Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
Writing Modern Ireland
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Writing Modern Ireland
- Yeats in Extremis
- “Here, of all places”: Geographies of Sexual and Gender Identity in Keith Ridgway's The Long Falling
- Beckett's Discovery of Theater: Human Wishes, and the Dramaturgical Contexts of Eleutheria
- “I have met you too late”: James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and the Making of Chamber Music
- The Politics of Pity in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way
- Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
- “Westward ho!”: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy
- Enabling Emer, Disabling the Sidhe: W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer
- The Use of Memory: Michael Coady's All Souls
- “To construct something upon which to rejoice”: Seamus Heaney's Prose Revisions
- Remains and Removals: The Cuala Press Revival, 1969–1989
- “The Old Moon-Phaser”: Yeats, Auden, and MacNeice
- A Satyric Paradise: The Form of W. B. Yeats's “News for the Delphic Oracle”
- Abroad and at Home: The Question of the Foreigner in Kate O'Brien's Mary Lavelle
- The Deathly Conformity of Irish Women: Novels by Mary O'Donnell and Susan Knight
- Mercury in Taurus: W. B. Yeats and Ted Hughes
- “Notes Chirruping Answer”: Language as Music in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
- Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats's Work
- “Halved Globe, Slowly Turning”: Editing Irish Poetry in America
- Contributors
Summary
As a refrain, “Ireland is changing Mother” drives Galway poet Rita Ann Higgins's poem of the same title, published digitally in 2008, and in 2011 in her collection of the same name. The poem's speaker asks,
And where have all the Nellys gone
and all the Missus Kellys gone?
You might have had
the cleanest step on your street
but so what mother,
Nowadays it's not the step
but the mile that matters.
Higgins's speaker laments that what Ireland was has been replaced by a much more complex and globalized picture. Goodbye to recognizably Irish names. Customs that used to matter no longer do. A national identity that—while contested—could survive for a time is threatened. A nation whose economic situation led to mass emigrations now finds itself full of immigrants seeking benefit from Ireland's rapid economic growth: Ireland's transformation from one of Europe's poorest nations into one of its wealthiest brought benefits, but also the inevitable strains of modernization, not to mention those strains that come with collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
Higgins's poem embodies this change in mothers and sons, warning: “your sons are shrinking mother.” This mother who may also be a motherland has borne sons who emblematize the Ireland the speaker knows. And although their mother doubtless loves them, these sons are—face it—not that impressive. The third stanza opens,
Before this mother,
your sons were Gods of that powerful thing.
Gods of the apron string.
They could eat a horse and they often did,
with your help mother.
The sons’ strength grew entirely from their relationship to the mother, giving them power but keeping them tied to home. And because of Ireland's isolation, these men could be mediocre but self-assured.
Now that position is threatened, and the speaker describes a football match, where the “local yokels” are challenged by players who “breeze onto the pitch / like some Namibian Gods,” much to the delight of “the local girls” who “wet themselves” and “say in a hurry, O-Ma-God, O-Ma-God!” The speaker cautions: “Not good for your sons mother, / who claim to have invented everything / from the earwig to the slíothar.”
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- Writing Modern Ireland , pp. vi - xiiPublisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015