In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh suggests that literary fiction has difficulty representing the Anthropocene, the epoch of irreversible human impacts on the planet, because the Anthropocene “consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel – forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space.” This chapter investigates how poets from Ireland have been making the Anthropocene imaginable over the past two decades by rendering “unbearably intimate connections” in lyric forms. Reading Moya Cannon alongside Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Sinéad Morrissey, the chapter spotlights poems in both English and Irish that look beyond Ireland – to Africa, the Americas, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Arctic – to arrive at a recognition not just of the human-centered globe, but of the Earth system or planet. These contemporary poets’ work makes visible how language and technology, including writing, mediate human efforts to represent the climate crisis. Their poems challenge us to develop a mode of reading that emerges from the interface of the global with the planetary.

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.