'Neither here nor there, and therefore home': A Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Abstract

This thesis proposes a reading of the migration impulse in contemporary Irish poetry, arguing for a distinctive nexus of memory and an ethic of reinvention. It sets out how contemporary poets reinvent inherited tropes of emigration and argues for an interpretation of migration as a spectrum rather than a trajectory. Against the backdrop of changing socio-cultural and literary conditions, the thesis presents a series of close readings of migrant poetry to explore how memory and its reinventions are deployed.

Chronologically, the thesis begins at the point of ‘New Irish’ migration of the 1980s and concludes in the post-Celtic Tiger period. It argues for a reinterpretation of migration that recognises its plurality by engaging a cross-section of migrant poets with eclectic experiences of migration ranging from permanent, long-term and traumatic to transitory, peripatetic and liberating. Through the dual and related modes of memory and ethics, particularly an ethic of reinvention, this thesis provides a way of reading contemporary Irish poetry that moves beyond established spatial, imaginative and thematic paradigms.

Chapter One considers Greg Delanty’s American Wake (1995) and Eamonn Wall’s Iron Mountain Road (1997) as key migration volumes in their permanent relocation to the United States. Chapter Two posits the alternative cartographies pursued by Vona Groarke and Sara Berkeley in relaying their migratory experiences. Chapter Three investigates how home is configured from abroad in the poetry of Bernard O’Donoghue, Martina Evans and Colette Bryce. Chapter Four explores how willed migration and physical repatriation are represented in Sinéad Morrissey’s and Harry Clifton’s poetry. Chapter Five concludes with an examination of how migration is impacted by contemporary technology in the poetry of Justin Quinn and Conor O’Callaghan.