Between the Lines: Post-Agreement Poetry

Abstract

In one of her earlier poems, post-Agreement poet Leontia Flynn recounts a chance encounter with the late Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize laureate and “one of Ireland’s major exports.”¹ “When I was Sixteen I Met Seamus Heaney”² opens with the speaker running into Heaney “outside a gallery in Dublin” (l. 2), along with her friend. Far from being intimidated, the two teenagers approach Heaney in a surprisingly calm and casual manner. The playfully indifferent tone of the poem not only underplays Heaney’s artistic achievements, but it goes on to challenge the literary conventions of Northern Ireland wherein “[p]oetry is seen to be the dominant form of writing about the north and fiction is regarded…as the poor relation.”³ As the friend of the speaker asks Heaney to sign her copy of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Poor Mouth, Heaney exclaims: “That’s a great book” (l. 6). The pubescent speaker, however, prefers prose to poetry, which might explain her sheer indifference to the “personality cult of Seamus Heaney.”⁴ For her, compared to O’Brien, Heaney is a ‘no-name’ artist whom she does not associate with Irish classics at all, as indicated by the splitting of his name with an emphatic slash in her note: “I had read The Poor Mouth—but who was Seamus/Heaney?” (ll. 9–10).⁵ In Flynn’s flippant verse, there is “an oblique yet playful relationship with notions of poetic tradition,”⁶ one that is characteristic of post-Agreement poetry at large. Indeed, as Fran Brearton insists, “Flynn is not alone among her peers in exhibiting both an admiration of, and tendency to react against, the celebrated older generations of Northern Irish poets,”⁷ but is part of an emerging group of poets, most of whom published their work after the signing of Agreement: Colette Bryce, Deirdre Cartmill, Miriam Gamble, Alan Gillis, Nick Laird and Sinéad Morrissey.

…the poems occupy indeterminate zones, mediating between redundant pasts and nebulous futures, questioning the rhetoric of ‘progress’ even as they seek adequate modes of resolution.

Miriam Gamble, “‘The Gentle Art of Re-perceiving’: Post-Ceasefire Identity in the Poetry of Alan Gillis,” Irish Studies Review 17, no. 3 (2009): 362.