Irish literature

The death of Gabrielle Carey earlier this year was a cruel loss for the Australian literary world, especially its Joyce community. I first met Gabrielle shortly after moving to Sydney from London in 2010. She invited me to her annual Bloomsday celebration, which took place in a Glebe pub. I was new in town and delighted to join the readings and revelry. I suspected, rightly, that my Dublin accent would glean me some credibility, if nothing else did.

For W.B. Yeats, Ireland was the place and source of poetry, even when he was living in Oxford or London. It was also a mythical figure, enabling of ardour and of song, the desirable ‘Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan’; and it became a delicately evocative crepuscule, mocked by Brendan Kennelly when he opens a poem with ‘Now in the Celtic twilight decrepit whores / Prowl warily along the Grand Canal’. The very phrase ‘Irish poetry’ sounds like a pleonasm. For that moist country has long seemed synonymous with verse and folksong: just as Holland is synonymous with painting and France with elegant thought. Further, when I think of contemporary poets in our widespread language, Seamus Heaney must surely be the dominant world figure and Paul Muldoon the most verbally dazzling, even if our Les is close to Paul in this caper.