Abstract
This chapter focuses on the work of three writers representing what has been termed the “post-Troubles” generation of poets from Northern Ireland: Leontia Flynn, Alan Gillis and Sinéad Morrissey. It demonstrates how their writing seeks possibilities for a new poetics to tackle the challenges of a changing society, and how the visual and spatial aesthetics of their work in particular mirrors and/or interrogates the continuing (and evolving) tensions between social groups and conflicting interests. This poetry combines aesthetic ambition with an acute awareness of how spatial relations reflect the variety of ethical issues demanding attention in twenty-first-century Northern Ireland, and beyond its borders. The chapter will pay particular attention to how, in many of the discussed poems, a visual-verbal aesthetics is employed to address or implicitly comment on the radical transformations in our current media environment, historically coinciding with the changes in the cultural, social and political landscape of post-ceasefire Northern Ireland.
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Notes
- 1.
Mitchell and Kenyon was founded in 1897 by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon. Their work was rediscovered in 1994 and is now available on a DVD titled Electric Edwardians. Whether they actually created this device has been challenged, but Mitchell and Kenyon nevertheless presented fictional and documentary films under the name of Norden in the final years of the nineteenth and the early years of twentieth century. See Toulmin, Russell and Neal and The Lost World of Mitchell And Kenyon.
- 2.
For a more detailed account of Carson’s poetry, space and surveillance, see, for example, Alexander 2009a.
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Karhio, A. (2019). Finished and Under Construction: Visual Representation and Spatial Relations in Post-Ceasefire Northern Irish Poetry. In: Armstrong, C.I., Herbert, D., Mustad, J.E. (eds) The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91232-5_12
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