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Alluring Complexity
Andrew J. Browne
Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry
by Shane Alcobia-Murphy
Liverpool University Press
ISBN 978-1846310324
For some readers, modern poetry has become a wasteland since T. S. Eliot’s own titanically elusive and esoterically allusive The Wasteland. Modernism tends to move poetry from the context of the general community into the realm of the university. Moreover, the debate about the effectiveness and purpose of poetry has become part of the current dilemma as shifting audiences define and receive modern poets.
In Ireland, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian offer two contemporary examples of this modernist trend. Muldoon is often seen as the all-too-knowing poet layering his work with complex references while McGuckian’s intertextuality is seen by some as nearly impenetrable. Shane Alcobia-Murphy’s recent monograph addresses these concerns expertly by examining criticism, such as John Banville’s assertion that Muldoon has become a poet writing fodder for PhD students, and then answering such criticism through painstaking research and close readings. Alcobia-Murphy shows that Muldoon gives the keys to his complex allusions while McGuckian, although skilfully hiding her sources, still melds their meaning into the forms and themes of her poetry. Alcobia-Murphy’s masterfully researched analysis opens up the work of two complex poets and contributes to our understanding by highlighting the intricacy of intertextual relations in their poetry.
Alcobia-Murphy’s method in Muldoon’s case is to use a careful and close reading of the source text. He discovers a number of intertexts (poems, letters, memoirs and travelogues) through close textual analysis and combines this analysis with attention to primary sources and author interviews. In McGuckian’s readings, he uses extensive primary sources including trawling through her papers at Emory University in the United States to find the notes in her drafts that indicate what sources she was reading at the writing of the poems; he then dissects both the source text and the poem to find words and phrases in common. To this end, Alcobia-Murphy displays a distinct notation system that exhibits the source text on the left column while the poem is shown on the right. This system allows the reader to see where McGuckian often uses direct quotations despite the chronological mixing of the original text in the poem. This method of analysis shows the reader how McGuckian uses the words and themes from her source texts to create similar themes in her poetry. She uses the meanings created by the intertexts to bolster her own themes while utilizing the reordered words to craft new poems that are supported by the intertexts, not dependant. This is an intricate detective work that must have kept Alcobia-Murphy busy for years while giving the reader a delightful analysis of a complex body of work.
Alcobia-Murphy also skilfully uses the poetry of Seamus Heaney as a foil to examine the work of both writers. This contrast acts superbly since both writers, as citizens of Northern Ireland, have Heaney as their Bloomian anxiety of influence; a writer to be absorbed as well as overtaken. The shifting frontiers of poetry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the post Good Friday atmosphere and the late post-modernist climate also demand a different way of examining the issues that arise from the Belfast of Muldoon and McGuckian. Writers are faced with representing a changing society; whereas Heaney and his contemporaries had to allegorically layer their representations modern writers are freer to bring the Troubles into their work. The post-structuralist crisis of representation also challenges the validity of that representation and provides another stumbling block for the poets to negotiate. Alcobia-Murphy draws a brilliant picture of how two talented poets deal with their literary and political inheritance by contrasting them with Heaney.
A chapter dealing with the body as a text is particularly interesting. The blanket/dirty/hunger strikers are used to show how the human body can connect to an existing tradition, in effect becoming a text which absorbs nationalist and Biblical mythology as its intertext. Alcobia-Murphy draws an interesting connection between how these poets use their own intertexts, in effect layering meaning into the poetry’s themes as the prisoners used their bodies to connect to the text of mythic nationalist and Biblical sacrifice. The nationalist prisoners join, through their actions, to the heroic youthful sacrifice as exemplified in the life of Cuchulain or Jesus Christ which are both strongly emotive connections within their community. By dealing with sensitive and highly charged issues this section runs the most risk of failure but succeeds in showing how the northern issues play into the themes and forms of the poetry examined.
The visual arts are also explored as a way to contrast how poetry represents the northern Troubles. Painting, photographic montage and even journalistic representation are all discussed in reference to the poets’ handling of this issue. The conclusion of this chapter is powerful in its analysis of the representations and impact of the killing of two British soldiers who strayed into a nationalist funeral. This section, like most of the analysis, is generally more robust when dealing with McGuckian. It finds convincing primary references for the impact of the film footage of the murders on her son and her poetry and then the intertextual relations of a non-fiction text dealing with mob behaviour. The readings of Muldoon, however, could benefit from the same intensive combination of primary research with close readings.
The chapter on language and identity is also well-sourced in its analysis of McGuckian. Alcobia-Murphy shows how her complex language and the intertextual incorporation of her own feminist canon (Emily Bront?, George Eliot, Olga Ivinskaya, Tatyana Tolstoy and Marina Tseteava) creates her own challenge to the patriarchal English language and sees her creating a Joycean primal language similar to his masterful linguistic pastiche Finnegans Wake. Once again, the Muldoon analysis lacks the primary punch of the McGuckian section and one wonders if Alcobia-Murphy should have written this book more specifically about McGuckian while using Muldoon as another foil to her work. By bringing the Irish language question into this chapter instead of just a general analysis of the language issue as with McGuckian, the argument loses some of its coherence since the complex linguistic and cultural issues around the Irish language deserve another book unto themselves.
McGuckian’s intricate and strongly intertextual poetry is compared to Ezra Pound’s own attempt at including all of human history and culture into his monumental Cantos. Alcobia-Murphy uses this comparison when he faces his own critics and McGuckian’s in the concluding chapter; a fitting end to this erudite unearthing of a complex poets’ work. The intense scholarly apparatus required for unearthing the meaning behind The Cantos exposed Pound’s genius while creating an army of scholars. One can sympathise with John Banville’s critique of Muldoon’s Madoc: A Mystery, where he saw Muldoon as going too far and losing a readership while creating fodder for PhD students: this is an example of how poetry has diverged, sometimes quite radically, from popular readership into what is sometimes a self-reflexive and intertextual nightmare for lay readers. For those who love both complex and popular poetry, however, this exquisite scholarly exploration will allow readers a fascinating route into two alluring poets.
Andrew J Browne is a Doctoral Teaching fellow at NUI Galway where he teaches modern Irish fiction and is conducting doctoral research on the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella.
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