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The Subversion of Supernatural Lament in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Irish language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill situates the female poet in terms of the supernatural in her essay, “What Foremothers?” when she describes a common superstition from bardic tradition that she heard as a girl in Ireland. It was the belief that a woman poet was such a destructive force that if one turned up in a family, the family was cursed against having future poets for seven generations (O’Connor 14). In this myth a woman poet is an oxymoron, whose mere existence cancels out poetry. The origins of this sexist curse foreground the difficulty women poets in Ireland have had in creating a poetics that reflects the way they see the world, offering a case of how canon formation haunts contemporary female artists. If women, as Eavan Boland has argued in Object Lessons, have traditionally been the objects of Irish poetry rather than the authors of it, then a critical transformation must occur when a woman attempts to cross one set of boundaries from woman to poet. The artist’s passage is fraught with the danger that once breached, she could never go back. It is this nowhere-land between woman as object and creating subject that I intend to explore using the work of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill as a guide to a feminist Otherworld. Ní Dhomhnaill, moved by the collective memory of cultural traumas, has developed a strategy of using supernatural female figures to model an expression of loss resistant to cultural hegemony. The Irish keen is a ritualized outpouring of grief often conveyed through women’s wailing and poetic lamentation, traditionally a feminized cry of collective suffering by a group. I argue that the poet’s invocation of the supernatural aspects of the Irish keen displaces the violence against and neglect of women’s historical social position in Ireland, offering instead a female