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Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928–1940

a stretch as seeing, as Guissin-Stubbs does, Yeats’s exhortation to “hammer your thoughts into unity” in Peter Sirr’s phrase “until we’ve hammered ourselves into it” (“Housed Unhoused,” The Rooms, 2014). Elsewhere, Guissin-Stubbs finds in the line “Shielded, vague soldiers, visored, crouched alert,” from John Hewitt’s sonnet “Bogside, Derry, 1971,” a “faint echo” of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” (Leda’s “terrified vague fingers”) (178). Very faint, I’d think. Guissin-Stubbs provides fine readings both of Sirr and Groarke in chapter five as she explores Sirr’s “almostsonnets” (from his 2014 sequence The Rooms) and the way in which they “negotiate ideas of homelessness and of being at home” and how Groarke, “homeless within the masculine, hegemonic sonnet form, can employ metaphors of domesticity in order to haunt its fringes” (168). When Guissin-Stubbs states in this chapter, in reference to the Northern Troubles, that “ . . . political sonnets often use the local and domestic as a way of increasing the discomfort or pathos of a political situation” (176), this seems oblivious to the way killings carried out in domestic or intimate settings became horrifically characteristic of the conflict. She is on much firmer ground when she writes, in a section entitled “The Domestic and the Everyday,” that within contemporary Irish poetry “ . . . familiar places, locations and events act as a springboard for broader musings, and normality can even become fetishised” (169). This is an acute observation, with a lot of scope. The Modern Irish Sonnet covers an expanse of ground: along with Muldoon, Heaney and Boland we find considerations of Sirr, Meehan and O’Malley, among others. There is a refreshingly welcome degree of inclusivity (although this can lead to some unequally weighted discussions). This inclusivity carries through to the conclusion which ranges from Paul Muldoon’s explorations of the sonnet’s limits to the American poet Merrill Moore’s collection of experimental sonnets M (1938), through to recent collections by Iggy McGovern and Micheal O’Siadhail. Taking O’Siadhail’s implied contention that the sonnet form alone is not sufficient for the contemporary world, Guissin-Stubbs discusses poems from Meehan’s The Man Who Was Marked By Winter (1991) which aren’t sonnets, proposing that the sonnet may be too “safe” a form for the expression of pain in these poems (222). After mentioning the difficulties involved in attempting any chronology of the modern Irish sonnet, Guissin-Stubbs proceeds to cite various historically neglected texts as illustrative of some of these difficulties. More pertinent, in the context of this study, is her closing observation that the sonnet might be “the perfectly imperfect form to work things through, but not necessarily to work them out” (229).