6 The Clamour of New Light

Monday is Labor Day in the US and it seems like the right moment to write about one of my favorite poems, “The Lighthouse” by Vona Groarke, a poem that talks not about the sea, as the title might suggest, but about rural electrification in Ireland, a labor that was only completed on mainland Ireland in 1973 (some of the remote islands had to wait until 2003). I’ve been thinking about this poem lately. Vona Groarke is gaining popularity in the US, but if you don’t know her, she was born in 1964 in Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, where the writer Maria Edgeworth spent most her life (1768-1849) managing her father’s extensive estate and writing her many novels and treatises. Groarke was born in the maternity unit of the hospital (now a nursing home) that occupied the Edgeworth family mansion, a fact she commemorated in her 1994 poem “Patronage,” where she writes about Maria’s courageous work of writing: While her sisters stitched bright patterns in a lace-work of pleasantries and chat, she took a clutch of unstrung characters and muddy syllables, and set them in a landscape of her own “Patronage” was my first encounter with Groarke’s work, and the poem meant a lot to me because I had visited that house in the late 1980s, searching for some link to the genius behind Castle Rackrent and the other works. I arrived uninvited in a January downpour, but the nuns running the nursing home took pity on me and invited me in, showing me some bits and pieces from Edgeworth’s day. Maria and her sisters haunted the place for me then as they must have done to Groarke when she wrote this evocative poem, following her interest in houses, the work that happens in them, and the lives, hopes, and dreams of their inhabitants. “The Lighthouse” considers a similar theme, the often forgotten perspective of women—women who work in the home—on important occasions, like the electrification of a rural village—an occasion for celebration for most, but not all. Stella Mews, past CEO of the Yeats Society in Sligo, told me about this poem; she actually recited it to me from memory when I visited the Yeats Museum with students from Agnes Scott in 2012. In the poem the speaker suggests that the story of the occasion is told differently by men and women. The speaker hears a version from one of...
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5 Nuts and Bolts

It has been humbling and at the same time strangely rejuvenating to set up life in a new place. Humbling because I didn’t know the steps, missed the nuances, and often felt embarrassed by my ignorance; rejuvenating because I felt such a sense of accomplishment as each new thing fell into place. We signed the lease on an apartment for the year! WiFi is working! I found a place to buy fresh fish! Bank of Ireland gave us an account! WiFi is fixed! Our IKEA pieces are put together (entirely Ron’s doing)! The utilities are officially in my name! I finally figured out how to get the washerdryer to do an actual “dry” cycle! I may be an old dog, but I sure have learned some new tricks. The apartment rental/utilities/Irish bank account dilemma was the most frustrating conundrum of our first few weeks in Dublin. You can’t get one without the other, it seems, a real chicken/egg problem. And of course, you need a working phone to make these things happen; to get a phone contract you need a residential address and an Irish bank account…. On top of that, we arrived in Ireland the day before all-new banking regulations for American depositors went into effect, byzantine rules and extensive paperwork designed to prevent us from laundering money in the wake of the Credit Suisse scandal, not that we have much to launder. Fortunately, people were nice to us and bent the rules a bit, and of course all negotiations transpired in English. I can only imagine what it would be like to navigate such bureaucracy in a language you don’t or barely understand and worried every minute that you are missing work or job-hunting or other vital activities. We had the luxury of being able to chase down all these rabbit holes fulltime until the job was done. In Atlanta public transportation is poor and having a car is a necessity. Here in Dublin where public transportation is excellent, we don’t have a car and are learning to adjust to that gradually. At home I can drive to work in twelve minutes and there’s always parking. Here I need to allot a minimum of thirty minutes to get to the library in the city centre or an hour for the theatre. When we first arrived and needed things for the apartment, I was overly ambitious about shopping...
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4 Grand Canal Dock

As Ron and I planned this joint sabbatical, we envisioned renting an elegant mini-Georgian house or quaint mews in the toney Baggot Street to Ballsbridge corridor in Dublin 4. To our surprise, we find ourselves in a sunny top floor apartment in a new building with all mod cons in the trendy high tech quarter of Dublin next to the Grand Canal Dock, or GCD for short. It’s Dublin 4 all right, but “new” Dublin 4, where the city’s history provides the scaffolding for its future. This is not the Dublin known to tourists, so finding out about its history takes some effort. Little by little, I’m figuring out the background of its structures, the meanings of street and building names, the stories—real and fictional—that cross my way as I map my own. In a city that is more than a thousand years old, stories abound. Even the modern building where we live offers a way into the area’s past. This seven floor apartment building is called The Dickens to commemorate Charles Dickens’s visits to this part of the city in the mid-1800s; he came to perform and to reap the accolades his works had earned. Another is named The William Bligh after the controversial captain of HMS Bounty who survived the mutiny and went on to survey Dublin Bay in 1800-01. The Dickens and The William Bligh are part of a complex of eight apartment buildings called The Gasworks that adjoin on one end a Victorian gasometer, an enormous, round, expandable container formerly used for storing natural gas that has dominated this landscape since it was constructed in 1885. The gasometer is also an apartment building now, its rust-red, ornate wrought iron frame housing a torus or doughnut shaped inner structure that gives every flat two curved walls of windows. The deep spiral-shaped underground cavern that formed the gas transport system provides parking and recycling stations for the complex (press -4 on the elevator). We call it the “pit of doom” and dread our weekly descents. It sounds a bit odd to say you live in The Gasworks, but this bygone industrial setting provides accommodation for today’s captains of industry. At the other end of complex opposite the gasometer and in and around Barrow Street are old and new buildings housing the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Airbnb, the world headquarters of Accenture (the world’s...
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3 Clearing a Space

Recently I happened upon a powerful poem by Irish writer and scholar Brendan Kennelly called “Clearing a Space” (If Every You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song. Eds. Pat Boran and Gerard Smyth. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2014. p. 182). The speaker talks about a Sunday morning walk through Dublin that allows him to “Clear a space for myself the best I can.” He feels a kinship with the city, recognizing in it and in himself a surprising capacity for renewal. To have been used so much, and without mercy, And still to be capable of rediscovering In itself the old nakedness Is what makes a friend of the city When sleep has failed. The walk and the poem are the same, the walking is the writing; in both he inscribes himself in the city, clearing a space that will define and represent his place there. I am reminded of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who walked their imaginings into verse, launching a whole new kind of poetry as they did so. I’ve been walking the streets of Dublin, particularly those in my neighborhood, at different times of day and night for a couple of weeks now. Already the city is taking on a different character for me, its residential, commercial, and industrial features emerging in the foreground, its stories leading one to the next until I feel I could pursue one strand for days and still not find the end. “Streets are adventures,” Kennelly writes, “Twisting in and out and up and down my mind.” As I explore the city on foot and by reading and writing about it, the streets and the stories twist in and out and up and down my mind. The poem is filled with wonderful lines, but I was particularly drawn to the idea of “rediscovering,” which is what my time in Ireland and away from my regular work and daily routine is all about. While going to new places is always exciting, returning to the ones you know and re-seeing them yields new perspectives in the context of the slight comfort of familiarity, a tether that sometimes makes risk-taking and creativity more possible as we know from studies of how learning occurs. Thinking back, I see how often I’ve written about just that—making the familiar strange, a phrase often used to define metaphor. Those of us in academia who are lucky enough...
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2 How It All Began

People often ask me where my interest in Ireland comes from and how it became so…well…extreme. I’ve been obsessed with the country—its history, literature, landscape, culture and everything else about it—for a long time. My interest was piqued when I was ten or eleven and discovered a copy of Finnegans Wake on my parents’ eclectic bookshelves in our house on Lincolnwood Drive, Evanston, Illinois. Both of them were readers and always had books stacked on their nightstands and near their chairs. The bookshelves covered two corner walls in the living room and one long wall in the den and included everything from complete sets of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, P.G. Wodehouse, and Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II to the novels of Nevil Shute, Jack Higgins, Angela Thirkell, and John Le Carré. They even had the collected poems of e. e. cummings and The Kinsey Reports. But Finnegans Wake? I can’t imagine that either of them ever read it. I will admit to never having read Finnegans Wake either, but I remember thumbing through the book long ago and facing up to the fact that I had a lot to learn before I would understand what was going on in those pages. Connecting the book to Joyce and Joyce to Ireland followed in due course, and more associations began to emerge. My aunt Ellen (never Aunt Ellen, but just Ellen) mentioned that the family on the Cozzens side had an Irish connection (among the Swedes, Scots, English, etc.); our great grandfather Nicholas Cozzens came to the US as a boy during or shortly after the Great Famine of 1845-52. A glimmer of Ireland’s “underdog” status in history intrigued me further. I finally read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school and loved it, though it was a very different book for me than the one I read in Bill Chace’s Joyce course at Stanford following my first trip to Ireland in 1971. That first trip with Claudia Cohen, my roommate from Stanford, sowed the seeds of later interests in Ireland’s soggy, boggy soil. From our spring semester jobs at a primary school in London, we took the student budget route—the overnight ferry from Holyhead to Dún Laoghaire—and spent the first few days crashing on the floor of a friend’s “bed-sit” in the Dublin suburbs....
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