Issue 09, Spring 2009

Chief among them is Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966), a book – length sequence which can be read as an autobiographical account of a breakdown and as a response to the chaotic and destructive emergence of the new state.These poems’ grotesque humiliations and their refusals to mythologise their protagonists or console them with larger narratives of redemption should be seen to define post-Yeatsian Irish literature as much as Joyce or Beckett or McGahern.