Published / Digitised / Open Access / Jacket2 Magazine
Now I am a tower of Darkness; Emerging genealogies by Walt Hunter
Jacket2 Magazine URL: https://jacket2.org/commentary/now-i-am-tower-darkness
Walt Hunter is assistant professor of world literature at Clemson University and visiting lecturer at NUI Galway. He's written on modern and contemporary poetry for the minnesota review, Pleiades, College Literature, and Modern Philology. His current book project, Ecstatic Call: The Global Lyric from Yeats to the Present, looks at modern and contemporary lyric as a social form that makes visible processes of globalization.
Here, Hunter examines failures in the Irish canon, including lack of critical reception for the work of the Irish poet, Freda Laughton (1907-1995). Laughton's date and place of death have just recently been verified by Emma Penney. Laughton's absence from the Irish poetry canon is a matter of scandal and one of the reasons why Fired! are interrogating the absence of women poets from the Irish cultural narrative.
Keywords, Freda Laughton, Jacket2 magazine, Fired! Irish Women Poets, The Cambridge Companion to Irish poets, Emerging Genealogies, Gerald Dawe, Irish Poetry, Irish Women Poets
The River Liffey, Dublin, Ireland
Emerging genealogies
The most interesting thing I read during a weekend of convalescence, under a March sun that seemed surprised at its own intensity, was this interview with Emma Penney on the website The Bogman's Cannon about an Irish modernist poet, Freda Laughton. Although Laughton was born in 1907, I feature the interview and her poems here because critical genealogies of twentieth-century Irish poetry are in the process of expanding dramatically. Laughton provides an alternative provenance and inspiration for some of today's writers and their concerns or interventions—as Penney points out:
The lack of critical interest in Laughton reflects the selective vision of literary traditions which often exclude poets who do not fit with the contemporary moment or who may trouble the formation of new movements. Irish critics during the 70's and 80's held Eavan Boland to be the first writer to express what "poetic being" was for a woman; the first to express the domestic; motherhood; the first to map Dublin city as a woman. Laughton expresses all of these experiences in her work decades before Boland.
Christine Murray has three of Laughton's poems here. "Now I am a Tower of Darkness" has a landscape all de Chirico, or Vertigo, and a voice that tracks its rhetoric carefully against the possibilities of enjambment ("As I child I knew / How"; "Hollowed by the silence of the eyes"). "The Welcome" sets its Latinate decadence ("quadriga"; "pavanes") in a Bishop-like cab ride through a city. The grey eighteenth-century houses of Dublin have rarely seemed so alive. What's most remarkable here is the compressed description of the space through which she moves: juxtaposition by careful selection rather than frenetic montage. But it is the dog "brighter than a chestnut" that will not leave my mind.
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