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Slightly Magical Irish Poetry and the Long 1990s

By Lucy McDiarmid

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£19.99

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Published 28 February 2027

About this book

Examines the way recent Irish poems interrogate the status of a place or being or phenomenon considered ‘magic’
  • Explores Irish poetry since 1990, in the English and Irish languages
  • Covers a wide range of poets including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Paula Meehan and many more
  • Incorporates information from private conversations with many of the poets as they explain the origins of their poems
Slightly Magical Irish Poetry and the Long 1990s is a major intervention in the field of Irish literary studies, disrupting conventional divisions and interpretive categories, mixing established poets and new ones, and including poems in English and Irish. McDiarmid argues convincingly for the importance of the ontologically ambiguous or ‘slightly magical’ mode in recent Irish poetry. She brings her wealth of knowledge in the field of Irish literary and cultural criticism to bear on subjects as whimsical as cats, railroad reveries and hair, and as serious as political critiques of both Irelands during the upheavals of the 1990s. Drawing on the author’s conversations with the poets themselves, the book is written in a style that is witty and learned, sophisticated but always accessible.

Reviews

I love the fact that the poetry in Irish in Lucy McDiarmid's book is as important as the poetry in English.

Lucy McDiarmid’s knowledge of poets and poetry is immense. Her intimacy with a thousand different texts, all different, distinctive, and as various as the variousness of the personalities of the poets of our recent era, is all simply breath-taking. [...]

Our Irish Nineties tale is a long tale and Lucy McDiarmid tells it well, all done with great learning and in great style. If you’ve missed the chance to read this book, read it in the New Year, a book that is thesis, encyclopaedia, a Who’s Who of Irish poetry and a lucky-bag of jewels.

The magical or slightly magical lens is certainly not the only one available. Nonetheless, it affords Lucy McDiarmid an enjoyable account of a diverse array of Irish poems and poets from the weirdly elastic decade of the 1990s. More importantly, it reminds us that if poetry aspires to the condition of music, it also depends heavily on the infusion of magic to make it come alive.
[A] brilliant book

Like the best poems, the best critical commentary on poems has the reader
coming away with a sense of astonishment — 'how on earth did she do that?'
That’s certainly the case with Lucy McDiarmid, a more than slightly magical
critic whose aperçus derive from no mere bag of tricks but a proper sense of wonder.

Table of contents

Acknowledgments
A Note on Spelling

Introduction: Poetic Figments and Unalive Beings
1. Slightly Magical Liquids
2. The Railroad Reverie
3. Encounters with Others
4. Irish Cat Traditions
5. Hair and Tongue
6. Slightly Magical Public Poems
Conclusion: The Return of the Revival

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Lucy McDiarmid

Lucy McDiarmid is a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. She was the first Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University. Her most recent monographs are At Home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916 (2015), Poets and the Peacock Dinner: the literary history of a meal (2014) and The Irish Art of Controversy (2005).