Writing Lough Derg

Download or read book Writing Lough Derg written by Peggy O'Brien and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The overarching purpose of this volume is to show how a discrete tradition of writing about Lough Derg, a pilgrimage site in northwest Ireland, helped contemporary Irish poets rescue free, metaphysical inquiry from the grip of nationalism. Linked with the supernatural pagan times, Lough Derg had by the early twentieth century become an icon of the fusion of the Catholic Church and the Irish nation. Surveying treatments of Lough Derg from William Carleton through Denis Devlin, Patrick Kavanaugh, and ultimately Seamus Heaney, Peggy O'Brien addresses the role of spirituality in an increasingly cosmopolitan, postmodern, post-Catholic Ireland. Her extended treatment of Heaney culminates in an insightful juxtaposition with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who also struggled with the conflation of Catholicism and patriotism.