Of Silences and Snow: Forgetting and Remembering the Troubles in New Poetry from Northern Ireland
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| Format: | Recurso digital |
| Language: | English |
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2025
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| author | Ray, Prayag |
| author_facet | Ray, Prayag |
| contents | <p><span lang="EN-GB"><strong>Abstract: </strong>“The Troubles,” an internecine conflict between Catholics and Protestants, raged in the north of Ireland from the late 1960s till 1998, claiming 50,000 casualties in riots, police brutality, paramilitary bombings, and assassinations. In its wake, poets from the region, including Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson, reflected on the conflict in poems such as “Punishment” and “Belfast Confetti.” The Blackstaff Press anthology, <em>Poets from the North of Ireland </em>(1979), brought many such voices together, serving as a site where poetry confronted trauma, inscribing the Troubles into cultural memory. On the other hand, Blackstaff’s more recent anthology, <em>The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty­­: New Poets from the North of Ireland </em>(2016), seems keen to leave the Troubles as subject matter behind. The anthology’s avoidance of Troubles memories—explicitly represented in only two of 116 poems—is the central problematic that this paper will explore. This literary forgetting is particularly curious given the overabundance of mnemonic constructs in the cultural fabric of the North. After historicising the Troubles and discussing the peace process—in particular, economic change and its reflection in the anthology—this paper will read the seeming eschewal of Troubles memories as a tacit and unacknowledged remembering. Drawing on new materialist philosophy, in particular the notion of “affective assemblage” growing out of the work of </span>Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I suggest that repressed Troubles memories <span lang="EN-GB">are encoded and inscribed into material, spatial, and affective dimensions of the poetic texts under consideration. </span><span lang="EN-GB">I read the anthology as part of a broader network of memory—an assemblage of heterogenous elements, where memories, matter, and affect interact, and leave their traces in semiotic as well as material elements of the book. </span><span lang="EN-GB">I shall focus on </span><span lang="EN-GB">four sites of inscription—spaces, bodies, animals, and mood</span><span lang="EN-GB">—that encode and bear witness to the trauma of the Troubles even as a new generation of poets explicitly distance themselves from the incendiary circumstances and divisive political rhetoric of the past. Focusing on key poems by Paula Cunningham, Caoilinn Hughes, Stephen Sexton, and others, the paper shall explore a spectral poetic landscape of snowfall and ruined cathedrals, hospitals and radioactive burns, fallen sparrows and stalking panthers, suggesting that even a strategic and transformative politics of forgetting leaves materially, spatially, and affectively embedded traces.</span></p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_15823583 |
| institution | Zenodo |
| language | eng |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
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| spellingShingle | Of Silences and Snow: Forgetting and Remembering the Troubles in New Poetry from Northern Ireland Ray, Prayag The Troubles Northern Irish poetry Affective assemblage New materialism Conflict studies Memory studies <p><span lang="EN-GB"><strong>Abstract: </strong>“The Troubles,” an internecine conflict between Catholics and Protestants, raged in the north of Ireland from the late 1960s till 1998, claiming 50,000 casualties in riots, police brutality, paramilitary bombings, and assassinations. In its wake, poets from the region, including Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson, reflected on the conflict in poems such as “Punishment” and “Belfast Confetti.” The Blackstaff Press anthology, <em>Poets from the North of Ireland </em>(1979), brought many such voices together, serving as a site where poetry confronted trauma, inscribing the Troubles into cultural memory. On the other hand, Blackstaff’s more recent anthology, <em>The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty­­: New Poets from the North of Ireland </em>(2016), seems keen to leave the Troubles as subject matter behind. The anthology’s avoidance of Troubles memories—explicitly represented in only two of 116 poems—is the central problematic that this paper will explore. This literary forgetting is particularly curious given the overabundance of mnemonic constructs in the cultural fabric of the North. After historicising the Troubles and discussing the peace process—in particular, economic change and its reflection in the anthology—this paper will read the seeming eschewal of Troubles memories as a tacit and unacknowledged remembering. Drawing on new materialist philosophy, in particular the notion of “affective assemblage” growing out of the work of </span>Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I suggest that repressed Troubles memories <span lang="EN-GB">are encoded and inscribed into material, spatial, and affective dimensions of the poetic texts under consideration. </span><span lang="EN-GB">I read the anthology as part of a broader network of memory—an assemblage of heterogenous elements, where memories, matter, and affect interact, and leave their traces in semiotic as well as material elements of the book. </span><span lang="EN-GB">I shall focus on </span><span lang="EN-GB">four sites of inscription—spaces, bodies, animals, and mood</span><span lang="EN-GB">—that encode and bear witness to the trauma of the Troubles even as a new generation of poets explicitly distance themselves from the incendiary circumstances and divisive political rhetoric of the past. Focusing on key poems by Paula Cunningham, Caoilinn Hughes, Stephen Sexton, and others, the paper shall explore a spectral poetic landscape of snowfall and ruined cathedrals, hospitals and radioactive burns, fallen sparrows and stalking panthers, suggesting that even a strategic and transformative politics of forgetting leaves materially, spatially, and affectively embedded traces.</span></p> |
| title | Of Silences and Snow: Forgetting and Remembering the Troubles in New Poetry from Northern Ireland |
| topic | The Troubles Northern Irish poetry Affective assemblage New materialism Conflict studies Memory studies |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15823583 |