THIS is the first critical study devoted to contemporary poetry by Irish women. Essays on individual poets or briefer overviews can be found elsewhere, but Haberstroh pioneers a sustained comparative framework. Her five principal chapters discuss Eithne Strong, Eavan Boland, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. As Haberstroh acknowledges, interest has intensified since she first "went hunting for books by women poets" on dusty shelves. Today, demand may even outstrip supply. Poetry lovers, publishers, academics, reviewers and anthologists have also become alert to how gender influences the transition between poem and reader bard and tribe.
Yet the current audience for Irish women poets is not necessarily stable if it owes more to fashion than to aesthetics or to deep cultural change. Women Creating Women omits historical perspectives which make us wary. Anne Ulry Colman, whose dictionary of 19th century Irish women poets will appear later this year, has shown that women published verse abundantly during a supposedly dark age. Indeed, she maintains, the real dark age set in during the 1930s.
So why did women poets fade from the scene? Possible causes include the usual suspects - censorship and conservative Catholicism; diminution of Irish publishing outlets; the erosion of southern Anglicanism (always the most literary sector of Irish Protestantism); the aesthetic uncertainties of mid century Ireland. On a wider front, the modernist climate could be hostile to women. Joyce said that The Waste Land had ended "poetry for ladies".
Haberstroh, however, follows Eavan Boland in implying that, "the Irish woman poet" is a recent creation. Indeed, much of Boland's critical polemic reads like a cry for women poets' recognition by the state which was established in the 1920s. In Haberstroh's words, Boland "works within the tradition to add the voice of the woman poet to the more dominant male voice in Irish literature". Boland's work has certainly helped to acclimatise feminist theory, but it sometimes encourages too homogeneous a view of history, women and poetic traditions.
And more is required, aesthetically and philosophically, than "addition". Haberstroh again assumes that Irishness has some kind of priority in literary matters when she concludes her chapter on Ni Dhomhnaill by saying: "Whether we read her in Irish or English the energy of that psychic landscape comes through vigorously to express an Ireland tied to the past, set in the present, and heading for the future."
Whenever we talk of poetry as expression, we easily fall into subject matter fallacies. The trap is baited by feminism as well as by Ireland. At one point Haberstroh lists "poems about orgasm and masturbation, poems about wombs, childbirth, mastectomies, hysterectomies, anorexia". It is too soon to assess the relation between poetry and the Irish women's movement, except to feel that there is one, but that it may be less obvious than such a catalogue suggests. How, since the 1970s, have the liberating themes of international feminism intersected with lived or imagined experience and with creative talent? Haberstroh's account of Ni Dhomhnaill misses some of her darkness and some of her originality.
There is a tendency, not always avoided in this book, for disturbing texts to be muted by the hype that waits on Irish artistic achievements. Also, a number of bad poems receive respectful exegesis. It is possible to write sentimentally about wombs, anorexia, etc. Nor does every revision of male myth change the world. What Haberstroh terms "a more confident female voice expressing the value of women's experience and perception" is a social phenomenon which should be distinguished from the complexities of "voice" in poetry. Nor am I convinced that poetry and confidence are synonymous.
Haberstroh examine's poetic voice in her most subtle chapters, those of McGuckian and Ni Chuilleanain. It is no coincidence that their work rarely lends itself to reductionist analysis and that their language strenuously exercises the reader. Haberstroh comments, for instance: "McGuckian's hes and shes seem to defy our attempts to keep the genders separate and in place". She strikes a similar note (almost of exasperation) when she says: "Because Ni Chuilleanain allows her image to carry her message, it is sometimes difficult to see how she challenges stereotypes and traditional myths." Nevertheless, Haberstroh proceeds to a sensitive treatment of the complex female "I" in Ni Chuilleanain's The Magdalene Sermon.
Haberstroh knows that to segregate women's poetry can limit the way in which it is read. She says: "In comparing Paula Meehan to Seamus Heaney, we gain one insight, but in placing Paula Meehan in the company of women writers, we gain another." Yet her own sense of 20th century Irish poetry is somewhat general and unhistorical. She ascribes Gaelic League motives to all Irish Language quotation in English language poetry; she underestimates Patrick Kavanagh's problems in securing an audience; and she refers to "mainstream critical standards" without recognising that modern Irish canons have long been contested. Nonetheless, Women Creating Women lays out a clear contemporary map to which many students will be indebted.