Review
Catherine McGrotty looks at an innovative publication of poets from Northern Ireland for the US.
- The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland
- Wake Forest University Press
A New North
There’s no doubt that Northern Ireland has produced some of the most important modern poets in the world – Carson, Heaney, Longley and Muldoon – to name only a few, and that poetry, as a genre, enjoys a level of esteem on this Island that poets in many other countries would envy.
Now an innovative literary project by the Irish Pages is offering American audiences an introduction to the best of contemporary poetry from Northern Ireland – and vice versa.
A collaborative venture between the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland sees the exclusive publication in the United States of The New North, an anthology of past and present generations of Northern Irish poets, and, on this side of the water, the release of New Voices, a collection of up-and-coming writers from the US.
On the Northern Irish team these new and emerging poets are the generation post Carson et al, and one doesn’t soon envy them the task of following in such heavyweight footsteps; especially when the anthology presents American readers with highlights from the past as well as present. ‘Classics’ by the household names (Heaney etc) are interspersed with the work of ‘emerging’ poets like Gary Allen, Leontia Flynn and Damian Smyth, and it is to the eternal credit of their authors that the newer work stands up to scrutiny when placed in close quarters with the work of such luminaries.
Emerging poets in Northern Ireland had to be born after 1956 for The New North, in contrast with a 1966 cut-off for the American project, New Voices. With the size disparity between the U.S. and Northern Ireland, this made sense in practical terms. However it also allows the Northern Irish collection to illustrate clearly the differences between the work of emerging and more established poets held within its pages.
And differences there are. Most notably in subject matter. The work of the newest poets, the ‘children of the Troubles’, is much less likely to bear the hallmarks of violence – and the struggle to come to terms with it, that marked the work of their predecessors. As Agee points out in his introduction, emerging poets are ‘more likely to be interested in new technology, ecology, Eastern Europe or bilingualism, than in any expected manifestation of ‘the Northern issue’.
Indeed, the very diversity of subject matter contained herein speaks volumes about how far we have come and attests to the fact that we really are living in a New North. Highly recommended.
