Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Editorial Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The Lie of the Land
- 2 Paradigms and Precursors: Rooted Men and Nomads (John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice)
- 3 John Montague: Global Regionalist?
- 4 Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon: Omphalos and Diaspora
- 5 Padraic Fiacc and James Simmons
- 6 Michael Longley's Ecopoetics
- 7 Derek Mahon: ‘An Exile and a Stranger’
- 8 Tom Paulin: Dwelling without Roots
- 9 Ciaran Carson: The New Urban Poetics
- 10 Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered Space
- 11 New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)
- Select Bibliography
- Index
11 - New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Editorial Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The Lie of the Land
- 2 Paradigms and Precursors: Rooted Men and Nomads (John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice)
- 3 John Montague: Global Regionalist?
- 4 Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon: Omphalos and Diaspora
- 5 Padraic Fiacc and James Simmons
- 6 Michael Longley's Ecopoetics
- 7 Derek Mahon: ‘An Exile and a Stranger’
- 8 Tom Paulin: Dwelling without Roots
- 9 Ciaran Carson: The New Urban Poetics
- 10 Medbh McGuckian: The Lyric of Gendered Space
- 11 New Voices (Peter McDonald, Sinead Morrissey, Alan Gillis and Leontia Flynn)
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The ‘Northern Renaissance’ – that journalistically touted efflorescence of creative talent and activity that corresponded more or less with the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969 – began with those poets born in the late 1920s and '30s who came to prominence in the early years of the Troubles (Montague, Heaney, Mahon, Longley). They were succeeded by a second generation born in the 1940s and 1950s who have also secured international reputations (Muldoon, Carson, McGuckian). Now we have a third wave, young poets born in the 1960s and '70s who grew up during the Troubles and who made their mark in the 1990s or early 2000s and are continuing to do so – Peter McDonald, Sinéad Morrissey, Alan Gillis, Leontia Flynn. While these new young poets may not represent anything as clear-cut as a definite break with the older generations, new directions and emphases may nevertheless be discerned in their work. Received identities and concepts of home continue to be interrogated as these new young poets seek out the fault-lines in familiar terrain, question the official maps, cross borders, break up consecrated ground, take roads less travelled by. Frequently, the desire to belong is in open conflict with the urge to flight. Attention is no longer focused on ‘one dear perpetual place’, but on multiple other places. Traversing internal, national and international frontiers, the younger poets are most at home occupying in-between places or inner spaces, zones between dream and reality, this world and the otherworld.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing HomePoetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968–2008, pp. 249 - 286Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008