This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
9780719075636_4_008.qxd 16/2/09 9:25 AM Page 142 8 Architectural metaphors: representations of the house in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke Lucy Collins Feminist criticism frequently employs metaphors of space to interrogate the position of women within society and their ability to articulate that position to a wider world. The idea of ‘clearing a space’ from which to speak suggests that for women freedom of expression can only be achieved in ‘empty’ space, space that is unmarked by ideological and aesthetic convictions. Yet such
16/2/09 9:25 AM Page 128 Poetry Flanagan’s appearance as a recognisable contemporary jobber hints at contemporary moral values driven by a desire for profit at the expense of the moral outcome of that action. Time is distended in the poem, the human tragedy of Jesus’ final humiliation overshadowed by a cute Irish ‘apparition’ who elides the significance of the moment with his casual profiteering, a chronological conflation that Lucy Collins adroitly identifies in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Kennelly’s epic sequence is a powerful indicator of the