Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008

Concentrating on the period since the outbreak of the troubles on the late 1960s, this study provides a detailed consideration of the work of several generations of Northern Irish poets, from Hewitt and MacNeice, to Fiacc and Montague, to Simmons, Heaney, Mahon and Longley, to Muldoon, Carson, Paulin and McGuckian, to McDonald, Morrissey, Gillis and Flynn. It traces the extent to which their writing represents a move away from concepts of rootedness and towards a deterritorialized poetics of displacement, mobility, openness and pluralism in an era of accelerating migration and globalisation.In the new readings of place, inherited maps are no longer reliable, and home is no longer the stable ground of identity but seems instead to be always where it is not. The crossing of boundaries and the experience of diaspora open up new understandoings of the relations between places, a new sense of the permeability and contingency of cultures, and new concepts of identity and home.