LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY and CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN POETS: MEDBH MCGUCKIAN, MOYA CANNON, and VONA GROARKE by KACIE HITTEL (Under T
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LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN POETS: MEDBH MCGUCKIAN, MOYA CANNON, AND VONA GROARKE by 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 by 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 © 2018 Kacie Hittel All Rights Reserved LYRICAL TOPOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN POETS: MEDBH MCGUCKIAN, MOYA CANNON, AND VONA GROARKE by 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. iv 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 v 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