Twenty-first-century migrant Irish poets in the UK: Martina Evans and Fran Lock

Darcy, Ailbhe ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5260-4672 2024. Twenty-first-century migrant Irish poets in the UK: Martina Evans and Fran Lock. Fogarty, Anne and O'Brien, Eugene, eds. The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First-Century Irish Writing, Routledge Literature Companions, New York: Taylor and Francis, pp. 143-153. (10.4324/9781003305392-14)

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Abstract

Martina Evans and Fran Lock, Irish poets based in the UK, employ what could be termed ‘exiled perspectives’ in their poetic explorations of identity, memory, community and belonging. In their work, ideas of exile – an inability to return ‘home’ but an insistence on dreaming of ‘home’ – produce a poetics of unfinishedness. In their very different ways, in works such as Evans's American Mules (2021) and Lock's The Mystic and the Pig Thief (2014), these poets explore how notions of belonging and memories of a homeplace complicate and interrupt everyday life, becoming a source of violence, distress or bewilderment. They achieve this, in part, by a poetics of repetition, whereby both writers circle the same ideas and narratives as if endlessly, across multiple works; through an embrace of theatricality; and through their attention to voices who remain erased or submerged in Irish literature. For Evans and Lock, the condition of exile from a place called Ireland becomes a metaphor, a way of thinking about more universal states of being in twenty-first-century Britain and Ireland.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis
ISBN:	9781003305392
Last Modified:	03 Feb 2025 10:25
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175744

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