Lucy Collins

‘Toward a Brink’: The Poetry of Kathleen Jamie and Environmental Crisis

Kathleen Jamie’s significance as a writer has, to a large degree, been predicated on the fortunate coincidence of the precision and clarity of her art and her engagement with important issues of identity in Britain today. A Scottish poet at a time when debates on the role of Scotland are to the fore in British culture, she has raised the awareness of readers not through polemics but with a minutely detailed approach to language and form. Her writings on ecological themes reveal a similar attention to acts of observation and representation, asking questions about the relationship between the interconnectedness of the natural world and the individuality that is necessary for creative work.

Changing Places: The Imperfect City in Contemporary Irish Poetry

The extraordinary rise of Ireland’s economy during the Celtic Tiger years, and its no less spectacular crash in the autumn of 2008, is by now a familiar story. The last 20 years have resulted in a radical change in Ireland’s social and cultural fabric that is reflected in its writing, art and built environment. Its capital, Dublin, has been the site of particular shifts in fortune during these years, and its evolution, both as a built space and a literary inspiration, is the focus of this essay. Today’s city is judged against its past, and its poetic representation often dwells on its imperfect state, whether as medieval settlement or twenty-first-century consumer playground. Many poets have seen continuities of past and present as essential to an understanding of the contemporary city, and their work interprets the recessionary space as part of a continuum—an ebb and flow of singular and collective meanings.

An etiology of metaphors: toxic discourse and poetic form in Andrea Brady’s Wildfire

ABSTRACT Andrea Brady’s long poem Wildfire, begun in response to the second invasion of Iraq, explores the impact of the incendiary on living environments. In formally challenging ways, the poem expresses the reach of the military–industrial complex and its varied mediation in contemporary culture. Combining print and digital modes, Wildfire incorporates a vast range of resources and offers a long historical view on the ethics of warfare. Fundamental to this exploration are questions of scale, and how our distance from the effects of war – both in space and time – limits our understanding of its environmental impact. This essay argues that poetic experimentation is fundamentally a political act, one that uses the resources of language to create new readings of environmental threat for the twenty-first century.

Urban and rural landscapes in modern Ireland: language, literature and culture, by Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena

puts it, ‘the environmental movement’s exploitation of the image of Native Americans as uber-environmentalists’ (128). The subsequent discussion of White Noise, another frequently studied text, reveals how DeLillo harnesses nostalgia for a broader social critique and the supposed loss of everything from nature to authenticity, from childhood to unmediated experiences. This kind of postnatural nostalgia – after ‘the end of nature’ declared by Bill McKibben in 1989 – draws on familiar nature narratives such as wilderness and pastoral but ‘compounds them, juxtaposing them alongside new circumstances and new ways of making meaning’ (168). Unfortunately, the sixth and final chapter of Reclaiming Nostalgia, on Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, is the least satisfying. Although Ladino again makes a strong argument for the connection between nostalgia and race, it seems to lack the force of the earlier chapters. Nonetheless, the chapter illuminates yet another incarnation of nostalgia, namely the longing for (racial) hybridity that challenges global American capitalism. Although the subtitle suggests that the book is just about ‘longing for nature in American literature’, Reclaiming Nostalgia ranges far beyond that. Through ingenious use of so-called ‘interchapters’ Ladino places nostalgia in a broader cultural context that includes Ansel Adams’ photo-series Born Free and Equal on Japanese–Americans interred during World War II, to a critique of the TV show Survivor. A good example of one of these interchapters is Ladino’s reading of Iron Eyes Cody, the iconic ‘Crying Indian’ from the 1971 and 1998 PSA campaigns. While in the 1970s this figure – of, as it later turned out, Italian descent –, merely referred back to the supposed environmentalism of Native Americans, a double nostalgia was at work in his 1990s reincarnation. By 1998, as Ladino shows, the image of Iron Eyes Cody not only signalled a longing for a greener past, but also gestured back to the birth of mainstream environmentalism in the 1970s. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, then, Ladino makes a convincing case for a renewed exploration of nostalgia. Although deemed archaic by many ecocritics and environmentalists, Ladino shows that particularly old narratives and genres – nostalgia, but also pastoral and wilderness – hold great power for a redefined engagement with the non-human natural world. The book consequently provides an inspiring example in demonstrating not only the potential of literature to redefine and reshape images of nature, but also, as Ladino concludes, that literary texts can redefine theory and show us that we ‘can be nostalgic and celebratory, cautious and forward-looking, sincere and humorous, at the same time’ (186–87). Reclaiming Nostalgia does an admirable job at showing just that.

On becoming a fish

whilst also being suggestive and often multiple in meaning – words such as ‘leaves’, for instance, often resonate with both meanings, thus referencing both human and non-human spheres simultaneously. Occasionally, a rather more pompous and poetic tone creeps in, which is less successful – see, for instance, the piece ‘Decidua’with its latinate language and familiar references to seasonality and ‘falling off’. There is also a vein of surreality and humour here, which contributes to the pleasure we take in the work. The final section of this volume looks forward to Burnett’s ambitious current project on Icarus, Through the Weather Glass. Readers of Green Letters should look out for this forthcoming book. Here, she engages in further experimentation within poetry and genres beyond, including fiction and travel writing, and explores hubris as a central conceit for our relationship with our world, particularly in relation to climate change.

Figures of Infinity: Two Poems by Maurice Craig

Maurice James Craig (1919–2011) is widely known as an architectural historian and biographer: those encountering his writing today may not even be aware that he was a poet of repute during his twenties, one expected to become a major figure on the Irish poetry scene. His poetry and reviews appeared regularly in both British and Irish literary periodicals in the nineteen forties, yet he published just one full-length collection, Some Way for Reason, with Heinemann in London in 1948. In 2011 Liberties Press published a new selection of Craigs poetry; this included poems from the Heinemann volume together with work that had previously appeared in journals or anthologies only. Since that publication, other previously uncollected poems have come to light, two of which are printed here. These poems first appeared, along with work by John Hewitt and W.R. Rodgers among others, in a pamphlet printed in Belfast in 1942 – 15 Poems in Aid of the Russian Red Cross. In my introduction to these poems I examine this pub...

History and politics

If Hegels famous definition, Weltseele zu Pfer? de, can be applied without fear of hyperbole to a historical figure, it can surely be applied to Alexander the Great. True, the German philoso? pher coined this epithet for Napoleon, whom he had glimpsed on horseback after the battle of Jena, and indeed it also fits the empereur, too, for without his actions, and the reactions they caused, modern Europe is inconceivable. In the same way the Hellenistic oikumene and its offshoots, the universality of the Roman Empire and Christianity, are in the end inconceivable without Alexanders revolutionary impact in many fields. It was a revolution ? as momentous for subsequent life and thought as the discovery of America and the demonstration that our universe is not geocentric... ? (Moses Hadas). The fact is that few exceptional personalities belonging to mankinds past have aroused such enthusiasm in biographers and historians as Alexan? der, the son of another figure of historical stature, Philip of Macedon. Witness the famous Einleitung, having all the character of a fervent hymn, that precedes the Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen by J.G. Droysen (1835), a book which, though superseded in many of its details, still stands out as a memorable historical exposition and above all a work of art, overshadowing many subsequent monographs which appear feeble and often pedantic in comparison. This is true, for instance, if only partially so, of the picture of this age and leader drawn by K.J. Beloch (Griechische Geschichte, 2nd ed., vols. III and IV, 1922-1927). According to this author, Alexander was neither a great statesman nor a great strategist, for it is argued that the bulk of his political successes are to be attributed to his father, Philip, and that his three decisive victories over the Persians are really due to the strategical genius of Parmenion. Yet despite these evident prejudices, stemming from a rationalistic ? professorial? aversion to that brilliance that transcends all ?normal? human standards, we are indebted to Belochs sober criticism for having clarified many details. Above all, he placed the incisive historical role of Philip, heralding the achievements of his son and heir, in true perspective, and pointed to the essential part the above-mentioned Macedonian general had in the military feats of the young king during the first half of his rule.

‘Never altogether the same. But the same’: strategies of revision in Thomas Kinsella's Notes from the Land of the Dead

The publishing history of Notes from the Land of the Dead is a complex one, heralding a change in Kinsellas attitude towards textual revision and volume publication. This article explores the ways in which the evolution of key poems from this collection demonstrates altering aesthetic priorities, while at the same time calling attention to the issue of continuity in Kinsellas work as a whole. His committed engagement with difficult and increasingly irreconcilable ideas can be traced in his rethinking and repositioning of these poems.