Book contents
- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture
- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction: A Weak Theory of Transnationalism
- Part I Transnational Genealogies
- Part II Planets
- Chapter 6 Stargazing in Joyce and Walcott: Navigating Colonial Entanglements with Asterisms
- Chapter 7 Ireland, Literature, and the Blue Humanities
- Chapter 8 You Have Gas: Reading for Irish Energy
- Chapter 9 “Unbearably Intimate Connections”: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Planet
- Part III Missed Translations
- Part IV Transnational Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 9 - “Unbearably Intimate Connections”: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Planet
from Part II - Planets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2024
- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture
- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction: A Weak Theory of Transnationalism
- Part I Transnational Genealogies
- Part II Planets
- Chapter 6 Stargazing in Joyce and Walcott: Navigating Colonial Entanglements with Asterisms
- Chapter 7 Ireland, Literature, and the Blue Humanities
- Chapter 8 You Have Gas: Reading for Irish Energy
- Chapter 9 “Unbearably Intimate Connections”: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Planet
- Part III Missed Translations
- Part IV Transnational Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
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.
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- Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture , pp. 167 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024