Alexander Street: Literature, Drama, and Performing Arts

The Irish are Coming! The Irish are Coming! Irish Women that is

Alexander Street is very excited for our initial summer release of Irish Women Romantic Poets. A fascinating counterpoint to the early English and continental romantics, this collection brings together disparate voices of Nationalism and Unionism, Catholicism and Protestantism, Traditionalism and Emancipation, Worship and Revolt.

Gestating at a remove from literary currents of the time, many of the works in this collection not only stop quite shy of literary tribute but are often quite more political. Sample  A Poem on the African Slave Trade, Addressed to Her Own Sex, Part 1 by M. Birket

OPPRESSION! thou, whose hard and cruel chain,
Entails on all thy victims woe and pain;
Who gives with tyrant force and scorpion whip,
The cup of mis'ry to a Negro's lip;
Marks with stern frown thy wide, unhallow'd reign,
And broods with gloomy wing o'er Afric's injur'd plain!

Published in 1792 this was by no means a popular sentiment of the time. It is an example of how a literary sub-movement is uniquely positioned to critique the mainstream or even, as evidenced below in Verses on the Present State of Ireland (1778) by Lady Lucan, Margaret Bingham, attack a controlling force;

Ah! wretched parents, little you foresee
Of gavel laws, the fad calamity;
Laws still accursed by the good and wife,
That teach the son, his father to despise:
Most cruel laws, that can such acts approve,
Ah! fad return of our paternal love,
That from all ties of brotherhood, deters,
And him, that's first a hypocrite, prefers,
China thy laws that bright with wisdom teem,
The pious sons, the best of subject's deem;
But English councils otherwise have thought,
Their laws a fort of parricide have taught.

The works in this collection will not disappoint those with a revolutionary spirit or a fascination with the Irish land.

 

A Caribbean Odyssey: Welcome Aboard Derek Walcott

A-toss the seas of post-colonialism, the Nobel Prize Winner’s epic Omeros (1990) island-hops in quest of a foothold in the slippery present as the meaning and relevance of the past become more slippery. Walcott’s alternately lush then bare-boned language is well-suited to evoking both the epic and basic human qualities of locals, islanders, yokels, modern-day Achilles and Hector, and a Helen most resembling the shifting, surrounding seas. All the while, old battles never seem far away;

 

Now, whenever his mind drifted in detachment

like catatonic noon on the Caribbean Sea,

Plunkett recited every billet, regiment,

 

of the battle’s numerological poetry;

he learnt eighty ships of the line, he knew the drift

of the channel that day, and when the trade wind caught

 

the British topsails, and a deep-draught sigh would lift

his memory clear….

 

nor easily evaded. Come and join the quest.