Poets from the south-east are challenging the cynicism accompanying Ireland's economic boom, an audience in Kilkenny was told last week.
Dr Caitriona Clutterbuck of the Department of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at UCD showed how poets from Kilkenny, Waterford and south Tipperary had brought an optimistic view of the Celtic Tiger to their work. Delivering the fourth lecture in the Co Kilkenny VEC "Second Sight" series, she said cultural critics suggested the Celtic Tiger was an illusion whose purpose was to consolidate social inequity.
Critics of the Celtic Tiger compared their own "clear-eyed perceptiveness" to the "self-delusion" and "naive surface optimism" they saw all around them. Four poets, either from or based in the south-east - Thomas McCarthy, Michael Coady, Mark Roper and Kerry Hardie - had all shown it was possible to be optimistic and open-eyed, rather than wide-eyed, at the same time.
Dr Clutterbuck suggested the south-east may be important as a focus for poets "precisely because it is not `important'; unlike the west or the urban east or the north, for example, the south-east resists appropriation as a signifier of any special identity".
"On the edge of the Pale but outside it, the first site of British colonisation, the south-east registers in a particular way the pressures to submit to and to challenge domination, at one and the same time. Its poets display a more directly vocational determination not to be outfaced by cynicism than is found in the work of poets from other parts of the country: there is an early and precisely identifiable focus on healing in their work."
McCarthy is from Cappoquin, Co Waterford, but now lives in Cork. The other three poets examined all live in the south-east: Coady has lived all his life in Carrick-on-Suir; English-born Roper settled in Piltown, Co Kilkenny, more than 20 years ago and Hardie, from Northern Ireland, now lives in Graiguenamanagh.
The fifth lecture in the series, at Butler House in Kilkenny tomorrow evening, "From William Fisher to Fethard-on-Sea: Meditations on Southern Protestantism", will be delivered by journalist and broadcaster Eoghan Harris. The final event, tomorrow week, will be a reading by the Booker Prize-nominated author Colm Toibin, from Enniscorthy, Co Wexford.