The history of Irish poetry, like the history of Ireland itself, has long been bound up with the broadcast voices that radiate into, and out of, its shores and the walls of its homes. This essay registers the poetic resonances of radio on the island of Ireland by considering both the traces of the medium that appear in poetry and prose by Louis MacNeice, Eavan Boland, Leontia Flynn, Seamus Heaney, and others, and by examining the cultural role and aesthetic qualities of works produced for radio, with a particular attention to Austin Clarke’s weekly poetry broadcasts (made between 1939 and 1955) and his radio play ‘As the Crow Flies’ (1942). By merging Clarke’s interest in traditional Irish prosody and myth with the demands of writing for a mass medium, ‘As the Crow Flies’ offers an allegory of the futile search for meaning, and shelter, in a world convulsed by violence.

Discussions of form in Irish poetry often equate formalist poetry with conservative politics. A more nuanced understanding of this relationship is that poetic form is a way of turning private experience into a publicly accessible commentary on the challenging times we inhabit. The women poets who came of age at the turn of the twenty-first century, including Sinéad Morrissey, Leontia Flynn, and Caitríona O’Reilly, are sometimes associated with a formalist turn in Irish poetry at the time, but in their embrace of form as in much else besides they are remarkably heterogeneous. All are distinguished by an international perspective, in their influences as much as their subject matter, and an attention to questions of form as embodiment, as well as a focus on the body itself. In their relationships with important precursors including Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath and Medbh McGuckian, they enact generational debates through their dialogues with form, from the ghazal and sestina to the chatty intimacies of the verse letter, vindicating the short lyric as a continuing space of freedom and resistance.

This chapter focuses on Northern Irish poetry in the twenty-first century and looks in particular at the work of Alan Gillis, Leontia Flynn, and Sinéad Morrissey in order to understand the relationship between the formal dynamics that have underpinned Northern Irish poetry – a general and continuing commitment to lyric conventions and to “the well-made poem” – and the shifting social and cultural conditions of Northern Ireland in the two decades since the Good Friday Agreement. Examining the ways that Gillis, Flynn, and Morrissey absorb and refract the compositional styles and formal tendencies of several precursor poets, this chapter suggests that all three aim to find what remains viable within the gallery of shapes, tones, and modes that have characterized Northern Irish poetry since the 1960s in order to catch and represent contemporary conditions in the North.