For Irish women poets, past and present exist in thematic and aesthetic alignment, making their treatment of memory of enduring importance to readers. Since the process of remembrance reveals as much about present needs as it does about past events, its conceptualization in the work of women poets reflects contemporary critical debate, as well as issues around the formation of Irish poetic traditions. In this way, to remember is to engage with a process of cultural evolution, perhaps even more than with calculated political change: ‘Images of the past change or remain the same […] to the degree that they fit into a changing or stable culture, a process that calls our attention away from cynical manipulations to an analysis of culture sui generis’. This study of contemporary women poets explores the function of memory in their work, examining the impact that both individual and cultural memory has on their creative processes. Their handling of poetic temporalities is of fundamental importance in exploring, whether obliquely or directly, their place in the tradition. All these women acknowledge poetic precursors and their work engages with earlier poems – their own and the work of others – in ways that constitute acts of textual memory. In this sense the book also considers the broader temporal framework within which the poetry must be read, in both political and aesthetic terms. Literary memory prompts exploration of the relationship between poet and reader, as well as of the larger critical contexts that support and impede the production of creative work. This study is concerned with issues of tradition and innovation as well as with the negotiation of public and private roles for these poets.

From these binary states emerge questions of belonging and estrangement which continue to shape women's perceptions of their relationship to Ireland's culture and its languages. The generation of Irish women who began to publish in the 1960s were the first to attract a wide readership both in Ireland and abroad yet their work remains alert to marginal states, to the silences at the edge of tradition. In their poetry the relationship between self and other is frequently interrogated, highlighting not only the place of the poetic subject but the process by which subjectivity itself is expressed in language.