dominated the Western episteme since the Enlightenment.^60 The
challenge then for poets and theorists is be strangers to themselves.
It is noticeable that English translations of Kristeva turn to the
French word, ë‡ líÈtrangerí, to express the need to defamiliarize from
what is given, while English translations of HÈlËne Cixousís French
stick mostly with the German word to denote the ëunheimlichí.^61
Whether words are foreign to readers or not is a matter of idiom.
Heaney writes of ëmaking strangeí and, as Cixous has suggested in
Rootprints (1997), there is something poetic in writing ë‡ líÈtrangerí
or defamiliarizing readers by using words from a different idiom. She
draws on the examples of Paul Celan and Osip Mandlestam, poets of a
less referential yet committed form of art, to suggest that poetry is a
ëlost vesselí and that ëwriting is beyond us, always going forwardí.^62
Cixousís interviewer, Mireille Calle-Gruber, argues that this con-
stitutes a ëpoethicsí: ëWhere writing frees itself of a form of ërealismí,
that is to say simplistic conventions, to give itself full latitude to think.
To become a ìthinking-writingîí (p.79). The question is whether
Berkeleyís poetry constitutes Calle-Gruberís definition of ëpoethicsí.
What would be a poetry that writes ë‡ líÈtrangerí and what
implications would it have for readings of Irish poetry?
The poem ëSea-borneí explores opening the floodgates, and
develops the tension between possession and dispossession described
in ëFacts About Waterí and ëPolesí. Once again thinking is associated
with fluidity as the speaker says:
I smell sea-salt from my thoughts
I begin to be obviously
sea-borne, as you were
once dragged from the waterís womb,slimy, sea-green, wreathed in foam,60 Jacques Derrida refers to this in his essay, ‘Structure, sign and play in the
discourse of the human sciences’, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed.,
David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), pp.108–23. From Writing and
Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1978).
61 Cf. Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das
Unheimlich (The “ uncanny” )’, New Literary History, Vol.3, Spring, 1976,
pp.525–49.
62 Cixous, Rootprints: Memory & Life Writing (London: Routledge, 1997), p.103.
All further references are cited in parentheses in the text.