Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

6 Sara Berkeley’s Nomadic Subjects

I lose my sense of self,

of home, and how the land lies^1

Sara Berkeley has left Ireland for the Western states of the USA and
her writing mentions Dublin place names but also Utah and San
Francisco. Asking what kinds of territories are charted in Berkeleyís
poems, it is interesting to assess how far her poetic landscapes move
away from the Emerald Isle, and to outline how Berkeleyís
representation of fluid spaces and unfixed subjectivities affects the
poetic voice, identity and communication. Addressing the issue of
Irish identity, Berkeley comments:

Iíve never been comfortable with the label ëpoetí, never mind ëIrishí or

ëwomaní, so if I feel myself to have any identity, itís as a writer who writes.

Thatís innocuous enough. I like to mention Dublin place names in the poems,

but I also love Utah, San Francisco, and the deserts of the western states, and I

mention these names too. Geographically, that makes me, I suppose, the Irish

Emigrant Who Writes. I hope I will always be able to write about Ireland but

the longer Iím away, the more I wonder how wise that is. I canít imagine that

anyone reading my work would know me at once for an Irish writer.^2

Focusing on poems from Facts About Water (1994) Berkeleyís con-
ception of identity can be interrogated further so as to ask what are the
effects of emigration for contemporary Irish poetry, feminist and post-
colonial debate.^3

1 Sara Berkeley, ‘Poles’, Facts About Water: New & Selected Poems (Newcastle:
Bloodaxe, 1994), p.66. All further references are to this edition and are cited in
parentheses in the text. This chapter was first given as a paper for the Women-
on-Ireland Network at Staffordshire University on 9th May 1998. It was later
developed into another paper that was delivered at the WERRC conference
‘Celebrating Irish Writers’ in Dublin 26th–29th May 1999. Thanks to Derval
Tubridy for her comments.
2 E-mail correspondence between Sara Berkeley and Sarah Fulford, May 1998.
3 The poems under discussion have been chosen as representative of poetic
concerns with nomadicity, l’écriture féminine and silence. Due to the restricted