Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

speaker is a middle man, the poem provides no spirit levelled sense of
balance. Rather, the poem articulates a rupture while holding op-
posites together.
Unlike ëThe Boundary Commissioní, Muldoonís poem ëIden-
titiesí represents identities in a process of continual altering and
interaction. The poem can be understood according to the conflicting
notions of hybridity, self-containment, community and individualism.
The speaker recounts an encounter:

When I reached the sea

I fell in with another who had just come

From the interior. Her family

Had figured in a past regime

But her father was now imprisoned.

She had travelled, only by night,

Escaping just as her own warrant

Arrived and stealing the police boat,

As far as this determined coast.

As it happened, we were staying at the same

Hotel, pink and goodish for the tourist

Quarter. She came that evening to my room

Asking me to go to the capital,

Offering me wristwatch and wallet,

To search out an old friend who would steal

Papers for herself and me. Then to be married,

We could leave from that very harbour.

I have been wandering since, back up the streams

That had once flowed simply one into the other,

One taking the otherís name.^38

The opening image of the sea introduces further images of journeying,
the groundless and liquidity where elements cannot be separated but
run into one another. Merging and dissolving boundaries are conveyed
particularly in the last lines of the poem whereby the use of assonance
enables the words in the line to audibly run into one another. This is
different from the two streams in ëMeeting the Britishí that merge
only with great difficulty since they are frozen over.

38 Muldoon, ëIdentitiesí, New Weather (London: Faber, 1973), p.22.