‘Their disembodied voices cry:’ Marine Animals and their Songs of Absence in the Poetry of Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, and Mary O’Donoghue

Abstract

Addressing the problem of animal textualization in Irish literature, poets Morrissey, O’Donoghue, and O’Reilly successfully maintain the balance between the cognitive and emotive functions of language: on the one hand, they criticize the suffering of animals caused by people, and on the other, they meticulously lay bare the linguistic means employed to obscure and desensitize us to this abuse. To illustrate this strategy, the poems I examine comprise a number of speaking positions. They range from a witness standpoint and memory guardian (‘Achill, 1985’), an ironic observer and shrewd commentator (‘Pilots’), and an elegiac, solemn chronicler of animal exploitation and extinct species (‘The Whale’) to the insider position of a co-experiencer in ‘Eel’ and the mocking, word-playing intellectual who openly satirizes the grounds for animal textualization (‘Manatee’). Poet Mary Montague has observed that the twentieth-century context of Irish women reclaiming their own voices corresponds to their attentive listening to the hushed or ignored voices of animals:

Something of this, for me, parallels the gradual claiming by Irish women poets of their own subjecthood; writing about nature is no longer seen as a retreat from more pressing concerns. … [W]e can bring to our poetry what science has taught us about our own animal bodies[,] the evolutionary and ecological interconnectedness that tie the fate of our species to that of others[.]¹