Contemporary Irish Literature

¶ … Irish Literature

Ireland has a rich literary tradition with a legacy of authors who have each contributed something to the creation of a cultural identity. For centuries, the authors of Ireland have utilized the beautiful landscape as a counterpoint to the violent political history of the Emerald Isle. Quite literally, the whole history of Ireland can be traced through the literature of the country's writers, both the good and the bad. This tradition lives on in contemporary Irish authors and poets. Two such poets, Ciaran Carson and Allan Gillis, have used their chosen literary type to illustrate their own understanding of Ireland's history. Through their poetry, readers can simultaneously travel back in time and also listen to the eye witness of Ireland's current historical moment. This can be traced through Carson's "Belfast Confetti" and Gillis's "The Ulster Way" in the poetic form, the techniques that the poets utilize, and then finally the subject matter of the poems themselves.

In the Ciaran Carson poem, the author has broken the poem into two stanzas. The first stanza is comprised of five lines and the second stanza has only four. The effect is to divide the poem into two parts of a narrative; both are from the perspective of the anonymous narrator as made evident by the use of the word "I." Also, with fewer lines in the second stanza, the reader will natural spend less time reading the final four lines than the first four, leading to an almost rushed conclusion. Each of the lines of the poem appears to be approximately equal in length making the poem seem more formal, but that also breaks apart in the second stanza, creating an appearance that the poem and thus the narrative of the piece is somehow off-balance. Counter this with the poetic form of the Allan Gillis poem. Just from the appearance, this seems to be a more traditional poem. There are three stanzas each with seven lines. Here too, however, closer examine reveals that this is not a traditional poem. The capitalization of the piece is odd. Usually the first word of a new line is capitalized but in this poem the second stanza of the piece is not capitalized.

Each of the poets chooses interesting poetic techniques in order to further the narrative and illustrate the meaning of the poem. In "Belfast Confetti," Carson uses nontraditional punctuation of the lines to heighten the off-kilter form of the poem. The punctuation of a poem will traditionally be that the end of each line will either have a period or a comma. In Carson's poem, some of the lines do end with the expected punctuation, but there are some lines without. There are also commas, dashes, and periods in the middle of lines, all of which serve to alter the equilibrium of the poem. This shows that the language of the poem is instead intended to be disjointed, adding to the feeling that this is an argument between two sides of one individual self. Unlike traditional poetry, and similar to the first poem, the lines of the Gillis piece have neither a rhyme scheme nor do they have a rhythmic pattern. The narrator of this poem also seems to be discoursing in the first person although there are not first-person pronouns. The narrator does use the word "you," indicating that he or she is discussing the content of the poem with a specific readership. Additionally, both of the poems use the metaphor that is comparing the process of writing and publishing of literature with the violence of their country's history, both past and recent.

The themes of both "Belfast Confetti" and "The Ulster Way" appear to be the ways in which the violent history of Ireland can be both explained and celebrated without necessarily having to approve of the methods of either side of the equation. "Belfast Confetti" begins with the narrator explaining that the present of the piece is a violent upheaval, a riot of some kind. Among the debris of the violent actions are exclamation marks as well as building materials and car keys. It is a comingling of propaganda, the foundation of society, and the necessities of an everyday life that comprise existence in Ireland. After the stanza break, the narrator's tone seems to change so that instead of more observational he instead becomes paranoid and panicked so that he feels that he is being cornered by the world in which he lives. The narrator appears to be someone in the literary field who does not know how to express himself in this world because the events of Ireland's history have become so palpable to him that he can no longer write about it without including himself emotionally. For Gillis, the narrator also is witness to a world around him that is dying in the wake of constant violence. Even the plants and trees, symbols of the natural world, are becoming violent and inhumane after witnessing so many atrocities. At the heart of this piece is not an uncertain writer, but instead deals with an individual who is trying to cope with his own place in Ireland's national identity. The culmination is in the final line of the poem when the narrator claims that the person to whom it is talking is all that matters in the world and the reasoning for this is that either the person to whom the narrator speaks is uncertain or the narrator is speaking to himself and trying to fortify himself with the knowledge that no matter what the rest of the nation may be doing or how, the self is all that matters.