This essay argues that the niche occupied by contemporary Irish poetry in global Anglophone literature is a function of its formal conservatism and resistance to theoretical reflection. Irish poetry offers a moderate and palatable alternative to poetic work that works in a more thoroughgoing fashion through the violence of the present. Its conservative formalism is a hedge against confronting form with the conditions poetry must engage with. Accordingly, much of recent Irish poetry paradoxically furnishes a convenient and consumable commodity form even where it seems to offer an alternative to the economic and ecological spectacle of global transformations. But a number of poets have found formally innovative ways to accommodate both the political violence of the Troubles and the depredations of neoliberalism in Ireland while at the same time drawing on the long history of Irish resistance to such effects of colonialism and capitalism.

This chapter re-examines the poetry of the early Troubles and addresses the limitations of what was, to a large extent, an atrocity-led literature, drawing on works such as Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ and Seamus Deane’s ‘After Derry’ to reassess the role played by writers and critics at this time. Discussing both retrospective and contemporaneous interviews with authors, the chapter also addresses the ways in which writers such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley responded to the new mandate which poetry had been given after the outbreak of the northern conflict, with the relentless media exposure of the Troubles often, but not always, eliciting evasive responses to the conditions engendered by the violence. Finally, it examines the fresh formal and linguistic strategies adopted by younger poets including Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. By this time, writing the violence of the Troubles into poetry could make evasion a form of engagement which helped to preserve artistic autonomy.

This chapter will consider the most recent English renderings of two key eighteenth-century Gaelic texts, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire and Cúirt an Mheán Oíche, by Vona Groarke and Ciaran Carson respectively. It will examine the role translation has played in the transition of these texts to a twenty-first-century English-language context. Taking as a starting point the poets’ reflections on their own translations, it will assess their re-imagining of eighteenth-century Gaelic female protest and their engagement with issues such as gender, colonial and cultural politics, voice/performance, and print. In doing so, it will consider the new and timely meanings these poets have brought to the fore in their translations.

Considering novels, poetry, drama, and non-fictional prose, this chapter examines how writers represented the Troubles and the gradual gains of the peace process between 1980 and 1998. It considers the historical displacements of Brian Friel’s Translations and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), the realism of Ciaran Carson’s The Irish For No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989), the staging of women’s lives during the Troubles in Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone (1985), the phantasmagorias of Paul Muldoon’s poetry and the metaphorisations of war and violence in Medbh McGuckian’s verse, and the Belfast panoramas of Glenn Patterson’s Fat Lad (1992) and Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996). Contemporary Northern writers contextualise the conflict by illuminating the country’s colonial past; they narrate structures of trauma by examining how history invades the present; they present palliative correctives to the vicious linearity of the conflict; and they project possible resolutions to the exhausted (il)logic of sectarian strife.