Stolen Landscapes

Abstract

This chapter shows how contemporary Irish poetry grapples with the politicized history of place, from the unfinished “ghost estates” to the recent monetization of water and the converted hotels used to keep asylum seekers in perpetual limbo. Readings of Irish poetry by Paula Meehan, Mary O’Malley, Seamus Heaney, and Sarah Clancy argue that the landscapes of contemporary Irish poetry are the indices of dispossession. The chapter then takes up poetic forms of the “block” and the “grid” to look more closely at the dispossessions produced by financialized capitalism, using as case studies British poet Keston Sutherland's Odes to TL61P (2013) and US poet Anne Boyer's "The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock" (2015). Finally, I turn to the literal displacement of forced migration, as well as its feminization and racialization, by reading the Iraqi poet Manal Al-Sheikh's prose poems.