Abstract
While Irish literary culture has long been preoccupied with migration, the urgency of late-Anthropocene concerns with climate collapse and mass displacement has overtaken traditional concepts of migration in the works of some emerging poets. As poems by Ailbhe Darcy and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe suggest, the intersection of vulnerable subjectivities and climate anxieties offers a poetic space to interrogate the degradation of humanitarian and ecological values. Using the formal innovation of the Fibonacci sequence, pioneered in contemporary poetry by Inger Christensen, both Darcy and Eipe present profound meditations on the fragile condition of the planet and its inhabitants in the early twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
See for example Centenary, a production by RTÉ, the national broadcaster, to commemorate the 1916 Rising. Amongst musical performances and dramatic interpretations of the events of the rebellion, Centenary culminated in a reading of the Irish Proclamation of Independence by members of the Irish diaspora, seen as a symbolic re-welcoming of the children of Ireland.
- 2.
Insistence is the subject of an excellent recent article by Julia Obert which considers the global and biopolitical context of Darcy’s latest collection (see bibliography). Eipe’s collection was reviewed in the Irish Times (31 July 2021). Her presence on the Irish poetry scene has been remarkable—her work has featured as part of the RTÉ Illuminations series, Galway2020, and the University College Dublin Irish Poetry Reading Archive, and she has been awarded an array of fellowships and prizes, including Poetry Ireland Introductions 2020, Next Generation Artist Award in Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland, Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme 2020, and Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust 2019 Student Prize. In terms of critical attention, however, her work has yet to receive sustained scholarly analysis in the context of the shifting Irish poetic canon.
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McDaid, A. (2024). “not safe any / where anymore”: Biopolitical Poetics and Irish Migration Poetry. In: Stan, C., Sussman, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_39
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