14 - Irish poetry into the twenty-first century

Summary

In a short, early lyric Michael Longley proposes a certain obstinacy, reticence and awkwardness as among the defining characteristics of his subject, 'Irish Poetry'. For Longley, Irish poetry issues forth not in glorious blossoms but 'tuberous clottings', 'a muddy/Accumulation' to be found in 'specializations of light', or, in Joycean style, 'dialects of silence' rather than the spoken word. When he imagines these elements combining in the poem's last lines, it is to form images of suffering: 'the bent spines, /The angular limbs of creatures'. The poem ends by conjuring 'the initial letter, the stance', but even this moment of self-assertion is coloured in 'lost minerals'. If Irish poetry in 2000 had fewer reasons for awkward introspection than it did in 1973, when Longley's poem appeared, its achievements in the intervening years had done much to foster a mood of buoyant well-being.