Wandering Songs

Abstract

The theme of repatriation is explored in Chapter Four, entitled ‘Wandering Songs’, which discloses an ethic of cultivated marginality at the heart of both Harry Clifton’s and Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry. Taking the well-established tradition of the writer-in-willed-exile, the chapter subjects this trope to scrutiny, considering the act of migration-as-liberation as a self-conscious gesture of renunciation as well as a deliberate aesthetic action that draws on the chosen destination as much as the place of origin. For Clifton, the imagined community of exiles amongst whom he locates himself serves as liberation from the oppressive constructs of canonical expectations dominating, as he perceives them, Irish poetry. Clifton’s invocation of European rather than national cultural memories connects him to a long tradition of self-styled literary exiles; his return, then, to Ireland challenges his marginality. Sinéad Morrissey’s migration poetry is predicated on cultural otherness that originates in her unconventional upbringing in Belfast, and is deliberately pursued in her poetry about Japan. Morrissey’s poetry frets over how codes of belonging are encrypted in ritual and communal memory that excludes as well as coheres.