Memory Spaces

Abstract

‘Memory Spaces’ concentrates on the reconstructions of home in the work of three poets who, despite their long-term relocations to England, continually revisit their native places through their poetry. Bernard O’Donoghue’s use of mythology as a frame of memory is a technique that transforms the rupture of migration into emotionally and poetically manageable material. O’Donoghue’s reconstruction of his native place is an act of myth-making necessary to his migrant sensibilities, in a way similar to Martina Evans’s almost obsessive re-making of her childhood home in her volume Petrol (2012). Evans’s subversive approach to memory, both private and collective, is realised in the mimetic fragmentation and disruption on multiple levels in her poetry. Colette Bryce’s migration is considered in terms of her childhood during the Troubles, arguing that the cultural and social configurations of that conflict-space are remembered and restaged in her aesthetic. The dialogue of departure and return in Bryce’s poetry is also read in terms of queer migration theory, examining how the ethics of memory and reinvention in queer migration challenge heteronormative constructs. This chapter highlights that migration not only instigates a dialogue with the adopted place but also enacts new engagements with the home that is left behind.