displacement, and to consider what effects this has on the language of
the poetry.
Taking Flight from Mother Ireland
At first glance there are significant differences between the poets
Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, Medbh
McGuckian and Sara Berkeley. It is necessary from the start to
acknowledge the different social, political and ideological contexts
existing between separate communities in the North and South of
Ireland, while examining the relationship between the national,
spatial, territorial, racial, religious and sexual as presented in the
poetry. What the poets hold in common is their revision of national
and gendered identity to provide a different understanding of the
poetic self in relation to the world. It is important to ask how the
poetry of a younger generation provides a response to nationality that
is significantly different from their predecessors. Regarding the
representation of identity in contemporary Irish poetry, it is necessary
to consider how the poets in differing ways readdress and discard
Revivalist myths of motherland.
Richard Kearneyís Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s
(1988) argues that the ëmigrant mindsí of Irish artists attempt to ëthink
otherwiseí.^5 He connects this move outwards from Ireland with the
political agenda of post-nationalism so as to provide a critique of
traditional nationalist narratives drawn on at the foundation of the
Irish Free State that created a strait-jacket of ëIrishnessí. Kearneyís
Postnationalist Ireland (1997) has moved on from his initial
publication of Myth and Motherland (1984) which was preoccupied
with grounded conceptions of the nation and this movement is
comparable with that of the poets under discussion.^6 Critiquing
5 Kearney, ëIntroduction: ìThinking Otherwiseîí, Across The Frontiers: Ireland
in the 1990s, ed., Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988), pp.7ñ29.
6 Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture and Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 1997).