Goodby notes that Eve Patten writes that Jennifer Johnston and Bernard McLaverty succombed to the ‘compulsive stereotype ... of the Irish writer defiantly extracting the lyrical moment rom tragic inevitability [rather] than engaging with a multi-textured and abstruse society’. Patten, ‘Fiction in Conflict: Northern Ireland’s Prodigal Novelists’, in Ian A. Bell, ed., Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction (Brigend: Seren Books 1996), cp.129. [covers McLaverty, SH Bell, Janet McNeill, Brian Moore and Maurice Leitch.])

Note criticism of J. W. Foster’s Forces and Themes as accepting the ‘static’ ‘fated’ view of Northern Ireland predicated by Eamon Hughes, op. cit., p.5. Bibl., Eamon Hughes, Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland (Open Univ. 1991).

Goodby: ‘[...] Northern Irish poetry was distinguished by its potentially flexible and self-critical qualities almost from the outset. During the early and mid-1960s Northern Irish poetry was unusually open to an unusually heterogeneous mixture of influences: English Movement and Group poetics, elements of Ulster Regionalism, the formalism of Frost and Yeats, European aestheticism, a lyrical tradition centred on Trinity College, Dublin, UK regionalist populism and others. Certain individuals - Philip Hobsbaum most famously - acted as catalysts, linking Belfast with Lodon and the regional energies of other British cities. The new poetry was conservative to begin with (strong conservative strains remain to this day). But the overdetermined variousness of the blend and the talent of the better poets involved soon enabled the exploration of a new set of literary possibilityies with a singularly unexploited “cultural ecology”, to use Terence Brown’s phrase. This was a dual process; the “cultural ecology”, as it were, also began to explore the well-made lyric. The eventual result of this was a radical mutation of the consercative inheritance in the work of the generation which included Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson. With these poets the Northern Irish situation is revealed as based on difference and fixed positions are eschewed in favour of a metamorphic pluralist approach.’ (p.221.)

‘At its blandest, this stance [‘radical conservatism’ identified with The Honest Ulsterman] takes the form of Frank Ormsby’s Preface to A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1992), which advocates “the affirmative thrust” of a poetry which is “sturdily and enhancingly alive” - sentiments difficult to reconcile with the apocalyptic meditations of Mahon, let alone Muldoon. (p.223.) The strength of this tradtion lies in its insistence on close attention to the text as well as its unrivalled insider knowledge. Yet although it gives a powerfl sense of the way poets work within a given tradition its commitments to pluralism and tolerance are belief by a consistently intolerant tone and unpluralist failure to examine its own philosophical and political presuppositions.’ / Balancing criticism which often slides into a neo-loyalist position ... is that which might be labelled ... as its neo-nationalist mirror image. More theoretically aware than its opponent, it has ... insisted on reading Northern Irish writing in the context of the history of the state and its formation. Despite its taste for theory, however, Marxist (or class-based) and feminist models are noticeable by the absences. Seamus Deane, representative in this as in much else, is the author of at least one revealing anti-socialist outburtst, as well as the more notorious and public exclusion of women’s writing from The Field Day Anthology. Both blindnesses demonstrate neo-nationalism’s inability to escape its petty-bourgeois ideology, with its touchstone of an undifferentiated “Irish people”. Deane and Declan Kiberd exemplify the backward-looking paradigm in their criticism of Northern poetry fro failing to rise to to the demands of the Troubles conceived in terms of 1916-1923 ... While such criticism uses recent theory, the strain of adapting its most radical variants to a traditionalist template of national and individual autonomy is often all too evident.’ (p.223.)

Bibl., Terence Brown, ‘A Northern Renaissance: Poets from the North of Ireland, 1965-1980, Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Lilliput 1988): the myth of Protestant unity is ‘disabling in the political sphere since all political possibilities are subordinated to the basic determination to maintain the historically authenticated resistance.’ (p.209; here 225.)

‘Derek Mahon: State of Siege’ [section], in Goodby, op. cit., pp.226-34; Glenn Patterson, ‘Dumps and Carnivals: Burning Your Own’, in Goodby, op. cit., pp.234-40.

‘The typical Mahon poem hovers between MacNeice’s unquiet tourist’s vision and that of Beckett’s minimalist existentialism, and the contradictory responses to Modernism these allegiances suggest are of the essence of his work. In Freudian terms the struggle is between a sublimation of repression by identifying with an artistic community distinguished by purity and excess - Van Gogh, Villon, De Quincey, De Nerval - and the unreasonable, purgative self-hatred of the speaker of the poem such as “Ecclesiastes”. One way of examining the double resonse is by aligning Mahon’s work with contemporary cultural and social developments and the terms of Freud’s essay on ‘Negation’ [viz. ... negation is a way of taking cognisance of what is repressed ... &c.]’ (p.228.)

On Mahon’s ‘notorious’ revisions (viz., ‘middle-class cunts’ to ‘middle-class twits’ in “Afterlives”): ‘The effect is to conceal the self-loathing produced by a politics of suppressed difference which the original version revealed even as it colluded with them. What was genuinely provocative has been rendered bathetic, almost silly. [/...] The irony is that continual revision makes textual authority weaker ... Mahon’s procedures reveal a violent instability inherent in the text which mimis the violence from which, as aesthetic object, the poem claimed detachment even as it recognised the Troubles.’ (p.228).

Speaks of Edna Longley’s ‘use of Mahon’s work to illustrate the political inviolability of poetry.’ (p.232.)

‘In Mahon’s poetry the aesthetic and exilic distances of Modernism are offset by guilty, often anguished attachments figured in coservative form and local particulars. Calleing the syclical, mythic history of a Heaney, the poety is also deprived of the alternative Whig or progressive myth ... But although Mahon shares the late Romantic/Modernist desire for symbolically resolving social contradiction, his work is characteristically Protestant (or Anglo-Irish, to use an obsolete term) in its mixing of this mode with allegory. Allegory is what disturbs plenitude of symbol, in Bejamin’s terms; it signals a political unconscious in Irish Protestant writing which gives a priority of meaning over experience, and stems from a feeling that meaning is already prescribed by an inherited mythology, that (postcolonial) experience is narrow, starved and unrepresentative. This modal uncertainty gives the poetry its genuine vitality [... &c.]’ (p.241.)

‘Had grown up in a society characterised ... as morbidly immutable; yet there was another, equally valid reading which said that, quite the reverse, change was in fact the society’s only constant ... While there can be no ignoring the destabilising effects ... of all this (I choose the words deliberately) deconstruction and revision, it nevertheless contains within it a certain liberating potential.’ (Glenn Patterson, ‘I am a Northern Irish Novelist’, in Ian A. Bell, Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction, Brigend: Seren Books 1996, p.151.)

There is no unjust monster to be endured or resisted; but the uncomfortable knowledge that we and our immediate ancestors have burnt our collective backside, and we must sit on the blister.’ (Simmons, Introduction to Ten Irish Poets, Carcanet 1974, p.9; here p.285.)