The strangers' house Writing Northern Ireland

Alexander Poots, 1985-

Book - 2023

"Northern Ireland is one hundred years old. Northern Ireland does not exist. Both of these statements are true. It just depends on who you ask. How do you write about a place like this? THE STRANGERS' HOUSE asks this question of the region's greatest writers, living and dead. What have they made of Northern Ireland - and what has Northern Ireland made of them? Northern Ireland is roughly the same size as the State of Connecticut, yet has produced an extraordinary number of celebrated poets and novelists. Louis MacNeice, too clever to be happy, formed by his childhood on the shores of Belfast Lough; son of a Protestant clergyman "banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor". C. S. Lewis, who discovered Narnia ...in the rolling drumlins and black rock of County Down. Anna Burns, chronicler of North Belfast and winner of the Booker Prize. And Seamus Heaney, the man of wry precision, the poet with the gift of surprise. As well as household names, Poots also examines writers who may be less familiar to an American readership. These include the dark and bawdy novels of Ian Cochrane, a celebrated raconteur obsessed with Columbo, and Forrest Reid, a man who saw Arcadia in the Irish countryside, and who was, perhaps, the North's first queer author. Reading the work of these writers together produces a testament to over one hundred years of literary endeavor and human struggle. THE STRANGERS' HOUSE is the story of how men and women have written about a home divided, and used their work to move, in the words of Seamus Heaney, "like a double agent among the big concepts.""--

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Subjects
Genres
Criticism, interpretation, etc
Literary criticism
Published
New York, NY : Twelve 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
Alexander Poots, 1985- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xxiii, 223 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-220) and index.
ISBN
9781538701577
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Former bookseller Poots debuts with a lyrical ode to Northern Irish literature. Through close readings of literary heavyweights (C.S. Lewis, Seamus Heaney) and overlooked talents (Forrest Reid), Poots surveys the writings and history of a region known for fraught "political positions and cultural identities." He contends that homesickness "pervades the writing that has emerged from Northern Ireland over the past century," and unpacks Tom Paulin's poem "An Ulster Unionist Walks the Streets of London" to illuminate how even Irish unionists could feel out of place in both "Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain." Biographical background on authors highlights the relationship between their writings and history, with an account of poet Patrick Kavanagh's youth serving as a window into the Irish independence struggles of the 1910s and '20s, during which he cut telegraph wires until the onset of the civil war, when he spent isolated years honing his poetry. Poots demonstrates a masterful knowledge of Northern Irish authors and his prose is at turns funny and poetic, suggesting that Lewis's prim child protagonists act like "bank managers in training" and that poet Louis MacNeice "describes his childhood with tactile care, as if he were running his hand up the bannisters of the rectory once again." This powerfully evokes the beauty and complexity of Northern Ireland and announces Poots as an author to watch. (Mar.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A highly learned but lightly worn literary history of Northern Ireland that reaches beyond books into political and cultural turmoil. Belfast bookseller Poots opens his brightly opinionated study with the titular Strangers' House, a long-ago London hostel for foreign sailors. In a poem by Tom Paulin, an Ulster Unionist--a supporter of a Northern Ireland joined to the U.K.--ended up there with "the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere." Stressing that the divisions in Northern Ireland center on "access to good land and decent employment, combined with competing ideas of what and where home is" more than on religion or ethnicity, Poots draws on literature, beginning in the early 20th century, to examine responses to such matters. It's often forgotten, for instance, that C.S. Lewis, though a renowned Oxford don, was from Northern Ireland. Writing to an Irish friend in England, he lamented that as much as he loved his home, he despaired of "the invincible flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race." It took Ireland decades to admit that Oscar Wilde was one of its own, and Poots does admirable detective work. He recounts how the lawyer who brought about Wilde's downfall by exposing still-illegal homosexuality went on to found the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force but, on the Republic of Ireland's achieving independence in 1920, "found that he had presided over the creation of a strange new country, a Protestant statelet that no one could have envisioned at the turn of the century." Louis MacNeice, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and many other writers figure in the narrative before Poots arrives at the modern triumvirate of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon, who created a literature that, while Irish, was also universal and nonsectarian--and thankfully so, for, as Poots writes, "In the hundred years of Northern Ireland's existence, there has not been a single poet or novelist of any worth who has succumbed to the cosy certainties of the tribe." An essential guide to contemporary Irish letters. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.