Upload
review-by-robert-brazeau
View
213
Download
1
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies
Irish Poetry after Joyce by Dillon JohnstonReview by: Robert BrazeauThe Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Jul. - Dec., 1999), pp. 530-532Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515292 .
Accessed: 16/06/2014 16:06
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and Canadian Association of Irish Studies are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 16:06:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
530 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
state of Irish criticism and "the undiscriminating tolerance of second-rate poetry," one knows what he means. To his lament Gerardine Meaney adds the lack of
"feminist critical and theoretical work in relation to Irish women." Meaney herself
writes here about myth in Irish women's poetry, and Clair Wills in turn focusing on McGuckian and Linda Revie on Ni Dhomhnaill. Yet these feminist essays are
regrettably among the less satisfying in the collection.
A minor but not unimportant note: a volume of this quality and price deserves more attentive proof-reading. It contains too many typographical and punctuation errors, the occasionally misplaced footnote numbering, and at least one error in fact.
John Montague did not grow up in "remote Fermanagh" (220) but in the rough field of Tyrone. How could one possible forget?
Brian John
McMaster University
Johnston, Dillon. Irish Poetry After Joyce. 2nd ed. New York: Syracuse UP, 1997.384 pp.
There should be something liberating about reviewing the second edition of
any book. If the role of the reviewer is to introduce the book, offer a commentary on its main arguments, and conclude with some remarks on the overall value of the
volume, then all of these tasks are made somewhat easier by the fact that the book itself has effectively proven its own worth within the discipline by meriting a second edition. However, it soon becomes evident that the reviewer is simply faced with a different set of problems, since the new edition invariably seeks to correct
shortcomings of the earlier edition, and the reviewer is, therefore, confronted with the task of commenting on how well or poorly the newer edition meets this implicit aim.
In the case of Dillon Johnston's Irish Poetry After Joyce, the preface and afterword added to the new edition attempt to steer what is commonly regarded as an important text in Irish studies in ways that the principal chapters of the work cannot accommodate. The preface will especially strike many readers as a poor fit, as it does not really introduce the book at all, but apologizes for what the volume fails to do. Specifically, Johnston draws attention to the lack of historical, political, and ideological context offered for the poets he discusses and to the absence of Irish
women poets in the original book. For many readers, myself included, the first of these shortcomings hardly warrants an apology since there is no shortage of very good books that contextualize contemporary Irish poetry against the political climate from which it emerges. In fact, Johnston's stated interest in tone as the
defining feature of contemporary Irish poetry, and his disinclination to read poetry as betraying a clear ideological agenda, does not render the book in any way less
This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 16:06:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews 531
important for the discipline. As well, it should not be assumed that Johnston's
interest in the formal features of Irish poetry betray New Critical assumptions about
autotelic works of art, as this book offers intricate and highly theoretical readings of the poets it considers. Yet, the preface to the new edition intimates that
contemporary Irish politics is the most salient lens through which to view Irish
poetry, even while the book itself suggests otherwise.
The latter self-criticism points to the more serious shortcoming of the volume, and Johnston's attempt to rectify it by discussing a number of Irish women poets in an afterword is awkward both because the limited space does not permit a
thoroughgoing analysis, and also because this chapter does not follow the same
method as the earlier ones, where the work of a younger Irish poet is discussed
against the work of an older poet. The benefit of this approach is that it offers a
sense of dialectical engagement between succeeding generations of Irish writers, with the concomitant assumption that a tradition is self-consciously unfolding itself in this poetics. By not presenting Irish women poets in dialogue with both the
tradition and their contemporaries, Johnston furthers the already pervasive view, criticized by Eavan Boland and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill among others, that Ireland's
female poets are still not regarded as an integral part of the Irish tradition. Short of a complete rewrite, there is, it seems, no satisfactory way for Johnston to undo the
critical and methodological assumptions inherited from the first edition of this
work.
Despite this shortcoming, it must be recognized that Johnston's book is easily one of the cornerstones of contemporary Irish criticism, and that it fully deserves
the influence it enjoys. If, as Edna Longley asserts in her polemical introduction to The Living Stream, it "has grown harder to discuss Irish literature without being drawn into arguments about culture and politics," then Johnston's book is an
especially important one, in that he takes up historical and aesthetic questions while
avoiding the pitched ideological debates that characterize much Irish literary criticism. As an example of the kind of hybrid sensibility found in Johnston's book, I would like to conclude this review by drawing attention to what I see as one of its most persuasive and insightful discussions: Johnston's reading of Derek Ma
hon's poetry.
Johnston begins his discussion of Mahon by asserting, as a number of other critics have, that the poet dispenses with "history" as it is conventionally understood in Irish politics and culture and opens the past to questions beyond those posed by
nationalist or unionist interpretive frameworks: "The history Mahon discards includes the Troubles in Ulster, but is larger and less defined than that ineluctable
homicidal process" (225). What makes Johnston's work on Mahon particularly interesting, however, is that he moves between the language and the thematics of this very difficult poetry with unmatched fluency. After a careful reading of
Mahon's interest in objects that become symbols through which to glimpse histori cal processes (a theme found in Mahon's foundational work "A Disused Shed in
This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 16:06:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
532 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
Co. Wexford" and other poems), Johnston offers the following summary of the
complex language, imagery, and ontology of Mahon's poetry:
At this point we might remind ourselves that Mahon is not a
pioneer in following Husserl's first directive to return to the
"things themselves." For example, this work has asserted that
Mahon's fellow Irishmen, Thomas Kinsella and Seamus Heaney,
employ a peculiar hinged image and a textured language, respec
tively, to restore the aseity of things. Mahon's method is distin
guishable from theirs, however, and from that of such poets as
Ted Hughes and Gary Snyder, because his wit and elaborate
rhetoric remind us of the observing speaker and of "the meta
physical disjuncrure between 'subject' and 'object.'" (231)
Here we have an illuminating example of how Johnston's emphasis on tone leads him to larger theoretical considerations regarding the divergent trajectories of a
number of different poetics. As well, it should be noted that Johnston's remarks are as insightful and as critically current now as they were in the mid-1980s. In fact, Johnston's discussion of Mahon's poetry alone makes this book an important one
for students of Irish writing. This observation is in no way meant to disparage the other very good chapters of this book, but only to point out that in his discussion of Mahon, Johnston achieves a compelling and original balance between attention to what we might call purely aesthetic or formal concerns, and the overarching theoretical orientation of the poetry being considered.
Robert Brazeau
University of Alberta
Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle. Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets. New York: Syracuse UP, 1996. xxvii + 224 pp.
Having worked in the area for many years, I always get a thrill of excitement when I see a publication dealing with some aspect of contemporary Irish women's
writing. Sometimes that initial interest rums to disappointment with the realization that the work is not quite new, but is actually a re-working of the 'best of or a critical engagement with those writers already widely published, and I must confess that for a short time, Patricia Boyle Haberstroh's Women Creating Women seemed to fit the latter category. Dealing principally with the work of Eithne Strong, Eavan
Boland, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, at first glance the book seems to be a further confirmation that these five women poets, whose literary reputations are well established both inside and outside Ireland, are the only ones worthy of being heard/about yet again. Viewed at closer range,
This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 16:06:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions