Irene Gilsenan Nordin (editor), The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry.

Cahill, Susan

Irene Gilsenan Nordin (editor), The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006. viii+ 254 pages. EUR 20.00 (paperback).

Irene Gilsenan Nordin's collection, The Body in Contemporary Irish Poetry, draws together recent critical explorations of poetic representations and engagements with the bodily. The essays included in this volume focus on the work of poets such as Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, and Paula Meehan, among others. As signalled in the title, the issue of desire forms an important critical focus for the essays in this book, which is thought of in terms of power as well as the libidinal, the political as well as the erotic. The means by which poetic, social, and political discourses employ the metaphorical desiring body is also examined. Gilsenan Nordin's collection is the first of its kind to engage with such issues in a sustained way in relation to Irish literary studies and thus represents an important marker for changes in critical focus that are taking place in the field.

In the last two decades, there has been an explosion of work on the body in sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, and feminist theory. However, this interest has only recently filtered through to discussions of Irish literature, which belies the importance of the body as a potent source of metaphor and identity construction, particularly in terms of nationalist discourses. Ireland's corporeal figurations and body politic have been fraught ones historically and issues relating to political landscapes often became imbricated with constructions of the 'national body.' The dominance of Catholicism as a set of moral principles, an ideology, and a collection of imagery, despite being one of the more bodily oriented religions, contributed to a repression of the physical on a widespread scale in Ireland's independent nation. Though this morality has loosened its hold in the Irish cultural arena, certain areas, particularly those pertaining to the body, such as reproductive rights, remain bastions of conservative opinion. It is no accident that the corporeal is situated at the crux of conflict. Metaphors of the body form the basis of our ordering of the world and are a forceful means of structuring concepts of nation and history. However, in contrast to the fields of body criticism in areas such as sociology, feminism, and literary criticism from the early-modern period to the nineteenth century, Irish studies remains largely starved of works related to corporeality. Gilsenan Nordin's book thus makes an important contribution to this much-neglected field.

Despite the bodily-orientated literary antecedents provided by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, poetry, particularly the contemporary, has received most attention in recent years in terms of Irish literature's engagement with the corporeal. The Body in Contemporary Irish Poetry is a timely reflection of this growing interest.

In her introduction, Gilsenan Nordin sums up the Irish cultural engagement with the body as follows:

 the body has a long tradition as a powerful trope, reaching back
 to early Celtic Christianity, when the body was celebrated as a
 source of wisdom and beauty, to the fear of the body as a site of
 temptation and its strong negation in the Catholic tradition, to its
 exploitation as a force in the construction of Irish national
 identity, where the body was depicted as a landscape on which the
 nationalist drama was inscribed (p.2).

In this identification of the tendency to envisage Ireland in terms of a body-politic, Gilsenan Nordin signals the dominance of this critical approach to the corporeal in studies of Irish literature. Reflective of this imaginary embodiment of the land, then, the existing critical commentary on contemporary Irish poetry can be divided into two main trajectories. Furthermore, these two different strands can be identified along gendered terms. Broadly speaking, then, the first category is made up of critics who focus particularly on Northern Irish male poets in terms of political violence enacted upon the body, resulting in a traumatic dispersed, fragmented, or dismembered corporeality. The second category would include critics who focus on poets such as Eavan Boland, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, and Medbh McGuckian in terms of concerns linking body and nation.

The first two of the divisions in Gilsenan Nordin's collection are reflective of these two dominant trends of body criticism in analyses of Irish poetry, which she titles respectively, 'The Body Politic: Territorial Reconfiguration and Desire' and 'The Female Body: Women's Sexual, Maternal, Ageing Bodies and Desire'. In the first section, Scott Brewster's essay on Northern Irish poetry explores the work of Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Tom Paulin in relation to their engagement with the abjection of dead and violated bodies that are scattered throughout their work. For much of Northern Irish poetry, the violence and fragmentation of the political landscape are often negotiated through the metaphorical body. Brewster argues that poets like Muldoon and Carson maintain the 'uncanniness of the corpse' through their emphasis on irony and rhetorical playfulness, whereas Longley's poetry acts to lend coherence to the dispersed body through naming and commemoration (p.22). In the second section of his essay, Brewster points to the connections that are formed in these poems between reactions to the corpse and attitudes to notions of home, which are played out in the work of Mahon and Paulin through aesthetic engagements with landscapes of waste and isolation.

Robert Brazeu's essay on Thomas Kinsella focuses on the body as a 'site of contest' between conflicting political, historical, and ethical discourses (p.58). Northern Ireland again emerges as the political landscape, the local disturbances of which find expression in the corporeal. Similarly, the images of the body in Heaney's poetry, for Eugene O'Brien, serve as a ground upon which conflicts between the ethical and political can be negotiated. As in Brazeu's valorization of the local, O'Brien argues that Heaney's use of the body insists upon 'the importance of the individual life, the individual body' (p.97). Elund Summers-Bremner answers back to the dominant focus on Northern Irish male poets and political landscapes in her essay on McGuckian, and explores the difficulty that emerges for a female poet when 'the feminine and the maternal have signified loss of land, language and national sovereignty' (p.41).

These concerns are taken up in the second section of the collection, which focuses explicitly on the female body. Veronica House holds that women's lived experiences of ageing are obscured by the literary images of Ireland as old hag transformed into a young queen who is representative of the hope for Ireland's political renewal. Boland's poems reclaim and rewrite similar myths, such as that of Ceres, in an effort to symbolize the reality of the ageing female body. Michaela Schrage-Fruh focuses on the image of the Virgin Mary as a myth of the maternal, which similarly obfuscates social, material, and physical expressions of female sexuality and embodiment. Schrage-Fruh's conclusion echoes that of House, in that the rewriting and disruption of this myth by Irish women poets have been instrumental in the re-imagining of women's bodies and sexualities. Colleen A. Hayes carries forward the focus on the maternal in her essay on poetry and the intergenerational relationship between mothers and daughters that has remained under-symbolized in Western, and more specifically, Irish culture. Again, Hayes argues for a reclamation of traditional images and discourses in order to make explicit the particular ways in which rhetorical uses of women's bodies remained unacknowledged.

These first two sections in Gilsean Nordin's collection eloquently reflect the two major trends of Irish critical writing on the body and poetry. However, critics such as Gilsenan Nordin herself, and Elin Holmsten have recently been expanding the remit of Irish literary criticism on the body. Gilsenan Nordin acknowledges this in her introduction to The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry:

 the collection is a much-needed addition to contemporary Irish
 studies criticism in that it deals with issues of otherness in an
 existential and spiritual sense, issues that have long taken second
 place to the public discourse in contemporary Irish literary
 criticism (p.3).

In the third section of the collection, 'The Existential Body: The Self and Desire For the Other', Gilsenan Nordin gathers together essays that think through the body in terms of its facility for encountering otherness. This critical focus on otherness, empathy, and the interface between the embodied human subject and the aesthetic and rhetorical conditions of poetry is significant in its move away from approaches that mediate body and political landscape. While such criticism is important and necessary, Gilsenan Nordin's collection must be noted for its insistence on moving beyond these paradigms.

Elin Holmsten, in her essay on Medbh McGuckian, is particularly interested in the question of otherness, which she defines as 'what is beyond the present cognitive horizon of self (p.163). Holmsten frames her analysis through the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Emmanuel Kant in relation to philosophies of desire. McGuckian's poetry then is approached through a consideration of how it expresses the embodied self's engagement with its own otherness, its continual becoming. Helen Blakeman also considers McGuckian's poetry, but specifically in relation to mourning and desire. Otherness is again of primary concern, as Blakeman identifies 'the body of the lost other' as 'the abject site of both terror and longing' (p.197). This engagement with the body of the other troubles any ontological security. Lucy Collins turns to the poetry of Thomas Kinsella and its dialogue between suffering and desire. For her, Kinsella presents the body as 'nexus of physical and cultural impulses' and a 'site of desire and denial', which undermine fixed identities and privilege encounters between self and other (p. 182). Charles I. Armstrong's essay on Seamus Heaney explores these concerns through the poet's attitude to aesthetics in terms of poetry's relation to the embodied self.

Gilsenan Nordin's analysis of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain concludes this volume. Her opening statement, 'The idea of the body as a vital component of existence and an important means for the articulation of experience is a recurring theme in the work of a number of contemporary Irish poets', could be seen to sum up the collection as a whole. Gilsenan Nordin views the body as a liminal space, one that acts as a site of interrelation between physical and spiritual, conscious and unconscious, self and other, space and time, and the known and unknown.

The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry, then, offers a sustained exploration of the ways in which the poets focused upon in the collection articulate embodied subjects and their positionings in relation to configurations of the political, the cultural, and the existential. To consider how authors use the body in their writing is to think about their attempts to intervene in political and cultural placements of corporeality in the milieu in which they write. To focus on the body is to ask how it matters and Gilsenan Nordin's collection offers a variety of such interventions[degrees] The collection is noteworthy in its attempt to move beyond existing paradigms of critical analysis of contemporary Irish poetry and the body.