Wake Forest University Press

Irish Poetry | Anthologies

The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland

“Wake Forest University Press continues its impressive dedication to Irish poetry ... with The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland. ...[T]he poems and poets offer an insightful, lyrical look into the psyche of 21st-century Northern Ireland.” Irish America Magazine, Feb./March 2009

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“American-born editor Chris Agee, who has lived in Northern Ireland for decades, provides a meticulous introduction with judicious context to explain the convoluted motives and historical betrayals that forged contemporary Northern Ireland, suggesting as he does that the ‘creative interaction’ of poets working in a ‘damaged, and damaging, society’ has freed a previously ‘hidden’ and therefore distinctive contemporary ‘Ulster’ poetics set in a ‘post-imperial’ climate.…     [W]omen’s voices are better represented in The New North than in any previous collections spotlighting Northern Irish poets published on either side of the Atlantic. …

The gunfire and bombings are fading in these poems, but cultural troubles linger. These resonate with the most acute psychological complexity in the bilingual poets, from Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s ‘Caoineadh’ (‘Lament’) which (in its facing-page English rendition) tells us, ‘To-day it’s my language that’s in its throes, / The poets’ passion, my mothers’ fathers’ / mothers’ language, abandoned and trapped,’ to Gearóid Mac Lochlainn’s ‘Aistriúcháin’ (‘Translations’) which (with its built-in devastating contradiction) refuses to convert its Irish original text into ‘hub-bubbly English / that turns the ferment of my poems / to lemonade’ to be condescended to by Anglophone readers who would ‘love to have the Irish’ but prefer the laziness of ‘café culture’ and ‘Seamus.’” Rain Taxi Review of Books Winter 09-10