Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Paulin the essayist has no firm position. However, unlike his critical
essays, Paulinís poetry refuses stable ground. Inspired by the
attractive figure of Klee, Paulin the poet seeks to open up conceptual
and perceptual spaces, experimenting with the way we see and choose
to represent, to question the politics of representation and the
representation of politics. The destabilizing and edgy aspects of his
poetry are comparable with the deterritorializing vision of Heaney in
Seeing Things, with the effect of changing what we take to be
political, and challenging the shaky line that has been drawn between
an aesthetics of privacy and a public politics. Deliriously pacing at the
border between aesthetics and politics, Walking a Line is as near as
Paulin has ever got to challenging the nets of language and nationality.