Poetry as endurance : Caitríona O'Reilly' Geis

Title: Poetry as endurance : Caitríona O'Reilly' Geis
Author: Pietrzak, Wit
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2020, vol. 46, iss. 2, pp. 249-260
Extent
249-260
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Article
Language
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
The article focuses on O'Reilly's Geis (2015), exploring the notion of poetry as a force of endurance of life's traumas. The volume is shown to display a tense balance between celebrations of life and a constant awareness of death as well as between displays of language's expressive capacity and the recurrent realisations of the ineffable nature of the world. This vacillation, in turn, takes on a critical potential, as her poems investigate the situation of a traumatised psyche and the ends of art, all the while being alert to the question of what enables the (poetic) voice to speak out. In the course of my reading, O'Reilly's insistent ambiguities are mapped out against the classical writings of Jacques Derrida, whose challenge to the metaphysics of presence, truth, speech and coherence helps trace O'Reilly's investment in the perception of poetry as springing from no source but nevertheless representing a vital force of endurance, life and resilience.
Note
The article has been written within the framework of the project financed by The National Science Centre, Cracow, Poland, pursuant to the decision number DEC 2017/25/B/ HS2/02099.
References
[1] Ashbery, John (1991) Flow Chart: A Poem. New York: The Noonday Press.

[2] Collins, Lucy (2017) Airborne. Dublin Review of Books. https://www.drb.ie/essays/airborne. Accessed on 5 Jan 2020.

[3] De Beauvoir, Simone (1953) The Second Sex. Parshley, H. M. (trans.) London: Vintage.

[4] Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (trans.) Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[5] Derrida, Jacques (1981) Dissemination. Johnson, Barbara (trans.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

[6] Derrida, Jacques (1982) Margins of Philosophy. Bass, Alan (trans.) Brighton: The Harvester Press.

[7] Derrida, Jacques (1994) Shibboleth: For Paul Celan. In: Fioretos, Aris (ed.) Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–72.

[8] Dickey, Eleanor (2007) Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[9] Heaney, Seamus (1993) On Yeats's "Man and the Echo". Harvard Review 4 (32), 96–99.

[10] Holdridge, Jefferson (2002) The Nowhere Birds by Caitríona O'Reilly. Irish University Review 32 (2), 377–380.

[11] Joyce, James (2001) Dubliners. Ware: Wordsworth Editions.

[12] Maeder, Beverly (2007) Stevens and linguistic structure. In: Serio, John N. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 149–163.

[13] Marder, Elissa (2018) Derrida's matrix: The births of deconstruction. The Oxford Literary Review 40 (1), 1–19. | DOI 10.3366/olr.2018.0235

[14] Marlowe, Christopher (2000) Tamburlaine the Great: Part II. In: The Plays. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 77–152.

[15] Naiden, James (2003) Review of The Nowhere Birds. New Hibernia Review 7 (3), 154–155. | DOI 10.1353/nhr.2003.0066

[16] O'Reilly, Caitríona The act of poetry is a rebel act: Interview. Wake Forest University Press. wfupress.wfu.edu. Accessed on 5 Jan 2020.

[17] O'Reilly, Caitríona (2015) Geis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe.

[18] Pound, Ezra (2005) The Chinese written character as medium for Poetry. In: Rainey, Lawrence (ed.) Modernism: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell, 99–112.

[19] Ross, Stephen J. (2017) Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[20] Sampson, Fiona (2006) Stacking myths, making meaning. The Irish Times 20 May 2006. www.irishtimes.com. Accessed on 5 Jan 2020.

[21] Stevens, Wallace (1982) The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage.

[22] Tate, Allen (1932) New England culture and Emily Dickinson. Symposium 3, 206–218.

[23] Yeats, W. B. (1996) The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Scribner.