Coda: Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney

Author(s):  
Eric Falci
Keyword(s):  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 182-207
Author(s):  
Catriona Clutterbuck

This essay explores fabric, clothing and textile motifs in Irish poetry concerned with the relationship between this life and the afterlife. It intersplices readings of poems by W.B.Yeats, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney and Paula Meehan which acknowledge the fact that doubleness of presence and absence is integral to all human lives, and which are alert to the fact that this same duality is already embedded in man’s engagement with cloth. The essay argues that Irish poetry attends to the dense physicality, immediacy and depth texture of textile materials, as a key image complex allowing negotiation of significant loss, including the task of reconstructing life’s meaning following bereavement. Therefore, the essay explores how a concern with texture, processing, feeling and mood is facilitated in a special way through the haptic power of fabric symbolism in Irish elegiac poetry. It proposes that by mediating the theme of afterlife as a space which allows us to imagine multiple alternative lives in the here-and-now, fabric imagery as deployed by Irish poets challenges us to accept both our losses in this world and our on-going potential for life-renewal.


Author(s):  
Michael O’Toole

In this article I examine aspects of the relationship between mothers and sons from an attachment perspective in an Irish context. Through the works of Irish writers such as Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, and Colm Tóibín, I focus on particular aspects of this relationship, which fails to support the developmental processes of separation and individuation in the many men who come to me for psychotherapy. I illustrate key points concerning this attachment dynamic through the use of clinical examples of my work with two men from my practice. While acknowledging that many other cultural factors play a significant role in the emotional development of children, integrating the work of our poets, novelists, and scholars with an attachment perspective


Author(s):  
Nicholas Allen

The islands of Ireland are shaped by their relationships with land and sea. This book is a study of the various and changing ways in which literature has drawn the coast in lines that shape the contours of cultural experience. The literary and historical study of the sea has swelled in the last decade, as has an interest in the littoral and the archipelagic. Beginning with the early works of William Butler Yeats, this book travels through the diverse hydroscapes of Irish literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, framing writers and artists from James Joyce to Anne Enright in liquid, and maritime contexts. In doing so it suggests new planetary frames through which to read literature’s relationships with the sea and its margins. With readings of contemporary writers, including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Kevin Barry, Seamus Heaney, Sinead Morrissey, and John Banville, and literary magazines, including The Bell, Atlantis, and Archipelago, this book is the first sustained study of Irish coastal literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942199605
Author(s):  
Matthew Whittle

Decolonization is presented in dominant accounts as an orderly transition and not the culmination of anticolonial resistance movements. This in turn contributes to what Paul Gilroy terms an endemic “post-imperial melancholia” across contemporary European nations and the removal of empire and its demise from understandings of European history. Drawing on Bill Schwarz’s reconceptualization of a Fanonian commitment to disorder, this article focuses on Britain’s history of colonialism and post-imperial immigration and argues for the mapping of a disorderly aesthetics in works by V. S. Naipaul, Bernardine Evaristo, and Eavan Boland. The three formal features of non-linearity, polyvocality, and environmental imagery enable these writers to bear witness to the complex histories of empire, transatlantic slavery, decolonization, and immigration from the colonial “margins”. These “aesthetics of disorder” counter a dominant narrative of decolonial order and challenge conceptions of British exceptionalism that were reinforced at the moment of imperial decline.


2000 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-180
Author(s):  
Irene Gilsenan Nordin
Keyword(s):  

2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (6) ◽  
pp. 73-73
Author(s):  
Fred Dings
Keyword(s):  

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