Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

of the politics of Enlightened Dissent that are celebrated in Paulinís
essays. Instead the poetry offers readers a more doubtful vision that
questions authenticity and this results in a critical historical
consciousness that is far from self-affirming.
It is important to notice the conflicting pull within the poetry
between a rational and sensible epistemology, and irrational and
sensual representations of the world. Rather than continue the
characterization of Paulin as straight-talking political activist and
rebel, a more fruitful aspect of Elmer Andrews’s argument is to be
found when he argues that Paulin’s poetry ‘operates in the danger
zones of margins and boundaries [...] where it may be he can release
new energies from the dead hand of history and state power [...]
searching the gaps in discourse, the blanks and holes and silences.’^14
Elsewhere, Andrews comments that ‘the best contemporary Irish
poetry is a poetry on the edge’ and he applauds Paulin’s poetry, from
before Walking a Line, for constantly throwing us off balance in a way
that is comparable with Heaney’s preoccupations with the spirit
level.^15 As Andrews notices: ‘To jump is to liberate the self from the
rigid structures by which consciousness is determined, to escape from
a constricting environment. Paulin enacts this “ jump” in the structures
of his poetry.’^16 Paulin’s notion of the ‘dangerous edge of things’ also
recalls Robert Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’:

Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist, demirep

That loves and saves her soul in new French books –

We watch while these in equilibrium keep

The giddy line midway: one step aside,

They’re classed and done with. I, then, keep the line

Before your sages, –^17

14 Andrews, Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, p.338.
15 Andrews, ed., ëIntroductioní, Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of
Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1992), p.21.
16 Andrews, Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, p.339.
17 Robert Browning, ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, Poets of the English
Language, Vol.V Tennyson to Yeats, eds., W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes
Pearson (London: Heron, n.d.), p.173.