Irish Women Poets Rediscovered

Women Creating Women is a pioneering exploration of contemporary Irish women poets that should provide a frame of reference for all future discussion of this topic. Patricia Haberstroh focuses on five poets in particular, beginning with Eithne Strong and Nuala Nf Dhomhnaill, both of whom still write in the Irish language—each emphasizing the importance of the female perspective on the human experience. She then turns her attention to three of the best-known contemporary poets: Eavan Boland, the most highly esteemed; Medbh McGuckian, the most difficult and original; and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, whose poems make some of the stronger statements about the need to balance a male with a female perspective to broaden the human vision. Drawing on a wide reading of the poets' works and extensive personal interviews with them, Haberstroh demonstrates the emergence of a more self-conscious and self-confident female poet who is ready to rewrite the story of Irish women and redefine and explore female identity and the image of women in Irish history, culture, and literature. Her final chapter explores Irish women's poetry since 1980. This book is a celebration of poets, poetry, and Ireland that allows the reader to discover the works of these fine poets.

In twentieth-century Ireland the relationship between the personal past and narrative history has exerted a shaping force on the lives of individual writers and on the formation of literary communities. This study explores this important intersection of the personal and the political, and its aesthetic consequences, in individual poems and volumes by contemporary Irish women. Collins argues for the central importance of memory in the work of contemporary Irish women poets such as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian, and for its significant role in their creative development and critical reception.

A unique look into the minds and creative processes of contemporary Irish women poets, this book focuses on the transformation of their life experiences into poetry that blends personal identity with national identiry. It assembles many voices around common themes that are emerging to change Irish poetry permanently. Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, whose book Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets was a Choice Outstanding Academic book in 1996, shows in this new work how nine of the most prolific Irish women writers generate their poetry, broadening our understanding of the context of the poems. She pairs each author's verse with a companion (and often autobiographical) prose piece to illuminate the ways in which the poetry expresses the poet's personal experience. As women in a politically and religiously charged, male-dominated genre and country, these poets feel compelled to transcend daily life by articulating against the "norm." In this book, they describe the issues they confronted in their growth as poets and the strategies they developed to translate life into art. In linking these poets—drawn from Northern Ireland and England as well as the Republic of Ireland—Haberstroh throws into relief the characteristics that define their unique, individual subjects, themes, and styles.

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

"In the millennial year 2000, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin published an essay on the nineteenth-century poet Speranza, claiming her as a foremother. Ní Chuilleanáin asks: 'what use are our female predecessors to us as writers, what is the function of model, teacher, exemplar?' What Irish women poets seek when they conjure foremothers is continuity: a 'women's tradition' that legitimises the writing of their own poetry; influence aside, a sense of 'the woman writer as embodied, creative agent in the process of textual production,' to use Jennie Batchelor's phrase. When Ní Chuilleanáin considers Speranza as a foremother, she remarks that Speranza's life has mattered to her as much as her work and: if we are to consider the importance of her example for women writers of a later generation, it's partly in that lesson, that it is possible to have a warm and generous character and to look after and remain close to one's children while holding on to the egotism that makes one a writer. It's both as a person and as the kind of writer she is that she functions as exemplar and ancestor. Women writers of the past are useful to women writers of the present in part because they legitimise the business of writing; we can look to the busy women poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and imagine a life and maybe even a livelihood that comprehends the art"--