Sailing to an island: contemporary Irish poetry visits the western islands

The islands off the west of Ireland have always been regarded as a sanctuary of Irish identity. Having escaped the worst of Cromwellian despoliation, and untainted yet by what Yeats calls the “modern filthy tide” (1974: 196), the Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking areas are invoked by the Literary Revivalists as a site of Irish authenticity. But they seem like another country and are irreducibly other, their alterity testing the coherence of the mainland. My paper explores the trope of the island in the work of contemporary Irish poets. Although rejecting the nationalist appropriation of the western landscape, these poets are drawn to what MacNeice calls “island truancies” (1949:28). If the islands are no longer emblems of origins, they provide the distance from which to survey the twin issues of self and home. Physically and psychologically, the crossing to the islands is a journey into another country. In visiting these satellites that seem so much like home and yet are formidably alien, the tourist-poet negotiates the threshold between home and abroad, inside and outside, self and other.