A History of Irish Women's Poetry

A History of Irish Women's Poetry is a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women's poetry from earliest times to the present day. It reads Irish women's poetry through many prisms ? mythology, gender, history, the nation ? and most importantly, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures, such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women's poetry has been produced and received, from the anonymous work of the early medieval period, through the bardic age, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival, and the advent of modernity. As capacious as it is diverse, this book is an essential contribution to scholarship in the field.

Introduction: why foremothers? Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley; 1. The reception of Irish women poets Anne Fogarty; 2. Women in the medieval poetry business Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha; 3. Seventeenth century women's poetry in Ireland Danielle Clarke and Sarah McKibben; 4. The oral tradition Tríona Ni Shíocháin; 5. Archipelagic Ireland: women's anglophone poetry from the eighteenth century Sarah Prescott; 6. Irish Romanticism Catherine Jones; 7. Mary Tighe in life, myth, and literary vicissitude Stephen Behrendt; 8. Masculinity, nationhood and the Irish woman poet, 1860–1922 Lucy Collins; 9. The eclipse of Dora Sigerson Matthew Campbell; 10. Between revivalist lyric and Irish modernism Sarah Bennett; 11. The other 'northern renaissance' Jaclyn Allen; 12. Rematriating mid-century modernism: Carla Lanyon Lanyon Moynagh Sullivan; 13. Accidental Irishness and the transnational legacy of Lola Ridge Daniel Tobin; 14. Crisis and renewal: Irish-language poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Daniela Theinová; 15. The poetry of Máire Mhac an tSaoi and the indivisibility of love Patricia Coughlan; 16. Voices from limbo: Biddy Jenkinson David Wheatley; 17. Bilingual poetry Kenneth Keating; 18. Catholicism in modern Irish women's poetry Catriona Clutterbuck; 19. 1970s–80s feminism Kit Fryatt; 20. The art of fabrication: reading Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin Maria Johnston; 21. Eavan Boland, history and silence Guinn Batten; 22. Paula Meehan and the public poem Kathryn Kirkpatrick; 23. Formalism and contemporary women's poetry Tara McEvoy; 24. Susan Howe, Maggie O'Sullivan, Catherine Walsh Nerys Williams; 25. Irish women's poetry beyond the now Anne Mulhall.

Ailbhe Darcy is Senior Lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University and the author of Imaginary Menagerie (2011), Subcritical Tests (2017), in collaboration with S. J. Fowler, and Insistence (2018), which won Wales Book of the Year, the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and the Pigott Prize for Poetry, Ireland's largest poetry prize, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
David Wheatley is a reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave, 2015), and five collections of poetry, including The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet, 2017). Among the awards David has won are the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize.