The 1970s and 1980s were decades of intense culture wars in Ireland, as the feminist movement did battle with the forces of conservatism over a host of high-profile constitutional issues. It was also a period of feminist awakening in Irish poetry. The poetry of Eavan Boland entered this world somewhat tentatively, beginning to establish its suburban terrain and slowly shedding the more static aspects of that writer’s juvenilia. A very different poet is Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, whose dominant note was from the outset one of uncertainty, searching, and transition. Where Boland will focus on the theme of unrecoverable women’s lives, Ní Chuilleanáin will typically be found actively recovering submerged and lost stories and lives. Medbh McGuckian’s approach is different again, and is often characterised in terms of écriture féminine, though scholarship of her extensive use of intertextuality has added new layers of complexity to our understanding of her work. Other poets, including Nuala Archer, Paula Meehan and Rita Ann Higgins, round out this survey of a busy and radical chapter in the history of modern Irish women’s poetry.

Women have paid a historically high price under the patriarchal Irish Catholic church. The wrongs of the church do not detract, however, from the rich vein of poems written by Irish women informed by Catholic spirituality. Traditionally, women have been scapegoats for the fallout from patriarchal theocracy, and any resistance has begun with acts of bodily reclamation. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill reaches into Celtic tradition for paradigms of female empowerment that overturn more recent misogynistic palimpsests, and Medbh McGuckian filters an anti-colonial poetics through an engagement with her radical and ecstatic strain of Catholic spirituality, re-envisioning the leaders of the 1798 rebellion as ‘feminine Christs’. Earlier women poets engaging with religious material have fallen into neglect – Katharine Tynan’s Catholicism is often cited in evidence against her – and large bodies of work now pass unnoticed, such as the heavily female contributions to the Jesuit-edited The Irish Monthly. Restoring their work to visibility, and that of more recent writers such as Eithne Strong and Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, helps us read the work of Ní Dhomhnaill and McGuckian in a more informed and spiritually literate context.

This essay argues that the niche occupied by contemporary Irish poetry in global Anglophone literature is a function of its formal conservatism and resistance to theoretical reflection. Irish poetry offers a moderate and palatable alternative to poetic work that works in a more thoroughgoing fashion through the violence of the present. Its conservative formalism is a hedge against confronting form with the conditions poetry must engage with. Accordingly, much of recent Irish poetry paradoxically furnishes a convenient and consumable commodity form even where it seems to offer an alternative to the economic and ecological spectacle of global transformations. But a number of poets have found formally innovative ways to accommodate both the political violence of the Troubles and the depredations of neoliberalism in Ireland while at the same time drawing on the long history of Irish resistance to such effects of colonialism and capitalism.

This chapter re-examines the poetry of the early Troubles and addresses the limitations of what was, to a large extent, an atrocity-led literature, drawing on works such as Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ and Seamus Deane’s ‘After Derry’ to reassess the role played by writers and critics at this time. Discussing both retrospective and contemporaneous interviews with authors, the chapter also addresses the ways in which writers such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley responded to the new mandate which poetry had been given after the outbreak of the northern conflict, with the relentless media exposure of the Troubles often, but not always, eliciting evasive responses to the conditions engendered by the violence. Finally, it examines the fresh formal and linguistic strategies adopted by younger poets including Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. By this time, writing the violence of the Troubles into poetry could make evasion a form of engagement which helped to preserve artistic autonomy.

Considering novels, poetry, drama, and non-fictional prose, this chapter examines how writers represented the Troubles and the gradual gains of the peace process between 1980 and 1998. It considers the historical displacements of Brian Friel’s Translations and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), the realism of Ciaran Carson’s The Irish For No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989), the staging of women’s lives during the Troubles in Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone (1985), the phantasmagorias of Paul Muldoon’s poetry and the metaphorisations of war and violence in Medbh McGuckian’s verse, and the Belfast panoramas of Glenn Patterson’s Fat Lad (1992) and Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996). Contemporary Northern writers contextualise the conflict by illuminating the country’s colonial past; they narrate structures of trauma by examining how history invades the present; they present palliative correctives to the vicious linearity of the conflict; and they project possible resolutions to the exhausted (il)logic of sectarian strife.