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Here and There: Poetry after Devolution in Wales and Northern Ireland

Neal Alexander

Abstract

This essay develops a comparative reading of recent poetry from Wales and Northern

Ireland in the wake of the successful Welsh referendum on devolution (1997) and the

Good Friday Agreement (1998). Although the historical and political contexts are

importantly different in each case, it is possible to identify the development of a

broadly ‘transnational’ poetics in the work of contemporary Welsh and Northern Irish

poets. After devolution, concepts such as ‘identity’, ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are

increasingly subjected to the alienating displacements of globalization, so that

representations of place often explore the entanglement of different spatial scales:

local, regional, national, international. This is perhaps the most clearly defined and

widely commented-upon feature of contemporary poetry in Northern Ireland and

Wales, and the most obvious point of comparison. However, I also argue that several

younger poets from Wales and Northern Ireland demonstrate a shared concern with

the politics of memory in a historical period marked by various forms of forgetting. In

Northern Ireland, poets such as Sinéad Morrissey and Alan Gillis often employ

complex or distorted temporalities in their texts, so as to highlight and contest the

elision of history in the Peace Process’s dominant narrative of socio-economic

‘progress’. In Wales, Gwyneth Lewis and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch both draw

attention to the ways in which threats to Wales’s Welsh-speaking communities are

being ignored or overlooked, and suggest that remembering is a political

responsibility after devolution.

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In the last years of the twentieth century devolution became a political reality for Scotland,

Wales and Northern Ireland, thereby reconfiguring the structures of governance and

confirming a significant shift in the self-understandings of the peoples living in the (formerly)

United Kingdom. Of course, devolution is more accurately regarded as a process than as an

event, one that continues to unfold unevenly in different parts of the UK. To speak (or write)

of poetry after devolution, then, is to gauge the extent to which this process establishes new

conditions for cultural production and to consider what role poetry plays in the social

imaginary of communities experiencing devolution. This essay will offer a comparative

analysis of recent poetry from Wales and Northern Ireland in the wake of the successful

Welsh referendum on devolution (18 September 1997) and the endorsement of the Good

Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland (22 May 1998). My interest is less in poems that can

be said to respond directly to these political events than in the various ways in which poetry

from Wales and Northern Ireland is shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by its respective

post-devolution contexts. If, as Derek Mahon claims, ‘[a] good poem is a paradigm of good

politics – of people talking to each other, with honest subtlety, at a profound level’, the

analogy should not be interpreted too literally.1 It remains vitally important to respect and

remain attentive to the ‘subtlety’ of poetic language, and to acknowledge that ‘honesty’ is not

incompatible with perspectives that may be sidelong, oblique, or indirect. Nonetheless, in

what follows I take my bearings from Theodor Adorno’s thesis that ‘[a] collective

undercurrent provides the foundation for all lyric poetry’ and that the subjective autonomy of

poetry is itself social in nature.2 My primary focus is upon the work of several younger poets 1 Derek Mahon cited in Matthew Campbell, ‘Ireland in Poetry: 1999, 1949, 1969’, in

Matthew Campbell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–20: 12.

2 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’ in Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to

Literature, Vol. I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York:

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from Wales and Northern Ireland who published their first collections in the late 1990s or

2000s and whose careers have developed in tandem with the unfolding of devolution in their

respective polities.

Devolutions

The first thing to note, of course, is that the historical and political conditions for devolution

are very different in each case: although devolution has been experienced roughly

simultaneously in Wales and in Northern Ireland, those experiences carry their own particular

inflections. For instance, however slender the majority in favour of devolution for Wales, it

seems clear that the 1997 referendum has opened an entirely novel phase in Welsh history

and significantly altered perceptions of what it is to be Welsh both at home and abroad. As

Martin Johnes observes, the rather belated devolution of legislative powers to the National

Assembly in 2011 allowed ‘laws to be enacted in Wales for the first time since the medieval

period.’3 Consequently, in Wales, devolution is associated with an unprecedented degree of

political autonomy and an enhanced ‘sense of Welshness’, particularly in the industrial

south.4 Kenneth O. Morgan points to ‘an upsurge of national self-confidence’ since 1997 and

claims (perhaps optimistically) that the ‘old divisiveness created by conflicting views on the

Welsh language […] has largely disappeared’ from the cultural life of the country.5 This

sense of novelty is not so prominent a feature in the case of Northern Ireland, by virtue of the

fact that, before 1997, it was ‘the only part of the United Kingdom with practical experience

Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54: 45.

3 Martin Johnes, Wales since 1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 423.

4 Johnes, Wales since 1939, 428.

5 Kenneth O. Morgan, Revolution to Devolution: Reflections on Welsh Democracy (Cardiff:

University of Wales Press, 2014), 261.

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of devolution.’6 For fifty years, from the opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1921

until the imposition of Direct Rule from Westminster in 1972, a deeply dysfunctional and

undemocratic form of devolved government was practised in the province. So, although the

Good Friday Agreement of 1998 offers the prospect of ‘a new beginning’ in its first

paragraph, and makes provision for several novel political mechanisms – including a power-

sharing Executive, a North-South Ministerial Council and a British-Irish Council –

devolution is actually the default condition for Northern Ireland rather than an innovation.7

There is a sense, then, in which Northern Ireland’s experience of devolution might be

described in terms of a return to ‘normal’ following the thirty years of the Troubles, however

spurious this rhetoric of ‘normalization’ is in reality.8 By contrast, the rhetoric of devolution

in Wales is of new freedoms and fresh departures, foregrounding the novelty of the situation

and its orientation towards the future.

These differences are related to the divergent paths to devolution taken by the two

countries. In Wales, it is particularly important to acknowledge the disparity between the

outcomes of the 1979 and 1997 referenda. In 1979, nearly 80% of Welsh voters voted against

devolution; in 1997 there was a huge swing of 30% and the ‘Yes’ vote was passed with a slim

6 Vernon Bogdanor, Devolution in the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1998), 55.

7 See ‘Declaration of Support’ (paragraph 1) of ‘The Agreement: Agreement Reached in the

Multi-Party Negotiations (10 April 1998)’, CAIN Web Service – Conflict and Politics in

Northern Ireland <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/agreement.htm> accessed 16 July

2015.

8 For a succinct critical account of this rhetoric of ‘normalization’, see Colin Graham,

‘Luxury, Peace and Photography in Northern Ireland’, Visual Culture in Britain 10/2 (2009),

139–54: 140.

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majority of 50.3%.9 It is the swing, rather than the narrow margin, that has seemed most

significant to cultural commentators such as Jane Aaron and M. Wynn Thomas. They argue

that Welsh writers played an important role in creating the conditions necessary for a ‘Yes’

vote to be possible, ‘drawing in new adherents to an expanded and more inclusive image of

Wales, in which a more varied and heterogeneous percentage of the Welsh population could

feel they had a stake.’10 Aaron and Thomas are probably over-optimistic about the impact that

literature has on society and politics. However, their analysis does suggest that, as a result of

developments between the two referenda, contemporary writing from Wales is more

responsive to difference and diversity, and (paradoxically) that manifestations of ‘Welshness’

have become less central to it. For instance, in a 1998 editorial for Poetry Wales entitled ‘The

Road Ahead’, Robert Minhinnick predicts that devolution will catalyse the withering away of

divisive identity politics in Wales:

The Referendum vote last September, which has introduced a degree of political self-

esteem to the country, and which will have profound implications for our cultural

confidence, ended an era of introspection and ludicrous Welsher-than-thou, not-as-

Welsh-as-s/he-should-be, posturing. Post September 18, there is no need to define

ourselves.11

9 Bogdanor, Devolution in the United Kingdom, 190, 199; Johnes, Wales since 1939, 415.

10 Jane Aaron and M. Wynn Thomas, ‘“Pulling you through changes”: Welsh Writing in

English Before, Between and After Two Referenda’, in M. Wynn Thomas, ed., Welsh

Writing in English, A Guide to Welsh Literature, Vol. VII (Cardiff: University of Wales

Press, 2003), 278–309: 298–9. See also Jane Aaron, ‘Towards Devolution: New Welsh

Writing’ in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-

Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 685–99: 699.

11 Robert Minhinnick, ‘The Road Ahead’, Poetry Wales 33/3 (1998), 2–3: 2.

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Again, this sounds rather like wishful thinking and is clearly an attractive position for

Anglophone writers to adopt. But Minhinnick’s faith in Wales’s newfound ‘cultural

confidence’ is shared by many of his contemporaries, not a few of whom are notably wary of

the adjective ‘Welsh’.12

In Northern Ireland, the situation for poets writing after devolution is rather different,

for the Good Friday Agreement is also central to a larger and ongoing peace process. That is

to say, in Northern Ireland devolution is closely bound up with political and socio-economic

changes that, it is hoped, will bring a protracted period of civil and sectarian violence to an

end. Thus far, the experience of devolution has been profoundly uneven, marked by a series

of political deadlocks over IRA decommissioning and reforms to policing, and repeated

suspensions of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was formally constituted on 2

December 1999 but dissolved just ten weeks later on 11 February 2000. Responding to these

events with a mixture of anger and despair, the novelist Glenn Patterson remarks that in

Northern Ireland ‘[c]risis management has become indistinguishable from actual

government’ and devolution seems little more than an ‘illusion’ to the province’s citizens.13 It

was not until May 2007 that devolution was fully restored, with Ian Paisley of the Democratic

Unionist Party as First Minister and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin as his deputy. As Paul

Dixon observes, this was ‘a turnaround in Northern Irish politics that was probably as

remarkable as the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement’, and devolved government

continues to have an air of improbability in Northern Ireland.14 It is in the context of these

faltering attempts to establish a new political dispensation, which are closely bound up with a 12 Alice Entwistle, Poetry, Geography, Gender: Women Rewriting Contemporary Wales

(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 2.

13 Glenn Patterson, Lapsed Protestant (Dublin: New Island, 2006), 88.

14 Paul Dixon, Northern Ireland: The Politics of War and Peace, 2nd edn (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 304.

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similarly fragile and problematic peace process, that a new generation of Northern Irish poets

have begun to write and publish. Paradoxically, circumstances of relative political stability

and Northern Ireland’s gradual integration with the socio-economic model of global

capitalism seem to have produced a pervasive sense of uncertainty and self-consciousness in

these poets. As Miriam Gamble observes, Northern Irish poetry established its international

reputation during the period of the Troubles (1969–1998), and ‘the poet has held a prominent

place as spokesman or sage in relation to the conflict.’15 However, for younger poets writing

after the Agreement, the relationship between poetry and politics seems less clear, and ‘the

sense of having no poetic “role”, no civic function’ is an implicit preoccupation in their

work.16

Transnational Poetics

Bearing in mind these very different contexts for devolution, I want to identify two broadly

common features of contemporary poetry in Wales and Northern Ireland, both of which can

be traced to the historical irony of the fact that devolution has only been possible in a period

of thoroughgoing globalization. Fredric Jameson argues that any critical discussion of the

contemporary ‘must confront globalization as its absolute horizon’, for in the present

historical situation international relations have become dominant rather than secondary or

incidental.17 Jameson’s remark finds a kind of echo in Gwyneth Lewis’s phrase, ‘In these

stones horizons sing’, which appears in letters six feet high on the face of the Wales 15 Miriam Gamble, ‘“A potted peace / lily”? Northern Irish Poetry since the Ceasefires’, in

Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2012), 668–83: 670.

16 Gamble, ‘“A potted peace / lily”?’, 672.

17 Fredric Jameson, ‘New Literary History after the End of the New’, New Literary History

39/3–4 (2008), 375–87: 375.

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Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay – though Lewis also implicitly qualifies Jameson’s claim

that in globalization ‘there are no cultures, but only the nostalgic images of national

cultures’.18 Although Lewis’s stones sing with horizons that reach beyond the borders of

Wales, they also acknowledge the nation’s industrial histories of quarrying and slate-mining

in a manner that is not merely ‘nostalgic’ but rather historical and political.19 Consequently, a

more useful way of thinking about post-devolution poetry from Wales and Northern Ireland

is in terms of the elaboration of what Jahan Ramazani calls a ‘transnational poetics’, whereby

poetry’s ‘cross-cultural knotting’ produces a ‘nuanced and cross-hatched picture of

intercultural borrowings, affinities, and flows’ in which national ‘horizons’ do not simply

disappear.20 ‘In the twentieth century,’ argues Ramazani, ‘even localist poems evince the

contracted space and time of transnational flows and imaginaries.’21 This is even more

obviously true of the twenty-first century, and seems to describe one broad tendency that runs

through contemporary poetry in Wales and Northern Ireland (but which is not unique to

either). After devolution, concepts such as ‘identity’, ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are increasingly

subjected to the alienating displacements of globalization, so that representations of place

often explore the entanglement of different spatial scales: local, regional, national and

international.

18 Jameson, ‘New Literary History after the End of the New’, 379.

19 Lewis’s English-language phrase is accompanied by one in Welsh: ‘Creu gwir fel gwydr o

ffwrnais awen’ [Creating truth like glass from inspiration’s furnace]. See Gwyneth Lewis,

‘Wales Millennium Centre’, Gwyneth Lewis

<http://www.gwynethlewis.com/biog_millenniumcentre.shtml> accessed 16 July 2015.

20 Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

2009), 12.

21 Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, 15.

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A good example of this transnational poetics can be found in the work of Patrick

McGuinness. Born in Tunisia of Belgian and Anglo-Irish parents, but a long-time resident in

Wales, McGuinness’s poetry often explores the border-crossings between places, identities

and languages. In ‘Glo’, for instance, he writes a kind of elegy for the Welsh coal industry

that stresses the international networks of trade and economic exchange in which Wales has

long been implicated:

Glo, dark as the place it came from; coal

blazing underground, ponies drawing shoals

of barges along the oily waterways:

canals dreaming of the open seas,

of coal that eddied into coral as

the Mersey flowed into the Meuse.22

The geographical movement of these lines is immediately striking, shifting from the localized

but unspecific ‘place’ of a Welsh coal mine to the ‘oily waterways’ of two European rivers

and the ‘open seas’ between them. ‘Glo’ offers the reader a condensed image of transnational

flows in which marginal spaces become central to a network of terrestrial and maritime

connections. In the poem’s distinctive spatial imaginary, the Mersey, which skirts the

borderlands of England and Wales, ‘flow[s] into’ the Meuse, which links central France to

Belgium, the Netherlands and the North Sea. These geographical correspondences are further

reinforced at a linguistic level by the poem’s rhyming of place names and topographical

features: ‘Mersey’ and ‘Meuse’, ‘Afan’ and ‘Pont Aven’. Moreover, in McGuinness’s poem,

the malleability of poetic language mimics the metamorphic qualities of matter itself, as

‘coal’ becomes ‘coral’, then ‘charcoal’, ‘ash’ and ‘karandash’ (Russian for ‘pencil’). In an

appropriately bilingual pun, the Welsh word for coal, ‘glo’, with which the poem begins, 22 Patrick McGuinness, The Canals of Mars (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), 23.

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translates into the ‘afterglow’ of a defunct industry in its final image: ‘burned to ash / what

once was thunder for the eyes.’23 Indeed, ‘glo’ embraces its own fundamental antithesis: it is

at once ‘dark as the place it came from’ and imagined ‘blazing underground’, a source of fire,

heat and light. In interview, McGuinness glosses the poem by noting that it explores an ‘idea

that is very important to me: things changing form and dissipating but never disappearing.’24

So, whilst ‘Glo’ might be regarded as elegizing the Welsh industrial past – in a manner akin

to Owen Sheers’s ‘The Steelworks’ and ‘History’25 – it is more persuasively read as a poem

about change and the ever-present potential for change, which affects everything from

economies and identities to language itself. In this sense, it seems a poem keenly attuned to

Wales’s post-devolutionary moment, bringing the present and the past into oblique

conjunction and placing local or national concerns in wider European contexts.

A similarly striking instance of transnational poetics can be found in the poetry of Zoë

Skoulding, who shares something of McGuinness’s cosmopolitan, European sensibility. What

is distinctive about Skoulding’s geographical imagination is the way in which she

foregrounds the mutual entanglement of different kinds of places and spaces, conflating the

rural and coastal landscapes of Wales (where she has been resident since 1991) with the

actual or imagined cityscapes of continental Europe. For instance, in ‘Preselis with Brussels

Street Map’ she creates a kind of psychogeographical double exposure by describing a walk

on a Pembrokeshire mountain-side whilst imaginatively navigating the cityscape of Europe’s

civic capital:

Up Europalaan under blue

reach of sky bare feet in spongy moss23 McGuinness, The Canals of Mars, 23.

24 Chris Miller, ‘Choosing Who One Is: Patrick McGuinness Talks to Chris Miller’, PN

Review 31/5 (2005), 69–72: 70.

25 Owen Sheers, Skirrid Hill (Bridgend: Seren, 2005), 26, 35.

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I need a map to tell me where I’m

not along the avenue de Stalingrad

squeal of a meadow pipit

skimming

over rue de l’Empereur

tread softly on the streets the sheep trails

between bird call and bleat echo

a street folds across two languages here and there26

These lines produce a distinctive form of socio-spatial dissonance, not only because of the

way in which they shift restlessly between urban and rural landscapes, but also through their

jarring combinations of different sensory perceptions and sign systems. The Brussels street

names (‘Europalaan’, ‘avenue de Stalingrad’, ‘rue de l’Empereur’, ‘Kolonienstraat’, ‘rue de

la Loi’) that the speaker reads from her map are redolent of military conquests or

metropolitan power, linking the city symbolically with the geopolitical frontiers of empire.

By contrast, the flickering impressions of intimate sensory experience that she reports at

intervals, feeling moss with her bare feet and listening to the sounds of rural wildlife, return

the reader to the relatively lush affective environment of the Preseli Hills. Busy urban streets

merge with remote sheep trails, and the map itself fails to offer any clear coordinates, folding

together the bilingual cultures of Wales and Belgium in an extended moment of spatial

simultaneity ‘here and there’. In the final lines of the poem, map and territory appear to

coalesce and become identical, in a Borgesian elision of the borders between reality and

representation. Yet it is her supple attunement to the manifold relations betwixt and between

places, their dynamic co-implication, that is characteristic of Skoulding’s poetry. In a 2004

interview, she remarks: 26 Zoë Skoulding, Remains of a Future City (Bridgend: Seren, 2008), 50.

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Even while you’re in one location, you are simultaneously linked to many others. For

me, this is a more interesting way of thinking about Wales and it gets beyond the idea

of there being an essential Wales and who it belongs to and who’s allowed to write

about it.27

As these comments indicate, Skoulding’s transnational poetic is both a means of

circumventing essentialist conceptions of identity and a method for depicting the intrinsically

multiple correspondences that lived experiences of place afford in a fully globalized world.

That McGuinness and Skoulding should both discover creative potential in hitherto

underexplored parallels between Wales and Belgium is intriguing, but perhaps no more than

fortuitous. More significant is their shared interest in the relations and connections between

different places and cultures, attending simultaneously to local or national conditions and the

kinds of ‘globe-traversing influences’ that Ramazani regards as fundamental to modern and

contemporary poetry.28 Both are poets of transit and travel, writing poems in which journeys

on foot and by train facilitate experiences of discovery and encounter; and both frequently

explore liminal spaces or borderlands of various kinds. For instance, in ‘Kleinbettingen’,

from his sequence ‘Blue Guide’, McGuinness describes a border crossing in terms that equate

spatial transitions with both linguistic translation and economic exchange: ‘A few kilometres

across the border, // the change in language comes like a switch in current, / a switch in

currency.’29 And in ‘The New Bridge’, Skoulding’s speaker recognizes that ‘the lines of the

landscape / run through me to somewhere else’.30 Co-ordinating between places, languages,

cultures and identities, Skoulding’s and McGuinness’s poems evince an imaginative 27 Fiona Owen, ‘A City of Words: Zoë Skoulding interviewed by Fiona Owen’, Planet 166

(2004), 57–62: 61.

28 Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, 23.

29 Patrick McGuinness, Jilted City (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010), 36.

30 Skoulding, Remains of a Future City, 14.

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commitment to Wales that is only one part of a more expansive and self-consciously

cosmopolitan aesthetic sensibility. In this regard, they are representative of a wider tendency

in contemporary poetry from Wales. Of course, transnational horizons also feature in the

work of more senior poets such as Robert Minhinnick, but, as Matthew Jarvis argues, ‘the

matter of Wales’ occupies a more radically decentred position in the work of younger poets,

as ‘just one element in a strikingly various palette of ideas’.31 After devolution, Wales

remains an important point of reference and orientation for poets who situate themselves

within a context of transnational flows, but is no longer the centre of its own universe.

Northern Ireland occupies a similarly decentred position in the work of younger poets,

typically serving as a point of departure for exploring other concerns, or as one place among

others. Indeed, Elmer Kennedy-Andrews argues that in contemporary poetry from Northern

Ireland ‘“home” is produced out of the encounter with other places, languages and histories,

in the process of which the opposition between home and away, self and other, rootedness

and itineracy, is inevitably revised.’32 This kind of transnational production of ‘home’ is

dramatized explicitly in Sinéad Morrissey’s poem ‘In Belfast’, where her speaker ironically

reappraises her home city from a perspective informed by travel and migrant experience.

Initially, Belfast is defined in terms of its stolid materiality and historical freight:

Here the seagulls stay in off the Lough all day.

Victoria Regina steering the ship of the City Hall

in this the first and last of her intense provinces,

31 Matthew Jarvis, ‘Repositioning Wales: Poetry after the Second Flowering’, in Daniel G.

Williams, ed., Slanderous Tongues: Essays on Welsh Poetry in English 1970–2005

(Bridgend: Seren, 2010), 21–59: 52.

32 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968–2008

(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 18.

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a ballast of copper and gravitas.33

Ponderous, Victorian, provincial: Belfast’s civic architecture and symbolic centre seem

leaden and uninspiring, except that the conceit of the city-as-ship introduces an unexpected

mobility into the urban landscape, recalling Belfast’s maritime histories as a port city, a place

of departures and returns. Indeed, throughout the poem, flux and stasis, present and past, land

and sea are dialectically interrelated, making Belfast itself a meeting place of contraries. In

Part II, the speaker announces her return ‘after ten years’ living elsewhere, weighing the

‘reality’ of her home city against ‘the twenty other corners I have slept in’. Although she

remains keenly aware of ‘history’s dent and fracture // splitting the atmosphere’, even in the

context of peace, ‘In Belfast’ concludes by affirming a deliberately provisional and

ambivalent mode of belonging:

This city weaves itself so intimately

it is hard to see, despite the tenacity of the river

and the iron sky; and in its downpour and its vapour I am

as much at home here as I will ever be.34

In contrast to the poem’s opening images, these lines dissolve Belfast’s bluff solidity in

metaphors that grant it both the intricacy of a woven textile and the vaporous insubstantiality

of the Irish rain. So, whilst the returned exile proclaims herself, however equivocally, ‘at

home’, the place she claims is itself rendered unstable, inscrutable, liable to sudden

displacements. Belonging is implicitly conceived as both partial and contingent, subject to

historical forces that are beyond the control of the individual.

Another contemporary poet who responds to the signs of change in post-Agreement

Belfast, and her own changing relationship to her ‘home’ city, is Leontia Flynn. In ‘Belfast’,

she opens an intertextual dialogue with Louis MacNeice’s 1931 poem of the same title, which 33 Sinéad Morrissey, Between Here and There (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 13.

34 Morrissey, Between Here and There, 13.

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depicts the city as a philistine bastion of industry, commercialism and latent violence.35

Writing more than seven decades after MacNeice and with a keen awareness that Belfast’s

received image is increasingly at odds with its contemporary reality, Flynn offers a wry

appraisal of the city’s recent transformations:

The sky is a washed-out theatre backcloth

behind new facades on old baths and gasworks;

downtown, under the green sails of their scaffolding,

a dozen buildings’ tops steer over the skyline.

Belfast is finished and Belfast is under construction.

What was mixed grills and whiskeys (cultureless, graceless, leisureless)

is now concerts and walking tours (Friendly! Dynamic! Various!).36

Flynn’s playful irony is evident from the outset as she presents Belfast as a stage for the

performance of its latest identity which, it is implied, may be little more than a ‘new façade’,

behind which its industrial substructure (‘old baths and gasworks’) remains essentially

unchanged. Like Morrissey, Flynn employs the conceit of the city-as-ship, recalling Belfast’s

shipbuilding past, via the ‘green sails’ that swathe new buildings, which ‘steer’ their way

over a changed and changing skyline. Here, then, is another striking image of the city-in-

process, manifesting an unsettling but vital mobility as a result of capital investment and

redevelopment projects. And yet, in the poem’s second stanza Belfast seems hardly to exist in

the present, instead belonging to the past and the future simultaneously: ‘Belfast is finished’

and ‘Belfast is under construction’. In transition between its former and future incarnations,

as provincial backwater and cosmopolitan hub respectively, Belfast is more an object of

discourse than a physical place with a real location. Flynn’s parentheses collect (and hold at 35 Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. E. R. Dodds (London: Faber, 1979), 17.

36 Leontia Flynn, Drives (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), 2.

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an ironic distance) the adjectives characteristic of two very different, but equally inadequate,

discursive constructions of ‘Belfast’. The poem locates itself somewhere between these

sharply contrasting versions of the city but seems unwilling or unable to define the new

Belfast in its own terms. Noting this reluctance, Miriam Gamble aptly describes Flynn’s

poetry as manifesting an ‘aesthetics of transition’, one linked to ‘the point at which Northern

Ireland teeters on the brink of becoming one thing rather than another’.37 In ‘Belfast’,

everything remains provisional and uncertain, including the poet’s own judgement on the

city-under-construction. However, even this rather fashionable intellectual stance is

knowingly undermined in the poem’s final lines, which depict men gathering in ‘the city’s

handful of bars’ to talk ‘of Walter Benjamin, and about “Grand Narratives” / which they

always seek to “fracture” and “interrogate”.’38

Like McGuinness and Skoulding, Morrissey and Flynn are poets for whom travel,

transit and various (imaginative or actual) elsewheres are important. In ‘China’, for instance,

Morrissey writes: ‘There is a country which does not exist and which must be shown’; and

Flynn depicts herself ‘saddl[ing] a rucksack, / feeling its weight on [her] back’, only to admit

that ‘the furthest distances I’ve travelled / have been those between people.’39 However,

whereas McGuinness and Skoulding both emphasize the historical and geographical

connections between Wales and other places, Morrissey and Flynn tend to focus upon

Northern Ireland’s transformation from within, as a result of Belfast’s penetration by the

logic of global capitalism. On the one hand, this process results in experiences of

defamiliarization that seem creatively fertile and contribute to a certain feeling of political

optimism. Thus, in ‘Tourism’, Morrissey’s speaker importunes European visitors to Belfast 37 Gamble, ‘“A potted peace / lily”?’, 672, 678.

38 Flynn, Drives, 2.

39 Sinéad Morrissey, The State of the Prisons (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), 22; Leontia

Flynn, These Days (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 47, 48.

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directly: ‘infect us with your radical ideas’; ‘bring us new symbols, / a new national flag, a

xylophone. Stay.’40 On the other hand, however, both poets maintain a wary scepticism about

the consequences of Belfast’s reconstruction, noting its touristic commodification and

submission to the bland homogeneity dictated by market forces. ‘A tourist pamphlet contains

an artist’s impression // of arcades, mock-colonnades, church-spires and tapas bars’, remarks

Flynn, before pointedly quoting MacNeice: ‘are these harsh attempts at buyable beauty?’41 It

is this very equivocality – whereby globalization is at once the best and the worst thing that

could possibly happen – that is distinctive in the transnational poetics of younger poets from

Northern Ireland.

Memory, History, Language

The development of a transnational poetics is perhaps the most clearly defined and widely

commented-upon feature of contemporary poetry in Northern Ireland and Wales, and the

most obvious point of comparison. However, there remains the question of how far such

poetry engages critically, or the extent to which it is merely complicit with the cultural logic

of late capitalist globalization. This is an issue broached by Jasmine Donahaye, who argues

that the ‘liberal internationalism’ that has become prevalent in recent Welsh poetry, and also

in much poetry criticism, ‘on occasion lends itself to double standards, to cultural co-option,

and perhaps to cultural colonialism.’42 Donahaye’s main target is the poetry of Pascale Petit,

which Donahaye accuses of cynically appropriating the rituals and mythology of an

Amazonian culture, the Yanomami, for the purposes of self-expression. Yet, the burden of

her larger argument is a thoroughgoing rejection of ‘postmodern uncertainty’ in favour of a 40 Morrissey, Between Here and There, 14.

41 Flynn, Drives, 2.

42 Jasmine Donahaye, ‘Identification, Rejection and Cultural Co-option in Welsh Poetry in

English’, in Williams, ed., Slanderous Tongues, 226–46: 235, 236.

18

‘poetry of engagement and affiliation – elective or intrinsic – with the local and the

particular’.43 Although Donahaye’s call for a return to roots seems an overly simplistic,

perhaps even reactionary response to the dynamics of globalization, her suspicion of the

politics and poetics of liberal internationalism is salutary. Consequently, I want to follow her

lead in identifying a nascent counter-current in the work of some younger poets from Wales

and Northern Ireland, one that productively complicates the kinds of transnational poetics I

have described above. However, where Donahaye places her faith in new forms of rooted

localism, the counter-current that I want to describe is most clearly evident as a shared

concern with the politics of memory in a historical period marked by various forms of

forgetting. In the work of poets from Northern Ireland it manifests itself through the use of

complex or distorted temporalities, which contest the elision of history in the Peace Process’s

dominant narrative of socio-economic ‘progress’. In recent poetry from Wales, by contrast,

this preoccupation with memory draws attention to the ways in which threats to Wales’s

Welsh-speaking communities continue to be marginalized, ignored, or overlooked. In both

Wales and Northern Ireland, then, the work of younger poets suggests that remembering is an

urgent ethical and political responsibility after devolution.

Issues relating to memory, commemoration and forgetting continue to be sources of

deep contention in Northern Ireland. Indeed, Graham Dawson remarks that ‘In the Irish peace

process after the Good Friday Agreement, the terrain of the past has remained a battlefield.’44

Not only what to remember, but how to remember are potentially divisive questions,

receiving conflicting answers from unionists, nationalists, socialists, feminists and others.

However, Colin Graham warns that the greater danger may lie in ‘constructing a political

process which forgets rather than remembers, which detaches itself for survival’, because 43 Donahaye, ‘Identification, Rejection and Cultural Co-option’, 244, 245.

44 Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma, and the Irish Troubles

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 84.

19

such forgetting risks miring Northern Irish society in Freudian ‘patterns of repression and

recurrence’.45 For Graham, the problem with the political culture of the peace process is that

it encourages a form of amnesiac presentism which fails to address the bases of conflict and

disunity in the province. This impulse to forget rather than remember is further compounded

by the rhetoric of ‘normalization’ that predominates in official discourse on post-Agreement

Northern Ireland. The now familiar narrative is one of integration with, or accession to the

global capitalist economy, and an associated experience of ‘modernization’ that marks a clear

separation between the peaceful, prosperous present and a violent past that is best forgotten.

For Aaron Kelly, however, the recent redevelopment of Belfast and the city’s new ethos of

entrepreneurialism do not constitute ‘a new ethical dispensation’ but rather attest to a more

equivocal ‘reconciliation with the dynamics of a world system and the postmodern, an

ideology whose only compass is the flow of capital around the globe.’46 Importantly, the

temporal logic of this ‘economic reconciliation’ ensures that history is preserved ‘only as

archival curio, cultural treasure or commodified and reified remnant.’47 This is a process that

is especially evident in the branding of the Titanic Quarter and the recent opening of the

Titanic Belfast visitor centre on Queen’s Island, the heart of Belfast’s now-defunct

shipbuilding industry and the ‘birthplace’ in 1912 of the most famous ship ever to sink.48 In

such circumstances, where history is reconfigured as heritage and touristic spectacle, the

recourse to questions of memory and recollection on the part of Northern Irish poets is not 45 Colin Graham, ‘“Let’s Get Killed”: Culture and Peace in Northern Ireland’, in Wanda

Balzano, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan, eds, Irish Postmodernisms and Popular

Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 171–83: 180.

46 Aaron Kelly, ‘Geopolitical Eclipse’, Third Text 19/5 (2005), 545–53: 547.

47 Kelly, ‘Geopolitical Eclipse’, 553, 550.

48 See, respectively, Titanic Quarter <http://www.titanic-quarter.com/> accessed 16 July 2015

and Titanic Belfast <http://www.titanicbelfast.com/> accessed 16 July 2015.

20

simply an instance of what Edna Longley calls ‘Irish mnemophilia’.49 Rather, memory is

conceived in ethical as well as political terms, as an exigent and necessary mode of critique.

Perhaps the most striking example of this nascent tendency in contemporary poetry

from Northern Ireland is Alan Gillis’s ‘Progress’, from his debut collection, Somebody,

Somewhere (2004). Gillis is a poet who is particularly attuned to the social and ecological

damage wrought by consumer capitalism, and the compounding of inequalities in a globally

connected world. He is also adept at catching the topsy-turvy logic that seems to predominate

in Northern Ireland’s new political culture, casting a sceptical eye over the changes that have

occurred during the peace process. ‘Progress’ both satirizes the empty rhetoric of socio-

economic development and laments the irreversible effects of time and past events:

They say that for years Belfast was backwards

and it’s great now to see some progress.

So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes

from the earth. I guess that ambulances

will leave the dying back amidst the rubble

to be explosively healed.50

Like Kurt Vonnegut’s account of the bombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969),

Gillis’s poem runs history ‘backwards’ in an attempt to defamiliarize it and thereby grasp its

internal logic. By imaginatively rewinding representative events from the Troubles, Gillis

powerfully illustrates the contradictions and essential hollowness of all talk of ‘progress’, for

whatever progress might ultimately mean for Northern Irish society it cannot undo what has

been done. Adopting a disarmingly colloquial mode of address, the poem refutes teleological 49 Edna Longley, ‘Northern Ireland: Commemoration, Elegy, Forgetting’, in Ian McBride, ed.,

History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),

223–53: 238.

50 Alan Gillis, Somebody, Somewhere (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2004), 55.

21

models of history, insisting upon the lingering consequences of the past in the present even as

it desires to turn back the clock or discover some impossible form of ‘explosive’ healing.

Through the poem’s penultimate image of ‘one hundred thousand particles of glass’ that

gradually coalesce ‘into the clarity of a window’, it also literalizes the theme of re-

membering, of piecing together the shattered fragments of the past as a way of making sense

in and of the present. And yet, the poem’s pervasive irony also extends to the act of

remembering itself, which, it is implied, is unlikely to result in simple ‘clarity’, for some

things simply cannot be put back together or restored to their original states. In Gillis’s poem,

then, memory is at once an ethical responsibility and a necessarily fallible way of engaging

with the explosive past.

The impulse to remember and commemorate those who died during the Troubles also

informs Colette Bryce’s ‘1981’, from her 2005 collection The Full Indian Rope Trick.

However, Bryce’s technique involves a kind of documentary reconstruction of one highly

charged moment from the past that contrasts with Gillis’s more self-reflexive and wide-

angled re-winding. 1981 was the year of the republican hunger strikes, in which ten men died

as part of a long-running campaign for ‘political status’ in Long Kesh/Maze prison. Although

their protest was technically unsuccessful, the hunger strikes were immensely important in

giving the Provisional IRA and their political wing, Sinn Féin, ‘a moral legitimacy in many

people’s minds it had never hitherto enjoyed’.51 Bryce, who grew up in Derry’s nationalist

Bogside area, recalls in interview the formative influence of this period:

My remembered experience was of Thatcherism, the Hunger Strikes, memorials,

protests and funerals. A lot of it was about remembering and grieving, some of it was

51 Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2002 (London:

HarperCollins, 2004), 326.

22

about seeking change. I’ll never forget the billboard clocking up the days of hunger

strikes, the black armbands, the collective anger.52

‘1981’ clearly draws upon this remembered experience but employs the present tense

throughout, creating an effect whereby the reader is immersed in a vividly recreated past that

appears to be happening now:

A makeshift notice in the square

says it with numbers, each day higher.

North of here, in a maze of cells,

a man cowers, says it with hunger,

skin, bone, wrought to a bare

statement. Waiting, there are others.53

In these lines, Bryce draws self-consciously upon the trope of ‘the body-as-text’ that figures

in many poetic responses to the hunger strikes, for the hunger-striker’s wasted frame is itself

a kind of poem, ‘wrought to a bare / statement’.54 Moreover, her variations upon the stock

phrase ‘say it with [flowers]’ foreground modes of non-verbal communication – ‘numbers’,

‘hunger’, ‘anger’, ‘stones’, ‘fire’ – calling attention to the limits of language as well as its

resources for reanimating the past. ‘1981’ has all the perverse force of an anachronism: in a

context of peace and power-sharing between nationalists and unionists (but also low-level

paramilitary violence), the poem remembers a pivotal and profoundly divisive moment from

the Troubles. In doing so, it implies that Northern Ireland cannot, and should not, be done

52 Collete Bryce in John Brown, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland

(Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Publishing, 2002), 313–14.

53 Colette Bryce, The Full Indian Rope Trick (London: Picador, 2005), 11.

54 Shane Alcobia-Murphy, ‘“Neurosis of Sand”: Authority, Memory, and the Hunger Strike’,

in Brearton and Gillis, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, 387–402: 389.

23

with reflecting on its troubled past; and that the events of 1981 still reverberate in the

collective unconscious of its divided communities.

This politicization of memory is perhaps less emphatic in post-devolution Wales,

although it is present in the work of two contemporary women poets, Gwyneth Lewis and

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, both of whom link acts of remembering to issues of land and

language. For instance, the title of Wynne-Rhydderch’s poem, ‘71,200 Megalitres’ refers to

the capacity of the Llyn Celyn reservoir in the Tryweryn Valley, created between 1960 and

1965 to supply water to the city of Liverpool and parts of the Wirral. The reservoir became a

focal point for Welsh nationalist politics during the period because its construction entailed

flooding the village of Capel Celyn, a small but symbolically significant Welsh-speaking

community.55 As Kirsti Bohata notes, such projects for reservoir construction can be regarded

as an index of Wales’s colonial domination, for they ‘brought little or no profit to Wales, but

sometimes demanded enormous sacrifices.’56 Wynne-Rhydderch’s poem was prompted by an

apology issued by the city of Liverpool in 2005 and is framed as a deliberate act of

mnemonic reconstruction.57 The complicating factor is that the poem’s speaker, like Wynne-

Rhydderch herself, was not yet born in 1965, when Capel Celyn was flooded. So the poem’s

vivid and moving account of the days and hours preceding the inundation – a symbolic

‘drowning’ of Welsh culture by alien powers – is refracted through her mother’s memories of

55 See Johnes, Wales since 1939, 212–16.

56 Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 83. For

the wider cultural, political and socio-economic contexts of reservoir construction in Wales,

see Andrew Webb, ‘Socio-ecological Regime Change: Anglophone Welsh Literary

Responses to Reservoir Construction’, International Journal of Welsh Writing in English 1

(2013), 19–44.

57 Jarvis, ‘Repositioning Wales’, 57, n. 101.

24

attending contemporaneous protests and the poet-speaker’s own research undertaken via the

internet:

A film on the net lasts

ten seconds of silence where

a postman stumbles up to

the neat gate of Ty’n y Rhos. A caption

says an old man opens

his front door for the last time.58

The delicately ironic framing of these lines seems to grant the moment of loss and

dispossession they describe its poignancy whilst also holding the quoted caption’s

sentimentality at arm’s length. Moreover, as the film’s ‘ten seconds of silence’ suggest,

Wynne-Rhydderch’s poem is also a reflection upon the inevitably fragmentary character of

all acts of remembering, however charged with ethical significance.

Nonetheless, the thousands of megalitres of water that the reservoir now contains

become a figure for the forgetting against which the poem mobilizes its empathic powers of

memory and imagination. Like Alan Gillis, Wynne-Rhydderch invites the reader to rewind

the course of history, to ‘drain away, // if you can, from your head, the opaque face / of the

lake’ and ‘think of // evictions, of watching your home engulfed.’59 She also self-consciously

borrows from the rhetoric of Welsh nationalist discourse when referring to a famous graffito

on a wall by the A487 near Llanrhystud in west Wales: ‘Still / the writing on the walls

calls: // Cofiwch Dryweryn.’60 The preposition ‘still’, accentuated by its placement on a line-

break, insists that there are good reasons for continuing to remember the flooding of the 58 Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, Not in These Shoes (London: Picador, 2008), 7.

59 Wynne-Rhydderch, Not in These Shoes, 6–7.

60 Wynne-Rhydderch, Not in These Shoes, 7.

25

Tryweryn Valley. For, whilst the Welsh language has enjoyed a modest resurgence in the

period since devolution, its decline throughout much of the twentieth century was precipitous

and its status as ‘a living, everyday language’ has ‘remained weak’.61 It therefore seems

significant that Wynne-Rhydderch should decide not to translate the injunction: ‘Cofiwch

Dryweryn’ (Remember Tryweryn). Her poem not only repeats this famous exhortation to

remember past injustices, and does so in the Welsh language; it also alludes self-consciously

to the ways in which memory becomes politicized, taking on a kind of material presence in

the Welsh landscape. In this way, ‘71,200 Megalitres’ reminds its readers not to forget about

the threats that the Welsh language faces in a historical context where devolution and

globalization converge.

Gwyneth Lewis similarly enjoins her readers to ‘[f]orget forgetting’ in the final poem

of her sequence ‘The Language Murderer’, which partly translates and partly re-works her

1999 Welsh-language detective story in verse, Y Llofrudd Iaith.62 In her ‘Preface’ to Keeping

Mum (2003), the collection in which ‘The Language Murderer’ appears, Lewis disputes the

claims of those ‘political optimists’ who, following devolution, ‘declared that the battle for

the language had been won’, adopting a perspective that is at once more pessimistic and more

interrogative: ‘If the [Welsh] language is dying it seems important to know who or what

killed it.’63 Over the course of the sequence a half-Welsh, half-Japanese detective investigates

the ‘death’ or ‘murder’ of the Mam iaith (mother tongue), incarnated as an old lady in a half-

derelict Welsh village. In the opening poem, he hears the bilingual poet-speaker’s guilt-

wracked confession: ‘I did it. I killed my mother tongue. / I shouldn’t have left her / there on

her own.’64 The implication is that the ‘mother tongue’ (Welsh) has died of neglect, her 61 Johnes, Wales since 1939, 431.

62 Gwyneth Lewis, Keeping Mum (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2003), 23.

63 Lewis, Keeping Mum, 9.

64 Lewis, Keeping Mum, 13.

26

faithless daughter having abandoned her for an English-language muse. However, several

other poems in the sequence complicate this over-neat explanation and point to more

complex cultural and socio-economic factors prevalent in post-devolution Wales, particularly

when they lament the inexorable decline of Welsh-speaking farming communities and their

distinctive way of life. In ‘Small Holding’, for instance, a hill farmer describes the lonely

isolation of his existence and ends with a direct challenge to the poet-speaker: ‘Ask about

killing the already dead / and the beast of prey inside the head.’65 In these lines, the realities

of physical and psychological decay are registered as a problem for poetic representation but

also as a feature of contemporary Welsh society that must not be forgotten or ignored.

Tellingly, in ‘Brainstorming’, Lewis’s poet-speaker declares: ‘I need to know / what survives

forgetting’.66 And in another poem, ‘What’s in a Name?’, she undertakes an act of

remembering that is also an attempt to recover and preserve a linguistic and cultural heritage

on the verge of being lost forever:

Today the wagtail finally forgot

that I once called it sigl-di-gwt.

[…]

Leian wen is not the same as ‘smew’

because it’s another point of view,

another bird. There’s been a cull:

gwylan’s gone and we’re left with ‘gull’

and blunter senses till that day

65 Lewis, Keeping Mum, 18.

66 Lewis, Keeping Mum, 23.

27

when ‘swallows’, like gwennol, might stay away.67

Paradoxically, these lines both remember the Welsh names of birds and lament their

forgetting, a process that leaves the (Welsh) collective subject with ‘blunter senses’ as a

result. Lewis clearly relishes the irony of recording little-known Welsh words and phrases in

a poem that is ostensibly ‘English’, discreetly encouraging her reader to adopt a bilingual

sensibility and discover other points of view. What becomes clear over the course of ‘The

Language Murderer’ is that Lewis regards post-devolution Welsh culture as beset by a

pervasive tendency towards amnesia, and conceives of poetry as means of registering what is

being forgotten and perhaps also of catalysing new modes of remembering.

Wales and Northern Ireland have experienced devolution near-simultaneously, but the

historical and political circumstances in which they have done so are different in a number of

important respects. In Wales, devolution opens a wholly unprecedented historical situation,

and the cultural response has tended to stress fresh opportunities and new beginnings. In

Northern Ireland, by contrast, the restoration of devolved government after a protracted

period of direct rule from Westminster is widely regarded as a sign of ‘normalization’, and is

closely connected with the ongoing peace process. Nonetheless, I have argued that two

broadly common themes can be found in the work of younger poets from Wales and Northern

Ireland writing after devolution. The first concerns the development of a transnational poetics

in which concepts such as ‘identity’, ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are thoroughly reconfigured by

the alienating displacements of globalization. However, whereas Patrick McGuinness and

Zoë Skoulding tend to foreground the spatio-temporal connections binding Wales to other

places, Sinéad Morrissey and Leontia Flynn typically depict the transformation of Northern

Ireland from within, as it is permeated by the logic of late capitalism. The second is

characterized by a preoccupation with the politics of memory in contexts that seem to

encourage a condition of cultural amnesia. For poets from Northern Ireland, such as Alan 67 Lewis, Keeping Mum, 14.

28

Gillis and Colette Bryce, remembering becomes a means of dissenting from the dominant

political narratives of ‘progress’ and insisting upon the lingering presence of the past in the

present. For Welsh poets such as Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch and Gwyneth Lewis, issues of

memory and forgetting are closely bound up with the fate of Wales’s threatened and

marginalized Welsh-speaking communities. Despite these differences, then, in contemporary

poetry from Wales and Northern Ireland remembering not to forget emerges as an urgent

ethical and political responsibility after devolution.