History has given Ireland's writers deep acquaintance with darkness – and the gifts to find its poetry
A dark view …Worshippers attend mass at a Dublin church. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
Patrick Kavanagh, in his stark poem "Dark Ireland", wrote: "We are a dark people, / Our eyes ever turned / Inward / Watching the liar who twists / The hill-paths awry". In a slant way, he exposes a genre of writing that is concealed in plain sight, what might be called the Irish book of the dark. It comes out of the persistent tendency of Irish writers to occupy the shadows of the mind, often pushing the English language out of shape in the process. Last week's winner of the inaugural Goldsmiths prize, Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, is only the most recent example of this compulsive, unsettling tradition.
Ireland's history of colonisation, famine and flight, a collapsed revolution, a dominant church and the vitalising deformation of English by the Irish language have created conditions that occasioned writers to follow the twisting inward paths, and for the courageous, to look at the darkest of human behaviour and bring it to some form of light.
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Ireland's history of colonisation, famine and flight, a collapsed revolution, a dominant church and the vitalising deformation of English by the Irish language have created conditions that occasioned writers to follow the twisting inward paths, and for the courageous, to look at the darkest of human behaviour and bring it to some form of light.
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