With great anticipation and curiosity I received the Anthology of Young Irish Poets published in 2019 by Vakhikon and edited by Irish poet and visual artist Ingrid Casey who undertook the task of harvesting representative new Irish poetic voices for the purposes of this collection. The volume reflects the need to maintain representational gender balances by showcasing modern Irish poetry as a “living art” (p. 7) with agents of this representation eleven Irish poets: Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ingri..

Remoundou, Natasha

OpenEdition

 
Études irlandaises 
45-1 | 2020
Irish Arts: New Contexts
Anthology of Young Irish Poets, Ingrid Casey (ed.)
Natasha Remoundou
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/9012
DOI: 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.9012
ISSN: 2259-8863
Publisher
Presses universitaires de Caen
Printed version
Date of publication: 24 September 2020
Number of pages: 135-137
ISSN: 0183-973X
 
Electronic reference
Natasha Remoundou, « Anthology of Young Irish Poets, Ingrid Casey (ed.) », Études irlandaises [Online],
45-1 | 2020, Online since 24 September 2020, connection on 30 September 2020. URL : http://
journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/9012  ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.
9012 
Études irlandaises est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution
- Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International.
135C o m p t e s  re n du s  |  B o ok  rev i ews
of economics on theatrical productions are mentioned several times, the lack of 
funding is never seen as potentially problematic or damaging for the community 
of theatre practitioners. If anything, the emergence, during the post-Celtic tiger 
period of austerity, of the self-employed “theatre-maker”, who “has written a play” 
and who is now “producing, acting in, directing, marketing and otherwise staging 
their own works” (p. 201) is hailed as unambiguously positive.
Hélène Lecossois
Anthology of Young Irish Poets, Ingrid Casey (ed.), Athens, Vakxikon 
Publishers, 2019, 124 p.
With great anticipation and curiosity I received the Anthology of Young Irish Poets 
published in 2019 by Vakhikon and edited by Irish poet and visual artist Ingrid Casey 
who undertook the task of harvesting representative new Irish poetic voices for the 
purposes of this collection. The volume reflects the need to maintain representa-
tional gender balances by showcasing modern Irish poetry as a “living art” (p. 7) 
with agents of this representation eleven Irish poets: Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ingrid 
Casey, Alice Kinsella, Rob Buchanan, Dylan Brennan, Colin Dardis, Stephen Sexton, 
Jessica Traynor, Elaine Feeney, Seán Hewitt, and Annemarie Ní Churreáin. Casey’s 
springboard for collecting the content of this anthology evolved from the digital 
platform of social media following an open call that invited Irish poets to express 
interest in featuring their work in this publication. The radical process of scouting 
new creative writing talent through social media spaces does not just provide new 
sets of tools to both writers and readers; it expands a nuanced rethinking of sites 
of agency and the democracy of representation while revolutionising poetry as an 
art form that remains powerful in the digital age.
The poetic ideograms anthologised here from the North, the South but also 
from migrant poets across the Irish borders, construct a co-operative aesthetic 
repository that bridges the past with the present in political terms. The anthology 
opens up a bold poetic universe that, while emanating from a solid literary tradition 
that maps modern Irish writing, is retested as a linguistic, historical, and social 
transmitter of the art of empathy in the 21st century. Against this aesthetic backdrop 
and its multivalent artistic aims, Manuela Palacios’s introduction and Lucy Collins’s 
concluding note both reiterate the pioneering aim of the trilingual anthology to 
present a generation of emerging Irish poets to a Greek audience. With the Greek 
translations, the volume naturally becomes the textual meeting ground for Greek 
readers opposite contemporary Irish poetry and culture; translated into Greek 
from English and Gaelic, the anthology acquires an intercultural force located 
both in the terrain of language and in the conscious engagement with issues that 
resonate with readers from source and target cultures. An anthology that decidedly 
136 Ét u d e s  i rl a n da i se s ,  n º   4 5 - 1  –  2 0 2 0
addresses biopolitical issues like the environment, homelessness, violence, sexuality, 
and migration in a consistent debate between tradition and modernity could not 
resonate more with a Greek readership.
Palacios points out that the selected poems are representative of a new gener-
ation of Irish poets who “dig” into the present often through the past in order to 
“restore” (p. 9) Irish identity to the landscape and the temporality it belongs to. 
Writing both as the inheritors of a traumatic past distinguished by institutional 
violence, social disenfranchisement, borderlines, fringes and peripheries constructed 
by the hegemony of Church, state, and the legacies of the Troubles, but also as 
members of the generation of the Celtic Tiger era that witnessed its own subsequent 
downfall, the Irish poets featured propose poetry as a cosmopolitan event and a 
means of renegotiating collective memory in the present. Yet, the historical past 
that as Collins argues “is not a foreign country” (p. 123) stands at the background in 
dialogue with contemporaneity without defining it. The varied themes of the poems 
are illustrative of the broad culural scope of the poetic imagination, experience, 
and right to write and rewrite tradition “without being bound by it” (p. 123): myth, 
family, love, memory, the role of the poet, social and political responsibility and 
autonomy, the position of women, and language are the overarching keywords that 
embody imagery, sound structures and contexts. In narrating the stories that need 
to be (re)told, the poet is confronted with the paradox of language: “when I open my 
mouth / my tongue flies away” (p. 18) Ní Ghríofa writes. From the outward-looking 
free-verse poems that gaze acutely at the world beyond the Irish spatial borders 
(blurred, Brexit-complicated), the poets are animated by literal and imaginative 
border-crossings and travels from America, Paris, and Amsterdam to Oaxaca, the 
Brazilian Amazon, and Kuwait. Then, the profoundly inward-looking odes revisit 
the familiar topography of the maternal body: “your mother’s voice / calling you 
home across the fields” (p. 76) as Traynor writes in “I could name a country”. The 
natural landscape exposes the empirical memory but also a sense of the self and its 
vulnerability to the contingencies of an unfathomable world. Palacios and Collins 
discuss the recurrent juxtaposition between the private self and the natural world in 
the poetic ecologies proposed by Hewitt, Dardis, Brennan, and Kinsella where the 
material body takes centre stage within a shifting social and sensory environment 
that provides consolation but often alienates. Simultaneously, these are individually 
synthesised polyphonic odes that scrutinise inherited mythologies like Casey’s 
“Molly Bloom goes to Yoga” or Buchanan’s “Archipelago”. The contemporary 
Irish literary idiom marks its own intrinsic form reinvention via a visceral language 
uncompromising in the breadth and depth of its scope and critique, reenergising 
the role of the contemporary poetic identity captured in Feeney’s “Whisht” as an 
“uncertain shadow / miles shy of who I am, or once was” (p. 86).
In conclusion, I would like to dwell on Palacios’s observation regarding the 
power of (self / auto)translation to cultivate, expand, and reshape the written word 
by dismantling, teasing out and then by rebuilding the poems from English to Irish 
and vice versa. In the case of the commissioned Greek translations of this anthology, 
the questions raised are even more complex for they do not simply problematise 
137C o m p t e s  re n du s  |  B o ok  rev i ews
notions of authenticity in search of a “respectful” version or practice that is equivalent 
to what Ní Ghríofa calls “untranslatable” (p. 22) in her poem “Jigsaw”; in fact, these 
questions make us often wonder if we are talking about two or three altogether 
different poems. If something disconcerts in this anthology it is primarily that it 
falls short of allowing the translated word to be further cultivated, fertilised, and 
remolded in the Greek language because the translation work mediating source and 
target poems has not been given enough time. This is particularly evident as regards 
those aspects of language that demand and do not negotiate that the translator, as a 
mediator of representation, interpretation and communication between languages 
and cultures, is at-home in the Hiberno-English diction and its “multiple souls” 
conjured in semantics, allusion, style, word-play, and sound structures. Such lack of 
knowledge and experience of idiomatic expressions of everyday language in Ireland 
as it is spoken and more importantly felt – in its inherent ambiguities – breaches what 
translation theory terms the basic reliable representation norm. Not being attuned 
to these linguistic / textual dimensions of the distinctive cadences that characterise 
contemporary Irish writing, still does not justify the translator’s linguistic decisions 
to translate a “shirt” as “skirt” (p. 104-105), nor “doing a great impression” as 
“making a great impression” (p. 70-71) or “predators” as “descendants” (p. 38-39) 
in Greek. In this light, the translation works inter alia against other meanings and 
other themes that are far removed from the heart of certain poems, fundamentally 
distorting the atmosphere created by the poetic source. It would have also been 
compelling to see the anthology including poetic voices representative of writers of 
colour and from minority ethnic groups who live, write, and publish poetry in and 
about Ireland. The anthology, still, is valuable for anyone with an interest in Irish 
writing in general (particularly engaging and resonant to a Greek audience is the 
fact that many of the featured poets rely on classical references in their work) as it 
makes available to Greek readers a new generation of contemporary Irish writers 
beyond W. B. Yeats and other dead male poets.
Natasha Remoundou


Anthology of Young Irish Poets, Ingrid Casey (ed.)

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