Abstract

Ask a rhetorical question and you get a silly answer. In Poetry Ireland Review No.14 I wrote about the group of poets in Irish who first came together at UCC in 1986 and subsequently published their work in Innti and various individual collections from 1970 on. Their achievement seemed all the more remarkable to me given the almost complete silence of the poets who should have immediately preceded them. The Innti poets faced into a silence, with no context or continuity to ease their early progress. What happened, I asked, to the generation which should have formed the link between that of Ó Direáin and Ó Ríordáin and that of Davitt, Ní Dhomhnaill, Rosenstock, et al? My own (sensible) answer, as I looked for the Irish-language contemporaries of Montague, Kinsella, Heaney and Longley who began publishing during the fifties and sixties, was 'They are not there.'