Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T01:13:50.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 9 - “Unbearably Intimate Connections”: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Planet

from Part II - Planets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2024

Cóilín Parsons
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Get access

Summary

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh suggests that literary fiction has difficulty representing the Anthropocene, the epoch of irreversible human impacts on the planet, because the Anthropocene “consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel – forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space.” This chapter investigates how poets from Ireland have been making the Anthropocene imaginable over the past two decades by rendering “unbearably intimate connections” in lyric forms. Reading Moya Cannon alongside Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Sinéad Morrissey, the chapter spotlights poems in both English and Irish that look beyond Ireland – to Africa, the Americas, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Arctic – to arrive at a recognition not just of the human-centered globe, but of the Earth system or planet. These contemporary poets’ work makes visible how language and technology, including writing, mediate human efforts to represent the climate crisis. Their poems challenge us to develop a mode of reading that emerges from the interface of the global with the planetary.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×