thalasa,” “‘Toam,’” “Introductions,” “Murdering the Language,” “Scríob,” “Carrying the Songs,” “Our Words,” and “Script,” all confront the use of language. Eamonn Wall and Lucy Collins both address her use of language; see Wall, Writing and Collins, “Clearing the Air.” I will address Cannon’s use of Irish later in this chapter. 98 Ketelaar, “Archives,” 10.

114 The poem “Finger-fluting in Moon-Milk” also considers the marks left behind and opens up the conversation about what might be incorporated into an archive, embracing a “record … that speak[s] with multiple voices through many intermediaries.”99 Inspired by Rouffignac cave in 2010, the poem tells of the poet’s visit to see the Paleolithic cave drawings. The first long stanza describes an image: it looks as though a woman holding a child dipped both their hands in the soft white limestone runoff and then walked while dragging their fingers across the cave walls. Thousands of years later, the walls still contain this inscription of five large flutings next to five smaller flutings, elongated dinger prints. The limestone runoff the two used Cannon calls moon-milk. The final stanza reflects upon the finger-flutings:

With no gauge to measure sensibility we cannot know what portion of our humanity we share with someone who showed a child how to sign itself in moon-milk one day, late in the Old Stone Age. (KL 11)

The decorative flutings are suggestive of things that resonate through space and time. The layered internal rhyming makes the haunting image aural, as sensibility gestures to humanity and

“age” reaches back to “gauge.” Also evident is Cannon’s training in history and politics. As she says, “I am also curious to know how sensibility mutates and changes over the centuries, or whether it does. That is one of the reasons I am also intrigued by prehistoric cave-paintings and by archaeology generally—as evidence of what people held dear—also evidence of what they hoped and feared.”100 “Finger-fluting in Moon-Milk” is an ekphrastic poem, focusing on the act of creation even though the meaning is obscured. Cannon’s emphasis on fingers points to her poem “Hands,” which proposes, “this is what a human life is: / to be passed from hand to hand, /

99 Quoted in Ketelaar, “Archives,” 10. 100 Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention,’” 165.

115 to be borne up, improbably, over an ocean” (H 20).

“Finger-fluting in Moon-Milk” suggests the child was held up to decorate the cave walls, a suggestion supported by recent archeological developments from Rouffignac and other caves which offer more insight into the finger-flutings.101 The children’s drawings are not restricted to one cavern; in fact, a young girl is one of the most prolific finger-fluters in Rouffignac.102 Leslie

Van Gelder proposes that these flutings are evidence of children’s integration in Paleolithic societies and that the drawings are most likely not ritualistic.103 Her position allows for the possibilities that the finger-flutings might be expressive of play, learning, language, and artistry.

That women and children are active participants might also suggest more important roles than twentieth-century archeologists and anthropologists originally posited.

Rouffignac cave is filled with drawings, and mammoths make up almost sixty percent, but there are also bison, ibex, and horses.104 That Cannon selects the flutings instead of the more pictorial drawings as the focus points to her concern for details. Instead of reflecting on the great cavern or the many mammoths, the speaker looks to one image of fluting by a parent and child.

To ask what humanity we might share with the parent and child who wrote in moon-milk is to wonder at what point or at what inscription humanity occurs. Part of the gauging that the poet does considers the history of writing and language. Moon-milk carries the gendered connotations of the moon and the physical necessity of milk that mothers provide to their children. So while

101 Because of the size and shape of the flutings, researchers have determined that children participated in decorating the cave. Leslie Van Gelder, “Counting the Children: The Role of Children in the Production of Finger Flutings in Four Upper Paleolithic Caves,” Oxford Journal of Archeology 34, no.2 (2015): 119-138, Science and Technology Collection. 102 Van Gelder, “Counting the Children,” 131. 103 Van Gelder, “Counting the Children,” 136. 104 “The Rouffignac Cave,” The Bradshaw Foundation, http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/france/rouffignac/index.php.

116 Cannon never ascribes a gender to the parent, the references in the poem point to a mother and child. This archival interpretation then posits the mother and child as writing to one another, as each other’s primary audience. Cannon’s emphasis on the shared sensibility of fear and hope is an attentiveness to signs that are at once present, past, and future looking.

“Burial, Ardèche 20,000 BC” picks up on notes from “Finger-fluting in Moon-Milk” and earlier poems.105 The poem is a meditation on a Paleolithic child’s burial. As with Heaney’s bog poems, the central concern pushes for consideration of what makes us human and asks how we come to terms with violence and death. The cause of the child’s death is unknown, perhaps

“illness, accident or sacrifice,” but the care that went into his burial is evident thousands of years later (KL 15). The speaker reflects,

Someone sprinkled his grave with red ochre, someone tied a seashell around his neck, someone placed a few flint blades by his side, and under his head someone laid the dried tail of a fox, perhaps a white fox. (KL 15)

Identified here are significant objects of adornment. Cannon lists the objects to show the importance of the child, but her lines also emphasize the rituals of burial. Someone sprinkled, tied, and placed which indicates a relationship of care and of a community in which the child died. This poem might be read alongside Paula Meehan’s “Child Burial” as both address the artifacts buried with children as a means of emphasizing human compassion and care, the form that love takes in loss.106 Landscapes are marked by such practices, and “Burial, Ardèche 20,000

BC” demonstrates that what has left traces continues to influence later interaction in and with

105 In Hands, most notably, “Eliza Murphy,” “Flowers at Loughcrew,” or “The Important Dead.” 106 Paula Meehan, “Child Burial,” Mysteries of the Home (Tarset, England: Bloodaxe Books, 1996; reprint, Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2013), 18-19.

117 place. Cannon’s choice to use the ambiguous word someone, repeated throughout the second stanza, implicates readers in the act of witnessing and caring. Readers are asked to participate in the meditation of life, death, and love.

Sometimes, documents and objects slip into archives or are purposefully included in order to challenge the dominant narrative. As libraries, museums, and private collectors work towards including all kinds of archival material, the significance of all incorporated objects is complicated and enriched. “Four thimbles,” inspired by Cannon’s visit to Coimbra in Portugal, takes up objects that usually go unnoticed, not only because of their ordinary domestic use, but because they are ready-to-hand. We notice these objects most when they are misplaced, and, in such a way, they can productively disrupt us. The thimbles Cannon sees “were sieved out of the mud of the riverbank / in the cloister of the convent of Santa Clara a Velha” (KL 12). They were salvaged during the unearthing, or de-swamping, of the convent that had for seven hundred years been besieged by water. In the second stanza, Cannon writes:

In May light, broad sandstone vaults are sand-blasted, clean as stones fallen from glacial till at the sea’s edge – clean of mud, of candle smoke, almost of history (KL 12)

The promise of recovery and spring here coincide. But along with the newly cleaned and vaulted ceilings are a variety of other objects:

Four battered silver thimbles were dredged up with needles, scissors, broken crockery, cloister tiles. (KL 12)

The mundane objects are evidence of life so that the convent cannot be free of history nor the political and cultural power that built the monastery.

The objects themselves exert a particular reading: they are evidence of the lives of the

118 women who used them, who were related “as stars are sisters, / who form a constellation / but inhabit different planes and eons” (KL 13). Particulars of these personal lives do not remain; as

Eavan Boland shows in her poetry, they can only ever be hinted at or guessed.107 Yet Cannon’s poem demonstrates that

Small things survive inundations – thimbles, blue tiles, doves. (KL 13)

Cannon’s use of the word inundations directly references the prolonged flooding of Santa Clara a

Velha and also suggests its other meaning, which is an overwhelming abundance of things.

Whether positive or negative, the abundance shapes lives, places, and memory. Cannon’s recording of these everyday objects that have survived points to the importance of the rote, menial tasks performed, especially by women, as evidence of their labor and creativity.108 The combination of flooding with doves also points to the biblical story of the flood, followed by the promise of the dove and rainbow. We can take up the archivist’s work in combination with the theoretical implications of new materialism to note that matter, here, matters: that the objects themselves have lives and consequences that impact their environments, present and future.109

There is power in that impact, and Cannon’s impulse is to allow the objects their independence and importance. She simultaneously recognizes that that these objects, like the sisters who used them, also only exist in constellations, in continuous relation to other objects, people, and environments. Cannon’s archive searches not just for origins, but questions what remains, as

107 See, for example, “Mise Eire,” “Outside History: A Sequence,” or “In a Bad Light” in Boland, Collected Poems, 102, 148-161,177, and Boland, Object Lessons, 123-153. 108 Might there also be a sense of humor in inundations? 109 See Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter and Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

119 “Four thimbles” demonstrates. The final line, “doves,” suggests, again, a hope and promise for renewal after tragedy or the gradual inundation of our lives.110

“Two ivory swans” focuses on a carving in mammoth tusk of two swans, which she saw in the British Museum in 2013. The figures are evidence of observation, imagination, and the impulse to create. The carvings, Cannon imagines, “fly across a display case /as they flew across

Siberian tundra / twenty thousand years ago” (KL 10). They flaunt “their wings, their necks, stretched, / vulnerable, magnificent” (KL 10). She imagines “Their whooping set off a harmonic / in someone” who, “with a hunter-gatherer’s hand, / carved fine white likenesses” (KL 10).

Perhaps they were worn “for a while, / traded or gifted” before being “dropped / down time’s echoing chute” from which they “emerge, strong-winged, / whooping, / to fly across our time”

(KL 10). The aural qualities the carvings evoke are worth noting as they herald, harmonic and whooping, calling out for interpretation and recognition. That many of Cannon’s poems, especially those that address objects, imply some mode of travel whether walking, flying, swimming, driving, or sailing, demonstrates that active engagement and participation with landscape is important to her. As she has said, the act of walking allows for unexpected discoveries to occur, questions to be raised, and the clarity to write.111 Such movement also privileges an engaged experience of space, although not an idealized one. Another interesting component of the poem’s address to the carved swans is the break from how swans have been memorably treated by Yeats. They are not an agent of violence as in “Leda and the Swan” nor are

110 As with “Finger Fluting in Moon-Milk,” there is a pattern of discovery or excavation. The silvery glow suggested by the moon and, in “Four thimbles,” the May light illuminates what has been hidden, as Boland has done in much of her poetry. Yet Cannon is not following a program or a salvaging of history. Her archival poetry in focusing on the inexplicable and mundane points simultaneously to that which is especially human in relation to the extra-human. 111 Moya Cannon, email to author, 27 March 2015.

120 they emblematic of the fear of lost creativity, love, and youth as in “The Wild Swans at

Coole.”112 Instead, they continue to inspire creativity and demonstrate that nature has and will continue to provide inspiration for poetry.

“Two ivory swans” suggests a kind of artistic leveling. Speaking of the Irish lyrics she first read, including Eilís Dillion’s translation of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, Cannon remembers being impressed not only with the beauty and imagery of the works, but with the way

“their aesthetic undermined the model of historical progress” she had come to understand as a student.113 This historical progress has been supported and undermined by archives, changing ecology, and knowledge of places. Indeed, if these unassuming, “relatively uneducated or unlettered country people” could produce works that were

sufficiently valued by their communities to allow for their preservation, then a linear model of human progress, where we had evolved upwardly from ignorance and superstition into the light of reason, was quite inadequate. I found great solace in the felt evidence that humanity was much deeper and higher than such a model could allow.114

The same sentiment might extend to those who created the swans and signals in moon-milk.

Creativity is central to the concept of what it means to be human, but so too is the willingness to stop with care, tenderness, and attention, evidence of an ethical response. Considering such objects allows Cannon to address the linear progression of history. Her poems thus call into question dominate narratives, and by collapsing time in place, offer her readers opportunity to do the same.

Cannon’s curatorial impulse is also the poet’s impulse. There’s a yearning for discovery, preservation, and recollection. To read the poems, especially in Keats Lives, enables readers to

112 Yeats, The Poems, 260, 180. 113 Cannon, “The Poetry of What Happens,” 125. 114 Cannon, “The Poetry of What Happens,” 125.

121 participate in the archive of human history. The archeological past is a cue to think about the symbolic, creating a sense of deep time in which humans are implicated not only with human history, but natural history. From her comments on actual archived material to her own work of recording experience, moments, and discoveries, Cannon demonstrates that objects cannot be read alone. Instead, readers must bring to objects all their associations and experiences just as objects brings their own. In a similar way, Cannon’s poems confront one another, so that when readers move from one to another as museum goers would move through a museum’s display cases, they must see one at a time while holding all the others they have read. In effect, Cannon’s collections act as archival commentary, mirroring the commentary often associated with display descriptions, but complicating the objective perspective. Cannon’s poetry asks readers to consider the objects and their meaning, as well as the principles and objectives of how those objects are seen, categorized, and what we value ecologically, socially, and spatially. The negotiation in her poetry between past and present, different people and places, involves an eye to the future, with all its implications of responsibility.

Orientations

In his chapter on Moya Cannon in Writing the Irish West, Eamonn Wall aligns Cannon not with ecofeminism, but with deep ecology: “Her western landscapes proceed from an anti-hierarchical consciousness with the result that places and people share equal billing, as do humans and nonhumans, the living and the dead, and those who live in the [Irish] West and those who have been forced to leave it to prosper elsewhere.”115 Similarly, Christine Cusick argues that “Cannon’s poetry enacts an ethics of active humility with the natural world, focusing on the relationship as a

115 Eamonn Wall, Writing the Irish West, 159.

122 process involving both knowledge of the natural world and a surrendering to its elusiveness.”116

Both Wall and Cusick offer the opportunity to take these perspectives and begin to explore

Cannon’s attentive poetry as a means of orientation, of positioning in relation to the history, geography, and others that she meets. The poems demonstrate meetings where there is creative tension at the boundaries. The very approach toward a boundary demonstrates its impossibility; yet it is also where one can learn to live ethically. To understand Cannon’s construction of place is not just to highlight the importance of the natural world, but to question as she does in

“Flowers at Loughcrew” “what makes us human” (56). To understand a here-and-now is to acknowledge all the thens-and-theres that constitute the places where we dwell. She uses lyric to explore the fusions of experience and to walk landscapes known and visited. In this way,

Cannon’s poetry becomes an orientating practice, a means of knowing-her-way-around and an invitation to consider that which shapes our lives.

Writing poetry, for Cannon, aligns with Doreen Massey’s point that noticing and engaging with places leads to “practices of relationality, a recognition of implication, and a modesty of judgement in the face of the inevitability of specificity.”117 “The Fertile Rock” from

Cannon’s 2011 collection Hands demonstrates the throwntogetherness of place and the attempt to articulate a here-and-now that does not foreclose history, futurity, and the relationships that constitute a place.118 The poem in full reads:

In May evening light an exhausted silver ocean collapses. It has carried so much to this island, blue rope and teak beams, dolphin skulls and fish boxes, and, once, a metal tank on wheels,

116 Christine Cusick “‘Our Language was Tidal,’” 62. 117 Massy, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 147. 118 Massy, For Space, 149.

123 containing one cold passenger.

It rises and collapses at the rim rises and collapses again – a mile of white, salt lace which races across the low limestone terraces, invades every crack and crevice in the brown, brine-bitten stone, and sprays up over a small grey plateau, whose fissures brim with sea pinks. (H 26)

“The Fertile Rock” is characteristic of Cannon’s short lyric poetry. Written in free verse, the varying line lengths give the poem a sense of movement as does the repetition of the alliteration: collapses, carried, tank, containing, cold, collapses, collapses, across, crack, crevice; blue, beams, boxes, brine, bitten, plateau, brim, pink, passenger; silver, skulls, fish, salt, stone, sprays, fissures, sea; light, lace, low, limestone. The line breaks call attention to the border between sea and land as half the end line words recall a kind of edge: island, boxes, rim, terraces, crevice, stone, over, plateau, brim. Paired together, the line breaks and the alliteration mirror the shoreline scene, so that the poem enacts the repetitive action of the waves crashing on the rock. It reveals the impossibility of the shore as the island and sea reinforce each other in their meeting, defining the other. The ocean, as a central agent in the poem, collapses and carries, depositing its finds on the fertile rock, the Burren landscape of the title. As opposed to the seeming immutability of rock, “The Fertile Rock” presents a place of variety and connection. The movement of the poem and the ocean waves indicate that the Burren is a changing landscape, carved by fresh and salt water with the delicacy of the “salt lace” and the harshness of the “brine-bitten stone.”119 The

119 Christine Cusick also notes that Cannon’s verse carefully balances the human and nonhuman, working against the traditional privileging of the human; see Cusick “‘Our Language was Tidal,’” 59-76.

124 Burren may be a bounded place geographically, politically, and culturally, yet the poem opens it ever outward.

The first stanza exhibits the connections that Massey claims characterize place. Here the blue rope of fishing boats meets the teak beams from the tropics, the dolphin skulls, remnants of the natural life cycle of living creatures, meet with the nonliving metal constructions of humanity. The experience of place, and therefore of the poem, cannot be extricated from all the other connections that are present. What we see is that “the negotiations of place … do not create bounded territories but constellations of connections with strands reaching out beyond.”120

Although “The Fertile Rock” is framed by human sight and language and although humanity and human production invade the natural or nonhuman landscape, the human provides only some of the strands in the complex interactions of the place. Readers are encouraged to remember that

“the nonhuman has its trajectories also and the event of place demands, no less than with the human, a politics of negotiation.”121 To emphasize the agency of the nonhuman, an ecological move, Cannon uses the strategy of personification. The sea is “exhausted”; it “carries,” then

“rises” and “collapses,” “invades” and “sprays.” Endowing the sea with animate agency emphasizes its power. The verbs equalize what is often considered an inanimate force, redistributing the power dynamic, reasserting the sea within a connective mesh, and de-centering humankind. The power of the sea can reframe “how to go on” and alter the process of “knowing- your-way-around”; or as MacNeice writes in “The Sea,” it is “Like something or someone to whom / We have to surrender, finding, / Through that surrender life.”122 The Burren has its power

120 Massey, For Space, 187-188. 121 Massey, For Space, 160. 122 MacNeice, Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2009), 142. Olsen, “Reclaiming Things,” 181.

125 too, which Longley’s “Burren Prayer” makes evident. He catalogues elements of place (not only ice cream flavors), personifying the landscape: “Gentians and lady’s bedstraw embroider her frock. / Her pockets are full of sloes and juniper berries.”123 The poem in listing particular flowers and plant life in the Burren becomes a prayer and ends with a direct appeal to the personified landscape: “Our Lady of the Fertile Rocks, protect the Burren. / Protect the Burren,

Our Lady of the Fertile Rocks.” 124 Combining religious imagery with a particular landscape extends the practice of early Christianity in Ireland, which adopted pagan sites and rewrote their significance. Here, however, Longley creates an ecological appeal by noting the elements of place that will disappear without deference and care. As readers we are then implicated in the prayer, called to note the devastating effects humans have on landscapes and called to participate in their preservation. Cannon’s appeal is less direct, but “The Fertile Rock” also suggests a desire and need for preservation.

The shoreline is an important location for Cannon because of the way that it locates while resisting stable borders and emphasizes, along with Derek Mahon, “two worlds, earth and air; / water, the best of both.”125 Indeed, water’s interaction with land is a recurring motif in her poetry.

In her first collection, “Holy Well” may gesture to Yeats’ silver trout and Heaney’s echo soundings; yet, Cannon’s inspiration comes less from visitations than from active engagement in and with place. Like Auden, she is drawn to limestone and the paths that water makes, shaping the rock and the geography of land.126 “Thirst in the Burren” documents this landscape of rock

123 Longley, Collected Poems, 249. 124 Longley, Collected Poems, 249. 125 Derek Mahon, Harbour Lights (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2005), 48. 126 It is also “Because it dissolves in water” as W. H. Auden has proposed; it is a “secret system of caves and conduits” whose springs “spurt out everywhere with a chuckle, / Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving / Its own little ravine”; see W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 540.

126 “Porous as skin” that “resounds sea-deep, time-deep / yet, in places, rainwater has worn it thin / as a fish’s fin” (CS 57). It is a “headland full of water, dry as bone, / with only thirst as a diviner.” “Holy Well” precedes “Thirst in the Burren” and charts the path that water takes when it “returns, hard and bright, / out of the faulted hills” (CS 56). The poem begins with a couplet, followed by four stanzas of varying lines and rhythms: the effect is of water’s meandering path.

Cannon observes the return of rainwater “that flowed / down through the limestone’s pores / until dark streams hit bedrock” and has now made its way to the surface again, “past the roots of the ash, / to a hillside pen / of stones and statues” (CS 56). The landscape’s natural wells call to mind John Montague’s “The Water Carrier” whose visits to the well of his childhood are to find

“some rare thing, / Some living source, half-imagined and half real.”127 The half-imagined and half real is also the subject of Paula Meehan’s “Well” whose speaker “know[s] the path by magic not by sight” and undergoes an unspeakable experience at the well that leaves her “unkempt” and in her bucket “a golden waning moon, / seven silver stars, our own porch light, / your face at the window staring into the dark.”128

“Holy Well” respects the cyclical path that the water takes as well as appreciates its pilgrimage. Cannon’s focus shifts, however, from the water’s path to “the necessary miracle / of water trapped and stored / in a valley where water is fugitive,” and so this momentarily captured water is marked by “Images of old fertilities” and a “chipped and tilted Mary” (CS 56). Donna

Potts has noted a sense of the spiritual in Cannon’s poetry, a spirituality influenced by early

Celtic nature poetry as much as by Catholicism.129 The sundry of objects left at the well gestures

127 John Montague, “The Water Carrier,” in An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Wes Davis (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2010), 259. 128 Paula Meehan, “Well,” in An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Wes Davis (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2010), 775. 129 Donna Potts, “Water from Stone,” 46-54.

127 to the many ways that spirituality is practiced. Although Mary’s “trade dwindles,” Cannon continues to express an appreciation for these naturally occurring holy wells (CS 56). The final stanza highlights the pleasure she takes and the inspiration in place that she experiences:

Yet sometimes, swimming out in waters that were blessed in the hill’s labyrinthine heart, the eel flashes past. (CS 56)

These lines are reminiscent of Heaney’s otter and eels, indicative of poetic inspiration. “Holy

Well” locates the same inspiration in the convergence of water and land.130 The attention paid to the here-and-now, the different entities involved in place’s throwntogetherness, the open futurity of their relations can result in allurement and wonder.

The effect of the nonhuman on the event of place is evident throughout Cannon’s poetry in “Sea Urchins” or “Hedgehog” from Hands, for example. “Rún,” from her 2007 collection

Carrying the Songs, describes the sudden appearance of a seal as the speaker is walking through

Galway; its

black head broke through the silk of the morning estuary, turned, and swam near enough to the pier for me to see two soft dents. (CS 24)

Cannon uses internal rhyme and the repetition of b, k, s, and t sounds to convey the casual suddenness of the seal’s appearance. Such visitations are common in Irish and Scottish poetry.131

130 Joyce’s charge as related by the poet in “Station Island XII” is here too: “fill the element / with signatures on your own frequency, / echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements, / elver- gleams in the dark of the whole sea”; Heaney, Opened Ground, 245-246. 131 See Gregory Darwin, “On Mermaids, Meroveus, Mélusine: Reading the Irish Seal Woman and Mélusine as Origin Legend,” Folklore 126 (August 2015): 123-141, T and F Online. Darwin includes a number of the folktales, their history, as well as their connections to contemporary writers such as Heaney and Ní Dhomhnaill.

128 Here, however, the seal does not transform as it might in folktales, and the image is one that recalls birth and a child’s fontanelles. Cannon joins McGuckian in shifting readers’ focus to emphasize a word’s or an image’s associative possibilities. Here, too, the appearance of the seal points to the subtle way that the nonhuman helps to re-orient that which humans see and acknowledge. The speaker watches the seal observe the din of the city then sink “down into its own world” (CS 24). Later and “further west,” the speaker sees

a colony of them warm slugs clustered on the seaward side of a rock – one of the three fastest creatures in the sea, one of the slowest and most awkward on land. (CS 24)

And she realizes “how much they need this element too” (CS 25). There are a number of trajectories meeting in this poem: the world of the seal and all its material and mythical associations meets the world of the human; the city intertwines with the natural or rural in the canals and entry of the seal colony; there is also the implication of the globalization of capital in referencing the building sites and docks. These pairings can be read as binary juxtapositions or the eliding thereof. Certainly, the seal with its sudden appearance, its selkie associations, its ability to sink Ophelia-like “on its back, down into its own world,” and the mystery of its absent presence complicates the border between the human and nonhuman (CS 24). It shows that the line between the human and nonhuman is a porous one, or if not porous, then constantly shifting, requiring ever new negotiations. As rún means secret in Irish, the poem’s secret seems to be the shared space the seal and speaker cohabit but also describes the life of the seal that humans cannot know.132

132 For English speakers, the pronunciation is reminiscent of rune, so the idea of a symbol or a spell, verse, or incantation also haunt the reading of the poem; see The Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “rune, n.2,” The Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com.

129 The “lyrical I” gains perspective in realizing that the seal needs air and land in order to

“breed and breathe” (CS 25). The realization reframes the speaker’s prior division of her world and the seal’s world. The seal’s appearance in Galway also points out that while we associate

Cannon’s poetry with place and sea, light and stone, she has lived in cities since she was in her late teens. Ireland, she says, is “now a predominately urban nation” and so “seals, starlings, seagulls, swans … also happen to be city dwellers.”133 Sentimentality is dangerous, but “nature makes everything new and we have to make it new too—but in collaboration with nature.”134

“Rún” is evidence of the willingness to collaborate. In pointing out what the seals need, Cannon also acknowledges a changing landscape influenced by local and global interactions. The poem becomes a way, as Collins suggests poems can do, of making elements of the world familiar so that poet and readers are implicated in the environment.135

There are a number of poems whose titles like “Rún” are in Irish. Occasionally, Cannon also includes Irish phrases since she grew up speaking Irish, although she writes in English.136

Yet her western landscapes often gesture to the language and its traditions, showing that she honors how “history resides in landscape and in architecture, vernacular and public, in people’s psyches, in their culture—their art, their songs, their stories.”137 Unlike Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill or

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhhuigh, who write in Irish, Cannon’s is a process of subtly drawing readers’ attention to the intersections of language and landscape: how words define, exclude, and hide, as rún suggests. Her poetry demonstrates what Robert Macfarlane shows in prose: the language we use shapes how we see and experience the world. Lucy Collins draws out this aspect of Cannon’s

133 Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention,’” 166, 164. 134 Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention,’” 166. 135 Collins, “‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven,” 2. 136 Cannon, “Reassembling the Broken Jar,” 9-15. 137 Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention,’” 166.

130 work when she notes Cannon’s observations of the natural world and how it highlights “the dynamics of power and objectification in the act of representation itself.”138 Word play in poems such as “Timbre” demonstrate how “language is formed to accommodate new realities”; the link between nature and the poetic impulse reveals Cannon’s “connection to a larger scheme of understanding [which] is implicit in significant acts of self-realization, such as those prompted by the closest creative engagement.”139

Such openness extends through Cannon’s collections so that in Keats Lives, the opening poem highlights some of these same relations of space. “Winter View from Binn Bhriocáin” describes Cannon’s walk, “tramp[ing] across a plateau / of frost-smashed quartzite / to the summit cairn” (KL 9). In keeping with her other poems of walking and discovery, the frame moves from particularities of place to a more sweeping perspective, balancing the minutiae with the grand, linking patterns. Walking, as Eleanore Widger observes, “explores ways of relating to the external world, or to be more precise, moves towards reconciliation of the interior-exterior dichotomy through an enactive understanding of the body and its environment.”140 The opening quatrain explains “the mountain-top stillness” where “the bog is heather-crusted iron” and a

“high, hidden mountain pond / is frozen into zinc riffles” (KL 9). The quatrain gestures to the envelope stanza with its near tetrameter; the form does not hold, however, and the following tercet and septet contain lines that range from two feet to five. The poem is reminiscent both of landscape painting and a story Cannon tells about climbing Muckish mountain as a child: “At one point we came down over a shoulder of the mountain and were halted by the brown and

138 Collins, “Clearing the Air,” 205. 139 Collins, “Clearing the Air,” 205-206. 140 Eleanore Wider, “Walking Women: Embodied Perception in Romantic and Contemporary Radical Language Poetry,” Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 9, no. 1 (2017): 3, The Open Library of the Humanities.

131 silver world below us—bogland stretching north from the mountain towards the sea, which was like mercury in the summer evening light.”141 The experience led her to understand, “so that is what people mean when they say something is beautiful.”142 Such revelation continues to sustain

Cannon’s poetry so that our experience of reading mirrors her experience of landscape: “like being penetrated by the view and being in it and part of it at the same time.”143 What is remarkable about “Winter View from Binn Bhriocáin” is not just the way that it begins the collection with quiet, meditative movement, but that Cannon continues recognizing that place is open to possibilities.

Place is geological, biological, human, and non-human; there are many histories and stories that shape each place as well as provide the possibilities for how place will continue to unfold. The final stanza describes the view from Binn Bhriocáin as Cannon looks out over the

Maumturk range “in February light” to see

lakes, bogs, sea-inlets, the myriad lives being lived in them, lives of humans and of trout, of stonechats and sea-sedges fan out, a palette of hammered silver, grey and silver. (KL 9)

The repetition of the word silver is not just a qualification, but an emphasis on the qualities of light to which Cannon is so attuned. In “No Good Reason,” she writes that “There is no good reason / why my heart should be so gladdened / by a green hillside which turns golden” (H 19).

Light is intimately tied to her poetic understanding of landscape as its quality and movement emphasize places’ various contours. Cannon notes that wonder in place can come from watching

141 Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention,’” 161. 142 Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention,’” 161. 143 Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention,’” 161.

132 the changes of light, so she shares with McGuckian and Groarke an eye for color and ekphrasis.

C. Day Lewis’s “Near Ballconnely, Co. Galway” begins by describing landscape in similar terms with “boulders / Half-buried in furze and heather, / Purple and gold.”144 Yet he claims, “Little survives of our West / But stone and the moody weather,” then muses on the historic trials of many who lived in and left the west coast of Ireland, concluding that “The landscape’s an heroic

/ skeleton time’s beaked agents have picked clean.”145 Cannon refuses to draw the landscape seen from Binn Bhriocáin so directly to the national narrative of loss. Yet the literary traditions and associations of the west invade the poem, creating a backdrop together with the hammered color palette suggestive of an “ecological melancholia.”146 Still, her focus on being in place, while not discounting memory, is an active “knowing-your-way-around.”147 The view from the summit of Binn Bhriocáin provides the perspective from which to see and imagine the interactions within eyesight, of all the places that constitute the larger region of Connemara. The lives that are “hammered silver” extend beyond Cannon’s sightline, however. And Cannon’s positioning inside this mesh, observing imperfectly from her connected vantage, emphasizes her important orientating practice.

That a significant number of Cannon’s poems are situated at the edge of sea and land shows that places are ongoing negotiations between elements and actors, animate and inanimate, time and space. In “Orientation” from Carrying the Songs, the speaker comments on a flock of seagulls “at the sheltered end of Nimmo’s pier”; the flock bookends the poem, providing the visual image of the gulls all facing a January wind (CS 46). Although written in free verse, most

144 C. Day Lewis’s “Near Ballconnely, Co. Galway” in An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Wes Davis (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2010), 56. 145 Day Lewis, “Near Ballconnely, Co. Galway,” 57. 146 Collins, “‘Only the Dead Can Be Forgiven,” 3. 147 Olsen “Reclaiming Things,” 181.

133 lines range between four and five feet, creating a familiar rhythm. Like “The Fertile Rock,”

“Orientation” does not emphasize end rhymes, but instead the alliteration and assonance of the hard c’s and long e sounds simultaneously push the reader forward and call attention back to the previous stanza. Here Cannon deploys a layered analogy to explore her question of orientation,

Crystals in cooling magma orient themselves to magnetic north as towards a constant although, over deep time, poles shift about like bedrock or stars. (CS 46)

Citing crystals as examples of a kind of orientation, the poem simultaneously proposes a possible pattern for human orientation while hedging her claim. The “as towards” is suggestive of a constant, but undermines its certainty and “although” indicates the “constant” is, in fact, not constant. Continuing to focus on the temporality of experience, the speaker insistently questions:

For us, who carry, in our twined chromosomes, all the wonder and terror evolved within animal time and bone –

the carnage of our last century and of the century just begun – for us, might there be some wandering pole or orient,

towards which some primal grain in us might align itself, some kind of good, some love, not absolutely constant,

but within the time which comprehends us, constant enough to draw us like these seagulls, their tails and bills the dipping points of compass needles. (CS 46)

On one level, the poem is a lyric of place, reflecting on a Galway scene and the associations it conjures. At another level, the poem may be read alongside Louis MacNeice’s poem “Galway” as it is inscribed on a plaque at the opposite end of the pier, and which can be read looking inland

134 towards the city.148 MacNeice’s poem is as ambivalent as MacNeice’s acknowledgment of his

Irishness, incorporating praise and mourning. It details elements of Galway, the “salmon in the

Corrib / Gently swaying,” and documents the moment he learns of Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the definite beginning of the expected and dreaded war.149 Readers must look at the city and contend with the phrase he repeats as the final line in each of the three stanzas, “The war came down on us here.”150 The poem thus compels a practice of geographic and ethical positioning.

“Orientation” also questions geography and ethics. The materiality inherent in our

“twined chromosomes” helps to hold us in place. As our chromosomes are paired, Cannon offered a series of pairs: “wonder and terror,” “time and bone,” “century” and “century” to continue the twining image. Cannon chooses twined instead of a similar word twinned, which emphasizes that the two are bound in a string of attachment. Instead of running parallel, the elements are braided together, allowing them to remain autonomous while intimately connected.

This sense of connection points back to the power of perception and the quartz under the heather in “www.annalsofulster.com.” All the doubling is a search for something that holds us in the twining of time and space. This something, “some kind of good,” “some wandering pole or orient” is “not absolutely constant” but sufficient to hold us and be held by us. The orientation that Cannon proposes here is multiple. It must take into account all of animal time and bone, so past and present, history and geography, as well as materiality must be considered. It is only at this intersection, and this intersection is in place, that any understanding of our own self and relation to a wider whole is possible. There are different spatial and temporal orientations in the

148 The plaque was erected in 2007, the same year Cannon’s collection was published. See Tom Paulin, “An Irishman’s Diary,” The Irish Times, 28 April 2007, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.1295531. 149 MacNeice, Selected Poems, 84; Paulin, “An Irishman’s Diary.” 150 MacNeice, Selected Poems, 84.

135 poem, demonstrating that reflection on the environment can have the effect of a conflation of time. Yet “Orientation” does not mark a temporal standstill; rather its speaker is able to reflect on the past in the present while looking towards a future. The appeal to the past lends the poem a depth that is complemented by the reflection on the twining chromosomes. This depth confronts the flatness of the sight of the seagulls on water and the wavering of the compass needles. The result is a sense of expanse, down and out, that makes the speaker need to locate herself and helps to point her forward.

Cannon’s orienting is in part a map making project. She remembers being impressed by a map her father made of the area around her Donegal home: “I was tremendously exhilarated at the sight of places which I knew well. … The stories of these places we knew well from school

… an odd conjunction of intimacy and abstraction. There was also a childish sense of viewing things from above in an almost God-like manner.”151 The childish sense of possession expressed here is constantly hedged in Cannon’s poetry. The bird’s-eye views that she takes are means to understand the scope of the world but do not result in claims of dominion. The “lyric I” of her poems maintain an even view, looking from the world at the world as a part of it. Humans situated through the remove of language exercise some power over the world or at least of organizing through words, but the power is not absolute. Cannon’s appeal to the bird’s-eye view is a means to question her bearings, not impose them; and, in that way, it also becomes a spatiotemporal way of seeing, a kind of foresight. To participate in orienting is to draw lines and make claims. It seems that the cartographic impulse was instilled in her from childhood as was the impulse to provide an alternative orienting practice from the narratives and maps imposed on place. Her father’s mapping project seems to align with the mapping projects of Tim Robinson

151 Nordin, “‘The Habits of Attention,’” 161.

136 whose charting of landscape in the Aran Islands and Connemara takes mapmaking past the visual depiction and instigates an intimate and prolonged engagement with place.152 Such a genealogical inheritance gestures back to “Orientation” and the twined “chromosomes” and

“bones” of relationships to “some kind of good.” Perhaps we can inherit practices that question and preserve places and our engagement with them.

Cannon’s concern for patterns and form means that she engages with the past, but in situating the past and in confronting landscape, Cannon quietly criticizes her inheritance and looks forward. “Flowers at Loughcrew” is prefaced by two lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65:

“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea/ Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” (H 56).

The lines ask how beauty can overcome the destructive force of time that affects all things:

“stone … earth … sea.”153 Reflecting on mortality, the poet concludes in the final couplet that nothing will outlast time “unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.”154 It is through the poem that beauty and love might be preserved. “Flowers at

Loughcrew” follows Cannon’s curation in cataloguing and questioning. The pace of the poem is slow. Cannon’s free verse breaks up the phrases of her sentences in such a way as to cause pause, to encourage the reader to linger, and to work to knit together the thoughts and sensations she presents. Each stanza may be read as a separate reflection, and while there is a chronology to the poem in sight, revelation, and reflection, there is a sense that each is held alone, then read together. The containment of each stanza makes it a quiet poem. Cannon’s voice, while identifiably her own, nevertheless begins the poem with the pronoun “we,” an ambiguous

152 See Folding Landscapes, http://www.foldinglandscapes.com/. 153 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson, 2004), 1725. 154 Shakespeare, The Complete Works, 1726.

137 inclusiveness that becomes more defined and which offers participation for her readers.

If we map “Flowers at Loughcrew,” then it would be located at the megalithic burial mounds of Loughcrew in Co. Meath, which are estimated to date to 3500-3300 B.C. The cairns are constructed so that “a rising sun at equinox / will flash its torch / on flowers and suns” (H

56). The speaker and her companions stand outside of the central mound looking in as they “have no key with which to enter / this chamber of the dead” (H 56). Barred from entry by an iron gate, the company is also barred by the fact that they live and breathe. “Flowers at Loughcrew,” then, raises a quiet negotiation of life and death. In the second stanza, Cannon reports that a friend tells her

that fossil pollen is found in the earliest burials. He says this is what makes us human as much as stone tools – our ceremony of grief, attended by what is most beautiful, most fragrant on this earth. (H 56)

According to the speaker’s interlocutor, to be human is to exhibit care in the face of grief and to manage death with aesthetic practice. Such an approach further aligns Cannon’s work with Tim

Robinson who seeks to depict a vision of deep time. Cannon’s focus on temporality here is an aversion to finality while it simultaneously acknowledges that finality to prioritize human response. Interestingly, Cannon foregoes offering further commentary or perspective. The effect is that readers too are barred from fully understanding. During the cold day, a brilliant sun reaches far / into the passage” and illuminates a corner revealing “one carved flower, / picked out in white” (H 56). As Shakespeare’s flowers are preserved in verse, this flower is preserved in stone.

The next stanza highlights both pictorial and aural experiences. “A family plays among

138 the ruined cairns,” and after the father photographs his family he calls “on the youngest, / to come along— / Bríd, Bríd” (H 56). This fourth stanza provides the image to best process

Cannon’s formal choices. Each stanza appears separate in the way that snapshots appear separate, capturing and stalling the event, setting it apart. When placed together in an album, the effect of snapshots is one of stasis and movement. So “Flowers at Loughcrew” is a poetic collection of snapshots selected from Cannon’s visit on the winter day she describes. For the final snapshot, Cannon remarks that “Tomorrow is St. Bridget’s Day”; the recollection is sparked by the construction of the tomb as well as the child’s spoken name (H 57). This knowledge helps the speaker to attend to the “patches of greening rushes” that they pass on their way home and which would be used to make St. Bridget’s cross, and most remarkably, “near an old farmhouse,

/ on a slope, / strong clumps of snowdrops” (H 57). As Brigid’s Day, February 1st, is the celebration of coming spring, the snowdrops affirm the cycle of seasons and of life continuing.

Cannon’s flowers are in the process of regeneration. The poem may act as a place of preservation, but it may also allow place its own process of being and becoming. The speaker in

Shakespeare’s sonnet looked to the poem as a means of preservation of youth and beauty.

Cannon’s poem questions what can be preserved: the flower in stone, family photographs, moments turned into poetry.

The patterns Cannon focuses on are often aesthetic and elemental, but extend to human practice, both familial and cultural rituals. These patterns also gesture to the ceremonial boundaries we draw as a means of responding to the changing environment. Ceremonies are another means of orienting ourselves and contribute to Cannon’s lyrical topography as they are markers to be experienced, passed, and revisited so that the remembered and present landscapes, interior and exterior, are spaces through which Cannon pursues what it means to be human.

139 Indeed, she repeats the word ceremony when calling attention to repeated practices and the rituals that humans undertake to mark the seasons and changes in their lives.155 “Primavera” in

Keats Lives continues to explore the sensations of spring introduced in “Flowers at Loughcrew.”

It begins with similar imagery of “A first sighting, / five low primroses” and “a sliver of white among clumped shoots – / a snowdrop splits its green sheath, / and high birdsong in the hazels –” (KL 21). The naming of the flowers allows them their specificity, while recognizing the different individuals of each new year, and they are affective as they split open and split the bird song, showing spring’s forceful interactions. The flowers come as a blessing, welcomed, but also as “a jolt to realize that here too, / below snow-shawled Alps / … / this is St. Bridget’s Eve” (KL

21). The first three collections are largely based in Ireland, especially in the west. Her two most recent collections have expanded the localitions Cannon contemplates, widening her scope, but also returning her to Ireland with new sight and sense. The manner in which she confronts her memories affirms the aspects of place that I have been acknowledging: its relationally, its openness, and the surprise that openness can help to foster. In “Primavera,” Cannon chances upon convergences of her own. The repetition of s sounds in this first stanza are aural reminders of the translation of the title of the poem: spring. That Cannon writes from the Alps may explain her choice of title as primavera in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian means spring.156

Spring’s new growth often comes with a mixture of reflection and hope. Just as places are constituted by all the entities that meet, so Cannon brings with her memories of a childhood in

Ireland that resurface at the sight of primroses and snowdrops. She remembers that “This is the evening when my father / used to knock three times on the scullery door / and wait for an

155 The word ceremony suggests Yeats’ “Prayer for My Daughter,” The Poems, 230. 156 Cannon held a writer’s residence at the Centre d’Art i Natura de Farrera, which inspired numerous poems in Hands and might also provide the context for this poem.

140 invitation to enter” (KL 21). Ritually, her father enacts a folk custom in which men circle the house three times “with a bundle of cut rushes” and the women inside the house grant the men entry only after they have completed their circuit (KL 21). Cannon remembers her father saying,

“Téigi ar bhur nglúine / fosclaigí bhur súile / agus ligigí isteach Bríd” (KL 21). The Irish is translated in a footnote to the poem: “Kneel down, / open your eyes / and allow Bridget to come in” (KL 22). Yet readers do not initially see the translation since the poem is divided over two pages, and so they must decide to turn the page to search for the translation or continue reading the poem. For those who read Irish, the lines present little issue. For those who do not read Irish, the short third stanza is a language that must be accepted and contemplated just as the flowers that arrive each spring.

The circling and repetition are all part of the pattern of the ceremony and link her concern for ritual shapes to her fascination with nests and shells. Thinking of things her father relayed about his own childhood, Cannon wonders, “What ritual were they re-enacting?” (KL 21). This question is extended as the following lines begin two other interrogative sentences that stretch across four irregular stanzas:

Or we, in the warm yellow kitchen, suddenly full of rushes and scissors and coloured wool ends,

what ceremony were we weaving there, folding the silky stalks into crosses to hang above the door of each room in the house, or what do those little island girls celebrate who still carry the Brideóg, the spring doll, from house to welcoming house,

if not for the joyful return of the bride of Hades after three months of deep wintering, if not a first sighting of Persephone among the rushes in a wet western field?

141 And what caution was told in the hesitation, until that third knock granted admission, what fear of deception, of late frosts, of February snow and dead lambs? (KL 21-22).

There are many variations of the customs associated with St. Bridget’s Eve, and Cannon recalls some of them here. St. Bridget’s crosses are well known. Made of rushes with a woven square center and four equal length arms tied at the end with string, they are hung above doorways to protect the house and its inhabitants from harm. In addition to the crosses, in parts of Ireland, a doll is made representing the saint. In some instances, she and a special bed are created. On St.

Bridget’s Eve, the women of the village gather and keep the Brideóg company through the night; the men of the community, like Cannon’s father, must ask for permission to enter the house and pay their respects to the saint. The following day, she is taken, most often by young girls, from house to house where she is brought in and the children are given food or coins.157 The visitation of the doll is welcomed as she is a symbol of the warmer weather and longer days to come.

Woven together with these particularly Irish customs is the classical reference to Persephone whose anticipated return to her mother, Ceres, marks the coming of spring. The classical allusion has the effect of extending time or of suggesting an on-going, all-time. It also harkens to the way that classics have been used by Irish poets, especially as a means of exploring ideas of the nation.

Michael Longley’s “Ceasefire” is one such example. In tying together these references, the speaker seeks to come to terms with the patterns that have shaped her life. Mixing sadness or loss and hope or futurity, each fragment fits into a larger frame of contemporaneity, of welcoming

157 For more information see County Kildare Archeological Society, Journal of the County Kildare Archeological Society and surrounding Districts, vol. 5 (Dublin: Edward Ponsonby, 1908), 441; and Jonny Dillon, “Traditions Regarding the Feast of St. Brigid in Co. Wicklow,” The Wicklow Times, 27 January 2015, Our Wicklow Heritage, http://www.countywicklowheritage.org/page/traditions_regarding_the_feast_of_st_brigid_in_co _wicklow.

142 spring. There is joy in the ambiguous transition of the seasons, but the poem is marked by hesitation as well. Crossing the boundary of St. Bridget’s Eve does not guarantee warmth nor success. The arbitrary demarcations are often betrayed by external forces, and an unlooked for cold front is one such force.

Each “what” builds upon the next and the stanzas become more uniform quatrains, giving the poem a consistent rhythm. The repetition of w sounds is wistful and affirms the questions asked. There is little rhyme, but occasional internal rhyme and repetition of words and sounds also help the poem create a rhythm that topples readers forward through the questions until the rhythm is altered in the final quatrain:

Our fears are different now, of floods and fast-calving glaciers, of birds and beasts and fish and flowers forever lost and the earth’s old bones pressed for oil. (KL 22).

Much of Cannon’s poetry may be said to have an ecocritical bent, but here it is clearly articulated. The lines suggest that the flowers of the first stanza should not be taken for granted neither for what they symbolize nor for their particularity. The interaction of the human and nonhuman world is only subtly referenced, but the implications are sweeping. Cannon’s landscapes are different with the passage of time, but each is still a co-dependent ecology. While fewer people may worry about the loss of newborn lambs, more people should worry about the loss of animal and plant species, and not only because these losses may be indicative of losses humankind might suffer. The classical reference takes on a new bent as it must now comment not on the state of the nation, but the state of a precarious global environment. This chilling stanza shows Cannon’s lyrical topography is one marked by fear of loss.

Still, the title of the poem is “Primavera,” so Cannon ends with hope, a trait common to her poems and indicative of a kind of futurity that affirms the openness of space. February is the

143 time and place to look for Bríd:

But our bones still bid her welcome when she knocks three times, when she enters, ever young, saying Kneel down, open your eyes and allow spring to come in. (KL 22)

This is the third time that the phrase “knock three times” is used, an open invitation to the reader to respond to the poem’s three knocks. The final stanza also parallels the second stanza in which

Cannon remembers her father’s circumambulations, repeating in altered form his actions: knocking, entering, saying. This time, however, the message is delivered in English with a slight variation of the Irish in the third stanza, substituting “spring” for “St. Bridget.” The result is a continuation of Cannon’s memories, but also an openness to new transitions.

These transitions continue to be facilitated by movement through space, as in “Keats

Lives on the Amtrak,” the title poem from her 2015 collection. The poem is a narrative that relays Cannon’s trip on a train from Philadelphia to New York. The title gestures to some of

Keats’ own familiars, for example, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In fact, Cannon’s attention to objects, their stories and beauty align with Keats’ reflection in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” concerning the capabilities of art, beauty, and truth: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all /

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”158 Although Cannon forgoes Keats’ adherence to more formal rhyme and stanzas, her reflections in Keats Lives question inspiration and orientation practices. Cannon is not a showy or abrasive poet. Her poems are often neat and adhere to their forms instead of breaking them. She does not push for confrontation as does

Eavan Boland; she does not play with language and comprehension through translation as does

158 John Keats, The Complete Poems, 3rd ed., ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin, 2006), 346.

144 Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; she does not create an elliptical and referential poetic mode as does

Medbh McGuckian. Yet it is her directness, the sparseness of the poems, their neatness, and even their sense of resolution that makes for an understated, observation driven critique of that which the poet sees.

In “Keats Lives on the Amtrak,” Cannon tells of “the African-American conductor” who

“squeezed himself / into the dining car seat opposite” (KL 26). The two begin a conversation in which he confesses, “‘I’m going to get a t-shirt with / Keats Lives on it. This time of year,’ –” and the speaker interrupts to describe the scene, “he gestured towards the window, / trees were blurring into bud –” (KL 26). Against the backdrop of spring, the conductor resumes, “when everything starts coming green again, / I always think of him…” (KL 26). The slant rhyme of again and him introduces the remembered Keats verse,

A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Its loveliness increases, it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us. (KL 26)

These lines come from the opening of “Endymion: Book I,” a long, narrative poem that describes the relationship between mortal Endymion and immortal Cynthia, but the lines have also entered into the rotation of commonly recited poetry.159 The speaker continues and appreciatively tells the conductor that “it was a Dublin taxi-driver” who quoted to her that Keats’ “only certainties were / the holiness of the heart’s affections / and the truth of imagination” (KL 26). The exchange of Keats lines leads the conductor to write down the quotation, asking its origin, “as I

[Cannon] had done, two decades earlier / in the back of a taxi,” paralleling the actions of

“hundreds” who had done the same thing “since the young, sick apothecary / penned it to his

159 Keats, The Complete Poems, 107.

145 friend” (KL 26-27).160 In the final stanza, the conductor exclaims, “That is a bombshell”; “I’m going to give that to my little girl tonight— Oh light winged dryad…” (KL 26).161 The intercom interrupts the conversation and the conductor vacates his seat. As he leaves, he “smiled again and, drawing a line / across his chest with his thumb, said, ‘Keats Lives.’” (KL 26).

This poem demonstrates a continuity with Cannon’s curatorial practice, collecting fragments of Keats’ verse and narratives. The spring setting on a moving train highlights the transitory nature of time and space. The train as mobile and immobile also parallels the potential of Cannon’s sea shells discussed earlier: both as capsules hold the potential for poetry as the box of the poem may be opened or closed. It also gestures back to “Flowers at Loughcrew” and the epigraph from Shakespeare’s sonnet, pursuing the capabilities of art. Another of Keats’ philosophies related to his stance on truth and beauty is included in a letter to his brothers,

George and Tom. Negative capability, he says, “is when man is capable of being in uncertainties,

Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”162 While the proposed t- shirt seems to commodify Keats’ life and work, it also highlights the philosophies that we use to situate our lives. Keats’ suggestion is to be open to the vast experiences of life and to resist dogmatic approaches that foreclose discovery, appreciation, and doubt. Citing his words, Cannon encourages a similar dialogue and suggests that poetry endures. Certainly, the meetings we experience can affirm and challenge what we know.

160 Keats, The Complete Poems, 535. Keats wrote this in a letter to Benjamin Baily in 1817. 161 It is a line from “Ode to a Nightingale”; see Keats, The Complete Poems, 346. 162 Keats, The Complete Poems, 539.

146 Meetings

One of Cannon’s strengths is her ability to look from or at particular positions while acknowledging the unique and open positioning of others. The brief intersections that she has with others, human and nonhuman, are filtered through her lens, and yet, she constantly offers deferral. Certainly, she makes judgments, draws conclusions, offers ethical pronouncements, but these occur in a respectful tone with knowledge of her limited perspective that nonetheless points to larger avenues of connection. Partly, this ability comes from a recognition of alterity and a willingness to meet it without fully grasping the other. Sometimes, it comes from her poems of observation where she assumes the role momentarily of amateur naturalist or anthropologist, as in “Fly-Catcher.” While in America, Cannon hears a story of “a one-legged bird, a fly-catcher”

(KL 25). The poem retells the story, demonstrating yet again Cannon’s affinity for patterns, here of migration. The bird “traced the spine of the Appalachians / year after year” making her way south and “balancing her tiny, tattered body / down through Mexico / all the way to South

America,” managing to return “back to the same Philadelphia hedgerow” (KL 25). Each year, the fly-catcher made the journey “to be caught in the same birder’s net, / to raise brood after brood” balancing all the while on one leg, feeding and storing “fat for her next Odyssey” (KL 25). The distance the bird covers in her yearly migrations parallels the remove from which Cannon hears the story.

The poem ends with a short couplet, reflecting on the story but also offering up a possible reflection on Cannon’s experience and, perhaps, our own: “Life can be so rough, / yet we can’t get enough of it” (KL 25). One of the orienting principles, then, is this response to the pull of life.

For just as lyrical topography demands attention to form and a responsible orientating practice to continually re-see the world, so too does a curatorial practice. Cannon’s collections then are a

147 further means to know the places we visit and inhabit by accounting for the elements and individuals that we meet within those places. The work also acknowledges a boundary making process which is inevitable and necessary, however arbitrary, for making it through the world.

148

CHAPTER 4

“THIS WHERE I AM”: VONA GROARKE’S RELATIONAL POETICS

Visual and formal concerns drive much of Groarke’s poetry so that it is no wonder her seventh collection, a personal essay titled Four Sides Full, takes up an investigation of frames and framing. Fintan O’Toole reads the book as “a consideration of the history and purpose of frames

[that] is also a way to deal with what is beyond the frame of its philosophical argument: the poet’s own life and especially the breakup of her marriage.”1 Groarke considers how frames have been used to include or exclude and what they bring to a work of art, which she then extends to examine the aspects of art and life that exceed framing. Weaving together memoir, history, and reflections on the visual arts, beauty, the body, love, and loss, Groarke creates a moving portrait.

To use the word portrait, however, suggests a capturing and completeness that the book resists.

Frames do not wholly contain nor explain, yet they are important tools that help us to navigate the world. As O’Toole proposes,

though frames promise to divide art from life, life itself is always framed. Our bodies are frames, and so are our homes. We look at the world through windows and television screens, phones and laptops, all of which frame the images they present. We look at our past through photos on those screens. Our lives are framed by rites of passage.2

These ideas of framing, patterning, and looking are central to the poetry in this chapter for the ways in which they foreground color, landscape, and work to always situate the figure in place.

1 Fintan O’Toole, “Four Sides Full review: delicate portrait that spills out of its frame,” The Irish Times, 24 December 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/four-sides-full-review- delicate-portrait-that-spills-out-of-its-frame-1.2892645. 2 Fintan O’Toole, “Four Sides Full review.”

149 Vona Groarke shares with Moya Cannon a concern for patterns. With Medbh McGuckian and

Derek Mahon, she shares a concern for light and color. What Groarke’s poems show is what she insists upon in Four Sides Full: “Perspective is tricky to get right.”3

Four Sides Full continues Groarke’s concern for perspective and attention established since her first collection of poetry, Shale. Central to Groarke’s work are considerations of spatiality: architectural features, geography, digital spaces, transatlantic commutes, and the space of the poem. Place is a part of that spatiality and an important component of her poetry. Groarke admits, “Well, a physical environment makes its way effortlessly into the space of a poem. … In effect the poem is made up of many little rooms that open on to each other in various way. So yes, physical space is crucial. … yes, place informs language and identity. In a way, place is poetry.”4 Encompassed within this statement are overlapping understandings that complicate the spatiality of poetry. There is the textual space of the poem. There is also the imaginative space of poetry and the references the poem makes through form and content. The particular situation of the writer and her environment filters into the poems written, and the poems also shape the way that the lived and imagined environments are engaged with by the poet and readers. The entwined ideas of space and place in Groarke’s work become an interesting network at once layered, looped, and dispersed.

While Groarke claims that places interest her more for their psychological import, they are, nevertheless, one way she must “negotiate between the life one lives and the life one writes,” honoring both.5 Born in the Irish midlands, Groarke’s poetry is not restricted to the landscapes of

3 Vona Graorke, Four Sides Full (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2016), 47. 4 Hedwig Schwall, “‘How do you make a teapot be intellectually interesting?’ An Interview with Vona Groarke,” Irish University Review 43, no. 2 (2013): 288, emphasis in original. 5 Schwall, “How do you,” 288, 298.

150 her childhood. The west coast of Ireland, especially Spiddal where her family has a cottage, the

United States, including North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and England, where she now lives in

Manchester, are present and important places within her work. Lucy Collins and John Redmond have commented on some of these influences, and Collins has written most extensively on

Groarke, noting the significance of houses, especially in Groarke’s early work. Most recently,

Collins has written of Groarke’s intertwining of materiality and memory in Contemporary Irish

Women Poets; she observes, “Her philosophical enquiries are always aware of that subject’s location in time and space—their moment in history, their place of birth and belonging.”6

Catriona Clutterbuck investigates Groarke’s speaking subjects in “New Irish Women Poets: The

Evolution of (In)Determinancy in Vona Groarke,” and Ailbhe McDaid focuses on the elements of migration, movement, and liminality in her essay on Groarke and Sara Berkeley.7 Each of these studies demonstrates the range and dexterity of Groarke’s poetry. Her work consistently challenges landscapes and then moves to consider particular places and their wider relationship to space.

6 Lucy Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 195. See also Lucy Collins, “Architectural metaphors: representations of the house in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke,” in Irish Literature since 1990, ed. Scott Brewster and Michael Parker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009) 142-159; John Redmond, Poetry and Privacy (Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 2013). Redmond writes of the balance between the public and the private in Groarke’s work, but he is concerned with her use of intertextuality and responds, in particular, to a published conference proceeding by Selina Guinness, “The Annotated House: Feminism & Form,” in Irish Poetry After Feminism: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Justin Quinn, Gerrards Cross, and Colin Smythe (Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures 10, 2008), 69-79. Redmond rather vehemently disagrees with Guinness’ reading of Groarke’s “The Annotated House.” 7 Catriona Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets: The Evolution of (In)Determinancy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 651-667; Ailbhe McDaid, “‘I Mean It As No Ordinary Return’: Poetic Migrancy in the Poetry of Vona Groarke and Sara Berkeley,” Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 13 (2013): 38-56, Humanities International Complete.

151 Groarke’s poetry uses spatial metaphors and parallels while putting tension on the interchange between poetry and the life lived. The result of the spatial exchange is a lyric practice that always acknowledges and honors being-in-the-world. Speaking with Hedwig

Schwall, Groarke proposes that “The poem can actually honour that commitment, that dedication to life, in a way that transcends the actual act of brushing your teeth, so almost everything has a kind of fidelity to the life that one creates with other people, and I think that’s what’s of interest to the poem.”8 The lyric spaces are practices in connection, a defining act of both poetry and place. Whether through alliteration or imagistic accumulation, the poetry’s formal awareness points to boundedness, contact, and the impossibility of distinguishing between the two. Reading

Groarke’s work demonstrates “our constitutive interrelatedness – and thus our collective implication in the outcomes of that interrelatedness; the radical contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and nonhuman; and the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which that sociability is to be configured.”9 The meeting of the material and psychological in poetry illuminates “one’s sense of being alive in a network of other people” that cannot be fully extrapolated from a network of places.10 Such a network from which we make meaning may especially be true if we consider place as, “whatever stable object catches our attention” and causes us to pause.11 The very way that places lead to human centered investigations and vice versa, as well as the way that Groarke’s lyric practice opens out to acts of orientation that makes for a compelling lyrical topology.

To begin, this chapter will highlight selections of Groarke’s early work in order to

8 Schwall, “How do you,” 296. 9 Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 195. 10 Groarke in Schwall, “How do you,” 296. 11 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 161.

152 demonstrate some threads that are more fully developed in Spindrift and X, her most recent poetry collections. Specifically, this chapter focuses on perspective, noting the poems’ returns, their use of image and color, and their framing patterns. Groarke continues to be hailed as one of the leading poets of her generation, and these two texts demonstrate the depth and dexterity for which her work is praised.12 As Caitriona O’Reilly asserts in her review of Groarke’s Selected

Works, numerous poems are “a virtuoso demonstration of what Groarke does exceptionally well: marshalling the atmospherics of light and water in service of an increasingly abstract vision of reality.”13 The poetry’s combined insistence on architectural features and the elemental components of place make for a compelling negotiation of the figure in space.

Ghosting the place, Groarke’s early works

To speak of all the spaces that Groarke addresses in her early work is beyond the scope of this section, yet there are threads, including houses, water, and the in-between, that should be mentioned. These threads continue whether in the romantic landscapes of Shale, the American landscapes of Juniper Street, Flight’s familial and transatlantic concerns, lived and imagined places in Other People’s Houses, the Irish west coast in Spindrift, and the heartbreak and

Manchester buildings of X.14 There is a sense in all of her collections that the places she knows

12 Many reviews of Groarke’s work echo this sentiment. See, for example, Anthony Cummins, “Selfish Giants,” New Statesmen (23-29 January 2015): 42-43. Also see Christina Hunt Mahony, “The Mature Groarke,” Irish Literary Supplement (Spring 2016): 8. 13 Caitriona O’Reilly, “Selected Poems, by Vona Groarke: the arc of a singular poetic voice,” The Irish Times, 16 July 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/selected-poems-by- vona-groarke-the-arc-of-a-singular-poetic-voice-1.2715234. 14 Groarke’s collections include Shale (Loughcrew, Ireland: The Gallery Press, 1994); Other People’s Houses (Loughcrew, Ireland: The Gallery Press, 1999) hereafter cited in-text as OPH; Flight and Earlier Poems (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2004) hereafter cited in-text as F; Juniper Street (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2006) hereafter cited

153 have held other lives. Inevitably, physical experience of space influences our interactions and our conceptions of orientation; our cultural contexts, our family units, our myths, and our world views also contribute to the ways that we conceptualize space. As Irving Hallowell notes,

“Perhaps the most striking feature of man’s spacialization of his world is the fact that it never appears to be exclusively limited to the pragmatic level of action and perceptual experience.”15

Groarke’s work extends the pragmatic and perceptual to the linguistic. She uses formal constraints to emphasize the relationship between the world and the subject so that her poems mediate sensory experience or, more accurately, reflection on that experience. Each poem becomes a reframing of thought and environment. Her investigations of house and home raise interesting complications as the domestic space continuously converses with the world outside, eliding easy distinctions between indoor and outdoor.

The collection that has garnered the most attention in relation to place has been Other

People’s Houses in which the poems acknowledge others, human or otherwise. The imagined otherness has something of the creative power of Nuala Ni Dhomnaill while the interior spaces might serve as productive comparisons to Eavan Boland’s domestic interiors. The collection begins with Emily Dickinson’s lines: “One need not be a chamber to be haunted, / one need not be a house.” Dickinson’s poem goes on to compare bodily threats from an “External Ghost” to confronting interior ghosts in the brain’s many “corridors”; she concludes the first is “far safer.”16 Other People’s Houses also operates within this tension of material and psychological ghostings. Lucy Collins suggests that

in-text as JS; Spindrift (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2010) hereafter cited in- text as SD; and X (Loughcrew, Ireland: The Gallery Press, 2014) hereafter cited in-text as X. 15 Quoted in Tuan, Space and Place, 87. 16 Emily Dickenson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Back Bay Books, 1960), 333.

154 the house as an emblem of cultural survival reveals its potential as a repository of emotional meaning, especially in connection with forms of self-determination in language. In the private context, the house also provides an essential creative space within which to think and write. This metaphor offers an enduring structure for Groarke in her exploration of the relationship between memory and language and her investigation of the limits of knowledge.17

Groarke reveals the different hauntings that might occur within houses, but also the way in which we are haunted by the places we experience.

The hauntings may be merely suggestive for how life was conducted or how future lives may be constrained by circumstance. “Domestic Arrangements” is a sequence poem that explores rooms in a big house. Combining description with wit, Groarke calls attention to the arrangements of rooms and the objects within, as well as the way in which these arrangements enforce and subvert human expectation and action. “The Library,” for example, is full of

“accumulated wisdom” that is truncated as the books “around doors and windows” have “been trimmed to fit” (OPH 28). The conservatory as the site “Where future daughters of the house / will languish and endure / the promise of orchid” parallels the expectations for those daughters’ lives, as the elements “supply ideal conditions / to graft, or to deflower” (OPH 31). These words of cultivation also imply a code of strictly determined behavior that suggests young women should be beautiful, kept, and fertile. The code of behavior also extends to guests: while “The

Guest Bedroom” is generous, its defining feature is the “Guide to Local B&Bs” on “the bedside table” (OPH 33). The idea of arranging emphasizes human action and illuminates how often we take for granted the manner in which our own lives have been arranged by circumstances and locations. “Domestic Arrangements,” then, provides brief still lives that undercut domestic bliss and formally introduces the condensed glimpses that Groarke will develop to great effect in later

17 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 199.

155 collections.

In her first collection, Shale, places move between lived and imagined localities, with some poems offering the blending of the two, “If There is a City” and “For the Unkept House” for example. “Patronage” and “Enclosure” both reflect on passing by houses, including the place where Groarke was born, a hospital converted from the house where Maria Edgeworth lived and wrote. Perhaps surprisingly for a midlands poet, seascapes and water are important topographical features. Sometimes the seascapes form the backdrop for a typically lyrical reflection, as in the title poem. The speaker in “Shale” addresses her “moon-eyed lover” with whom she withdraws from society to seek solace in the abandoned “lighthouse-keeper’s house” (F 13). The house assumes the characteristics of water, as it “has been decided by the sea. / These rooms are stones washed over by waves / and spray from the lighthouse” (F 13). The repetition of the waves on the pier and the image of the revolutions of the lighthouse’s beam exist outside the room; they serve not only as suggestive metaphors for the lovers’ sensuality but lend the room a rhythm.

The title takes its name from the “necklace of shale,” the speaker has made her lover (F 14).

Shale is a relatively soft rock, one that can be broken by the sea and by human hands. Titling the poem and collection after the rock highlights the delicacy of material objects and points to the delicacy of human interactions. Both may appear solid but are also capable of being ground down. As with the long history of love poems, some of John Donne’s sonnets come to mind, the lovers are constituted by their contact with each other against the threat of the world outside. The strength of their connection, however, is enough to transform a temporary locality into a place of ephemeral permanence. In this way, the speaker of “Shale” constructs an imagined home. The poem plays with this idea of home as it enacts the building of intimate space in the poem. The repetition of the word “house” and the room that the lovers find within the lighthouse also ask us

156 as readers to confront the constructed nature of the poem, its stanzas and rooms that house the imagined lovers and location. These formal elements support Clutterbuck’s contention that the

“clearest theme is the condition of exile as it relates to the ideal of sanctuary.”18 “Shale” then centers a position of inside and outside, connected and estranged from the material world that will continue throughout her collections.

Such liquidity is evident in her early poems “Islands,” “What Becomes the River,” and

“The Riverbed,” but is further developed with “Athlones” from Juniper Street. The river is one of the defining features of the midland town. It both dominates the landscape and is the reason that the town exists with all the historical associations Groarke highlights. The two-faced nature of the river is not easy to confront as it seems to treat equally the rights and wrongs it witnesses.

Through this focus on the river, Groarke establishes a sense of the town aesthetically, culturally, and materially. Yet the river gives way to light so that “a sunlight / that could open out a river’s darknesses” lights on people and locations in the town. It “tinkles down through Northgate Street

/ like someone running late” and “roots then in the florist’s bins for cellophane / to dabble in” before lighting on a child, a girl in the Genoa Cafe, a man with a suitcase, and a woman

“emerging from Estelle’s Salon” (JS 10-11). The light, like the water helps to construct the town, demonstrating its features, pinpointing individuals, but also showing their participation in a wider community. Ailbhe McDaid aligns “Athlones” with Groarke’s writing of water and in between spaces:

In her careful observations of transitions—cultural, geographical, personal, familial and poetical—her aesthetic is located in border-spaces, on the fringes and peripheries of land and lake, sea and sky. … Such is the nature of postnational experience that all borders are fluid, all territories tenuous, and Groarke’s poetry rests (rather than resides) in these sites of temporal and spatial mutability.19

18 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 654. 19 McDaid, “‘I Mean It As No Ordinary Return,’” 46.

157

The River Shannon in “Athlones” in part recalls the River Liffey in Eavan Boland’s “Anna

Liffey,” but “Anna Liffey” confronts gender directly while “Athlones” refuses to name the river and recounts the place at a slant. The two poems chart the course of water, and both reflect upon the charged historical and cultural implications of their respective places. Interestingly, both also end with a diminution, a washing away that is at once evasive and confrontational. Boland asks that the rain “become the river. / Let the spirit of place be / A lost soul again.”20 “Athlones” ends with a vision of smashed glass and rain, or clocks whose ticking is “like the tinkle of light / on a river learned by rote, if not by heart. The sky / concedes. Any minute now will come release” (JS

14). What this release will be, a deluge or cloud break, remains unsaid. Groarke contends with the legacies embedded culturally and materially in the landscapes she knows and explores. Yet, the national is never definitively reestablished or affirmed. It exists as one component to acknowledge and investigate and is brought to face with other issues. This introduction to liquidity, and its possibilities for expanse and enclosure will be furthered in Spindrift.

Other People’s Houses continues Groarke’s imaginative construction of spaces, containing as it does poems that address many houses from many perspectives. It seems that

Groarke’s writing of houses is one way to honor the life lived, but also a way to explore the act of writing poetry, as is furthered in X. Not all the poems are as playful as “Domestic

Arrangements.” The collection ends with the four poems “The Empty House,” “Other People’s

Houses,” “Outdoors,” and “The Haunted House.” “The Empty House” acknowledges the agency of the nonhuman in place, a deference that will be expanded in Groarke’s most recent collections, and contributes to her sense of being in a network of others. The speaker claims that

20 Eavan Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), 204.

158 “The house will replace us with sounds of its own” so that it has a life independent from its human inhabitants (OPH 51). The title poem is a reflection on a shared life. After visiting “a house where we / once lived,” the speaker remembers an earlier period in the relationship (OPH

51). The areas of the house suggest objects infused with memories, “the yellow / couch that was our ‘amour prop,’” or “the soggy mattress where we sailed / beyond the beyonds” (OPH 52). The phrase “amour prop” is playfully suggestive of theatrical property and a domestic drama. Within this lyrical staging, objects and locations within the home are recalled, so that the house itself is a constellation of places, creating paths that may be traversed in practice and in memory. The connection between memory and place is important here and demonstrates that a place can exist in two forms simultaneously: physically and within memories. The poem reveals a negotiation between those two existences, indicating contention between human agency and the house’s own becoming.

The quality of in-betweenness is a continuing theme in much of Groarke’s works and will be later revisited in X’s garden sequence. In “The Empty House,” “the porch where I use to write those / flowery poems” is also long gone, although the speaker recalls its quality of “halfway between the In- and Outdoors” while also acknowledging a self-aware critique of her craft (OPH

52). The reflections echo some of Mahon’s questions in “Garage in Co. Cork” about what remains and what meaning we can ascribe to those remains.21 From the in-betweenness of the porch, the speaker decides to “throw in my lot with yours,” precipitating the couple’s progress from other people’s houses to living in their own, “steady and tied” (OPH 53). Looking at their former house, the speaker maintains “something remains / here, even after so many years: / the starlings are still nesting in the eaves” (OPH 53). The poem ends with the couple leaving the

21 Derek Mahon, New Selected Poems (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2016), 48.

159 house “together and for good” (OPH 53). This ending lends a finality that is difficult not to read as double edged. Such togetherness is complicated by the following poems. “Outdoors,” for example, reflects on the difficult boundaries drawn between inside and outside, how each defines and invades the other. As night settles, the speaker says, “only our room / is losing ground, while nothing outside is lost” (OPH 54). In the second stanza, the haunting image of the speaker’s partner standing in the kitchen facing the garden, his eyes on her in the glass reflection, is one that shows how difficult conversations displace us. The connections we make tie us to the places in which we live and love. The poem exemplifies what Clutterbuck notes of the whole collection that “there is an acceptance of the fact of co-dependent relationship between the provenance of stability and familiarity … and that of irreducible strangeness.”22

The collection ends with “The Haunted House,” an appropriate closing as it echoes and answers Dickinson’s epigraph. The first stanza repeats the command to “Think of home” (OPH

55). To think of home is qualified, however. Perhaps you should think of home “As though you could step in and find them / waiting for you with your tea kept warm” (OPH 55). Yet, recovering home is an impossible feat, and the desire is a conflicted one, which is reinforced by the references to the aria “I dreamt I dwelt in Marble Halls” from The Bohemian Girl. Arline’s aria recounts her vaguely remembered noble childhood and her love of Thaddeaus. The opera is a comedy, so Arline is reunited with her father, her noble social status, and her love.23 James

Joyce’s use of “I dreamt I dwelt in Marble Halls” is not so happy. Appearing in two stories in

Dubliners, it is a sign of what the characters cannot or will not achieve.24 The song’s longing for

22 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 657, emphasis in original. 23 M. W. Balfe, The Bohemian Girl (New York: Schirmer, 1902). 24 The stories are “Clay” and “Eveline”; see James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 257, 315.

160 a childhood home that cannot be recovered is the thread that Groarke extends. “The Haunted

House” also shows that no house is ever fully our own. In the final couplet of the sonnet,

Groarke writes, “The time is now, / and I never will step into this house again” (OPH 55). The poem picks up on Larkin’s “Home is so Sad” with its stasis and lost potential: “It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back,” and yet it “withers so” while not forgetting “what it started as, / A joyous shot at how things ought to be.”25 The indication, circling back to Dickinson’s epigraph, is that the poet is haunted by houses, those within this collection, and by rooms and blocks of the poems. And while there is a sense of release in these final lines, there is simultaneously a sense that the haunting never quite ceases.

Groarke’s 2002 collection, Flight, explores the possibilities inherent in the title. Naoko

Toraiwa reviewing the collection asserts that the “book show both the willfulness and guilt inherent in the attempt at flight from rural life and from those traditions, including the literary, which informed the poet’s upbringing.”26 The poems gesture to the act of flight as well as the desire to fly the nets or to take poetic leave as in “Flight.” “The Way it Goes,” “Or to Come,” and “Thistle” explore the passing of time, what remains, and ways in which we might come to terms with death. “Imperial Measure” and “White Noise,” even “The End of the Line,” take up the concept of nation as a contentious place in more direct ways than Groarke has previously addressed. Yet it is “Oranges” that extends the negotiation of in-betweenness and, written in two columns, textually acknowledges the tension between inside and outside present throughout

Other People’s Houses. The columns mirror each other, their distinction enforced by a

25 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 88. 26 Naoko Toraiwa, “On Vona Groarke’s ‘Flight,’” Journal of Irish Studies 21 (2006): 74, JSTOR.

161 typographical caesura. The result is that readers must pause and question how to read the poem, how to bring together both columns which is necessary for the meaning making of the poem and places us in experimentation with Groarke. Groarke’s use of second person throughout the poem is another act of lyrical placing. On one level, the poem is an address to an imagined poetic self; the opening lines present the hypothetical situation, “Say you approach” (F 65). Using the address, you, however, also casts the reader into the position to imagine her own relationship to the poem and to her home life, its tensions, inconsistencies. The question that the poem raises is how to measures the “full world” of the poem against the “truth of our elsewhere lives.”27 Both speaker and reader are left to contend with how “Your life shines without you” (F 65). Lucy

Collins notes that “The separateness that enables the speaker to look at her family from a distance, yet closely, also creates apparently contradictory feelings of belonging and being excluded.”28 “Oranges” frames the subject and object relationship as well as highlights that writing about something is to stand just outside.

Juniper Street marks a shift in Groarke’s work. While her concerns for conceptions of home and family, place and placing remain, the poetry is less concerned with the cleverness of a word or phrase. Instead, she settles further into her attention to detail and its possibilities. The first poem, “Ghosts,” is one of two poems with that name in the collection. To give the same title to multiple poems, a practice she continues, has the effect of extending the idea of rhyme outside a single poem. Readers thus confront the word and poems from multiple angles. Since

“perspective is tricky to get right,” this re-seeing is a means of working through the different possibilities a word or idea raises. These returns also mirror the way that painters return to the

27 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 19. 28 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 208.

162 same subject, a model, haybale, or landscape, to chart changing light and patterns. Inevitably, with titles such as “Ghosts” the ways that words and poems are haunted with associations is also suggested. The first “Ghosts” works through the “Not exactly” and “I don’t think so,” betraying a “hesitancy” that infuses the poem and migrant experience, argues McDaid.29 Clutterbuck reads

“Ghosts” as “a meeting point between solidity and fluidity of presence, between available and absent identity, [which] can simultaneously be a valid and an illusory possibility.”30 The poem works to balance these positions, finding an image of that balance and a futurity alien to her in the “ghosts” her children breathe “that stand for the split second / it takes to take us in, and then they’re off / as though released, like figments of the air” (JS 1). The collection is a taking stock of such ghosts, temporary visitations of what has been, what is, and what might be, and so the volume is filled with reference to air, light, silver, and water. Place is central to the collection as

Groarke’s time in the U.S. and Ireland both inform her work.

“Windmill Hymns” is an exploration of the psychological importance of the house she and her then husband, Conor O’Callaghan, built. The poem takes its name from the street where they lived in Dundalk, Windmill Court, which in turn is named after the shell of a windmill that overlooks the neighborhood.31 It features the landscape where Groarke built her family and life, but pushes the idea of home to undercut any idealism and question the longing for permanence.

Reflecting on the windmill, Groarke comes to terms with her life, its continuities and stalls. The derelict windmill, missing its sails, seems an echo of the lighthouse from “Shale,” both buildings constructed for work and aid. The speaker’s house built in the derelict windmill’s shadows was meant to be a “stopgap” but amounted to the place where years unfolded. Instead of “arms like

29 McDaid, “‘I Mean It As No Ordinary Return,’” 41. 30 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 660. 31 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 75.

163 French film stars and mouthfuls of moonlight,” there has been “small talk, disappointments, lack of cash” (JS 2). The poem charts the monotony of “The same momentum, / selfsame page that drags itself and all its consequence / over the bones of another rattled year” (JS 2). The poet

“supposes” that at some point it will all stop, her family will move, and the decay that currently afflicts the windmill will extend to her house and home. As McDaid reads, “‘Windmill Hymns’ documents the slow decay of living using an analogy of corrosion to denote the personal damage sustained through living.”32 The poem ends with a plea, “Let my children stand within an inch of my life, so the way / their breath aspires could be the sky, or something close, to me” (JS 3). Her children’s breaths anticipate the ghosts of their breaths later in the collection and reveal the impossibility of what the speaker asks. The temporal shift in the poem “indicates the poet’s ability to hold different states of being in imaginative connection.”33 The poem in considering material objects and their associations betrays the impossibility of longing and the anticipation of loss.

Knowing how to read these objects honestly is taken up in “Archeology,” which might also be read as a response to Eavan Boland’s poetry. Many of Boland’s poems explore what history omits, namely the lives of Irish women. The poem begins by undercutting the certainty of archeology: “call it proof then, this thing that will survive,” suggesting that the material objects we find are limited in what they reveal (JS 28). It is “A story told / as if through frosted glass, all taken up with plot / and happenstance” (JS 28). Here are echoes of the soliloquy from

Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Bible’s “through a glass, dimly.”34 The frosted glass suggests not

32 McDaid, “‘I Mean It As No Ordinary Return,’” 45. 33 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 198. 34 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004), 5.5.17-28; 1 Corinthians 13.12 (New Revised Standard Version).

164 only the doors and display cases of museums, but computers and devices that now serve as repositories for archives. The internal rhymes that might gesture to resolution, however, are undermined by the final sentence of the first stanza, “As if” (JS 28). The speaker is not convinced that creative reimagining can capture or explain. She asks,

Who then will read a single word or two and take from this that once there was a language and a page, a person writing and re-writing this for days? A hand, a desk, some form of light, a life inferred from one of these details. Or maybe all. (JS 29)

The poem moves from questioning archeology to question poetry as a kind of archeology. The above stanza critiques the poet’s task to explore details and from them propose historical and cultural meaning. Ultimately, her conclusion is the same as Boland’s: we cannot know, too much is missing.

A second “Ghosts” poem gestures to the hauntings that Groarke has acknowledged in her previous collections. The repeated consonants hold this ghostly diminished sonnet together. Each tercet is a coming to terms with the world, those elements that call us out of ourselves. The poem begins by asking, “What is it this time” then proceeds to make observations: “There is it again: the exact blue of a hyacinth / forced out of season. In a shadow crimpling / the indoor step, I have made myself out” (JS 52). Groarke’s placing involves recognizing the many components that constitute place and the possible others to whom her lyrics often defer: “Everything I own would say as much, / even the cypress tree inside the wall / that mutters as I type, ‘To me, to me’” (JS 52). Such acknowledgment and response continues to characterize Groarke’s poetry, and demonstrates how the poems not only gesture to the networks of places but create their own networks that link up. Catriona Clutterbuck notes that “Juniper Street moves instead toward cautious optimism as the violence of public history is at once foregrounded, offset, and redeemed

165 by the more positive possibilities of personal history and larger history’s recoverability.”35 Yet

Clutterbuck also hedges her claim by observing that the second “Ghosts” poem reevaluates the

“gap” between “meaning and meaninglessness,” as the poem “convey[s] an arising fear that the balance she has so carefully elaborated might … not withstand exposure to reality because it is based on an unacceptable level of wish-fulfillment.”36 Even if the poem emphasizes the impossibilities of a poem to balance meaning and meaninglessness, it demonstrates how the materiality of place when combined with dreams and the imaginative leaps of the second

“Ghosts” poem “can still nurture one’s sense of being in and embracing the now.”37 These ghostings are one of the ways that place works in Groarke’s poetry with their ability to surprise and undercut. They are sometimes most evident when they are no longer there; and they consist of traces, intersections, and spatio-temporal experiences. So too, we might say, does the lyric.

Negotiating “a class of Irish” in Spindrift

A recurring concern for Groarke in Spindrift is navigating between Ireland and the United States.

Groarke claims that she writes about places when she no longer lives in them and can reflect upon the “emotional, psychological, [and] intellectual landscapes” for it is these more than actual landscapes that “have energy.”38 The energy in Groarke’s poetry comes from these interplays between actual and imagined space, in the varied landscapes with which she interacts. Spindrift continues Groarke’s attention to water, and it is “shaped not only by the motion of water but by its dispersal and evaporation.”39 The poems seek to distill and capture moments as the speakers

35 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 663. 36 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 664. 37 Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets,” 663. 38 Vona Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017. 39 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 202.

166 recognize their ephemerality. Collins ties this relationship to the interlinking of materiality and memory. She says,

the context between the human figure and the elements here is an investigation of the tension between stasis and moment, between withdrawal and expressiveness that is also the dialectic of human relationships and of the creative process. These are reminders too of the distancing effect that so many of these poems enact: the noted significance of what happens elsewhere and can be only imagined by the speaker.40

In the poem “Sleepless,” Groarke describes the experience of being in the U.S., comparing the two places through three similes. In the U.S., she hears “[t]he humdrum of cicadas,” which, she remarks “is like white noise on a radio / I last turned to Mo Cheol Thú” (SD 13). The long- running radio program (1970-2005) translates to “you are my music,” an expression of praise.41

That the cicadas are like white noise is both praise and disappointment. They provide a kind of sound track, yet as in turning on the radio only to find static, they suggest a desire to hear something else. Groarke uses Irish only sparsely in her collections; yet when she does the effect furthers the balance between spatial narratives and intimacy.

“Sleepless” belongs to the beginning of Spindrift as one of the poems that considers living in the U.S., recording the sights and sounds she encounters. The refrigerator motor is “like the engine of a great ship / hauling me out to the spot in the ocean / that’s just as far from one home as the other” (SD 13). The comparison is one that echoes Elizabeth Bowen, who claimed to feel most at home on the Irish Sea traveling between her lives in Ireland and England.42 Yet while Groarke’s similar expression captures the experience of knowing multiple places, the

40 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 204. 41 “Broadcaster Ciarán Mac Mathúna dies,” RTÉ News, 11 December 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20100116174356/http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/1211/macmathuna.ht ml. 42 R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane, 1993), 107.

167 heaviness of “hauling” and the stasis of being in the middle of the sea makes the stanza a guarded one. The final image of this short, three stanza poem is of “[a] borrowed cellphone” charging its battery that Groarke says is “like a spray of fireflies shaken out / of a second-hand ash tree” (SD 13). The image of fleeting brilliance shares its ephemeral nature with the phone’s battery life but extends to comment on our tenuous connections with and in place. Nature and technology blur in each of the similes so that sensory experiences are implied in technology and vice versa. The cellphone as fireflies indicates a hope for communication, the excitement of the texts received. The poem is not without its ambivalence concerning place or belonging. While the speaker feels out to sea, the possibility of connection that the cellphone provides opens the poem out to futurity.

Such a lyrical topological response is also foregrounded in poems such as “An Teach

Tuí” and “Derryloughane,” but the transatlantic negotiation is taken up further in the two poems titled “Away.”43 The first opens with a stock taking: “We have our own smallholding: / persimmon tree, crawl space, stoop, / red earth basement, ceiling fans, a job” (SD 14). The collective “we” serves to position the speaker in a shared space, but the list is unusual as they are not the usual glamorous selling features of a house and amounts to a fragmented sense of belonging. These fragments turn to further dislocation: “Hours I’m not sure where I am, / flitting through every amber / between Gales and Drumcliffe Road” (SD 14). There is a concern for time as the speaker’s hours slip away, and yet the title tells readers to pay attention to the place, to attend to the locations Groarke mentions and obscures. She flits through the traffic in Winston-

Salem, North Carolina, allowing her to comment on two countries simultaneously. “An

American Jay” is a more focused, playfully critical exploration of the U.S., foregrounding

43 An teach tuí translates as your house.

168 discontentment and longing, but “Away” reveals that Groarke continues to question what is meant by the idea of home. To use the word amber not only distinguishes Groarke from the

American idiom, but also conjures images of objects preserved in the substance, suggesting a stasis juxtaposed to Groarke’s driving. Drumcliffe Road is a street in Winston-Salem, but it also harkens to names in Ireland and, inevitably, Yeats. The poet is thus pulled back and forth between the two countries as memories and names insight convergences.

To combat homesickness, she paints woodwork “the exact azure / of a wave’s flip side / out the back of Spiddal pier,” located in Co. Galway (SD 14). Other reminders of home she can count on, just as she can trust that “any given morning pins / a swatch of sunlight / to my purple shamrock plant” (SD 14). In this mix of memory, present time, and place, the speaker is caught.

She acknowledges the pull: “My faithless heart ratchets / in time to slower vowels, / higher daylight hours” (SD 14). She may like more daylight, appreciate even a southern U.S. inflected speech, but “ratchets” and its grating sound seem to indicate a loss. Groarke’s verbs, “flit” for example, suggest a rote or careless approach to daily tasks, when in fact, the speaker is attuned to the menial and deeper webs that we graft our lives upon. The language shares with Elizabeth

Bishop’s “Questions of Travel” a concern for form, the presence of water, and the scope of the

“Continent, city, country, society.”44 Bishop questions the ethics, gains, and losses of traveling, posing, “the choice is never wide and never free. / And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?”45 Her poem raises the questions but refuses to answer them. Ambivalence pervades both poems. Groarke’s “Away” extends these questions to wonder who we become and how we act when taken out of what we consider our normal circumstances.

44 Elizabeth Bishop, Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 92. 45 Bishop, Poems, 92.

169 “Away” is ultimately a detailing of what it is like to be separated from the place and people we know and love. However subtly, it raises the question of what it means to be Irish in

America. Groarke claims she feels “almost exclusively to be an Irish woman,” and the first

“Away” poem probes that association:46

I grow quiet. Yesterday I answered in a class of Irish at the checkout of Walgreen’s.

I walk through the day-to-day as if ferrying a pint glass filled to the brim with water

that spills into my own accent: pewtered, dim, far-reaching, lost for words. (SD 14)

The experience of being away alters the idea of home with which Groarke must contend. The experience is one that is constantly placing her, calling her into herself and her environment. She joins Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, and Sara Berkeley Tolchin in writing of the

Irish in America. Checking out at Walgreen’s, Groarke’s Irishness is evident. Still, she qualifies the association; it is “a class of Irish” which gestures to but refuses to represent the whole and implies an acknowledgment of social class, too. The poem’s attention to language and finding a metaphor for it in water reaches back to “The Local Accent” in Juniper Street in which language and materiality are linked. Collins writes that “The Local Accent” is evidence of the ways that language can adapt and endure in order to link past and present experience.47 In “Away” language can become mixed as the water threatens to influence the speaker’s accent, which would leave her “lost for words.” To be away is to participate in a continuous spatial and

46 Schwall, “How do you,” 304. 47 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 201.

170 linguistic orientation practice. For Groarke, it means that she carefully carries with her the language, the places, the people, and the terms she has known.

The image of the cup spilling over produces a different pattern than spindrift, but the images share a sense of movement and excess. The title “Away” emphasizes distance but also suggests a way through the day and experience. As she did with “Ghosts,” titling two poems

“Away” creates a rhyme between the two. As Groarke says, “there’s also that kind of arching device that using the same word in a poem has. You’re both holding the poem steady and also allowing it to swerve in directions. … That process of maintaining but also accommodating change seems to me to be something that happens through repetition.”48 Both “Away” poems take up distance: its future and backwards look and its ability to create an intense here-ness contrasting with elsewhere. Both hold and swerve the word. In the second poem are the ghostings of the first with its liquidity and negotiation of space. Yet, it also suggests colloquial understandings of the term away, extending how readers confront the word. Saying fades away implies a move to nonexistence, while saying wail away implies continuous action, so the second

“Away” must straddle contradictory associations that ultimately parallel the speaker’s isolated feelings.

While Ireland serves as an actual and imagined place for Groarke to return to, her concern is less with nation than with the multiplicity of factors that contribute to understanding home and away. This positioning is further explored in the second poem “Away.” Separated in the volume by eight poems, the second “Away” is a reflection on intimacy and distance, converging and splitting both time and space, as Groarke reflects on living three thousand miles from her family. The poem begins with a description of how Groarke interacts with her children.

48 Vona Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017.

171 It is through Skype that she can babysit and share meals, even if she must “breakfast to their lunch / lunch to their dinner” (SD 26). Skype allows her to maintain an active presence in her children’s lives, a kind of technological ghosting of being and not being there. It shares with

“Sleepless” an appreciation for technology, but also a recognition that while this type of communication is now more common, it still seems unbelievable. Groarke is keenly aware of time and space and how the two conflate. She says that she is “three thousand miles ago, / five hours in the red,” highlighting the distance that builds up between countries and time zones as the world continues its spinning course. The gaps in time and space cause Groarke to question:

What would it take — one crossed cyber wire, a virtual hair’s breadth awry —

for theses synapsed hours to bloat to centuries, for my background

to be rescinded to a Botticelli blue, my webcam image

ruffled and pearled, speaking vintage words into spindrift? (SD 26)

Groarke’s colors, the arresting red and Botticelli blue, nod to a diverse color palette and appreciation of the visual arts that will be explored further in the discussion of “Spindrift.” Here, they help to emphasize the quiet horror at the possibility of being left out from her family members’ lives and their sense of unity. Using the word synapse is especially evocative as it indicates connection and communication—the hours shared. Additionally, synapsis is used to describe chromosomal pairing during meiosis, and so the word’s association with the biology of

172 reproduction doubles the import of the connection that the speaker draws.49 The images conjured by yet another definition of synapse, however, parallel with the wires and webs that Groarke imagines enables Skype. These are the images of fired synapses creating a neural network in the brain, which illuminates the brief, energizing, and life giving moments that Groarke shares with her children through the internet.50

Gesturing to the title of the collection, Groarke also wonders what change would have to occur to so displace her words that they turn to spindrift and be rendered incommunicable, to fade away. If not these disconnections, she wonders if she might be transported “into light years off”—conflating time and space—“to the room of an obsolete laptop / where I Skype and Skype

/ and no one answers,” where she will seek comfort in using Google Earth to try and find “my son’s bike in the garden, / my daughter’s skirt / on the line?” (SD 27). What is interesting about place in this poem is the way that Groarke and her readers know that the locations are separate, but how that independence is breached by the technology. It is not necessarily a comforting sight since it conveys a “crushing image of isolation [that] reinforces the high price exacted by technological communication. Unlike earlier emigrants, who imagined their homeplaces, usually in an idealized fashion, the poet knows precisely the realities of what she is missing.”51 While the distance in time and space is breeched through the love that she has for her children, she recognizes how tenuous and fragile those links are. This desperation reveals the importance of her relationships such that an imagined disconnection leads to a continuous searching away.

“Away” is a poignant reflection on a transatlantic life, one that resonates with a tradition

49 The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “synapsis,” Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com. 50 The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “synapsis. 51 McDaid, “‘I Mean It As No Ordinary Return,’” 48.

173 in Irish literature, suggestive of Derek Mahon’s “The Globe in Carolina.” Mahon’s poem expands and contracts space from desktop globe to earth and presents an apocalyptic view of history. The speaker is in North Carolina, and yet his attention continues to turn and span the globe, advocating for a fuller understanding of “the glory-hole / of space, a home from home,” which Emer Kennedy Andrews calls a deterritorialized perspective.52 Both Mahon and Groarke acknowledge a spatiality inclusive of but also exceeding place. Both, too, return to personal relationships to delineate space. In “The Globe in Carolina,” the speaker admits,

and what misgivings I might have about the final value of our humanism pale before the mere fact of your being there.53

Similarly, “Away” shows that the places where we live and love become intimately connected through our interactions in ways that transcend national identity. Even living in a place away from the ones that we love means that it too will be inscribed with the intensity of feeling, both love and loneliness. Places in “Away” are not described in detail, yet their exchange is emphasized. One cannot be closed completely to another. The connection is already there; the possibility for a synapse exists in the very nature of place and its interaction with people.

Love Songs, “Spindrift”

Spindrift begins with an epigraph from the Oxford Dictionary of English, “spindrift, n. spray blown from the crests of waves by the wind,” and the collection captures the spirit of spindrift:

52 Mahon, New Selected Poems, 55. Elmer Kennedy Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968-2008 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 166. 53 Mahon, New Selected Poems, 56. In previous versions these lines appeared as follows: “and what misgivings I might have / about the true importance of / the merely human pale before / the mere fact of your being there”; see Derek Mahon “The Globe in Carolina,” in An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Wes Davis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013), 438-439.

174 an evocation of movement and distillation. Groarke uses the word spindrift in a number of her poems, as seen above in “Away” and in “Texts.” The repetition is both a time and spatial practice as it forces an arch between poems; it is a return as well as a re-seeing so that readers consider and then consider again from another angle. The poems belonging to the sequence of 45 called “Spindrift” are themselves so brief that they are hard to capture or classify, and, as David

Wheatley suggests, refuse to provide a definite answer.54 Yet the title of the poem indicates a way to comprehend the sequence as spindrift: a single wave that breaks into each of the compressed poems. That image helps to highlight the importance of the visual for the whole sequence. It is a collection of sketches, attending to color, light, and composition. “Spindrift” defies a totalizing summary, but, in brief, the poems describe arriving at a house and settling in after a time away. Although the exact location of the place is not named, a different approach than Michael Longley takes with Carrigskeewaun, Groarke mentions Spiddal and Furbo as well as watching clouds gather over Moher, which indicates that the poem unfolds in the west of

Ireland. Most likely, Groarke is writing of her family cottage near Spiddal, “part summer house, part shack,” where summers and weekends were spent in her childhood.55 When she was thirteen, her father died and the regular visits ended until she had her own children.56 Due to this long relationship, the sequence has a depth that encompasses the memories associated with the place and the different ways in which the cottage is apprehended. The knowledge of place is intimate, shaped by habit and repetition, but also by the new changes both place and poet undergo. In this way, the experience of place is reciprocal and co-constituted, as Massey and

54 David Wheatley, “Vona Groarke, Spindrift,” georgiasam blog, 18 August 2009, http://georgiasam.blogspot.com/2009/08/vona-groarke-spindrift.html. 55 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 78. 56 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 80.

175 Casey claim, for “there is no place without self and no self without place,” which is the condition of our “being-in-the-world.”57 “Spindrift” enacts the combined sensual and psychological experiences, as it complicates perspectives of landscape, time, and foregrounds vision.

The sequence focuses on the elements within place, drawing inspiration and praising the constituent parts. The first poem invites the readers in, questioning,

What is to be done with a past tense that, once recalled, presents itself again? (SD 62)

The initial appeal concerns itself with time: pursuing an answer to what happens when the past is remembered. Groarke’s specification of past tense inevitably conjures associations of language and the past tense of a verb. When it presents itself again, however, the past and present collide so that the two exist simultaneously. Elsewhere in the sequence, Groarke introduces “[t]he future tense / of the bracken stream” so that past, present, and future, experientially and linguistically, meet and comment on one another throughout the sequence (SD 68). Groarke’s response to her question merits discussion as well. Instead of answering, she introduces a metaphor:

You might as well throw a stone in the sea and be taken aback when the same thing is keeping you from sleep. (SD 62)

This first poem is a balancing act, posing a question and response, but refusing an answer. In that way, it seems to echo Yeats’ final stanza in “Among School Children”: “O body swayed to music, O brightening dance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”58 Positing and

57 Edward Casey, “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place- World?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4 (December 2001): 684. 58 W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990; reprint, London: Everyman, 1994), 263.

176 refusing to answer the question is, perhaps, the condition of lived experience.59 It also introduces the idea of the coexistence of past, present, and future that “presents.”60 As Collins observes, the effect is a “crossing [of] the boundaries between past and present” and a “merging of literal and imaginative worlds,” which highlights “the paradox of what is cast away remaining with us.”61

What the poem seems to suggest is that we can only ever be in the present, acknowledging the recurrences, the way that memory visits and revisits, the manner in which future anticipation only returns us to the now, so that we must be here, now.

All of this questioning and concern unfolds in place, so the concept of present inevitably leads us to the idea and experience of presence. “Spindrift” is dedicated to Tommy and Eve,

Groarke’s children. At one level, then, the audience and addressee of the lyric poem has been identified. As we will see, “Spindrift” is also a love poem, and so it is ode-like in that it has a beginning, middle, and end and comes from a tradition of prayer and praise, a tradition of “trying to get into right relation to an imagined good or power.”62 It is both “request” and “quest”; although in its resistance of straight narrative and its address to the private life and the everyday, it might also be an anti-ode.63 There is a sense of litany not just in the lists, but in the pattern and cadence of the whole sequence. Perspective matters too; and the sequence is outlined by the landscape of Spiddal and the sea, “the perfect frame.”64

The poems as a whole are an exercise in relationality and a reaching toward understanding place and self-in-place. This is evident in the stanzas that catalogue:

59 Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 268. 60 Hear also gift and performance. 61 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 203. 62 Hass, A Little Book on Form, 228. The middle sections, poems 2-42, are “glimpses,” as Groarke says, and collage like; Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017. 63 Hass, A Little Book on Form, 224, 245. 64 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 80.

177 8 Heather and willowherb, clover and vetch, gentians, buttercups, stone. (SD 64)

And:

34 Bog cotton, convolvulus, cow parsley, woodbine; the whitewashed gable wall sees off the lot. (SD 70)

The effect of this cataloging is to render the words as incantation. The words call attention to themselves and to their sonic relationship with each other. As each conjures images of the plant, flower, or stone, the one named is held momentarily in relief to its background and companions.

The simultaneity of exposure and fading parallel the delicacy of treatment and respect in such cataloguing, a sense of letting things be. List making is an old poetic practice with famous examples including the Bible’s Old Testament genealogies and Homer’s cataloguing of ships, battle armor, and events. Michael Longley’s listing of ice cream flavors and Burren flowers in

“The Ice-Cream Man” is a well-known contemporary Irish example of the adaptation of the litany.65 List making, even of the brief series that Groarke includes, reveals an attentiveness as well as a need to name and situate the element named. Indeed, the whole sequence may be read as a list collected to reveal the poet’s relationship to the world, intimated by a record of visiting a place over the course of a life. Naming can be a violent act, but here, Groarke uses the common words for plants that have been passed down as one generation explains the local flora to

65 Michael Longley, Collected Poems (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 2007), 192.

178 another. The cataloguing poems pay homage to common plants that help to constitute place.

Their incantatory nature is increased not just as a result of the serializing, but because of the repetition of sounds within the stanzas. “Willowherb” picks up the h in “heather,” “vetch” the v in “clover,” “stone” the s and t from “buttercups” and “gentians.” The naming is also a kind of fixing—a still life.

As the sections of “Spindrift” are forms of incantation and acts of gathering, the accumulations recognize the prevalence of the nonhuman in the speaker’s daily life and serve as a kind of deference to the nonhuman. The lyrical topography of the poem demonstrates a respect for the coexistence and the co-convergence of the human and nonhuman in place. What each section also formally enacts is the impossibility of a completely accurate portrayal of place. In lieu of a detailed description of her environment, Groarke provides illuminating fragments. The result is a challenge to how the world is perceived and appreciated. It resonates with Massey’s dismissal of the claim that nature is static and culture is dynamic: “It is an imagination which fails entirely to appreciate that ‘traffic which is nature’s own,’ or to understand the ‘indigeneity’ of plants and animals, and of rocks and stones, as no less elusive than that of humans.”66 To list

“clover and vetch, / gentians, buttercups, / stone” is not to reduce the entities to their name, but in the very naming demonstrate the impossibility of conveying the many trajectories that cohere in place, plant, perception, and label. Places are complex, but so too are poems in the way that they respond to experience and “make it interesting” by allowing “different kinds of processes into it rather than taking a head-on, straight-forward, look-it-in-the-eye approach.”67 These poems may

“recognize the moment at which a sensory experience happens, and then, through a period of

66 Massey, For Space, 160. 67 Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017.

179 stillness and contemplation or daydreaming or some kind of fallow moment that comes after that, words begin to stick to that experience.”68 The litanies and glimpses are acts of distillation, of narrowing down, while still holding off a conclusion.

The litanies are one means of coming to terms with being in place. Another that

“Spindrift” adopts is to note the many and multiple connections that constitute a location. The sequence is constantly pointing to multiple locations as well as acknowledging that the interactions with other places and the trespasses that occur help to delineate the places’ specificity. Places are always already embedded in a constellation of connections that are human and nonhuman. For example, the third poem reads,

3 Telephone wires traipse the field where we drew water to gloss over months away, left a rock with twine around it and a path to keep track of the goings on of every stone and high-wire lament the hill sent down to us. (SD 62-63)

The telephone wires are an image of connectivity, joining together houses physically, metaphorically, even emotionally. They are also an open acknowledgment that we are no longer in a pastoral landscape, but one that is shaped by human and technological forces. The mention recalls the power of technology to connect and emphasize isolation that the speaker in previous poems, “Away” for example, felt. For all that, there is still an inability to fully take in or account for what happens in place, especially what happens in our absence. There is a commonness in the suggested repetition of cleaning the house on arrival, tricks the family perfects. The hill’s “high-

68 Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017.

180 wire lament” gestures to the storied history of the west coast of Ireland and Groarke’s acknowledgment of losses and changes over time.69 It is also a reminder of how close an ode can be to an elegy. Groarke details the activities we perform in place as not only a means of living, but as acts of return and greeting. The location is constituted by convergences, by entities passing through, as much as by what stays put. The word “traipse” is especially evocative as it implies both weariness and informality, while it gestures to a shift in the speaker’s position. The

“Spindrift” sequence reads as the speaker expressing a continual return to this location; it is a site that serves as a comparison to other places where she does not feel such belonging. The place thus becomes a resource through which the speaker can experiment poetically and linguistically.

From the seascape house, Groarke’s children wave to drivers counting “how may / wave back” (SD 65). The word wave serves as another arch, putting the gesture of greeting together with the repetition of the ocean’s patterns of sound and sight. The word encompasses momentum, connection, and response. She sees boats, wondering,

14 Where is that currach going and where is it coming from? (SD 65)

Later, there’s a car from Spiddal (SD 69). And more cars that make a light show of the room:

37 Awash with headlights, the blue room passes through the wake of closing time. (SD 71)

The evening light show is one that resituates the room. While we know that the cars go by the

69 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 80-81.

181 house, it is the room that acts: it “passes through.” Attributing the verb to the room lends it an agency and layered participation, even if the verb itself carries a passive connotation. The five line stanza breaks up the pattern of a pentameter couplet so that the juxtaposition is not 1 + 1, but

1 + 4. The sound in “time” picks up on “headlights,” and “through” picks up on “room,” emphasizing the only end word whose sounds are not mirrored: “wake.” The word acknowledges the state of being awake, but also of sudden attentiveness. It suggests not only the vigils held for the dead, but also the trail left in water after a ship passes through. It may be too much to note a

Joycean connection to Finnegans Wake and the first and final sentence of that novel; nevertheless, like Groarke’s poems that take up other houses in Other People’s Houses, the interior space is contained through contact with intrusions of light.

This light is a dominating feature of the west coast and of the family house. Groarke writes, “The blue room is propped like an eastern gemstone in a setting of grey and green. Some days it seems like the grey sky is hell-bent on climbing through the windowpanes to contradict the blue. But mostly it finds other distractions: this evening they are slate roof tiles and the house foundations over the road, remembering lunchtime’s rain.”70 The room stands apart from the wider world but is invaded by it and other elements. It serves as a position from which to view the immediate environment and continues to be a link to elsewhere. This attention to light is reminiscent of ekphrastic poetry and, especially, of Derek Mahon who Terence Brown describes as “attentive to the act of seeing. There is a visual self-consciousness in much of his poetry as if he is intent on watching himself and others watching the world through eyes that know light is a kind of artist which composes landscapes and cityscapes, still life interiors, as it falls on sea and

70 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 81.

182 shore, on street and table.”71 Light and colors are collaborates with Groarke in creating the compelling visual qualities of the sequence. Hers is a diverse palate, but yellows and blues infuse this poem most readily as does the juxtaposition between darkness or haziness and clear beams of light.

Part of Groarke’s lyrical topography is the acknowledgment and acceptance of the agency of the nonhuman elements that co-construct place, recognizing things for what they are with their power and ability to influence. In poem 26, “A field of scrub” has the capacity to “yield a bicycle” or “a bungalow” manmade objects that may be lost, abandoned, and reclaimed.

However, “given time,” the field “might yield” “even roses” (SD 68). Groarke is highly aware of the social construction of place, but the human element is kept in balance. There is an awareness of human impression on the nonhuman as some sections demonstrate. For example, “The waves break a cleaner white / than the Planning Application / fixed to the gatepost” (SD 67). Here, humans threaten the other elements of place with the possibility of new buildings, pointing to the development of landscapes and layering the nonhuman world with the cultural and capital worlds dominated by humans. The nonhuman is affirmed in this section: it is the “cleaner white.” Yet there is a delicate balance between the two forces. When “The island lighthouse / clenches the bay / and then sets it free,” the effect is to see not only the lighthouse’s pattern of illumination, but to see the intersections, the trajectories of light, sound, human and nonhuman, that meet in place and constitute it (SD 71). The poem also articulates the experience of being in place and of watching the lighthouse light revolve, capturing the experience of being caught out or revealed and of being let go.

71 Terence Brown, “Derek Mahon: The Poet and Painting,” Irish University Review 24, no. 1 (1994): 39, JSTOR.

183 Groarke treats landscape with a painter’s eye. The brevity of the poems coupled with their quick succession on the page and their attentiveness to the visual results in a sometimes cinematic effect and is also reminiscent of H.D.’s Sea Garden. “Poetry,” Groarke says, “likes to feed off that moment when you feel moved by something in whatever respect. … it is a kind of quickening”; and visual art is “a distillation of somebody else’s moment of quickening,” which can provide an impulse for “words [to] emerge.”72 In writing of the west coast of Ireland with such imagery, Groarke joins a tradition of depicting the landscape in poetry and prose. W.B.

Yeats might be present, but it is his brother Jack Yeats whose paintings and sketches of the west coast seem to be recalled here.73 In poem 19, for example, Groarke describes a wave as “a lifted thread / in a canvas” (SD 66). The canvas is “already primed / indigo,” and the description evokes precise images and textures. This gesture to the artist’s canvas is overlaid onto the sea so that the sea is reminiscent of the manmade and not the other way around. Groarke continues the artist similes in a number of other poems:

20 All horizontals: stone walls, the road, an ocean stretched out like an artist’s model on a hotel chaise, all lace and gravitas. (SD 66)

There are wonderful geometries in this poem, which reads both as a return to the architectural focus in her poems of houses as well as an expansion. The idea of landscape is emphasized in drawing attention to horizontals and horizons. Landscape “is both the context for places and an

72 Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017. 73 See Vera Kreilkamp, ed., Éire/Land (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) for more on Ireland and the visual arts and Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Hexam: Bloodaxe, 1994), 227-251.

184 attribute of places”; it is a “cusp concept” meaning that it distinguishes and marks the difference between space and place.74 The lines’ equivalency of between four to seven syllables emphasizes the horizontal component of landscape and of poetic line. Yet Groarke undercuts the strictly horizontal too. Words echo each other: “horizontals” in “walls,” “road” in “ocean,” “model” in

“hotel,” “chaise” in “lace” so that the near rhymes make within the horizontals a series of diagonals with the last word of one line connecting to the second or third word of the following line. The effect is to recognize the horizontal nature of landscape and art, but to see it slant.

Again, the ocean takes its description from the world of painting.

Groarke’s attention to the visual arts is not unusual for Irish poetry. Neil Corcoran writes of the relationship of the visual arts and modern Irish poetry beginning with Yeats then continuing on to examine specific poetry by Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice, and Derek

Mahon, among other male poets. He notes that it seems almost “programmed into [Yeats’]

DNA” since his father and brother were painters, and in poems such as “Leda and the Swan,”

“Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Among School Children,” he “pondered responses to the visual.”75

Corcoran then charts the relationship between poetry and the visual arts noting how the two inform one another through competition, tributes, cooperation, self-reflection, and tutelage.76 Rui

Carvalho Homem also takes up a review of the visual arts in Irish poetry, focusing of the rapport between the two. Homem points out the reciprocal relationship that ekphrastic poetry participates in as it is a “‘conversion’ of visual into verbal, followed by ‘the reconversion of the verbal

74 Casey, “Between Geography and Philosophy,” 689. 75 Neil Corcoran, “Modern Irish Poetry and The Visual Arts: Yeats to Heaney,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 252. 76 Corcoran, “Modern Irish Poetry and The Visual Arts,” 254.

185 representation back into the visual object in the reception of the reader.’”77 He reads ekphrastic poetry as creating “additional instability, by challenging the apparent determinacy of figurative representation,” which are all bound up with “family and generation, the difficult borders between intimate and public experience, challenged gender roles, and the perplexities and oppression faced by women.”78 To write ekphrastic poetry or poetry that takes up the influence of the visual arts is to consider representation and the tension between stasis and movement that painting and poetry offer. The combined effect in Groarke’s poetry is an attention to the interaction between space and time, as well as to what can be captured. Adopting the language of the visual arts reinforces the compressed poems as brief sketches which complicates their timeliness. As the opening poem suggests, they are past and also present. Yet their fluidity, as in

Cannon’s best poetry, offers the opportunity for a futurity of specificity and belonging.

Groarke mentions two specific paintings to draw parallels between what she sees and what others have created. The poems become sites for further connection and collaboration. In poem 22, Groarke mentions one of Henri Matisse’s paintings:

Between the headland and the island a skylight opens as the shutter in ‘French Window at Nice.’ (SD 67)

While painted in a small hotel room, French Window at Nice has height and spaciousness created by the tall shutters and floor to ceiling length drapes. The quality of light is warm and inviting, tinging the curtains yellow and illuminating the solitary female figure seated in front of the

77 Rui Carvalho Homem citing W. J. T. Mitchell, “‘Private Relations’: Selves, Poems, and Paintings—Durcan to Morrissey,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 296. 78 Homem, “‘Private Relations,’” 296.

186 shutters. She holds a book, but returns the painter’s gaze. Behind her, a single open shutter provides a glimpse of the golden beach, the blue sea, and bathers. The open shutter in French

Window at Nice draws the viewer’s gaze. So too, Groarke claims, does the shaft of light she witnesses. The surprising luminosity of the painting is remembered as the poet watches the quality of light suddenly alter. The sky seems to give way to a skylight and the effects of light concentrated. Matisse says of his painting in this period that he is “searching for the density of things—instead of reducing what I see to a silhouette I’m trying to convey volume and modeling.”79 Through a lyric practice of topographic depiction, Groarke also conveys volume and modeling, searching for density, the nuances and multiple contributions that make place, no matter how momentary. Groarke also gestures to Gustav Klimt in poem 39:

Headlights from Furbo, streetlamp in Vienna; rain on the window, Klimt’s luminous orchard. (SD 71)

This poem has the effect of pulling two different locations together: the west coast of Ireland and

Vienna where Klimt lived and painted. Watching the rain on the windows, Groarke recollects

Klimt’s orchard. Just as the painters that she names are concerned with color, shape, and light, so too is Groarke.80

Each poem is also concerned with framing, foreshadowing the fuller exploration that framing will receive in Four Sides Full. In her essay, she quotes Matisse: “The four sides of a frame are among the most important parts of a picture. A painting or a drawing included in a

79 Quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master (New York: Knopf, 2005), 238. 80 Which Klimt painting is referenced here is unclear. Spindrift includes a poem “Orchard with Lovers” based on Klimt’s The Park (1910). His 1898 Orchard does not have the same dizzying colors and patterns that characterize his later work, and yet the concern for texture and light is present. The painting looks as though it might have been painted while looking through a rain glazed window.

187 given space ought, therefore, to be in perfect harmony with the frame … according to the dimensions of the room in which it is to be hung,” and goes on to examine different elements and effects of frames, including how they separate, make art, make objects useless, and indicate a crossing.81 She wishes she could “surround [a poem] in a depth of space” and recognizes that

“[i]n my craft the portmanteau frame must be an elastic one. I would make it of clouds and feathers and, for every poem I put inside, I would take two poems back out.”82 In addition to the

“quickening” visual art can stimulate, the conception of framing is an important one for visual art and poetry, for “if there were no white space to mark [the poem] off, how would we know the difference?”83 These poems then address framed works, frame a place, enact a frame of reference, attend to the architecture of framing, re-frame experience, and invite readers to compare frames. Such a concern echoes Cannon’s preoccupation with patterns.

Aligning with the sequence’s attention to framing and the visual arts is the centrality of the effects of seeing:

6 The field is silken in magenta. Ragwort sequins it. (SD 63)

Ragwort is often considered a weed, and yet here its bold yellow takes on the brilliance that the sun’s beams and car headlights have in other poems. The yellow is suggestive of Vincent Van

Gogh’s French landscapes, especially in the juxtaposition of colors, as much of Van Gogh’s work contrasts light and dark. The fact that it “sequins” the magenta field makes the flowers

81 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 17. 82 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 18, 37. 83 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 19.

188 showy, theatrical. Such sections betray the poet’s concern for conveying, like Matisse and Klimt, not in the style of realism or naturalism, a mode often associated with landscape painting, but a textured description that illuminates the experience of being in and witnessing place as much as it conveys the landscape before the speaker. Indeed, other poems might serve as inspiration for future artists:

11 A deckchair drifting out to sea in the lawn’s long grass. (SD 64)

One image after another is presented, held momentarily, and then released as another comes into focus. The result is a composite, like a reel of negatives and still frames. Each poem stands alone and simultaneously informs the others.

Groarke’s attentiveness to presence is more than visual; she is equally concerned with sound and touch. Elsewhere, we learn that “the sea chatters to itself: / a hundred different escapades / with the same punchline” (SD 71). The sea’s sounds recur in various guises in the sequence, standing as one of the constants in the sequence. In poem 40, the speaker hears,

“Ghosts tinkling in the bedroom / fall silent when we turn in” (SD 71). The couplet captures the experience of moving through a house that has held lives and memories, some we know, others we cannot. This sense of happening upon and being overwhelmed (by joy, by sadness, by incomprehension) is also consistent throughout the sequence. Continuing to subvert horizontals and tell it slant, the poet claims, “Tilted up at one corner, / the bay would spill / into my whole life” (SD 67).84 The inundation would be the dissolution of the sea’s “perfect frame” in subsuming everything, and so it is a threat but also an appreciation for the water’s power.85

84 Dickinson, The Complete Poems, 506. 85 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 80.

189 Indeed this sense of being overcome connects to the synapses in the previous poem of the collection, so there is an acknowledgment that too much can cause our synapses to fire so rapidly we can go crazy. Our desensitization, even to the swell of the sea, is one of self-preservation.

Towards the end of the sequence, Groarke returns to color. There are aural repetitions within and between the poems, but the focus in on the visual. The palette of the poem is grounded in greens and blues, but infused with bright shots of color. In the following poems, the colors become verbs which has the effect of a takeover or the bleeding of one color into the elements and poet’s life. They cast the association of the still life or framed painting as static image in doubt:

41 Down on the rocks a driftwood moon is whitening tonight.

42 Each morning to be cornflowered; each night-time to be greened over in scutch and fern, wild sorrel. (SD 72)

These lines seems to recall the speaker’s wish to be subsumed in her life, expressed in “Windmill

Hymns” from Juniper Street (SD 72). Associating “whitening” and “driftwood” with “moon” washes out the scene. White will be an important color in Groarke’s collection X, but here is serves as a counter to the other colors in the palette, acting as the luminous backdrop against which the poems are set. Here stasis and movement are juxtaposed, since the poems present images, but mobilize the colors. The cornflower’s brilliant blue also gestures to McGuckian’s blues, which are colors of optimism and creativity, while the enfolding indicated in the final lines

190 of poem 42 suggests a desire for renewal. In these poems, the inundation or overgrowth is one of contentment, even while recognizing the fragility of our lives. There is an ecocritical appreciation in “Spindrift” and a drive to fully embrace and be embraced by a place held dear.

Groarke’s return to incantation marks the desire of presence, the realization and the inability to remain fully attuned to place. There is also something hauntingly sad about this impossibility.

Writing of ekphratic poetry, Jonathan Ellis notes,

[a] painting exists in the mind just as much as it exists on a canvas. It certainly exists in a poem just as much as it exists on the walls of a museum. Poems similarly float free of their verbal forms. In fact, perhaps most poems begin life as visual objects, words and phrases still waiting to be framed by lines and stanzas. The best ekphrastic poetry of this and earlier ages has not only always been conscious of these mixed messages. It has actively gone out of its way to disseminate them.86

Groarke’s “Spindrift” is not traditionally ekphrastic. Yet it has the effect of calling attention to how we frame vision, art, and poetry.

“Spindrift” pushes readers to consider how things cohere, but simultaneously suspends that coherence. The very brevity of the poems, the short lines, and white space of the page call for suspension while the sequence drives us on. It is a productive and provocative juxtaposition.

The final three poems of the sequence ask readers to hold the juxtapositions, the many images, sounds, and experiences that the poet has presented. They read in full:

43 Even the road knows what I know of the world.

The wall and shore, chimney and sky, lean into the good of it.

44 My answer blooms

86 Jonathan Ellis, “Ekphrastiv Poetry: In and Out of the Museum,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2012), 625.

191 like shingle I am dusting now between my fingertips.

45 It’s all a kind of love song, really, and I am only listening to it, trying to follow the words. (SD 72-73)

Knowledge of place is liberated from the confines of human possession. Here, the road, wall, shore, chimney, and sky are named as collaborators, equals in acknowledging the world as good.

The sequence takes up the first poem whose question was posed but whose answer was suspended. It seems that in poem 44, Groarke circles back, a move that involves both time and space. Her answer to “what is to be done” is growing; like place, it is in a state of process. The clarification that her answer “blooms / like shingle” that she polishes between her fingers also returns us to the image of the first stone and to the image of shingle from her first collection,

Shale, with its suggestion of dissolution. The result of presence in place is, for Groarke, articulated in the closing poem. With her, we learn the “love song” and we continue to attend with grace and deference as we “follow / the words.” The poem maintains the distance found in many odes, and the final three poems act as the end of the sequence which traditionally seeks to arrive at “or point toward, or try to instantiate, or ask a favor from that object or power.”87 In this way, the poem works through the idea of a “good.” Inevitably, too, the poem is also about being in right relation to the composition of poetry, or focusing on “the words” to create something good.

As David Wheatley points out, the short and the harsh, clear images created in the

87 Hass, A Little Book on Form, 291.

192 fleeting sections mirror the nature of spindrift itself, demonstrating a “rare unadorned self- sufficiency and grace.”88 Indeed, the poem’s form betrays Groarke’s continued awareness of perspective; each section turns the speaker’s gaze ever so slightly so that the relationality of the poem and place is highlighted. Each stands, momentarily, as center of the mesh, but connected as it is to the preceding or following section never stands completely alone. The sequence’s form parallels the constructed cuts Karen Barad explains from her scientific perspective: “‘This’ and

‘that,’ ‘here’ and ‘now,’ don’t preexist what happens but come alive with each meeting. … If we hold on to the belief that the world is made of individual entities, it is hard to see how even our best, most well-intentioned calculation for right action can avoid tearing holes in the delicate tissue structure of entanglements that the lifeblood of the world runs through.”89 Only in

Groarke’s work, the cuts, the very brief spindrift-like sections, reveal the partial and very human lens through which we negotiate the world. The gaze situates the speaker in the landscape so that the figure in the poem is not static nor silent as Boland argues many women have been in painting and poetry.

In offering the series of fleeting glimpses, Groarke shows the impossibility of capturing a place and the danger of too readily simplifying it. As Wheatley says, there is “a quality of closeness-to-the-bone, of an insistence on this, on a this here and only this which manages at the same time to be so much more.”90 Attending to “this here” is part of a lyrical topography, as it asks for an attentive, ethical response to what the speaker finds. To respond to place now asks much of us; it is to accept responsibility for the entanglement of place, to advocate for an ethics of hospitality, and to adopt a position of outwardlookingness. If we understand the construction

88 David Wheatley, “Vona Groarke.” 89 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 396. 90 David Wheatley, “Vona Groarke.”

193 of places as relational, we must also come to terms with the responsibility incurred through those relations. The formal configuration of “Spindrift” demonstrates Massey’s claim that “space can never be definitively purified. If space is the sphere of multiplicity, the product of social relations, and those relations are real material practices, and always ongoing, then space can never be closed, there will always be loose ends, always relations with the beyond, always potential elements of chance.”91 That “Spindrift” itself is a kind of accumulation, that the elements of Groarke’s focus maintain their own capabilities, and that there is a sense of wonder point to the event of place and its chances. As the poem is dedicated to Groarke’s two children, the social and familial relations are also ever present. The material environment and social relations push the poem towards its conclusion. Groarke’s “Spindrift” is an ever changing here- and-now.

Where Things Settle, X

Groarke’s most recent poetry collection, X, continues the concerns evident since Shale but emphasized in Spindrift. X takes its name from a poem about the breakup of Groarke’s marriage and “is much preoccupied with the shape of the letter and with how [she] once found in its four equal lines an equivalent of the four parts that made up [her] family.”92 But the collection’s considerations are more than crossing an anticipated trajectory off the list. The word may represent the “24th letter of the English alphabet; signifies an unknown person or thing; multiplication sign; a signature substitute; used to represent a choice or a vote; used to indicate a mistake; a mark for treasure on a map; a sex chromosome; a kiss.”93 These various associates

91 Massey, For Space, 95. 92 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 72. 93 Groarke, X, back-cover.

194 provide illuminating, contradictory, and pointed possibilities for departure. X is also intimately concerned with spatiality and relations. It begins with an epigraph taken from Florian Cajori’s A

History of Mathematical Notations: “Rene Descartes’ La Geometrie (1637) introduces the use of the first letters of the alphabet to signify known quantities and the use of the last letters to signify unknown quantities.”94 The epigraph sets two frames of known and unknown, which the collection develops. In taking the selection from Cajori’s book, Groarke also calls attention to mathematical notation and the creation of symbols which are used to map and explain the world.

The collection thus joins these others to examine the possibilities in orienting symbols. In evoking Descartes, the readers may also be reminded of the famous maxim, “I think therefore I am,” which frames the collection as a possible entry into the lyric—both a result and creator of worlds.

The collection pursues what can be known and how we must live with, even while trying to signify, the unknown. The title poem seeks a definition of the letter x and foregrounds the concerns of a poet to place herself by coming to terms with “a shape / signifying nothing / but a puzzle of itself” through a figure where “here and now” may be “equal lines” (X 14).95

Interestingly, the poem is one of Groarke’s least consistent in terms of stanzas and line lengths. It appears that the very attempt to think through the figure x and the speaker’s life necessitates a break in form. The precision of the letter gives way to the questions and disjunctions of the speaker. The poem forefronts the letter’s spatiality that conveys, sometimes, a “safe place” but

94 Emphasis in original. 95 It is hard not to hear an echo of Macbeth in “signifying nothing”: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day” is picked up in Groarke’s “the length and breadth of days / that bleed into other days”; see William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004), 5.5.17-28; Groarke, X ,15.

195 that is “now cornered, quartered, hinged” (X 14, 15). Groarke writes of how the letter once symbolized the safety of her family and marriage; it was a “safe place, framed off and protected from the usual bothers of life. … Perhaps there is no such thing as a safe-place.”96 The collection investigates the tension between places identified as safe that are then trapped or exposed.

The letter x carries the contradictions that Groarke appreciates in words as it can mean one thing and its opposite. So its equal lines, the way each point reaches out to space, the severity of its intersection, and its possible reconfiguration into a box hold a special sway. The poem is also a resolution and a recognition as the speaker says, “I may begin to fold myself / along four even lines / into the centre of those days” (X 15). Such spatializing resolves itself “as the blades of a bedroom ceiling fan come to / / a perfectly obvious stop” (X 15). The ceiling fan’s blades denote the stopped marriage, the poem’s end, and also mark their spot in space. The collection is imbued with loss and coming to terms with that loss. As the speaker says in “When

All This Is Done, Sure,” if she is to compare the addressee to anything “it will probably have to be / / the small boy on the A-train / with a xylophone on his lap” (X 33). The sound of his playing ends with the closing doors so that “nothing is left of him / / but precise, metallic silence

/ where his four right notes have been” (X 11). The memory of the sound lingers as does the sense of completion in the number four, but the speaker continues to push toward recognizing the world and her place within in, so the need for orienting in place and poetry remain the cornerstone of the collection. As Lucy Collins writes, “[t]he intersection of time and place is important here [in “X”], as it will be in the volume as a whole. They are seen as ‘equal lines,’ briefly conjoined yet divergent in meaning.”97 In “Fate” as with “X,” she reads “a containment

96 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 72. 97 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 211.

196 that paradoxically expresses the potential for personal liberation.”98

X moves from questions and dislocations to acts of placing and tones of resolution. The collection’s first poem “A Pocket Mirror” claims the arrival of the first snowdrop as the realization of “The promise” the speaker “buried / last September” (X 11). The speaker then recounts what she awoke to: “the hoops the woodpigeon puts himself through” or the “bells, bells on a loop, going over / and over the selfsame crucial news as yesterday” (X 11). The changing seasons, looping call, and daily bells lend this first stanza a repetition that is a progressing suspension. The stanza break marks a shift and calls to mind the initial question in the “Spindrift” sequence. The second and final stanza is a series of questions:

What is it I keep this tentative record of? For what reason do I step along high words with immeasurable care or list the fanciful logic of one moment, then another? Is it to do with allegiance, perhaps, with how a snowdrop keeps faith with the world, or a pocket mirror, matt on one side, is true to life on the other? (X 11)

The visual continues with the suggestions of reflection, mirroring, and alterations of light that occur as a result, although the aural is a guiding presence in this opening poem. The questions it poses begin the volume and, with the epigraph, form the frame through which we read the following poems. One of these frames is geometry, concerned as it is with shape, form, and the arrangement and relationships of parts. Geography intersects with geometry in its concern for the features of the earth and human interactions with those features. Central, too, is the poet making her way through the geometry and geography of her days while creating a geometry and geography lyrically. The collection begins by questioning the value of poetry and tentatively proposing the importance of its allegiance to the world through the act of creating a world. As

98 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 211.

197 Groarke says,

the writing of the poem is an act of paying careful attention to the world in whatever manifestation it occurs, in whatever moment it occurs. It is being alive to the world and to how language applies to that world. So that idea of allegiance—I don’t really hold with the idea of poetry as an hermetic act or as something that turns its back on the world and creates a precious space for itself. It is of the world because language is of the world.99

This allegiance comes from honoring the language, “keeping faith to that process,” and resisting the “debasement of language.”100 So language, landscape, place, and space shape one another, transforming the way each can be seen and work, and hopefully surprise, undercut, and demonstrate an allegiance to being-in-the-world.

The centrality of domestic space is apparent in X. “3” recalls the Bachelardian “House

Rules” from Other People’s Houses. “House Rules” charts the parts of a house, the foundation, walls, windows, doors, floors, and roof, reflecting upon their contribution to the house, but also their inevitable relation to the world, so that walls “cleave what’s outside in, and inside out” as

“doors are points of entry and deliverance” and the roof “for all its confinement and poise” is

“preoccupied with skies” (OPH 12). Groarke provides the definition for cleave in Four Sides

Full; it “means to split or rend apart, and also to cling or hold fast. I like a word that holds its own between opposite meanings, that can look in two directions at once and settle right at the nexus of two competing and crossed lines.”101 This affinity to look two ways at once and settle in the nexus is also the power of lyric poems to negotiate between and hold contradictory positions.

In “House Rules,” Groarke follows Bachelard’s charting of places in the house that are simultaneously porous and enclosed, that remind us that “Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves. Now everything

99 Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017. 100 Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017. 101 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 72.

198 becomes clear, the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them.”102

A similar record of abiding occurs in “3” where the speaker is “learning / to pay attention to this narrow, straight-line house / that must have had all its corners by heart before” she came to live in it (X 18). The time during which the poem unfolds is late, and there is a sense of letting be, of acknowledging the elements of the house, the balustrade and banister. The speaker recognizes, as did previous collections, the remnants that constitute place so that, she says, “I could count the balustrade shadows as standing in / for decades, or for owners, in my stead, and know / it is not for me to believe they left nothing behind” (X 18). The elements of the house are their own, but are also imbued with the lives of all previous inhabitants. As Groarke says elsewhere, “Perhaps nobody dies in houses, not really, not completely. Perhaps wood and glass and fabric and all retain an impression of every life lived in its rooms, however scant, just as every picture frame may wear a trace of all images housed by it.”103 This also means that “bits of us also, bits of our history” might adhere to the places Groarke and her family have lived.104

The “lyric I” seems straight forward in the first two stanzas, but in the third increases its identification, using terms generally reserved for interior design to articulate the speaker’s psychological state: “I am the clean slate. I am off-white walls / and open windows, a garden planted from scratch”; and further, “I am door knobs and reading lamps, blue glass / bowls on window sills” (X 18). She is “family photographs, / corners with silence in them, that sly peace”

(X 18). The fragments hint at and resist a history in the speaker’s attempt to be a “clean slate” and recreate a life after the dissolution of a marriage (X 18). The stanzas build from six lines to

102 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994), xxxvii. 103 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 76. 104 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 76.

199 two nine line stanzas to a final stanza of eighteen lines, which moves speaker and reader from the features of the house to its resonances. As the lines shorten slightly in the third and final stanzas, the pace also quickens. The speaker seems to conform to a lyrical positioning of turning away from the audience to reflect in isolation in her home at a late hour of night. Still, the audience is there; as we read, the poem aligns us with the ghosts who share the space and “who listen to everything” and “who play / noughts and crosses in the trellis shadow / and don’t care who loses, who wins” (X 19). The poem is a geometric, squaring itself off, and an interior geographic exploration of the house that recognizes places are constructed by all the intersects.105 Here, the imaginative construction and lyric composition are also part of creating the space that the speaker is learning to be in and accept, setting aside losses and wins. In shaping the poem, the space itself is further known and changed, and as the increasing stanzas may indicate, the formal aspects of the poem show a willingness to stay. Groarke’s lyrical and topographic engagement demonstrates her concern for place, which includes complicating her relationship to place through how she attends to the other: house, ghosts, and readers.

For all the difficulty of negotiating in X, there are others that read like poems in Spindrift.

“Midsummer,” for example is an extended sonnet, a fifteen line hexameter, so that the boxy poem has a sense of stretching to encompass. The repetition of days “yesterday,” “today,” and

“tonight” have the effect of trying to pin down what cannot quite be set still. The metaphors build upon one another until midsummer is construed by the elements of being in place. The day is

a garden with clothes on the line that smell of childhood and the kind of endings that fold themselves

105 Massey, For space, 95.

200 into tidy squares within arm’s reach of the sea. (X 36)

This geometric reference recalls the landscape of Ireland seen from a height and the pocket squares of fields that abut one another; it also recalls the active geometry of folding clothes taken down from the line. Such acts and smells conflate time as the smell of childhood happens in the present but simultaneously suggests the speaker’s own childhood visiting Spiddal coinciding with that of her children. In this way, the time of midsummer is spatialized. The extended sonnet continues to incorporate as “Today is a phrase / learned off by heart by asters and peonies. Also,

/ by fuchsia and mallow. And everything between” (X 36). Completing the stanza with

“between” furthers the geographic and typographic impulse of the poem as it highlights the stanza break, forcing readers to contend with the between. The poem ends with a future looking stanza, with sleeping “on a sheet that had joy / of a barefaced sun above the cherry tree” and with the inevitability of dreaming “of being here” (X 36). The experience of place is real and imagined, and the poem acts as medium linking the two and offering the paginal space for dreaming warmth, comfort, and midsummer.

This sense of the in-between picks up from Groarke’s earlier work and is extended in the trope of the garden in “The Garden Sequence.” Gardens make central human inhabitance and aesthetics, designed as they are to meet the needs and desires of those who frequent them. Like poetry, many of the most pleasing gardens have a semblance of ease and effortless order, although the labor it takes to make and maintain them may be significant. Gardens are also interesting settings for the way they mediate between indoor and outdoor, public and private and the way they serve as transitions from predominately human interior space to wilderness. Lucy

Collins points out that “The Garden Sequence” extends “the garden’s potential to invoke both continuity and change, and to draw attention to the complex interaction of mimetic and

201 metaphorical functions.”106 These poems, “capture moments of interaction between speaker and environment” and in revealing “forms or relationship that are not readily defined or understood,” make central a “commitment to vigilance that human connection demands.”107 Taking up the garden extends Groarke’s architectural, geometric, and geographic investigations as it aligns with the speakers’ interiority. It is also a means of further exploring the importance of relationships and how those relationships unfold spatially.

The opening poem, “The Garden as Music and Silence,” continues the practices of

“Midsummer,” noting betweenness but also recalling lyric’s long standing association with song.

It is framed by “a roofline tin whistle / practicing ‘The Parting Glass’” (X 41). Ascribing roofline to the tin whistle’s sound gives it an architectural feature to suggest both pitch and the way music carries between close houses. The sound “construes the gap / between lupin and rose / as possible held breath,” highlighting the fact and transgression of betweenness (X 41). The possibility of held breath offers also the possibility for music and for lyric. Introducing the well- known, traditional song “The Parting Glass,” means that the poem begins with endings in mind.

The architectural parallels continue, highlighting the constructed nature of the garden, as the speaker imagines “the blue of cornflowers / has knowledge / of gothic windows” (X 41). The poem reads associations onto the nonhuman flowers: “geraniums / might have something to say / about avowal” and “poppy seedheads / something about presentiment” (X 41). Thus geraniums and poppies take up the sentiments of “The Parting Glass.” “The Garden as Music and Silence” reinforces the trope’s associations with rest and restoration, and yet there remains something out of reach as the flowers “learn / to keep / to themselves” (X 41). While the visual is not

106 Lucy Collins, “Emergent Ground: Four Poems by Vona Groarke,” Irish University Review 43, no. 2 (2013): 266. 107 Collins, “Emergent Ground, 265, 266.

202 emphasized as much as in “Spindrift,” colors continue to pattern the poems, so that while they may have no knowledge of gothic windows, their colors illuminate like stained glass.

“The Garden Sequence” can be read in conversation with Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen

Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”108 Each sequence poses thirteen poems: thirteen ways of looking, seeing, and apprehending a single subject. Each is also concerned with landscape, light, and geometry. The blackbirds are constantly resituated in winter landscapes, on trees, flying through the air, and at the feet of women. Both sequences emphasize sight and the importance of careful attention. “The Blue Garden” melds McGuckian blues with Stephen’s blackbirds, combining a deference to the elements of the garden while noting the “means” through which the speaker can “slip … / into the ink of assembled flowers” and parallel the blackbird “in [her] sky- blue study / making bits of song out of his day” (X 49). “The Garden in Hindsight” and “The

Garden in Sentiment” look back at known gardens and so revisit the habits of previous poems to consider places once known intimately. In “The White Garden,” the speaker layers images of white with the repeated “Come the rain,” “Come the wind,” Come morning,” which implies a steadfastness, come what may (X 44-45). The poem seems to contemplate not only the garden but what poetry can accomplish and name. The elements of the garden perform, answer, and promise, acknowledging their independence and inter-dependence in creating place. Their knowledge is not dependent on the poet’s nor the poem’s and is continued in “The Garden as

Event” where the speaker admits

All of this happens, is happening without me, in much the same way as the cowslips make sense of their borrowed pot. (X 46-47)

108 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 99-101.

203 The space of the garden may be shaped by human design, and yet it has its own trajectories and influence.

The observation the poet makes of things going on without her picks up on Michael

Longley’s poem “The White Garden” in which he considers what it is to “Disappear in no time at all among lace and veils.”109 With attention and deference, Longley asks “For whom do I scribble the few words that come to me / From beyond the arch of white roses as from nowhere, /

My memorandum to posterity?”110 The answer is to “Listen. ‘The saw / Is under the garden bench and the gate is unlatched.’”111 This sentence is borrowed from a shard displayed in a

Greek museum, emphasizing the importance of the everyday even after the speaker no longer exists.112 That deference is present in all poems in “The Garden Sequence” but most apparent, perhaps, in “The Garden, From Above” which imagines the garden as a “sleeping body” (X 52).

The poem also suggests, as Lucy Collins notes, the responsibility in the act of watching and extends that responsibility to the objects of poetry and act of writing the poem.113 To observe and to practice lyric poetry is “something beyond love: / vigilance, maybe, or kindness” (X 52).

Considering what remains, what we can know and control, continues throughout the sequence.

In “The Garden as Garden,” the speaker asks that the garden be absolved of “each trace of my desiring, remember nothing of me” (X 54). The absolution is followed by the dormancy of the garden in “The Garden in Winter” and the sense of spring’s new growth in “The New

Garden.” The sequence concludes with “The Garden, Over Time” that allows for the garden’s

109 Longley, Collected Poems, 234. 110 Longley, Collected Poems, 234. 111 Longley, Collected Poems, 234. 112 Peter McDonald, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 185. 113 Collins, “Emergent Ground,” 266.

204 many angles and apprehensions and demonstrates a dynamic becoming. The poem reflects on the losses in the garden and the way that it has “come good / for the most part” (X 58). As Longley questions what remains after the poet dies, the speaker wonders “how much longer / until I am planted, … / in my parent’s soil” and then proposes some of what may come (X 58). She posits that the nonhuman “ask each other” whether it is “just a question // of clairvoyance,” reintroducing the presentiment of flowers in the first poem of the sequence, or “of drawing the line / between what’s known / and what’s to come” (X 58). The progress of time is configured spatially with the geometric line and then, too, sound is added: “of hearing, the way a blackbird does / the invisible worm, / what darkness makes of itself?” (X 59). These questions are impossible to answer, and the speaker defers, concluding the poem with only the “fact of winter / coming in early, / yes, this year” (X 59). Time and place coincide, but “[t]ime is not marked conventionally by the passage of the seasons here, but rather by the erratic involvement of the human in nature’s rhythms, suggesting that we are both part of and other to this non-human world.”114 The garden sequence shares with “Spindrift” a desire to question perspective. As

Collins argues, “Here her invocation of the imagery of the garden doesn’t assume unity of perspective but reflects more deeply on the passage of time and on the complex and contingent character of human perception.”115 This investigation of perspective aligns the sequence not only with different ways of looking, but with the need to think through the day to day both temporally and spatially. The poems in this collection focus on patterns to highlight what frames our lives and what exceeds that containment.

114 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 215. 115 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 213.

205 “Architecture” begins with an epigraph from Le Corbusier, “The wall is my everyday friend” (X 76). Le Corbusier, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, was an influential architect in the twentieth century, helping to design and promote modern architecture, including concrete, open plans, and roof terraces, although to critics, he is the progenitor of charmless blocks of elevated concrete. In addition to designing houses, Le Corbusier also published a number of books on architecture and the decorative arts. One of these, a mixture of drawings and handwritten text, is called Le Poeme de L’Angle Droit (The Poem of the Right Angle). It contains his personal maxims divided into sections titled: Milieu (Environment), Esprit (Spirit), Chair (Flesh), Fusion

(Fusion), Charactére (Character), Offre (Offering), and Outil (Tool).116 The images use bold lines and color; the translated text is self-referential and endlessly interpretable. Nonetheless, as a project it places an investigation of architecture and relations between human and environment in direct conversation with poetry. Groarke’s poem takes up this relationship between poetry and architecture, pressing what the two share and what one construction might reveal about the other.

The chosen epigraph seems to suggest something that can be relied upon, but also a commonness that might go unnoticed. The spatiality is undeniable as it draws attention to the buildings we inhabit and, by extension, the language we use in lyric form. To align the work with Le

Corbusier is to further press how painting, sketching, and architecture are evocative images for

Groarke. To invoke them in the poetry is to create a spectrum of color, associations, and places from Spiddal to Winston-Salem to Manchester that Groarke knows intimately.

After the epigraph, “Architecture” makes an allowance to “Say what you like” that immediately places speaker, audience, and addressee in a lyrical triangle (X 76). The first two stanzas demonstrate a concern for how elements of and within the house relate and how they

116 Le Corbusier, Le Poeme de L’Angle Droit (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2012).

206 “make an offer to a world” even if the world “thinks too much of itself / to accept everything” (X

76). The lyric becomes a site for the layering of what it means to come to terms with the world materially and metaphorically:

Words like stones with sunlight on them lead me to believe that if I put what I know into bricks and mortar and paint the plaster white

or position a square of dark blue glass underneath a square of red, I would say as much. (X 76)

Here is a direct return to a concern for architecture that Christina Hunt Mahoney calls “her most striking poetic denominator.”117 The speaker recognizes a need to say but also the way in which objects indicate language and so extends Le Corbusier’s statement to demonstrate the importance of structures. The speaker then goes on to describe the walls that she constructs, building them with the phrases that she crafts. The walls of the poem can only come together as “image predicts another image,” a process that ultimately leads to the disruption of a square room (X 76).

Two right angle walls give way to “a need, suddenly, for a curve” (X 76). And this sense of curve seems to share something with Groarke’s use of the same word for multiple titles; it is a way to cure or swerve readers’ expectations. The speaker then uses the connecting word “hence” to present a series of images that provide a curve to the poem, “that takes on board the whys and wherefores / but arrives at the same conclusion” (X 77). This poem exhibits the synthesis at the heart of poetry, allowing it to “mess with the original experience and make it interesting.”118 The architecture of house and poem, paralleled here, reflects a lyrical topological approach, or, as

Bachelard might say, “Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the

117 Hunt Mahoney, “The Mature Groarke,” 8. 118 Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017.

207 world, in spite of the world.”119 After all, the conclusion “that takes on board the whys and wherefores” is “as a morning come dressed in lined grey silk / to take us out of ourselves” (X 76,

77). Attending means noting and appreciating the structures, recognizing that the constraints are

“our everyday friends” that those constructs can convey: gravitas, meaning, and revelation. Such boundaries, however, are constantly being renegotiated, allowing for slippage and surprise. The unexpected curve is what provides the freedom to release us from ourselves, and so both form and its breaking are necessary to orienting Groarke’s poetry materially and poetically.

As a response, the following poem “How to Read a Building” picks up on some of the same images and metaphors of “Architecture.” It begins with the command: “Don’t. You might as well say a morning convenes / in a paneled reflection of itself” (X 78). The frank tone is one recognized from “Pier” in Spindrift. In “How to Read a Building,” the speaker explores the component parts of a building, what they contribute to the whole, and by implication, what it means to build poetry. The opening line, however, cautions drawing too close a parallel, recognizing the importance of structure as in “Architecture,” but also resisting the easy one to one correlation. The frank “Don’t” might also speak to the past collections, Other People’s

Houses in particular, seeking to comment on the previous subjects. The words radiate so when the speaker says “Write ‘arch’, / so the word has to position itself between noun / and adjective,” readers see the interplay between how the word is used, andhere is both playfulness and an undercutting in the speaker’s suggestion to “Put ‘Lintel” as a title: see what comes of it” (X 78).

The cleverness of the poem would ensure that a line break straddle the following: “I, too, may think of line endings with every quoin / or cant” (X 78). The poem enacts the spatial components of a building while simultaneously enacting the spatial components of poetry. The speaker also

119 Bachelard, The Poetics, 46-47.

208 reaches for metaphor and “rhymes between stone and stained glass” (X 78). She says, “So we deal in apertures, / we say, in the business of proportional reveal” (X 78). The shift from “I” and

“you” to “we” seems to suggest a poetic community, but also invites readers to participate in the act of building the poem and contemplating structural imperatives. The final four lines act as a concluding quatrain to record the two times “it falls into place”: the first time “when sand in mortar is listening to rain / and again, when slate roof tiles recall small words / in a ghost hand that rubbed them clean away” (X 78). The images remain architectural and animated, linking these later poems to her earlier elemental ghostings.

The poem enacts and resists its own framing. The title suggests that the poem will dictate exactly how to read a building. Yet, the poem subverts the title to explore the experience of writing and reading poetry. In Four Sides Full, Groarke writes about what she wishes she could do in a poem. After wishing she could “surround [a poem] in a depth of space,” she considers the material reality of the printed poem: “Inside is the poem. Outside is not. The poem’s white space is a framing device. But white space is not a fashioned thing: it is negative space. The un- poem.”120 Yet that negative space creates the necessary divide between the language of the practical day to day and the lyric. Groarke claims she would “like to write poems with mirror sequins stitched to them where the words should be. Or, failing that, I would like to write blanked-out poems, a book with not a single word in it, just blocks of black, redacted text surrounded by fascinating frames of while that do the poems’ heavy lifting for them, and tell all there is to tell.”121 Groarke believes in and wants to push language to a point where it can honor the experience of place and being-in-the world. Since X contains no mirror sequins, Groarke uses

120 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 18. 121 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 97.

209 metaphor, simile, and elemental ghostings to express a “quickening” of experience.122

The poems in the latter half of the volume concern themselves with proportional reveal and continue to explore a varied relationship to the world. The Hammershøi sequence recalls

Derek Mahon’s Dutch light in poems such as “Courtyards in Delft,” and others extend the

Spindrift concern for relationality, positioning speaker and object within a world that is a constant process and network. “The Potential Uses of Detail” is one such example where the speaker writes in open lyric address. The long lines push the breath and extent of the sentences, making readers lengthen to accommodate the stanzas. The four stanzas are bricks upon the page and emphasize time and place as “the varnish will be dry on another hour” (X 79). While X has been less certain than Spindrift and more melancholy, searching for a way to orient and come to terms with change and heartbreak, these later poems also manage to contextualize and balance a continued engagement with the world.

From “Architecture” to “How to Read a Building,” “On the Potential Uses of Detail” takes up intimate interior space beginning with the sensation of coming to: “Cubes of colour borrowed from a bottle of underwater blue” (X 79). The first two stanzas catalogue some of the details of the bedroom so that “My eyes, my tongue, are listening for a scheme / to reveal itself, a detail to prove the truth of it, a key / placed underneath the hearth by a hand in darkness too” (X

79). The speaker’s gaze shifts to the window through which “a way will be found / to paint ardour and rote as thin light on playing fields” (X 79). While the context of this collection has changed, the speaker’s position continues to indicate a commitment to life and a dedication to honoring the networks of relationships that create dynamic places. It is a continuous negotiation of connections in the physical world and the world of the poem. From the window frame, the

122 Vona Groarke in conversation with the author, May 2017.

210 speaker decides to reside in her house, in her poems:

… This might as well be where things settle, this where I am, this willing my heart to keep time with the dark inside the drawer of the realistic writing desk; with under the antique lid of the ring-box; with every imaginable facet of the withheld story there. (X 79)

Groarke has said that were she to collect anything, it would be boxes: “Boxes are, and they also do. Functional self-containment, now that is a thing to covet.”123 She notes that she likes the sonnet form for its boxiness, and we can see that in her own stanzaic form, their often box-like shape. Further, Groarke notes that “Boxes are so much surface and so much emptiness. They are all potential and, also, presence. How could you value art and not be open to what it is a well- made box will do with space?”124 References to boxes are littered throughout the collections, and

“The Potential Uses of Detail” is one such example. The ring box supplies an evocative site of recollection, accumulation, and presence: a marriage lost, certain futures closed.

The details of the poem echo details of the domestic space and reveal a lyrical topography that engages with and constructs a place that is material, interior, and textual.

Groarke’s dedication to poetry, to charting the geometry and geography of a life lived through language, also revealed by featuring the writing desk, with its possibilities and futures. As she says,

I am a poet: I believe the surface of my life is pretty much wafer-thin. What matters (if it matters) is not the business of the this-and-that, but something that rises (by stealth or magic) from stillness and silence. … I ply lines of connection that have to be both plausible and surprising. … Buried lines, staggered lines, lines that stutter and disappear—they are a poet’s stock-in-trade, the network that supports a poem, that holds the thing intact.125

123 Schwall, “How do you,” 301. 124 Schwall, “How do you,” 302. 125 Groarke, Four Sides Full, 94.

211 Understanding Groarke’s lyrical practices, her affinity for boxes, and the way in which place is co-constituted in her poetry, returns us to her claim that “a physical environment makes its way effortlessly into the space of a poem. … In effect the poem is made up of many little rooms that open on to each other in various way. So yes, physical space is crucial. … yes, place informs language and identity. In a way, place is poetry.”126 Groarke’s poems are boxes that open on to each other. Her stanzas give way and open out so that Groarke’s lyrics are always an acknowledgment of the self and an acknowledgment of others: places, peoples, and readers.

Attending to Groarke’s lyrical topography, we see that it is in this very productive space that

Groarke finds a place to “settle” and to acknowledge “this where I am.”

126 Schwall, “How do you,” 288.

212

CHAPTER 5

THE CONTEMPORARY TOPOGRAPHICAL POETRY OF

KERRY HARDIE, SARA BERKELEY TOLCHIN, AND MICHELLE O’SULLIVAN

Pastoral poetry has been traditionally understood as poetry depicting idealized landscapes populated by shepherds who epitomize rural life. In it, citizens of cities can retreat from the urban world for renewal and harmony in the countryside. Sometimes, the pastoral has been more loosely defined as poetry that depicts the rural or countryside even if it “does not always envision an idealized and falsified, conflict-free zone, transcending the tensions of history, though it can do that too.”1 The antipastoral undermines the expectations and idealizations of the pastoral, centering instead the difficulty of life in the countryside by employing the pastoral’s poetic conventions and showing their limitations. In Irish literature, the pastoral and antipastoral have been used to build as well as critique ideas of the nation. More recent critical conversation of poetry and place have used the changes in globalization, human geography, lyric theory, and postmodernism to challenge the distinctions of pastoral poetry.

There is a parallel, though less noted, tradition of topographical poetry, which has been generally understood as poetry taking up descriptions of particular places. Reading contemporary poetry through this tradition has the potential to allow for nuances and complications of poetry of

1 Jonathan Allison gives a succinct comparison of the pastoral and antipastoral, then examines how the antipastoral has been used by Patrick Kavanagh in “Patrick Kavanagh and antipastoral,” in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Matthew Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42.

213 place that the conventions of pastoral or antipastoral poetry curtail. Instead of focusing on idealization or the undercutting of that ideal, topographical poetry centers the experience of being in a place and seeing.2 It has been used to explore unpopulated landscapes, scenic tourist sites, houses, gardens, and towns. The range that the topographical poem can accommodate has meant that aesthetics, order, exclusion, and power as well as human negotiation of rural and urban places has been part of its poetics. This range means that topographical poetry can consider the material and sensory reality of places together with the increasingly global networks that places, and we, are located within. The poetry by Kerry Hardie, Sara Berkeley Tolchin, and

Michelle O’Sullivan exhibits a revisiting, resisting, and expansion of the topographical poem that seeks to situate the figure in a landscape through a composite set of perspectives.

Kerry Hardie, Sara Berkeley Tolchin, and Michelle O’Sullivan are inheritors of the topographical poem. This poetry has also been classified as loco-descriptive poetry, poetry of place, or scenic poetry, and the Irish tradition of dinnseanchas is a particular version of the mode. Dinnseanchas are “place-name lore” and involve describing and explaining particular sites. Usually, dinnseanchas are etymologically focused and follow the oral tradition of explaining the history and significance of places, often unique geological features, houses or fortresses, and sites of battles. These oral tales have been recorded, most notably in Táin Bó

Cúailnge and Acallam no Senórach, as poems that “narrativize and historicize the Irish ground, to explain it via either mythology, dynastic politics, or social history.”3 In this way they are

2 The importance of seeing and situating is important for feminist theory as well; see Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Feminist Theory Reader, ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-kyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2010), 370-381. 3 Eric Falci, “Place, Space and Landscape,” in A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, ed. Nigel Alderman and C.D. Blanton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 205.

214 associated with memorializing lost land, lost traditions, and a lost language. What is interesting in these dinnseanchas are the layers of descriptions and meanings of the places. In Acallam no

Senórach, for example, Caílte a great warrior and hunter and once member of the fían, a peripatetic warring and raiding-group, has outlived most of his fían companions. The structure of

Acallam no Senórach consists of Caílte relaying tales to St. Patrick and others. His dinnseanchas weave together topographical descriptions with numerous stories to explain the significance of the places he and St. Patrick see. These stories often involve the shifting of a place’s name and situate each place within multiple networks of meaning and associations.4 Originally composed in Irish, in the twentieth-century the dinnseanchas tradition has been taken up in English to explore the dispossession that Ireland experienced politically and linguistically. Seamus

Heaney’s poems, “Anahorish” and “Toome,” are examples of how “seeing … place becomes a way to see into its history.”5 Text and landscape overlap and inform one another such that dinnseanchas are a means of place-making, place-knowing and poetry-making, poetry-knowing.

There is also a tradition of poetry of place in the English language. Topographical poetry is often charted to John Denham’s “Cooper Hill” from 1642. Stephen Burt in his overview of the genre, or mode as he calls it, demonstrates its reach from Denham to the greater Romantic lyrics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth to the modernist collages of William

Carlos Williams all the way through Elizabeth Bishop’s collections and Heaney’s “Glanmore

Sonnets.”6 In the early twentieth century, R. A. Aubin defined topographical poetry as that which

4 Tales of the Elders of Ireland: A new translation of Acallam no Senórach, trans. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5 Falci, “Place, Space and Landscape,” 206. 6 Stephen Burt, “Scenic, or Topographical, Poetry,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2012), 601, 600.

215 “aims chiefly at describing specifically named actual localities.”7 Samuel Johnson’s definition is more inclusive; it is “a species of composition … of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental mediation.”8 According to these definitions, the topographical poem is one that addresses a place and in which the speaker takes up a particular perspective on that place to reflect and draw conclusions. Writing of the genesis of the genre, John Wilson Foster identifies five determining characteristics: “use of extensive description; use of space as a patterning device; use of time-projections; use of extended metaphor; development of a controlling moral vision.”9 The mode has been rightly criticized for its often didactic approach and its insistence on unity of vision that upholds the political and economic stability of the upper and middle classes. The scenic mode has also been criticized as mimetic and whose “authentic feeling” lacks “analytic intellect.”10 Nevertheless, topographical poetry remains, and as criticism has shifted from privileging temporality to recognizing and investigating spatial practices in the late twentieth-century, a reimagination of topographical poetry becomes possible.

More contemporary topographical poetry may be seen to take up real places while also complicating the vision and positioning of poet, place, and poem. Burt identifies a set of contemporary “formal signals” for topographical poetry including “the name of the places, often in the title, sometimes with a preposition—“At,” “Above,”; deictics (“here,” “there,” “now”);

7 R. A. Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1936), vii, emphasis in original. 8 Samuel Johnson quoted in John Wilson Foster, “A Redefinition of Topographical Poetry,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 69, no. 3 (1970): 394-395, JSTOR. 9 Foster, “A Redefinition of Topographical Poetry,” 403. 10 Charles Altieri quoted in Burt, “Scenic, or Topographical, Poetry,” 598.

216 present tense (we stand, walk, ride along with the poet, right now); and a structure involving movement or perspective, following the eye or the body as it moves across or through the site.”11

The topographical poem enacts relationality, as deixis is a “mechanism of relating” and place is defined by its “linkage to that ‘outside.’”12 It is illuminating to study poetry of place, especially when we consider the pluralization and multiplicity of those places. If we seek to understand places as relational, then we may also appreciate how topographical poetry, in calling attention to a particular place and features of landscape, does so through comparisons spoken and not.

Taking into account the advances of postmodern geography and human geography, we can recognize along with Eric Falci that “[a]s globalization continues to refigure the meaning of location and the texture of place, the space of poetry will absorb and refract such reconfigurations. Place will not dissolve into the virtualities of space, but location—as a constellation of forces, pressures, openings, borders, and passages—will become both more and less defined by its surface topographies.”13 To understand contemporary topographic poetry, place poetry, or poetry that considers elements of landscape is to confront the exchange between local and global, personal and communal, human and nonhuman.

The signals Burt identifies and the tensions of negotiating places occur in the poetry of

Kerry Hardie, Sara Berkeley Tolchin, and Michelle O’Sullivan, and in the following pages, I argue for an understanding of their work through this lyrical topographic lens. What their poems point to is “‘simultaneous perception,’ the ‘evenhanded, instantaneous and outward-looking flow

11 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographical, Poetry,” 602. 12 Gisa Rauh quoted in Alice Entwistle, “Writing [W]here: Gender and Cultural Positioning in Ireland and Wales,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 462; Doreen Massey, as pointed out by Jahan Ramazani in “The Local Poem in a Global Age,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017): 676, MLA International Bibliography. 13 Falci, “Place, Space, and Landscape,” 219.

217 of attention’ to ground and air, sight, sound and scent, by which ‘we are connected to the people and things around us—as part of a family, a crowd, a community, a species, the biosphere.”14

Their poetry conveys such an engaged experience of place. The works are situated within networks and reflect upon their meanings and relations, complicating just what a poem can do or say about place. In so doing, these topographic poems highlight the importance of vision and orientation, as the “authors offer a more open-ended understanding of place—or perhaps emplacement—through the more responsive, more relativistic, always potentially dynamic, terms of ‘positioning,’ in the historical, political, and aesthetic (as well as geographical) connections they mine.”15 The poems in this chapter are concerned with seeing and situating their speakers in place while pressing the constructed nature of the poem through their specific investigations of geography, landscape, dimensions, and form.

“Being here, now”: Kerry Hardie

Kerry Hardie’s poetry is sometimes loyal to the topographic tradition by taking up named localities, describing them, and drawing a conclusion based off the poetic engagement with the place. Even more of her work takes up the natural world as it also investigates “the intimacies of human community, … the almost unnoticed edges of the natural world, and … the ever-more insistent claims of the spirit.”16 Approaching Kerry Hardie’s poetry topographically demonstrates her acute positioning. In the poems that follow, places are not always named, but there is an intense attention to landscape and the speaker’s surroundings such that her work demonstrates a

14 Burt citing Tony Hiss, “Scenic, or Topographical, Poetry,” 602. 15 Entwistle, “Writing [W]here,” 477. 16 “The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry: Kerry Hardie,” New Hibernia Review 9, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 159, Project MUSE.

218 point of view that is both geological and psychological, meaning that they investigate both external and internal landscapes. Hardie was born in Malaysia in 1952, but grew up in Northern

Ireland, before spending time in England. She now makes her home in Kilkenny and has been publishing since 1986. Her work addresses the natural world, grief, exhaustion, and the complications of human community. Her poetry reveals itself by degrees of formal sophistication and honest depth. Hardie has published both poetry and prose, but her work has received little critical attention. Here, I focus on her two most recent publications from The Gallery Press, her

Selected Poems and The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree.17

Some of Hardie’s poetry emphasizes elements of landscape by addressing various aspects of cartography, aligning some of her interests with those discussed in the previous three chapters.

The first poem in Selected Poems, “We Change the Map,” comes from her 1996 collection A

Furious Place whose inclusion as the first poem serves not only as an introduction to the first collection, but to Hardie’s work as a whole. “We Change the Map” begins with a description of encountering a “new map, unrolled, smoothed” so that it “seems innocent as the one we have discarded — / impersonal as the clocks in rows / pacing the upper border, showing time zones.”18

The attention to the time zones clocks shows how we think time and space together. To bring this immediate parallel into the poem, then, is to foreground the common poetic trope of time passing. Yet it also suggests the way we read maps as a slice in time with space frozen for our

17 Selected Poems gathers together work from across her previous five collections beginning with A Furious Place (1996) and including Cry for the Hot Belly (2000), The Sky Didn’t Fall (2003), The Silence Came Close (2006), through Only This Room (2009). Her most recent collection is The Zebra in the Night (Hexam: Bloodaxe, 2014) and is a combination of poetry and prose. Hardie has also published two novels A Winter Marriage (New York: Back Bay Books, 2000) and The Bird Woman (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2006). 18 Kerry Hardie, Selected Poems (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2011): 13. Afterward cited in text as SP.

219 complete comprehension. The smooth, unrolled map is without crease or blemish, and its “colors are pale and clear, the contours / crisp, decisive, keeping order,” as Hardies’ careful pacing keeps order within the poem (SP 13). Her use of the iambic line and her inclination for listing, coupled with the slant rhyme lends her poems a sense of resolve. This resolve echoes the assurance of grasping the map’s content as well as maps’ relationships to power.

In Ireland, the shift from a tradition of dinnseanchas delineating landscape to mapping occurred as a result of invaders and colonizers. Maps were thus used to gain, maintain, and legitimize power, although maps could not convey every aspect of the landscape, its history and use. On the map in the poem, names “lie quite still / within the boundaries that the wars spill over” (SP 13). The end words of the second stanza emphasize shape and stability—“contours,”

“order,” “still”—until the final line concludes with “over” so that the inclusiveness and clean, stable meaning of the map is itself pushed over. The violence of wars made, the violence implied in the act of making maps and inscribing meaning pushes the meaning of maps over their smooth surfaces. After all, if we understand space and place relationally, then any specific location will overlap with or be included in different territories, regions, ecosystems, cultural, and historic practices.19 To “spill over” reveals that while it may be easy to chart a course on a map, the charting only captures so much. What is left unsaid is the lived experience of that crossing.

Visually, the poem consists of four quatrains, but the stanzas are divided by a single line, bifurcating the first two and the final two stanzas. The result is that a shift occurs midway through the poem, marked on the page as it is marked in the tone and content of the poem. The short line, “It is the times,” forces a caesura and asks for readers to continue to hold on to the

19 “It is not the case that one mode of space gives way to another. Rather, each spatial frame awkwardly overlaps the other, so that place is continually interrupted by incommensurable spaces”; see Falci, “Place, Space, and Landscape,” 215.

220 beginning images of time zone clocks and reckon with the colloquial phrase “the times” (SP 13).

The phrase is often a way of acknowledging while simultaneously dismissing those elements of our times that we struggle to comprehend or change. The wars, the concept of nation states, counties, towns, and their clear demarcation, as well as the personal traumas and trials that result are difficult to contend with. There is a need, then, to change the map as the title suggests. The final two stanzas shift the focus from the organization and sterilization of space to a lived experience of place. The speaker makes her case, “I have been always one for paths myself” (SP

13). The syntax of this line is significant in the way it emphasizes the word “always.” It is a confession and a claim in which the speaker centers her own existence, “I have been always,” and then reframes the experience of maps by moving from a view of above to one within the landscape, a view of paths: “The mole’s view. Paths and small roads and the next bend. / Arched trees tunneling to a coin of light / No overview, no sense of what lies where” (SP 13). The images are also ones of landscape and reminiscent of landscape painting, describing what it is to see from place.

Images conjure specific associations and advocate for an embedded experience rather than a disembodied overview. The perspective might be bucolic, but the speaker still express her desire to “trace and memorize / the shape of every townland in this valley” (SP 13). She wants to

“[n]ame families, count trees, walls, cattle, gable ends, / smoke-soft and tender in the near blue distance” (SP 13). The impulse to name is to ascribe an order to things in a manner much used in cartography. The speaker, however, seems to distinguish between her own work and experience of place from that of the “new names” the maps provide. Her tone reveals an intimacy and a drive to describe places that continues a contemporary dinnseanchas tradition. Dinnseanchas are network tales, linking events, stories, and geological features, so this sense of networking

221 extends to “We Change the Maps.” The counting of trees and walls is reminiscent of childhood games to entertain, but it is a personal marking, an accumulation of details for one person to reflect upon to build a world. This affinity for listing references the tradition of dinnseanchas which often include series of names, elements, and stories. The poem also speaks to Eric Falci’s contention that “place poetry [is] constantly reenergized by renovating its own perceptual apparatus.”20 Listing, as in previously discussed poems, thus becomes a way to know the world.

The mise-en-page of the poem seems to suggest that there will be and must be both perceptual apparatuses: a knowledge of maps and a knowledge of paths; and the shift from the pale palette of the first stanza to the blues and light of the final indicates an increase in intimacy and vividness. While the poem resists an overt moralizing message often expressed in early topographic poetry, it still hints at an ethical imperative: to treat places with respect. The title,

“We Change the Maps,” suggests that there is productive resistance to the sterility of maps and is an inclusive appeal to the idea that we have the ability to change places and their associations by our attentive participation within place.

“Interlude” is dedicated to the poet’s father and begins with a recollection: “My father told me how he dug up war graves, / picking out thigh bones” to identify bodies because skulls were unreliable as they “got mislaid and dumped” (SP 29). The informal and unceremonious

“dumped” calls into question how much we value life and the honoring of lives lost. The violence implied in the first line of this first stanza is sanitized by the time that has passed and nature’s ability to clean bones. The initial landscape is one of recent war, destruction, and human suffering that gestures to the poetry of World War I. The hard labor of digging up graves is also elided so that the poet may shift the focus to a different landscape. The second stanza centers the

20 Falci is speaking of Roy Fisher, “Place, Space, and Landscape,” 211.

222 speaker who says, “I live in a house in a space in the fields” (SP 29). The abrupt turn and intrusion of the “lyric I” further orients the speaker, describing what she can see and witness. The house is both a home place and “a space in the fields” serving as a site of gathering: “swallows winging round the bedroom; / earwigs and woodlice garrison dropped clothes, / mice quarry soap, harvest-spiders occupy all ceilings” (SP 29). The creatures who share the space are industrious and go about their business of living, adapting themselves to the environment and objects to hand. All of this activity points to how much of a network place, even home, is.

It might be the campaigns of the creatures that see “[t]he house is quietly invaded” (SP

29). It might also be the coming spring that quietly invades, as the speaker details her spring practices:

I watch the fragile blossom of the cherry trees, the distances smudge-blue, the mountains floating; sniff the green rain, mourn every passing, greet each shoot until they are so crowded and so many I cease recording and admit the summer. (SP 29)

These lines note the changing landscape and emphasize the visual qualities of both landscape painting and topographic poetry. There is also appreciation for the repetition of the seasons. That

“recording” gestures back in the stanza to “mourn,” however, also highlights Hardie’s skill at revealing how places are imbued with loss and memory. The title of the poem suggests a span of time, or music perhaps, performed between the pieces. The prefix from the title is picked up in the first line of the third stanza with “invaded,” then again in the final stanza that pulls together the juxtapositions: “Lives. Theirs, ours. Human times are mostly hard. / They will be so again.

Some veil, insubstantial / as wound-gauze, separates this from that” (SP 29).21 “Interlude,”

21 These lines echo the limitations of our knowledge as does the Bible’s “through a glass, dimly”; see 1 Corinthians 13.12 (New Revised Standard Version).

223 “invaded,” “insubstantial” all point to relationships and an attempt to situate between things by carefully marking the borders of music, time, space, and bodies. The decomposition of bodies in the first stanza is picked up again in the final, calling to mind the gauze needed to treat the wounded who fought and who the poet’s father later unearthed. It is suggestive too of the vulnerability of life, whose end is inevitable, but that in the meantime assaults the world. The vagueness of the speaker’s distinction between “this from that” avoids articulating, while calling to mind life and death, known and unknown. The deictics are also part of a topographic practice that seeks to locate as it opens up spatial relations, and so the poem becomes an investigation of the human condition through the juxtaposition of landscape and history.

Being in and moving through space is one of the features of Hardie’s poetry.22 In

“Signals,” the speaker is traveling through the Irish midlands by car observing, “a morning of swift grey skies, / crows walking the wet roads” (SP 48). The s and w sounds repeat throughout the poem, picking up on the sounds introduced in the title and the sound of car wheels on wet pavement. The sound is suggestive too of the sudden rush of birds taking flight, as the speaker sees “a field got up and took to the air: / white-bellied birds, their dark, splayed wings / flopping up into the sky” (SP 48). The syntax of these lines betrays the uncanniness of the event. The flock does not move but the field does. Ground is transfigured into discrete birds. When lapwings fly, they can have a flickering appearance due to the black and white color contrast of their breast and wings as they dart. This flickering and flopping recalls the previous night and the speaker’s memory of cold and a feeling of dark subsuming. The vision that is “Now, here”

22 Burt maintains that it is a feature of topographic poetry; see Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 602. Jahan Ramazani admits that traveling poems might be read in opposition to local poems, but then complicates the divide by demonstrating the process by which both space and place are made, experienced, and negotiated poetically; see Ramazani, “The Local Poem,” 693.

224 reorients the speaker as it locates geographically and in time. The lapwings fly “out of the north, filling the skies with their old, fierce weather” (SP 48). The title carries within it the meaning of the present tense verb to communicate, and it also suggests the symbols and remnants that gesture or convey information.23 In a way, too, the title points to one of the word’s oldest uses in the English language as a badge or emblem so that the lapwings become an emblem for the speaker’s revelations as they are emblems of winter. What she understands is a question that becomes a means of living: “And what can we do / but what must be done, / no matter what is lost or left behind us?” (SP 48). Posed as a question, there is uncertainty in interpreting the symbol of the lapwing flock, and yet the concluding stanza with its assurance of “more flocks on the Skyline / when we reached the bleak, wide flatlands of Kildare” suggests that the repetition and reliance of the image may be what is needed to ground the speaker (SP 48). Seeing and noting are important actions in this poem, and the speaker’s willingness or resolution to look at what exists lends the poem its frankness and futurity.

This impulse to look toward or for things that serve as signals and signs by which we might orient ourselves continues throughout Hardie’s poetry. Her attention to things resonates with the attentiveness of Cannon’s poetry. “Earthen” uses description to build a vista:

Sometimes when the sky clears to a thin astonishing blue the heart turns, looks over its shoulder at shadows of the tall perennials cross-hatching an old brick path. Wind rises. Dry seed-heads rattle and bow like old thoughts. The rivets on a wooden bench are rusting. Weeds thrive in cracked and broken bricks

23 The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “signal,” Oxford University Press, last modified 2016, http://oed.com.

225 set far below the clean high sky. Yet there is beauty in such fecklessness, such disrepair. It is our body’s native language. (SP 86)

There is a sense of expanse in the poem with its inclusion of “clean high” and blue sky, yet

Hardie turns the expectations of the landscape genre to describe from a height and distance.

Instead, she focuses on “seed-heads,” “rivets on a wooden bench,” and weeds that “thrive / in cracked and broken bricks.” Turning to such details of place narrows the speaker and readers’ field of vision so that we must confront the particularities of what it means to be in place. The juxtaposition of colors and plants recalls Groarke’s “Spindrift.” That Hardie refuses to name a location or provide a more scenic overview also highlights one of the components of contemporary topographic poetry which is an acknowledgment of the radical uniqueness and contemporaneity of the elements of place. The topography of emotion and memory that overlay a place change according to who is in the environment and what else shares that environment with the negotiating figure. This meeting of elements, human and nonhuman, is praised for its

“fecklessness.” Such ineffectiveness changes our goal oriented field of vision to one of being here, now.

The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree is Hardie’s 2012 collection and continues her attentive concern for the natural world. It also “alternate[s] between looking directly at, then glancing away from, the finite nature of our lives.”24 The collection begins with a poem called

“Being Here, Now”; the title reveals Hardie’s practice of understanding time and space as inextricably linked, while also offering deictics that invite. As Michel de Certeau says, “both a near and a far, a here and a there also has the function of introducing an other in relation to this

24 Elizabeth Oness, “Review of The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree,” New Hibernia Review 17, no. 1 (2013): 157, Project MUSE.

226 “I” and of thus establishing a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places.”25 Hardie’s depiction of places are always in some way also concerned with time. She writes repeatedly of the seasons, of the small things which change, of the expectations for sameness that are met with difference as each season brings with it a return and a forward venture. “Being Here, Now” serves as a prologue to the collection. Composed of three unrhymed couplets, the poem has a simple rhythm. Each line is end-stopped and the effect, much like the first stanza, reveals a kind of stock taking: “A suede-coloured bull, two cows and a calf in the pasture. / A blue seep under spring’s green sting.”26 The speaker looks out at the landscape to describe the particularities of the place she sees. The second stanza continue the observations of swallows and swifts, leading

Hardie to reflect in the final stanza, “This day — a round place of clean brightness, / a drop of rain laid on a pleated leaf” (AOW 9). To be here, now, requires orienting ourselves according to what we know, where we are, as well as who and what we share the space with. The poem serves as a prelude, a way to read the poems in the collection as their aim is to gather and distill.27

Following “Being Here, Now” is the book’s dedication to Hardie’s brother who died at 47 in

India. Hardie seeks to focus on the practice of being here, now, acknowledging that doing so means constantly orienting ourselves in full knowledge of our finiteness. To look at places through topographic poetry is to be constantly negotiating what can be seen and known as well as what cannot. Part of the networks of these poems participate in are networks framed by mortality and the edge of the horizon.

Hardie returns to consider maps in “Satnav for Melo, Dying,” combining the two tropes

25 de Certeau is cited in Entwistle’s study of deictics; see Entwistle,“Writing [W]here,” 477. 26 Kerry Hardie, The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2012), 9, emphasis in the original. Hereafter cited in-text as AOW. 27 See Elizabeth Oness, “Review of The Ash,” 157.

227 to consider what we can know of death. The first stanza reads,

Hic Finis Chartae Viaeque — Here the map ends. The known ends. And written on old maps beyond the land’s drawn boundaries: Here be monsters. (AOW 22)

Appealing to images of medieval maps, and the common misconception that the parts unknown were marked with the phrase here be monsters, as does McGuckian, Hardie draws attention to the act of creating boundaries and making navigable those boundaries. As she says, “they were needed / for navigation, for military adventures” and “for the confiscation of lands” (AOW 22).

While the past tense suggests that such imperial use is not in the main any longer, maps are still necessary. Now, “they are needed / for lives, futures, notions of well-being” and “to keep the fear confined, / the boundaries sealed” (AOW 22). The title’s reference to satellite navigation devices places readers firmly within the twenty-first century and our easily graspable landscapes made digital. Such maps are so pervasive in our lives that we hardly notice how they shape the way we see and interact with the world. Yet Hardie is also suggesting that there are other maps: the plans we make for our lives and the way we classify people and places. The poem ends with a reflection on death, the map of which cannot be read by the living. The poet’s final charge to

Melo is to “run the boat out for the old adventure. / Risk beyond all charted waters, / ride the glittering seas” (AOW 22). It is an attitude that echoes Dylan Thomas’ refrain “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” but in paralleling death with mapping emphasizes how time is implied in topographical poetry.28 To look out at the landscape and meet the horizon is to be met with a spatial end that suggests the passing and ending of time.

28 Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), 2450.

228 That the speaker’s final call to go regardless of the map also suggests there is no alternative to being here, now as a figure in and navigating the landscape. “Satnav for Melo, Dying,” shares with Eavan Boland’s “That the Science of Cartography is Limited” a sense that maps inscribe absences and much as presences.29

One of the unexpected pleasures of The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree is

“Frida Kahlo” which imagines the painter in Ireland. It is a lovely bit of imaginative play combining topographic writing with an ekphrastic reimagining of Kahlo’s self-portraits. The speaker suggests that “In Ireland she [Kahlo] would wear a velvet dress / and bind blue sloes and ash keys in her hair” (AOW 46). Her shawl would be “the pearling grey of our thin skies, / her crowned hair loosened to a tangled fall” (AOW 46). The bright colors of Kahlo’s Mexico are subdued by the Irish greys, greens, and blues. The sharpness of the paintings is blurred by the suggestion that “[t]railing the wet fields in draggled hems, / the fading colors would soon leach her eyes / of all that black defiance” (AOW 46). The image here is almost of a diminishing

Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Altering Kahlo’s color palette has the effect of heightening both the brightness of the painted portraits and the colors of the Irish landscape: “red fox cubs would find cradling in her arms, // magpies would cloak her shoulders on their watch / for necklet-bones to thieve from rotting kills” (AOW 46). Images of death and deviousness dominate the poem as they dominate Kahlo’s portraits. The weather would have an impact too; “fine rain would teach her water, runnels, ruts, / and gift her mud with its dumb, witching suck” (AOW 46). The power is in the environment to shape and shift the focus of the painter, and the implication is that the environment has shaped and shifted the focus of the poet. The water that inscribes the landscape,

29 Claire Connolly, “The Turn to the Map: Cartographic Fictions in Irish Culture,” in Éire/Land, ed. Vera Kreilkamp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 32.

229 creating mud that witches and sucks has the same power as the “Atlantic seepage” in Heaney’s

“Bogland.”30 It has the power to bewitch or strike dumb and connects the landscape of Ireland to other locations, communities, and cultures. The poem is one that remains as sensuous as Kahlo’s paintings with its textures of velvet, riches of pearling grey, suggestion of fine rain, and the possibility of gifts. The colors mark these connections in asking readers to imagine both: one as written, the other as comparison. Kahlo’s imagined figure in the landscape is not camouflaged, but entwined with the landscape.

“What Just Happened”: Sara Berkeley Tolchin

The contemporary topographic, loco-descriptive, or place poetry in this chapter demonstrates

Doreen Massey’s contention that places “change us … through the practicing of place, the negotiation of intersecting trajectories; place as an arena where negotiation is forced upon us.”31

Sara Berkeley Tolchin’s poetry has included images of landscape since she began publishing in

1986 when she was nineteen.32 Since then, she has released six collections of poems, a collection of short stories, and a novel. After growing up in Ireland and attending Trinity College, Dublin, she spent time in London then moved to California. She continues to live north of San Francisco with her husband and daughter. The result is that her three most recent volumes of poetry show

Berkeley Tolchin’s mapping of various landscapes, “out of events and moments when the poet is caught unawares or somehow reminded of another life” so that she “internalizes this natural

30 Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 41. 31 Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 154. 32 I use Sara Berkeley Tolchin as it is the name printed on her most recent collection of poems. Previous collections were published under Sara Berkeley.

230 landscape as an emotional territory at once exotic and intimate.”33 Increasingly, Berkeley

Tolchin’s poetry has a topographical focus, evident in Strawberry Thief and The View From Here but most fully developed in What Just Happened.

As with Groarke, Berkeley Tolchin’s impulse is for the natural world and its relation to interior transformations. Strawberry Thief, Berkeley Tolchin’s 2005 collection, is divided into three sections. Part One, “Feet First,” is seven poems about the birth of her daughter; Part Two,

“The Burning Building,” takes up her first marriage and its dissolution; and Part Three, “234a

Railroad,” charts a new and fulfilling relationship. The effect of the organization is that readers first meet the poet reflecting on incomprehensible joy only to be thrown back into the suffering and confusion that preceded her daughter’s birth. The final section returns the poet and readers to a sense of discovery, joy, and generosity that is more muted than the first section, but maintains a strength in human ties all the same. The collection is thus marked by journeys, movements, and transformations. It is bodily, as the poet recalls her pregnancy and her sorrow and joys are visceral. It is also physical in the journeys the poet takes to Ireland, America, Australia, and

Morocco, among others. The journeys are spatial and interior, small changes of mood and perspective that alter the ways that the poet comes to terms with the world.

The first section takes inspiration from plants. In “Strawberry Thief,” the speaker’s daughter is a “Been seedling,” and “wild thyme, climbing rose, strawberry thief” (ST 15).34 The

33 John McAuliffe, “Poetry: Opening the world in intimate, surprising and revealing ways,” The Irish Times, 8 August 2015, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/poetry-opening-the- world-in-intimate-surprising-and-revealing-ways-1.2308971; Selina Guinness, “Hunkering Down near the rim of the world,” The Irish Times, 14 January 2006, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/hunkering-down-near-the-rim-of-the-world-1.1001892. 34 Lucy Collins highlights the similarity to Anne Sexton’s “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman” in Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 221. Strawberry thief is also the name of a print that William Morris created in the 1880s which depicts intertwining strawberry vines with different flowers

231 images of growth contrast with the desert images of the second section that the speaker internalizes to express her own psychological state. “My First Day in the Burning Building,” for example, outlines the speaker’s revelation that she is trapped. It begins with the note,

“Marrakesh, April 1995,” locating the speaker as well as the readers. The poem explores the

Moroccan landscape and “all the colors that the dunes can be,” which prompts the speaker to “sit on the sand, looking at sand, / and watch myself burning” (ST 23). Yet it is “234a Railroad” that tries to, as Burt would have it, get at the “truth of a site.”35 “234a Railroad“ contrasts the searching of the previous section and mirrors the first in its praise of the local and sensual, relating an affinity for the poet’s chosen home in California. She begins by acknowledging, “I have always wanted this, always belonged here, / the crookedness, the rough tile floor” (ST 52).

Touch, sight, and sound accompany the title to set poet and reader in place. The poet’s sense of humor in rhyming “this” with “crookedness” reveals an honest assessment of the house. The poem is of a poet’s reflection about craft, as well as a woman’s reflection about coming to terms with articulating a life story. It is the house, however, that has helped to anchor the speaker, and it is the new relationship that has helped bring resolution and calm to the end of her first marriage. The speaker acknowledges that she must pay attention to place, the house, and herself:

One year in this lucky house, birthday to birthday, all May mornings up Suncatcher Ridge to the windmill farm, sometimes an hour at the brimming drawers of the past full of the spells of wet stone, big trees down, bottles and footfalls and blood orange tears; when I look back honestly

and thrushes. These birds Morris saw outside his window stealing fruit from his garden. See “Strawberry Thief,” V&A’s Collections, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O78889/strawberry- thief-furnishing-fabric-morris-william/. So the speaker aligns her daughter with the active, hungry searching of the thrushes, gesturing once more to her affinity for flight, but also the capacity for song. 35 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 609.

232 the present settles clear in me. (ST 52)

As with Hardie’s poetry, the above stanza gestures to a view from Suncatcher Ridge, but turns to focus on particular elements of landscape. The description is sensual and psychological.

Landscape is marked by nonhuman elements while it is shaped and negotiated by the emotional ties of the speaker. The final lines of the poem, “and with a red trowel / I buried my last shred of doubt in the warm ground,” signify a dual acceptance of self and place (ST 52). The speaker’s trowel is reminiscent of Odysseus’ oar in staking a claim on place, but also a reminder of

Heaney’s quest in “Digging.” These landscapes cannot be understood at the surface alone.

Contemporary topographical poetry engages with the multiple trajectories that meet in place, geological depth, as well as the layered meanings of history, culture, and memory.

The View From Here emphasizes engaged negotiation of places. Numerous poems take up the topographical poem’s mode to name a locale in the title and explore it in the text, “Bicycle

Ride, Point Reyes,” “Fairfax Theater,” and “59th Street Bridge” for example. It is the final poem,

“Boathouses,” that combines the particularity of topographical poetry with an understanding of contemporaneity and multiplicity that conveys what it means to be a body in place. The poem begins observing that “Everybody has a boathouse they drive down to / in their secondhand car.”36 They come to swim “naked from the jetty, / sometimes going under, the thin green weed for hair, / but always coming up for lungfuls of the grey-white air” (VFH 67). The opening lines are playful and inclusive. While they may be hyperbolic, the vision emphasizes a sensuous experience of swimming either off of the west coast of Ireland or the west coast of the United

States. The freedom of movement is a reminder of the release that the exercise of jumping from a

36 Sara Berkeley Tolchin, The View From Here (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2010), 67. Hereafter cited in-text as VFH.

233 jetty can bring, as in Vona Groarke’s “Pier.” The speaker then describes her surroundings

“[a]long the narrow lane” of her boathouse, including “the trees stand up, as at a funeral, in their new clothes; / in the ditches shooting stars and forget-me-nots I never planted / arise, fragile and lovely, without my care” (VFH 67). These images create a frame around the boathouse that is solemn and surprising, while also acknowledging what the speaker controls. In so doing, the lines highlight the independence of the nonhuman world that shapes her experiences and perceptions.

From these elements the poem enters a reflection on the speaker’s mental state in various locations, what she can and cannot do. In the final stanza she says, “Eventually I will be here more than anywhere else, / wading out every night, every morning waking out of the too-cold water / to the stillness that is just what it is. This. Here. Now” (VFH 67). Something of Elizabeth

Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” is in “Boathouse.” Both have a strong impulse to describe a promontory at the edge of sea and land; both observe and note the independence of the various elements of landscape or place; and both seek to articulate the experience of being in and attentive to the dynamism of place. Bishop’s poem is not as playful, but it features looking at and touching water: “All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, /swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,” and “If you should dip you hand in, / your wrist would ache immediately.”37

Berkeley Tolchin’s emphatic use of deictics in the final three single-word sentences of the poem forces readers to contend with what orienting in place means. As Susan Stewart writes, “poetry’s role … has to do with a transfer of sense impressions” in part through deictics: “This,” “Here,”

“Now.”38 The result of these words is that we must “imagine somebody, some body, located with

37 Elizabeth Bishop, Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 62, 63. 38 Susan Stewart quoted in Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 612.

234 respect to the things described” so that the poem demonstrates that place-making is meeting the negotiations that happen in place, in part through acknowledging the elements of landscape and the body’s positing within it.39

What Just Happened is full of Berkeley Tolchin’s desert and seascape imagery and continues to investigate the centrality of relationships in understanding the places she negotiates.

The desert and sea mirror each other at opposite spectrums of liquidity. The excess or absence of water holds for the poet the imaginative potential of poetry. The conditions offer different senses of limitations, while the meeting of desert and sea is also a lived reality in California. The first poem, “Cracking Open” takes up aging, laughter lines, and “skin memory —” the term a rewriting of sun damage and an appropriate phrase for the way that touch and sense, their repetitions, impose our sense of the world.40 There’s a nod to Yeats in the description that

Berkeley Tolchin undertakes with “noon ablaze with the songs of bees” and her attention too to gradations of light, its “seven different types” (WJH 11). Yet hers is not an imagined ideal as she notes her surroundings, including the “wicker couch” and “hummingbirds / flickering by the bottlebrush” in an attempt to pin down location and contentment (WJH 11). The opening line,

“See these lines —” is an invitation to see the poet, but also confronts the spatiality of the poem, a little nod to form and poetic process (WJH 11). The final stanza reveals the poet’s hope, “I’d like my heart / to be without conditions, / to crack each day a little more open” (WJH 11). The wish is a goal for life, but also a proclamation for the volume of poetry, one that as John

McAuliffe notes is “[process] based and serious.”41 It might also be read as a response to Yeats’

39 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 612. 40 Sara Berkeley Tolchin, What Just Happened (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2015), 11. Hereafter cited in-text as WJH. 41 McAuliffe, “Poetry: Opening.”

235 “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” with its “deep heart’s core” as well as “The Circus Animal’s

Desertion” with its “rag and bone shop of the heart.”42 Berkeley Tolchin suggests, as does

Hardie, that cracking open is the stuff of both poetry and life. The phrase with its connotations of

“cracking up,” implying either uncontrollable laughter or going a bit mad, lend the whole a sense of wildness. While not an explicit topographical poem, “Cracking Open,” sets the tone for the collection, seeking to discover places, to understand what it means to negotiate within them, and press upon the perspectives we gain from their entwinement.

“South Beach” describes a visit the poet and her daughter make to the location and uses the power of the elements and their association with classical myth to explore the poet’s relationship with her daughter. The poem begins with the daughter aged thirteen and driving the car to the beach. When they arrive, the sea is “boiling mad” and “climbing the beach, / ice-green at the curled-over tops of the waves, / then darker green and churned-up sandy foam” (WJH 32).

The speaker watches her daughter film the waves on her phone, so the ambiguity of the coastline is further mediated by the device. And yet, the poet resists the easy capturing as she knows, “I could no more hold her / than the fine sand” and “no more keep her safe / than the wind or salty air” (WJH 32). She hears in the waves “a rising choir / a melody, not sweet, but urgent, uncontrolled” who sings “of the earth that arose, bold, / from the featureless ocean, the hill of the world, / and of all mothers and their wild unpredictable girls” (WJH 32). The slant rhyme of

“girls” and “world” frames the speaker’s attachment to her daughter. It is something that shapes how she negotiates the world, and she recognizes that she is at a loss for how to control it.

The line also brings to mind the myth of Persephone and Ceres which Berkeley Tolchin

42 Yeats, Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990; reprint, London: Everyman, 1994), 60, 394.

236 uses to convey the relationship between human and land and mother and daughter, as Eavan

Boland has done throughout her career, notably in “The Pomegranate” in which the speaker summarizes the myth, “Love and blackmail are the gist of it. / Ceres and Persephone the names.”43 Boland goes on to chart the myth and how she “can enter it anywhere,” ultimately deciding that if she warns her daughter of all dangers it will “defer the grief” but “diminish the gift,” and so she says “nothing.”44 The speaker in Berkeley Tolchin’s poem also reflects on how she can protect her daughter, recognizing that there is only so much a parent can do. The speaker then watches as “the sun god, a phoenix” lights the hills upon which they stand, and it is from this place of illumination that the speaker can almost believe she “would always have her near”

(WJH 32). The poem concludes with the two leaving together and driving away. At first, “South

Beach” seems to shirk the signals of topographical poems, yet what it does so well is demonstrate the interplay between humans and the natural environment that is inextricable from memory making and understanding socialization.

The affirmation of “South Beach” is couched in the potential loss of the speaker’s daughter, and loss is a constant theme in the collection as Berkeley Tolchin considers her patients

(she works as a hospice nurse), her mother, her ex-husband who died suddenly, and of place and environment. There are a number of poems in the collection that demonstrate an ecological consciousness. “Shutdown” details what happens at the National Seashore on the day that the government shuts down.45 The poem juxtaposes the stagnancy of the government with the

43 Eavan Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), 184. 44 Boland, Collected Poems, 185. 45 Most likely referencing the 2013 shutdown. See “Government Shutdown Forces Closure of Point Reyes National Seashore,” National Park Service, 1 October 2013, https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/news/newsreleases_20131001_government_shutdown.html. Ailbhe McDaid has noted the diasporic nature of Berkeley Tolchin’s work in the way that she incorporates different places and perspectives into her poetry; see Ailbhe McDaid, “‘I Mean It

237 relentless activity of the nonhuman elements. While “Congress ran aground,” “the ocean showed up for work” and “the waves were giving it their all / rending the heart of the beach in two, / throwing their violent weight around” (WJH 42). The poem is humorous, poking fun at the limitations of government and criticizing those in power who make declarations at the expense of others, human and nonhuman. The barricades put up to keep people out do little for “the seals and the pelicans / and the small fish and the birds that eat them / kept coming back for more”

(WJH 42). The poem praises the tenacity of places, acknowledging their independence. It also demonstrates the reasonability and reach of government, questioning what government has a right to control and demonstrating that a simple, if unacknowledged, form of resistance are the actions of creatures in their habitats. Visiting the seashore on the day the government shut down, the speaker could still hear “the keening wail of the gulls” and know “the day was a good day, ungoverned, / lovely, full of miracles” (WJH 42). Berkeley Tolchin demonstrates that poems of place participate in place-making and allow for the poet’s “and their reader’s potential felt relations to some location, relations that may include nonhuman biota, geology, atmosphere, buildings, and human history.”46 In so doing, this topographic approach highlights the limits of human perception and influence, even what can be conveyed in poetry. Ultimately “Shutdown” is life affirming, a stark contrast to the title.

Continuing to question that which sustains us, Berkeley Tolchin takes up water in “Big

Dry.” She parallels the water crisis in California with a drought in Australia. The poem begins with an epigram from Mike Young, a Professor at the University of Adelaide: “At the peak of the

[Australian] drought it became apparent that the environment doesn’t lie” (WJH 62). The poem

As No Ordinary Return’: Poetic Migrancy in the Poetry of Vona Groarke and Sara Berkeley,” Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 13 (2013): 38-56, Humanities International Complete. 46 Burt echoing Yi Fu Tuan in “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 610.

238 uses Canadian Geese to explore the shortage. It is not a bird’s-eye view of the land nor a consideration of mapping, but the poet’s reflection of what the birds need to survive and complete their migratory patterns. The poem begins with a description of landscape, a reservoir near the speaker’s home. The geese are

skidding down into what little is left of our reservoir, the south end of which is a new wetland lush with grasses, a meadow that shouldn’t be there, the old road with the stone bridge that is only revealed when the rains don’t come and still don’t come. (WJH 62)

It is the impulse to observe and describe, sorting through the fact of place that leads the speaker to consider the importance of water. The second stanza details how the Australians learned to

“reform the allocation system, / charge for it, make all wastage hurt” as a result of “their ten-year thirst” (WJH 62). The poem suggests that we all must learn the same thing: how to be responsible with our resources for all the creatures that are reliant on them. After all, the speaker says that the geese need “enough water / to survive” (WJH 63). The poem ends with another landscape view of what is needed “high in the Sierras / the air to tremble and shimmer / with the promise of snow” (WJH 63). The poem is one of the longer ones in this collection, consisting of a fourteen-line stanza, two seven line stanzas, and concluding with another fourteen-line stanza, nodding to the sonnet. What such a local poem demonstrates is how “difficult [it can be] to keep a poem fastened exclusively to one place; even as it evokes a single site, it darts in multiple directions. As any one poem is enmeshed with other poems, and as any one place is bound up with other places, the combination of the two—a single place in a single poem—multiplies entanglements with numerous unseen places elsewhere.”47 Berkeley Tolchin’s “Big Dry”

47 Ramazani, “The Local Poem,” 677.

239 emphasizes an ecological imperative but in so doing also highlights how the local poem has altered. It must now contend with the wider world, seeking for models and parallels elsewhere, and as such asks readers to confront the responsibilities they might assume in the complex negotiations of places.

In light of environmental and personal changes, Berkeley Tolchin considers the things that bind us. “Universal Laws” shows a careful appreciation for place and the joy that can come from engaging in the moment. It is a boxy poem, four octaves without a constant rhyming pattern, although some end words suggest others and the internal rhyming of long i sounds is complex and consistent, but especially prevalent in the first few lines and picked up again in the third and final stanzas. The lines are lengthy; the shortest are eight syllables, but most range from ten to sixteen. The first and second stanzas follow a similar pattern, beginning with a short sentence in the first lines and then concluding with a sentence that sprawls. The short sentences take up the poet’s journey: “Later than midnight, almost early, I’m out driving,” and “The road ribbons on, endless and straight / between dry mountains and hot plains” (WJH 60). Each stanza begins with description, then gives way to a sentence that sprawls and reflects, as in the first,

I pass all the houses and the people who live in them with their layered and overlapping lives, their quiet abiding by the universal laws — that increasing atomic weight drives the periodicity of the table, that love is an art if you do it well, that eventually potassium moves down its concentration gradient and diffuses out of the cell. (WJH 60)

At first, the speaker continues her description of the journey, until the dash gives way to the universal laws she notes. The rhythmic pattern of “periodicity” and “concentration gradient” diffuses into the rhyme of “well” and “cell.” Berkeley Tolchin considers the universal laws that constitute and frame our lives, highlighting how “places pose in particular form the question of

240 our living together.”48The speaker’s journey reveals the overlapping “stories-so-far” of places within which we all participate. Her reflection continues after the dash in the second stanza:

… ninety-two natural elements, a gorgeous blend of soil, cool air, and birds above the plates shifting and vying far below for purchase, under all the slaking the same thirst. (WJH 60)

The effect of the second stanza is a collapsing of the scales and lenses through which the poet looks. Universal laws, as the title suggests, are laws by which we all abide. In pointing to the ninety-two elements, Berkeley Tolchin offers up the periodic table as an image through which to read the world. The boxy poem suggests the boxy progress and repeated pattern of the table—the poet is contending with the minute elements of which things are composed.49

Continuing the pattern, the third stanza describes the speaker resting in a hotel room off

Highway 99. It is “in the veiled dance between sleeping and waking” that she sees who she

“might have been in former lives” (WJH 60). This surreal moment might be suggestive of reincarnation, but seems to align more with the fact that the natural elements the poet has been considering must be recycled and reused. The end of the third stanza and the entire fourth stanza consist of a single sentence, so that the sprawling reflections of the first two stanzas are here extended further:

Maybe I was an Emperor who died surrounded by his wives, but I think it was often hunger, I think I sometimes drowned, and now my life is underpinned by everything I’ve learned:

layers of music, life upon life, and still I’m unprepared for the crazy joy, the blur of things, the longing, the size of the waves once I’m in them, the heights I’m brought to, the visibility up here, longevity

48 Massey, For Space, 151. 49 When combined with the history of landscape poetry and art, the boxiness is also suggestive of the postimpressionist painters, such as Paul Cézanne, whose small blocks of color and strong brushstrokes create compelling landscapes that reframe how we see.

241 of human kindness across time: that we are all one consciousness, that god has left the building, yet we continue to expand in the sleek pearly white low-power happiness of being, long after all the stars have died. (WJH 60)

The stanzas are pieced together with commas and colons to create a sensation of building. The poet seems to suggest, at first playfully with her dream induced consideration of past lives but then in earnest, that human kindness and connection are also universal laws. The words that

Berkeley Tolchin uses in this section highlight relationships between things and speak to both distance and time: longing, in, heights, visibility, longevity, across time. It is a poem that “create an eidos [image] of the human figure, a presence in a space [that] creates … other versions of the

‘here’ and ‘now.’”50 The first colon indicates that what follows are things that the speaker has learned; they are a means of situating herself in place and life. That learning gives way to an exploration of “human kindness across time” and the penultimate line, without commas, forces readers to contend with it in a single breath so that we too feel the effect and release of recognizing such attainable and still amazing “sleek pearly white low-power happiness” that is being (WJH 60). The final word “died” satisfyingly repeats the long i sound yet again, but also acknowledges another universal law: that death must necessarily govern our sense of being.

Falling toward the end of the collection, after a number of poems that contemplate the death of her first husband and contemporary environmental dangers, the poem is both balm and charge. It asks readers to recognize the things that humans share with each other and the environment and then to respond. It also makes apparent the paradoxes of a contemporary topographic poem. Burt writes of these “impossible tasks”:

To reduce the multi-sensory site-specific experience of place into a string of words; to make an essentially place-bound experience portable; to make the spirit of a place apparent both to a resident … and to a visitor …; to establish, for resident and for visitor,

50 Burt quoting Susan Stewart in “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 612.

242 a difference between region … and site. … A kind of poetry that began by tying the figuration of poetic language to literal fact (to facts on the ground, as it were) thus ends up, by our own era, emphasizing the limits and the contradictions in claims that a poem can make the world present to us, can place us (as topographical poetry promises) in the poet’s shoes.51

“Universal Laws” highlights the necessary failure of such a complex description of being-in- place. The poem acts to recalibrate melancholy and place, emphasizing the importance of framing as a formal practice for confronting what cannot be said. In featuring the speaker as both a resident and visitor, travelling and observing the landscape and other people, and as describing particularities of places alongside spatial abstractions, the poem shows that the contemporary topographical poem must contend with “location—as a constellation of forces, pressures, openings, borders, and passages.”52 Indeed, the shifting scopes and scales of the poem create a vision that is at once stable and kaleidoscopic, demonstrating that loyalty to describing being in place sometimes means being unable to do just that.

The collection ends with two poems that consider distance and immigration as the poet straddles the west coast of the United States and the west coast of Ireland. “Famine Cottages” describes the speaker’s loved California landscape set against the remembered landscape of her childhood in Ireland. The poem is different than another Irish-California poem, Seamus

Heaney’s “Remembering Malibu.” While both compare the west coast of the U.S. to the west coast of Ireland, Berkeley Tolchin’s has an intimacy that “Remembering Malibu” lacks. It sets the poet’s move from Ireland against the remnants of those who immigrated before.53 She aligns

51 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 609-10. 52 Falci, “Place, Space, and Landscape,” 219. 53 Titling the poem “Famine Cottages” immediately calls to mind those who had to leave Ireland because of famine, especially the Great Hunger in the mid 1800s. I cannot draw out all the implications of this parallel here, but Berkeley Tolchin is gesturing to a long tradition of immigration. Whether it is fair to equate the move of a poet in the twentieth century to those who immigrated due to the horrors and deprivations of the famine can be taken up elsewhere.

243 herself with the immigrants, and yet her position is different. At first, the speaker observes a sight already familiar to her readers, the reservoir from which she sees horses and water “still as stone” (WJH 64). The sight leads her to think,

If I had to let it all in to the places where I feel at home I’m certain it would take me down, I would be undone, I’d drown. (WJH 64)

The threat of being overcome is tempered somewhat in the second stanza where she clarifies,

“[a]s it is,” there are “[f]ew ways in,” and so the poem is a means through which she can “find purchase” and qualify the experience of dividing her life and love across two continents (WJH

64). She will not succumb to the feelings which seem to be simultaneously loss, longing, and deep appreciation for multiple places across the globe.54 She remembers, “This year I have been more than half my life / elsewhere. For so long I have been other, / insular, a foreigner with the buried idiom” (WJH 64). In this way, the poet has been like the other immigrants who found themselves in the U.S. and elsewhere, and it is language as much as landscape that helps to determine orientation, as in Vona Groarke’s “Away” or Paul Muldoon’s “Quoof.”

As the speaker is walking, she feels “two stones and a shell” in her pocket “from the beach below the famine cottages / at Rossohan” (WJH 64). She remembers, “[w]e used to row there in a skiff” and reflects that “the driving California rain / drove home” just “how far away // are those beaches where we played as kids: Dog’s Bay, / Inch, Cahirciveen” (WJH 64). Berkeley

Tolchin’s images of California often involve expanse and are associated with driving, a sense of

54 Ramazani says, “In a global age, scenic poems have radial dimensions. Modernity intensifies the cross-locational propensities of poetry; even when describing a single site, a poem’s allusions, formal structures, generic inheritances, affective work, and etymological self- consciousness spin outward”; see “The Local Poem,” 682.

244 exploration, movement, and even freedom, although that freedom is sometimes constrained and difficult to negotiate. In thinking back on the famine cottages that were part of her childhood topography, she both gestures to the history of Ireland and also demonstrates how time distances that history so that the association becomes a dull loss, always present, but one that begins to blend in with other day-to-day activities. The naming of the different beaches is important as they become reminders of what was home, the “handkerchiefs of land” (WJH 64). The repetition is both praise and keening. That the famine cottages center in her memories of childhood also demonstrates their power in haunting. They serve as a kind of premonition and now are influential in their emptiness, creating a kindred spirit between the speaker and those who left

Ireland before. The poem thus continues the tradition of Irish landscape art that acknowledges the centrality of land and the “interrelated social, economic, political, and cultural historical narratives” that create a varied and layered Irish landscape.55

The last two stanzas complete the poet’s story. It was

… New Year’s Eve 1993, I flew across an ocean and six thousand miles to be where I am now, and this is how

I’ve lived my adult life — away from my original home, in a new place with new people, an about face from all I’d known. This is what I chose — the airport departures halls, the agonized farewells, and now these hills, my northern moon, my pre-dawn birds. (WJH 64-65)

The rhyming of “1993”/“be,” “now”/“how,” “place”/“face,” “home”/“known” and the slant

55 Majorie Howes and Kevin O’Neill, “Introduction: Towards a History of the Irish Landscape,” in Éire/Land, ed. Vera Kreilkamp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13.

245 rhyming in “halls”/“farewells”/“hills” link the lines formally. The lyric is one that considers the speaker’s positioning of herself as a poet and person. The line ending with the dash, “This is what I chose —” emphasizes the speaker’s agency (WJH 65). It is her decision, and, perhaps, contrasts her decision with the decisions of former immigrants. It also formally demonstrates how she is continuing to come to terms with the decisions that she has made, recognizing that she loves and feels at home in multiple places and is grateful for her shifting sense of belonging.

Berkeley Tolchin’s experience as an immigrant has taught her the daily practice of recognizing where she lives. Since she did not grow up in California, she sees things differently. The poem is evidence that contemporary poems of place often take up Nigel Thrift’s contention that “place in this new ‘in-between’ world [is, by definition] compromised: permanently in a state of enunciation, between addresses, always deferred.”56 The speaker’s experience of in-between reveals her affinity for the harsh landscape of the western United States and her continued fondness for Ireland. Here, memory and topography coincide, as Lucy Collins observes, “past and present [are] vital” for the memories are “the cardinal points by which we must get our bearings—the intimacy of friendships, the broad and ever-changing sweep of our thoughts and feelings.”57

Combining many of the elements Berkeley Tolchin has explored in the collection and extending the questions of “Famine Cottages,” “Coyotes” concludes the volume. The epigram to the poem, “Gravity cannot account for falling in love” by Albert Einstein, gestures to the balance between science and emotions. It also considers the distance between California and Ireland and centers images of landscape. “Coyotes” is not a traditional topographic poem, but does focus on

56 Quoted in Entwistle, “Writing [W]here,” 477. 57 Collins, Contemporary Irish Women Poets, 222.

246 the experience of moving through places so that she is “not just traveling through space or across it, [but is] altering it a little. Space and place emerge through active material practices.”58 These material practices when inscribed in language reveal the experience of moving through place and the constant nature of topographical negotiation. The poem begins setting place and time through sound: “2 a.m. and the coyotes start / with their howls of victory and despair” (WJH 66). The speaker tries to parse things out, the difference between what our senses reveal, what we take for granted, and what underlies our lives. Characteristically, she collects her facts, “the keys in their jar, / the bird that flew up unhurt this morning / from beneath the car, an insect’s gauzy wings” and moves from them to conclude, “we live as though these things / and how the day went / constitute the only way things are” (WJH 66). The speaker’s search is framed here for the way that things are. She recognizes that her perspective comes in part from “these journeys / back to the country of my birth” (WJH 66). When she travels, she “feels like flying into the old / territory of my roadless self” (WJH 66). She sloughs off her skins as, “Days before I board the plane / I start to shed the layers of it all / like parchment wrappings” (WJH 66). From the no-time, no- space of the departure hall, the boarding of the airplane, and the transcontinental and transatlantic flights, she considers scientific principles, investigating further universal laws:

Because of the uncertainty principle space is never empty; because of supergravity and supersymmetry we have unified theories of everything, including the seven unplanned curled up dimensions I can’t fully understand. (WJH 66)

Up to the third stanza, the poem has maintained a loose iambic pentameter, but with the introduction of new terminology, the lines begin to stretch. There is humor too in slant rhyming

“unplanned” with “understand.” The “lyric I” is also playful here and invites a collective

58 Massey, For Space, 118.

247 understanding that is a singularity occupied by many perspectives. Berkeley Tolchin’s usual phrases are now contrasted with complex terminology. The result is that some lines feel slightly forced, but its incorporation also demonstrates the difficulty of creating a unified theory of everything.

Berkeley Tolchin finds the source material for her poetry en route. It is the nature of flight and its use of gravity that leads her to further reflect upon her own “slender theory / of quantum uncertainty” (WJH 66). She playfully uses the language of quantum science to investigate what holds us and begins with the contention,

… if all of existence is just patterns of vibrations without width or height, end or start, then what connects us must be the wildness that runs riot in the clamorous chambers of the heart.

In the big past it’s understood that stars burned through their hydrogen till they collapsed, beryllium fused with helium before it could decay to form a stable carbon isotope which is how I’m sitting here today, unruly conduit from heart to page for all the sudden joy, the human hurt and sorrow, laughter, love, and rage

that makes us undertake these solo expeditions into the territory. There isn’t any map. You have to be the architect of your life, the poet of it, hunger for what the future holds, face the inevitable, the unknown and, like the coyotes, pound down the double doors of the night and come out fires blazing, eyes wide open, heart alight. (WJH 66-67)

“Coyotes” is not Berkeley Tolchin’s strongest poem in the collection, and the final stanza’s parallel of architecture and animals feels forced. Yet the rhyming poem gives the poem and collection a sense of closure, as the end word of these stanzas all rhyme with previous words:

248 “heart” with “start,” “rage” with “page,” “eyes” with “wide,” and “alight” with “night.” Berkeley

Tolchin avoids the expected couplet end rhyme, but by displacing and burying the rhyming words internally, she provides both a sense of momentum and closure without allowing the stanza to become sing-song. To live and to write is always an acknowledgment of the self in relation to an other, whether human or otherwise. The speaker finds commonality with the coyotes whose associations are as tricksters and nuisances. Playfully suggesting that her readers

“pound down the double doors of the night” to “come out / fires blazing” points back to her poems in Strawberry Thief and concludes with an image of light. Such a conclusion to the collection lends a certainty to the whole and seems to respond to the very first poem which asks for her heart to “crack each day a little more open” (WJH 11). Facing her changing landscapes,

Berkeley Tolchin achieves openness. It is her attentive descriptions of places combined with a changing scopic vision that acknowledges the inter-dependence of the elements of place that makes for a dynamic topographic poetry.

“What this bright air won’t give”: Michelle O’Sullivan

Michelle O’Sullivan has published two collections, The Blue End of Stars and The Flower and the Frozen Sea. She was born in Chicago in 1972, but grew up in County Sligo. Since then, she has lived in England, Greece, and the United States. Currently, O’Sullivan lives in County Mayo with her two children, and it is these images of the west coast of Ireland that dominate her poetry.

As John McAuliffe suggests, it is “a landscape with which readers are already familiar” made famous by writers such a Synge and Yeats, then taken up again by Longley, Groarke, and

249 Cannon.59 O’Sullivan’s strength, as Madeleine Callaghan observes is “her clear instinct to translate images, people, ideas, into language” and create an “understated loss.”60 Indeed, her first collection is grounded in images of nature and tinged with loss, but “moves far beyond the nature poem and the solitude that pervades the collection reinforces the difficulty of meaningful human relationships.”61 The first collection may have some forced lines, but O’Sullivan’s attentiveness to place and mood make for a delicate and insinuating poetry. There is the sense in these poems, too, of a quality that can make itself know in topographical poetry whose

“originary perception initiated from stimuli from events in the natural world … The preverbal experience is primary.”62 As with Kerry Hardie’s and Sara Berkeley Tolchin’s poetry, Michelle

O’Sullivan’s uses perception and landscape to situate her poetry, negotiating the places she inhabits.

“The Giving” reads as a reflection on lyric poetry and its practice. O’Sullivan is carefully focused on the landscape surrounding her. Its details are explored, and within that exploration, she considers her own practice. The poem is a means of understanding self in relation to that which the poet meets, the places and elements that she knows intimately. It begins: “There are times when I begin to understand / the strain of glass kept tight in frost, / blues severe and fired white —”63 The tightness suggested in these lines is of a cold beauty. The image is of glass in early morning or late evening when the light that strikes it illuminates, creating the illusion of the

59 John McAuliffe, “Contemporary Irish poetry impresses in inventive mode,” The Irish Times, 4 January 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/contemporary-irish-poetry-impresses- in-inventive-mode-1.2483275. 60 Madeleine Callaghan, “Brush Strokes of Three Poets,” Irish Literary Supplement (2014): 9. 61 Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, “Review of The Blue End of Stars,” New Hibernia Review 17, no. 1 (2013): 154, Project MUSE. 62 Burt quoting Leornard Scigaj, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 610. 63 Michelle, O’Sullivan, The Blue End of Stars (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2012), 18. Hereafter cited in-text as BES.

250 opacity of ice. The severe colors, the fired white that speaks to the way cold can burn makes for a striking opening, suggesting that harsh conditions, physically and mentally, are ones in which we can learn. The final line of the stanza shows what happens when the poet reaches out and touches the panes of glass; “they begin to soften” (BES 18). The cold is compromised by the speaker’s touch, so the reciprocity between human and world is emphasized. This need for observation and for touch is part of the learning process, and the speaker understands its centrality to the composition of the lyric. In the third stanza, she reflects, “I understand most in the river’s flow, / purls thinning as it waves from its source, / patterns repeating in the undertow” (BES 18). The word “purl” and the image of patterns in the water align the creative capacity of the water with knitting and echo Heaney’s use in “Casualty” and “Eelworks.” In recalling knitting, the poem puts a domestic practice into the natural landscape and purposefully misplaces the action. The river’s current is “a constant hand that pushes and pulls” (BES 18). Here, O’Sullivan acknowledges the power of water, a force that permeates throughout the collection. This river’s flow like that of the lyric poem is a means of negotiation, streaming from a source and continuing on past the poet.

It is the interaction, then, between landscape and form that allows for the shared intimacies of place for it is “in winter’s early morning” that the speaker learns the most, “when so little comes to pass” (BES 18). It is then, she says, that “I have one eye that can rely / on the tapered line that stands for a border” (BES 18). O’Sullivan’s not so subtle rhyming is suggestive of that tapered line of the landscape, but that she ends the poem with the word “border” suggests the difficulty of looking directly at the dividing line. Only one eye can follow it; to look too closely is to watch it disappear or become impossible. As Massey says, “[s]ometimes there are attempts at drawing boundaries, but even these do not usually refer to everything: they are

251 selective filtering systems; their meaning and effect is constantly renegotiated. And they are persistently transgressed. Places not as points or areas on maps, but as integrations of space and time; as spatio-temporal events.”64 The landscape and poem both participate in the action of the title. That so little comes to pass on those winter mornings suggests a quietness, a lack of activity, but also that things are not passing, are not crossing the arbitrary borderlines.

That the world has power and that the nonhuman must be acknowledged and appreciated is evident in poems such as “Cargo.” The landscape is not named in the poem and so becomes a kind of abstraction that deterritorializes while simultaneously conveying its loyalty to place through site specific description. An initial reading of the title suggests things we carry and things we wish to be delivered to us. The word implies weight that is exchanged or, perhaps, dropped off. The pace of the poem is gentle. Six stanzas each of three lines, most end-stopped, suggest the pace of walking. The caesuras within each stanza are at those moments of stock taking when the poet pauses for more observation, considers her orientation, and turns perception on its head. In the first stanza, for example, the poet writes, “Still night, the fields doused black / though the sky is beginning to stir — / ivory glints from its granite sheet” (BES 24). O’Sullivan likes her nighttime observations and is attentive to the changing light. What is interesting here is how the night switches the level of solidity of earth and sky. It is the fields that are “doused,” subject to being soaked and also extinguished. In the west of Ireland, of course, this is a continuous possibility. The changeability of the sky, however, is challenged since it is like granite, solid and pressurized. The stars are “ivory glints” on its surface. Certainly, on very dark nights when there is a new moon and little light pollution, observing the sky can feel almost oppressive, like a rock weighing down in its brilliance. Momentarily, what is happening on earth

64 Massey, For Space, 130.

252 is dwarfed by the magnitude of the sky coming to life.

More of the speaker’s senses begin to detect the familiar elements around her, although they are made weird by the difference in perception. She hears, “In the distance the river sleepwalks. / It slips and hums, / the trail of its back to the fields” (BES 24). The sight and sounds of the still night are “Quiet enough,” and she says, “I stand for a minute / and hold my breath — is it foolish to think I’d hear this landscape speak?” (BES 24). The poet’s attentive desire continues as she writes of the wind on the river. In the penultimate stanza, the speaker pauses in her description to consider that “Everything must be here — / the river that sleeps and walks, / night that sinks like a stone” (BES 24). This pause is like a release of breath, providing a textual space that reflects an acknowledgment of the nonhuman world around her. It is, as

Doreen Massey says, an acknowledgment of the momentous and joyfully intimate knowledge of place.65 The landscape is not foreboding, but capable of communication, surprise, and revelation.

The speaker ends by wondering, “If I put my ear to the ground / will I hear it loosening, / spilling its beautiful cargo?” The tightness of cold from “The Giving” and the solidness of the granite sky here have the potential to liquefy and loosen like the river that sleeps and walks.

These liquifying and sensuous images contrast with the utilitarian sound of the title,

“Cargo.” Typically, it suggests capitalism and the exchange of goods, including logistical and utilitarian networks . As the final word in the meditative poem, however, O’Sullivan suggests that what is given and taken can be something other than commodities. Here, the exchange is of the elements of place and belonging. The speaker acknowledges the world as worthy of gift giving, as a compilation of forces outside ourselves that shape us and our knowledge of the world. “Cargo” and its possibilities for the landscape to speak force readers to note “the

65 Massey, For Space, 140.

253 unavoidable challenge of negotiation a here-and-now.”66 It is a here and now that is murmurous, as the repetition of s sounds throughout the poem sustain a sibilance. “Cargo,” with its origin in wheeling and loading, pushes us to consider that which our landscapes offer up: the things and their ways that go unnoticed. It also asks that we take the time to listen and to carry it ourselves.

O’Sullivan and her poems pay close attention to the world as a means of confronting uncertainty of life and craft. Many are concerned with defining states of mind and elements of landscape. “The Blue End of Stars” might be read as a response to the Heaneyesque “Ambit” that traces the borders of the river and its “long-running, well-deep” whispers (BES 20). “The

Blue End of Stars” is suggestive of the heat of the stars, how fire burns blue at its hottest, and calls to mind the blue giants that burn brightest but for shorter periods of time. It might also describe the coloring of shooting stars, which, of course, are not stars at all; yet the phrase hints at the yellow-blue of their tail as they dart across the sky. Further still, the title describes what happens at the transition from night to day. After all, the blue sky is the end of stars. The appeal to the celestial indicates a looking up and a continuity of searching as humans have long searched the night sky and stars for signs. Reading topography is aligned with reading the night sky. That the speakers in these poems are looking up and out shows how they differ from some of Boland’s most memorable speakers who look down and back, as in “That the Science of

Cartography is Limited.” A three dimensional experience of space is created. The word emphasized, however, is “end,” and so the poem is an exploration of scope and reach of “the sensory experience of a particular place.”67 The first stanza is full of edges: “It feels like an outer rim, / a cusp toughened —” (BES 42). The dash at the end of the second line is both a breaking

66 Massey, For Space, 140. 67 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 603.

254 and a continuity with the following: “this windswept strand, / this edged lip of land.” The stanza implies a body of land nearly surrounded by water and so easily identifiable. The emphasized words in this stanza: rim, cusp, strand, edged, lip, land not only play with similar sounds but call attention to the practice of noticing and taking advantage of natural boundaries.

The poet’s focus on light begins to show things differently. The second stanza shifts:

“Dizzy, the sun coming / and going over water, / over sand,” and the light also reflects the

“dandelion clocks / untethering themselves” (BES 42). The glint of the dandelions dispersing in the wind can sometimes look the way stars do. As the dandelions scatter, the poet shifts again to note, “There’s the dry sound / of the wind’s grain / lifting the marram grass” (BES 42). The effect is a cataloguing of senses: sight, sound, touch, so that while there is not an etymological exploration of place, the speaker’s attention to detail is one that continues the dinnseanchas tradition. Also present is an image that is both a sensuous experience and suggestive of an Irish poetic practice, “the instinct of fish / fills the air with movement” (BES 42). The description presents an image of the choppy, quickly agitated surface of water when a school of fish is swimming up close to the surface. To call attention to their “instinct” is also so suggest the instinct of Irish poets who have long referred to salmon and eels as emblems of knowledge. The poem ends with her acknowledgment of the impossibility of collecting all the offered cargo:

“This light won’t accumulate, / it rises and falls and is gone” (BES 42). The particularities of this place are held in abeyance by the light which is changing. There is a sense that this poem might be one in a number of studies such that landscape artists make to depict the varieties of light.

Instead of showing the location at multiple stages, it expresses the impossibility of completely comprehending or depicting. Such specificity incorporates another aspect of some contemporary topographical poetry, those that “alert us to the aspects of such experience that both precede, and

255 evade, language, the aspects for which you just have to be there.”68

The Flower and the Frozen Sea is a more certain collection and continues the attentiveness begun in her first. “The Dwelling” is a boxy poem, two stanzas of seven long lines.

It begins with description: “A motley crew, this silent stand of ash trees. / And an innocent sky that calls to mind Leonardo / running up a mountain to see how it could be so blue” (FFS 12).

The opening is playfully deprecating of the ash trees, motley, perhaps, due to the seasons or their placement. The phrase can be read as a near endearment. In this way, the trees may share something of the spirit of the people who live in the same place. The speaker’s reference to

Leonardo also lends to the place a part in experimentation and curiosity, as the artist sought to understand the world he saw and recreated. In one instance, he climbed a mountain outside

Milan to discover why the sky is blue.69 Leonardo as scientist is featured, but Leonardo as artist is implied as color and visual focus propel the poem.

The forth line marks a shift: “having worked the stars / all night, a dredge-man emerging from amongst the dead” (FFS 12). The syntax and dash seem to suggest a tension as the “bright air won’t give” and so holds onto its secrets of color or death (FFS 12). Yet the line is also reminiscent of the colloquial phrase “what I wouldn’t give,” suggesting something very much desired (FFS 12). The result is that there is both desire and refusal in these lines. Indeed the blue sky seems to emerge from the depths of the sea as a dredge-man would emerge from his work clearing channels. In this new light, the speaker tells her addressee, and by extension her reading audience, to “look closer at the stone-set walls, they might have been / etched with diamonds”

(FFS 12). The walls take on the characteristics of the night sky, sparkling in the reach of the

68 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” 610. 69 See Ross King, “Leonardo and the Last Super,” The New Yorker, 14 January 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/leonardo-and-the-last-supper.

256 morning sun.

That our attention is called to the new day sets the scene for discovery and revelation that follow in the second stanza. Here the speaker pursues an image of fox and sun: “The fox you didn’t look for, a burst of sun-stare / when you glance up, is a split second too slow” (FFS 12).

The result is that readers see both the movement of a fox at dawn as “a concentration of red that’s punctured, it darts / discovered through the fields,” while simultaneously seeing the way light spreads through ash trees and fields when it first rises: a bright blip, a slight pause, and then a running quickly from the horizon (FFS 12). The poem centers the nonhuman, making the ash, sky, fox, and sun subjects of the sentences, turning our attention to the detailed descriptions of the place, illuminated in morning light. The final three lines of the poem, then, undergo a shift, so that the poem seems sonnet-like with its volta. The poem concludes, “This is home. Up close or arm’s length, a sizeable / fist that draws from something old to make the new. / You cannot walk the land here, you must swim” (FFS 12). These lines are an affirmation: “This is home.”

The sky and water, trees and sun make up some of its elements. And the speaker seems to suggest that no matter where the addressee is, this place will be home; it grips with “a sizeable / fist.” While the poet has been describing a place she knows well, the final line indicates not only the often damp landscape of the west coast of Ireland, but the sense that sometimes the places we love are capable of enveloping us in ways we don’t fully understand. There is also a sense in a liquid land of things changing topographically, politically, personally so that to move through the place and through the life there is to negotiate all these things, to be a bit out at sea. There may also be some of Heaney’s “Atlantic seepage” that indicates the links between other places while acknowledging the difficulty of pinning down in a continually global world. Nevertheless, the final line offers the possibility that, if you know how to swim, you can navigate the land.

257 O’Sullivan has a number of poems in this collection where she names particular locations: “From Moyview,” “Dreaming of Orkney,” and “In Kinsale,” for example. These poems take up topographical positions, but there is also a current in The Flower and the Frozen

Sea of a liquid topography. In “Time and Weather,” the poet explores the change of seasons from spring to summer. The poem is divided into three stanzas, and the stanza breaks are marked with a small symbol. The effect is that the poem reads as three separate moments that explore the correlation of time and weather. The first of these observes there has been “So much rain” that while the sky looks “hardened” and “glazed” the “Bitter downpours” reveal water that “glitters”

(FFS 41). As if written, “[s]mall lyrics rinsed in the washed-out grass: / a cuckoo-flower, dog- violets” concludes the first stanza, so that we might read the small, native flowers as lyrics themselves, whispered over by rain (FFS 41). The first stanza offers a view of landscape that begins with a sense of the horizon and narrows to foreground the small flowers. In this way, it adopts the technique of landscape painting that foregrounds specific elements of landscape and juxtaposes those with a wider, expansive view. The speaker’s perspective continues to change with each stanza which has the effect of revisiting what it is to see into and out of a landscape scene.

The speaker attends to the changing world in the second stanza. While “[t]he wireless warms the kitchen with a slow tune,” she notes “the gift of more birds at the feeder” and its indication that “the bones of winter have been put to bed” (FFS 41). The result is that in the final stanza, the speaker lays claim to the time and weather: “We throw our coats down and give our bodies / to the dunes, like children” (FFS 41). There is joy in giving up to the beach scene so that we sense with her “The sea breeze” that “skims / the sun’s awning; close and far clouds are vast”

(FFS 41). Given all the time and weather, the poet welcomes “this brief sweetness of roots

258 emerging. / From darkness, bloom next to stone” (FFS 41). The images that O’Sullivan includes are temporary and fragmented, yet there is an acknowledgment of sweetness, known even partially. As the sun emerged from the sea in “The Dwelling,” here the new flowers blooming are lyrics to be read as well as the inspiration for a lyric poem. In this way, O’Sullivan adheres to the long lyric tradition of praising spring and its flowers, but that the poem ends with “stone” suggests a roundedness and a knowledge that the landscape is more complicated. The things that are difficult remain, and the stone is seemingly unchanged. Still, there is the need for partial appreciation extended in the poem “Alight” when the speaker traverses the warm house in “early autumn” and concludes “In this moment there is this love; here this us. / Let this be enough”

(FFS 44). Indeed, the poems in this collection are an attempt to be enough and to discover how to accept what is.

“The Flower and the Frozen Sea” is the title poem of the collection and is striking in its imagery of cold. There is a sparseness to the poem. The six stanzas are divided into three sections of two each and the driving sounds in the poem are w, h, and s, although b and c provide a contrast to the breathier sounds. The title is puzzling. At first, it seems not to relate to the poem itself. In some ways, it gestures to the tradition of Japanese postcards. The cover image of the book comes from one such of these and depicts a woman looking out of a window. Only her eyes, forehead, and part of her nose are visible through the gold shades lining the top and bottom of the print. Summer Room from Ehagaki sekai depicts a woman looking, offering only a piece of her face to the viewers’ gazes. She is not looking at the artist, so we watch her watch. What the image emphasizes is the power of perception and the attentiveness that O’Sullivan pays to her images. O’Sullivan also has a poem titled “Kintsukuroi” which is “the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery using resin mixed with precious metals such as gold, platinum or silver” (FFS 48,

259 64). The poem describes a walk and suggests the brilliance in how the landscape’s elements are knit together: “Not sun-gold yet, a feldspar glow catches / the water’s cuffed edge, a fold of linen

/ touched with frost dust” (FFS 64). The sun practices its own kintsukuroi. The speaker then thinks how “[d]ew-pale, the cool light rises and walks / through us, our breath vivid on the air: / there is nothing here that is mean or bare” (FFS 64). Landscape is seen here for the many and multiple things that it is, acknowledged for it brilliance, complexity, and complicity. The possibility of seams of gold extends to the speaker and her unnamed companion so that to be in the place is to potentially be knit together with precious metals. “The Flower and the Frozen

Sea” has a similar appreciation for what is coldly knit together. The title might reference another

Japanese post card, but also calls to mind images of winter: the creep of ice at the rim of water, frost stars on glass, ice ribbons or frost flowers left on a plant after a freeze, and frost flowers pulled from the sea by colder air. The image is one of the brilliant, uncanny, delicacy of cold.

The poem reads as an address to an unnamed companion whose strength and precision is noted as the addressee is “inoculated against winter wind and rain” (FFS 59). The elements that have been observed throughout the collection here serve as simile: “Like the river, what moves beneath this surface is what moves you. This is the climate you’ve come to: / where hoar incises cold and the thermometer sinks” (FFS 59). The terms “inoculated” and “incises” lend the first two stanzas a feeling of precision and discipline as well as medicine. Yet for all the cold, there is the suggestion of warmth arriving as “The birds are beginning to return” and the mist is “half- hearted” (FFS 59). There is

No wilderness here — only wild expanses as familiar as your hand. Blue-grey’s distressed as battered old metal. The sun’s gold piece lost in a pocket of cloud. And these trees committed to thrive another winter. (FFS 59)

260 The landscape is not wild and has no need to be tamed because the place is so well-known. The practiced knowledge of the location turns it into known wild expanse, and supports the conclusion that William Cronon draws: we must recognize that wilderness is a human construction and not something that is separate from human culture and history.70

70 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 69-90.

261

CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION: FIGURES IN THE LANDSCAPE

As Kerry Hardie, Sara Berkeley Tolchin, and Michelle O’Sullivan’s works highlight,

“Topographical poetry is at once factual and phenomenological, showing what it is like to be this figure in this place, now and here.”1 While some of their poems take up the expected move of the mode, naming places, describing the visual qualities of landscape, using deictics, and present tense to move speaker and reader through the landscape, they also push back against totalizing statements of vision and comprehension. Their scopes and perspectives continue to change, demonstrating the complex and changing nature of negotiating place. This topographic impulse considers that poems, like places, are constructed relationally. Indeed, as Massey claims,

Neither space nor place can provide a haven from the world. If time presents us with the opportunities of change and (as some would see it) the terror of death, the space presents us with the social in the widest sense: the challenge of our constitutive interrelatedness— and thus our collective implication in the outcomes of that interrelatedness; the radical contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and nonhuman; and the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which that sociability is to be configured.2

Instead, if we acknowledge this relationality, contemporaneity, and particularity, then we have the opportunity to appreciate the new variety of topographical poetry and to demonstrate that such work is engaged in deep poetic practices of describing, linking, and offering limited understanding of the world.

1 Burt, “Scenic, or Topographic, Poetry,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 612. 2 Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 195.

262 Hardie, Berkeley Tolchin, and O’Sullivan join McGuckian, Cannon, and Groarke in practicing embeddedness in landscape and language. As Timothy Morton argues, “To write poetry is to force the reader to coexist with fragile phrases, fragile ink, fragile paper: to experience the many physical levels of a poem’s architecture. … To write poetry is to perform a nonviolent act, to coexist with other beings.”3 Reading the poets in this dissertation through a lyrical topographic lens demonstrates their concern for relationality, which is a recognition of the elements of place and a recognition of the elements that constitute a poem. With their focus on minutiae, the poets foreground acts of perception and representation. To read their poetry is to navigate different scales as the particular locales necessitate interactions outside the immediate sites. These complex negotiations show that contemporaneity is met in the face of finitude and horizons with boundaries that continually shift. For these poets, the future is open.

McGuckian, Cannon, Groarke, Hardie, Berkeley Tolchin, and O’Sullivan’s work demonstrates that contemporary poetry by women in Ireland is engaging with dynamic ways of conceptualizing space and place. They resist the re-inscription of positions offered by traditional conceptions of nation or gender and are instead writing in ways that acknowledge the complex and overlapping sphere of our lives. Catriona Clutterbuck claims that one of the defining features of contemporary poetry by women in Ireland is indeterminacy.4 Perhaps we can complicate that idea by acknowledging that contemporary poets whose work is included in this dissertation face indeterminacy through confronting, unsettling, and distilling elements in place. The result is that

3 Timothy Morton, “An Object Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 222, Project MUSE. 4 Catriona Clutterbuck, “New Irish Women Poets: The Evolution of (In)Determinancy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 651-667.

263 the local and global influence one another. The acts of seeing and writing question perspective, pressing just what it is to be a figure in place.

264

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