desire to look for what is occluded and the hope of moving from a
customary ëcivil toneí into an uncustomary ëdarker oneí.^39 Bolandís
poem seeks a style of ëironic authenticityí that self reflexively brings
into question poetic form not so as to provide us with a poetry that is
more pure but so as to draw attention to the inauthenticity of poetic
discourse or its impurities.
A critical awareness of received cultural norms/forms informs
the intellectual agenda of the contemporary Irish poets under dis-
cussion. An ironic attention to the simultaneous complicity with and
potential subversion of dominant forms of cultural expression
(exemplified by the monumental conception of ëWomaní and
ëNationí) is also central to the feminist, post-colonial and Irish
criticism that has been drawn upon for its critique of ëthe jargon of
authenticityí which becomes criticized as jargon.^40 In view of Saidís
contrapuntal juxtapositions and Bolandís irony, Muldoonís dissem-
bling lines from ëTwiceí (1994) come to mind as a fitting/misfitting
exercise in such an ironic poetic/critical dissonance: ëTwo places at
once was it, or one place twice?í Muldoonís ëcontrapuntalí question
encapsulates the effects of the poetry under discussion in what Said
calls an ëatonal ensembleí^41 which uproots from fixed and monu-
mental representations of identity, using ëperformativeí, ëdisplacingí
and ëfluidí techniques that, as Bolandís ëArt of Griefí suggests, have
little ëcadenceí.^42 ëArt of Griefí writes of an art form that is
ëunrhymicalí, ëunpredicatableí and ëunmusicalí, and which does not
operate to the beat of the conventional song of ëmusic-makersí and
ëmetric-makersí. However, the poem is still trapped within the form of
poetic discourse as it calls into question a conventional artistic form as
represented by the statue, by looking to an unconventional way of
representing the woman. From Bolandís statues to revision of the
figures of ëCathleení and ëCuchulainní, the poets approach the myths
39 Eavan Boland, ‘The Necessity for Irony’, The Lost Land (Manchester:
Carcanet, 1998), p.54.
40 Graham, ‘Ireland and the Persistence of Authenticity’, Ireland and Cultural
Theory, p.8. Cf. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London:
Routledge, 1964, 1986).
41 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, p.386.
42 Eavan Boland, ‘The Art of Grief’, In A Time of Violence, Collected Poems,
p.208.