Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis

Description

Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis addresses what is arguably the most crucial issue of human history through the lens of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Irish poetry. The poets that it surveys range from familiar presences in the contemporary Irish literary canon―Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paula Meehan, Moya Cannon―to lesser known figures, such as the experimental poet Maurice Scully, contemporary poets Stephen Sexton and Sean Hewitt, and the Irish language poets Simon Ó Faoláin, Bríd Ní Mhóráin and Máire Dinny Wren. Adopting a variety of ecotheoretical approaches, the essays gathered here address several interrelated themes crucial to the climate crisis: the way in which the scalar scope of climate change interweaves local and global, distant past and imminent future, nature and culture; the critical importance of acknowledging the complex kinship of the human and nonhuman; the necessity of warning against the devastating environmental losses to come while mourning those that already occurred. Ultimately, by envisioning new ways of existing on an earth that humans no longer dominate, this book engages in what the philosopher Jonathan Lear refers to as a process of ‘radical anticipation.’ Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Introduction Chapter 1 Reading Heaney’s Bog Poems in the Anthropocene Chapter 2 Songs in Stone: Moya Cannon and Ecomusicology Chapter 3 ‘Balanced between Cliff and Flowers’: The Enduring Earth Step in Moya Cannon’s ‘Word Pools’ Chapter 4 Doing the Human Differently: Rabbits and Hares in Contemporary Irish Poetry Chapter 5 ‘The Struck Lyre Ripples as a Stricken Voice’: The Poetry of Derek Mahon from Landscape to Ecology Chapter 6 Heaney’s Proffer: Tollund Man, Catastrophic Climate Change, and the Responsibility to Mourn Chapter 7 A Tangle of Bright Fragments: Vegetal Life in Maurice Scully’s Humming Chapter 8 ‘When Species Meet’: Scale and Form in the Poetry of Ciaran Berry and Moya Cannon Chapter 9 The Corncrake, the Climate Crisis, and Irish-Language Poetry Chapter 10 ‘A Stain from the Sky Is Descending’: The Poetics of Climate Change in Irish Poetry Index