A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
which were thought to be contrary to the life of anarchic individualism invoked by the word “poet.” I found that a difficult and resistant atmosphere in which to write. I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman's life. And I couldn't accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.
(Smartish Pace 2015)
Her endeavor to put the life she lived into her poems resulted in a poetry that was indeed too large to be contained by one country. The Poetry Foundation webpage on Boland notes that her fifth collection, In Her Own Image (1980), though published in Dublin, “brought Boland international recognition and acclaim. Exploring topics such as domestic violence, anorexia, infanticide and cancer, the book also announced Boland's on‐going concern with inaccurate and muffled portrayals of women in Irish literature and society.” (“Boland,” Poetry Foundation 2015b)
Within the United States, many of Boland's collections were published by Norton, and, in general, Boland emerged as an iconic presence not just in terms of her subject matter but also her intense and well‐gathered style. Writing in The Southern Review, Kate Daniels starts off her essay “Ireland's Best” by declaring:
If one were to compose a scale of oppositions upon which to consider contemporary poetry by Irish women […] Boland […] would appear at one end, and Medbh McGuckian […] at the other. Although their work is fundamentally different—Boland the mistress of a highly cadenced, formalistic verse that favors “a lyric speech, a civil tone” (to use her own words), and McGuckian the wielder of nonlinear, surrealistic pieces—both women share a preoccupation with the liberation of Irish poetry from the historical grip of male readers and writers.
(Daniels 1999, 387)
Later in her essay, Daniels argues that both of these women poets might find a receptive audience in the United States because of the similarity of their struggles with that of Adrienne Rich, that their “plaints are recognizable versions of [Rich's] dilemma […] as a young American poet struggling to emerge from the grip of New Criticism.” (387). But thematic similarities can beget boredom as well as receptivity, not to mention gender‐connected blind spots, and Daniels, interestingly, also reports of some of her own male colleagues' resistance to Boland. According to them, she is “flat.” Nonetheless, writes Daniels, Boland “is one of the most celebrated poets writing today […]. If her voice is flat, it is the flatness of authority—no nonsense, take‐no‐prisoners. It is a voice that must be reckoned with” (390).
Of course, there are many other poets worthy of mention. Three books of the aforementioned Irish poet Medbh McGuckian (born 1950) have even been published in America by Wake Forest University Press: Captain Lavender (1995), Shemailer (1998), and The Currach Requires No Harbours (2010). Her work, involving a multilayered exploration of women's consciousness, has been said to be “reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke in its emotional scope and John Ashbery in its creation of rich interior landscapes” (“McGuckian,” Poetry Foundation 2015c).
Among poets on the other side of the Irish Sea, Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955) has certainly garnered attention in America. Britain's current Poet Laureate, Duffy is not just the first woman, but also the first open member of the LGBTQ community to achieve this recognition. Her poetry is so powerful because it conveys emotional immediacy with historical resonance in a way that constantly blends the personal with the political, and it is no surprise that it has gained an appreciation in America. Kevin Clark admires her offering “a feminist consciousness willing to reexamine itself while ultimately reaffirming itself.” (Clark 2005, 405) Writing in The Antioch Review of Duffy's The World's Wife (1999), Jane Satterfield (born in England but raised in America) has noted Duffy's “masterful subversions of myth and history” in these poems written from the perspective of women connected with various fictional as well as historical male figures of cultural note (Satterfield 2001, 124).
Anne Stevenson (born 1933) too is a “bi‐Atlantic” poet in that she was born in England, but raised in the United States from the time she was 6 months old until she graduated—in 1954—with a BA in Music and Literature from the University of Michigan, where she studied with the poet Donald Hall (“Stevenson,” Poetry Foundation 2015a). She then moved to England where she has lived for most of her adult life, though returning to Ann Arbor in 1960–1961 to complete an MA in English Literature. Over the years, however, her poetic presence on this side of the Atlantic has certainly remained. Living in America, her first collection, was published in Michigan by Generation Press in 1965. Several of her collections have also been published in both London and New York by Oxford University Press, including Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems, 1963–1973 (1974), Enough of Green (1977), Minute by Glass Minute (1982), and Four and a Half Dancing Men (1993). A Selected Poems, edited and introduced by the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, appeared from the Library of America in 2008. Besides such wide publication, Stevenson has also garnered such awards as the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of America, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from the University of the South—all in 2007—and, in 2008, an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan.
Suffering from a hereditary condition that robbed much of her hearing by the age of 30, Stevenson has nonetheless become known as a poet attentive to sound—of language as well as of music. According to Emily Grosholz in The Hudson Review, “Many of Anne Stevenson's best poems reflect on the action of poetry and music on time” (Grosholz 2009, 406–407). There is, though, evidence of some dissonance between her work and at least a few American readers, not so much in subject matter, but in “poetic ear.” Writing in a review of Stevenson's Poems 1955–2005 (Dufour Editions) in Poetry, D. H. Tracy, despite a considerable amount of admiration, nonetheless finds her at times awkward:
She has something of Bishop's patrician sequencing of observation and, less reliably, Plath's way of pogo‐sticking from word to word. More socially constituted than either of these poets, she possesses a charity that neither of them had, and suffers from an excess of consciousness that neither of them had either. I say “suffers” because the excess often manifests itself as literary mannerism or a chattiness of tone that does not entrain itself to the formal or dramatic requirements of the poem. Her challenge, generally speaking, is disciplining this excess.
(Tracy 2006, 169)
Also important to mention is Jon Silkin (1930–1997), a poet noted for long lines as well as historical witness, especially that involving the literature of World War I. Not only was he well known in America as a poet, but so was his literary magazine Stand. A representative appreciation of Silkin's poetry can be glimpsed in the 1970 inaugural issue of The Iowa Review, where Merle E. Brown describes his poetry as “many tongued, speaking with more than one voice even when containing only one person […]. Each creature and each voice [reverberating] with a representativeness beyond itself; if the society of a poem seems small, intimate, and personal at first, upon repeated reading its range widens and implicates a community, a nation, a world […]” (Brown 1970, 115).
Evidence of yet other interesting poets in the past half‐century or so from Ireland or England receiving notice in America can be gleaned from such prominent sources as the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry Volume II. Here we can encounter the work of additional Irish poets such as Thomas Kinsella (born 1928), Michael Longley (born 1939), and Derek Mahon (1941–2020). Other English writers include Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), Donald Davie (1922–1995), Charles Tomlinson (1927–2015), Thom Gunn (1929–2004), Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016), Tony Harrison (born 1937), Craig Raine (born 1944), and Grace Nichols (born 1950). In the case of Nichols, who was born in Guyana in 1950 but eventually settled in England in 1977, we see not just an example of a Black British poet's work being presented in America, but also the addition of postcolonial complexity in that some Anglophone poets from the British Commonwealth may see themselves as being both part of and beyond