Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Here, the ethical project for the female writer is to bring into being an
unruly feminine excess that displaces the (gender) binary altogether.^43
That is, an unruly dis-positioning that, although related by Irigaray to
the feminine, can be deployed by both sexes and is not gender specific
or only ëproper to herí.

Writing as Excess

In ëThe Girl Who Went To Live On A Wallí (1989) the poetic speaker
alludes to an excess that is connected with alterity:

I need only your eyes

To see to the writing of these difficult words

Feelings trapped between the

Lines, speared on the iís and fluttering.^44

The title of the poem states how the speaker is situated on a precarious
threshold or at a boundary point between two spaces, and she is
evocative of Humpty Dumpty which begs the question whether the
girl on the wall is about to have the great fall that is imagined at the
beginning of ëFacts About Waterí. Both the girl and Humpty are
ovular and both live in a world where ordinary language can easily
turn into nonsense; in Berkeleyís poem feelings are associated with
the nonsensical and are trapped within the sense of language. The
lines allude to that which is unamenable to representation in a way
that is comparable with Tom Paulinís poems ëAlmost Thereí and
ëThatís Ití from Walking A Line (1994), while the poem is haunted by
the dÈlire that was discussed in relation to the reading of Jean-Jacques
Lecercle.^45 The girl in the poem can easily fall off the wall, off the line
and into the delirium offered by ëthese difficult wordsí which provide

43 Cf. Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Post-
modernism and (Bio)ethics (London: Routledge, 1997), p.143.
44 Berkeley, ‘The Girl Who Went To Live On A Wall’, Home Movie Nights, p.47.
45 Paulin, ‘Almost There’ and ‘That’s It’, Walking a Line (London: Faber, 1994),
pp.21, 104–5.