Inside Innti: A New Wave in Irish Poetry, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Tristan Rosenstock (eds.)
Inside Innti: A New Wave in Irish Poetry, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Tristan Rosenstock (eds.), Cork, Cork University Press, 2023, 236 p.
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1Innti is the name of the poetry broadsheet founded by Michael Davitt at University College Cork (UCC) in 1970 and the nouvelle vague of poets associated with it: chiefly, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Michael Davitt, Gabriel Rosenstock, Liam Ó Muirthile. As Alan Titley points out in his foreword, “Nobody can ever precisely point to when a revolution in literature begins” (p. vii). And as with most such literary movements, there is no consensus over “why?”, or to what extent individual differences threaten the coherence of the group – the essential point is that none of the authors of the ten chapters or interviewees doubt that the revolution occurred. Published irregularly from 1970 to 1996, Innti changed the face, the body and the soul of Irish-language poetry, by letting in the winds of change: forms of the new, from cummings to Berryman to the haiku; the everyday, the urban, sex, faraway places and their mythologies as subjects.
2Although Titley favours “magic hand of chance” (p. xvi), the editors in their “Réamhrá” (“Introduction”) and afterword advance the idea that “the convening of a community of urban Irish-language speakers” (p. 174) was crucial to the genesis and success of Innti; its culture of happenings and poetry readings (there were 1,500 people at the launch of Innti 3, for example) one of its essential legacies. A number of chapters are relevant to all four poets. Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh gives historical consistency to the notion of a generation in “New Turns: A Perspective on Intergenerational Shifts in Independent Ireland, 1958-1973”, with a fascinating account of the overlap between language and revolutionary activism in the period. Louis de Paor, himself member of the second wave or “athghlúin” (p. xviii) of Innti, elegantly evaluates how the UCC professor, poet and playwright, Seán Ó Tuama, fostered a community of writers and generations of readers. “‘Máistir Maith Maolshásta’: Seán Ó Tuama agus filí Innti” (“‘A Good but Unappeasable Master’: Seán Ó Tuama and the Poets of Innti”) describes Ó Tuama, his creative work and his generous, though demanding, criticism. In “Tá Deireadh Anois le Ré na bPleidhcí: Tadhall fhilí Innti le hIarthar Duibhneach” (“The Time of the Messers Is Over: The Innti Poets’ Contact with West Kerry”), there is a magic lantern effect to novelist Pádraig Ó Cíobháin’s memoir of the poets and their links with the West Kerry Gaeltacht. He also gives the fullest account I have seen of the meaning of Innti (cf. Robert Welch, quoted p. xxi). In a dictionary, it means “in her” (a female, or a feminine noun; inti in modern standardised Irish). “An raghfá innti?”, the question you’d ask before getting into a naomhóg (feminine noun, a Kerry currach). Ó Cíobháin explains its sudden use as a kind of linguistic tic locally. From there, his brother called a painting he had done of a sailing boat “Innti”. This, he writes, was the first written appearance of the “mana” (“motto”, p. 91) we now know as Innti. In a similarly personal vein, the athghlúin poet Colm Breathnach describes, in “Dílis don Fhís” (“Loyal to the Vision”), the sense of community, poetic freedom and emulation released by the examples (and creative writing classes) of the Innti poets. In “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: An chollaíocht i saothar Innti” (“Sexuality in the Work of Innti”), the broad theme chosen allows Caitríona Ní Chléirchín to contrast the poets’ collective openness with the ambient conservatism, and then to address, via French feminists theorists, how the female and male gazes produce differing plaisirs du texte.
3Four further essays are dedicated each to one of the poets. Gearóid Denvir, in “‘Mairim i Ré Chinniúnach’: Gné d’fhilíocht Mhichael Davitt” (“‘I Live in a Fateful Era’: Aspects of Michael Davitt’s Poetry”), describes Michael Davitt as bringing together countercultural influences (Bob Dylan, the Beats) and modern Irish life in a convincing urban poetic idiom. Peter Sirr examines Liam Ó Muirthile’s oeuvre in light of the “dichotomy between what might be perceived as false and what authentic” (p. 66), particularly acute for a non-native speaker writing from an urban, and not a rural perspective (“From Leath [Half] to Leath [Half]: Liam Ó Muirthile’s Embrace of Uncertainty”). Pádraig de Paor, in his essay, “Gabriel Rosenstock, Cleasaí” (“Gabriel Rosenstock, Trickster”), draws on Jung and different anthropologists in order to identify some essential concerns of this playful but challenging “world literature” poet. A stand-out contribution in my view is that of Rióna Ní Fhrighil entitled “An Domhan Thoir agus Filíocht Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill” (“The East and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Poetry”). She identifies an important bias towards specifically Irish themes in the very successful bilingual collections of Ní Dhomhnaill’s work that have been published, choices which obscure Ní Dhomhnaill’s very important engagement with the East in different guises.
4In the final chapter, “A Munster Beat”, Clíona Ní Ríordáin adopts a postcolonial framework to demonstrate the “translanguage companionship” (p. 161) between English-language poets of Munster from the 1970s onwards with Ó Muirthile and Davitt and the Irish language more generally.
5This is a welcome collection of lucid, thoughtful essays, along with interviews with Ní Dhomhnaill and Rosenstock. Three chapters are in English, as well as the foreword, the afterword and the Rosenstock interview. Overall, contributors address poets’ individual collections. For someone who has never held a paper copy of Innti, it would have been useful to get a clear idea of precisely what was published, issue by issue, to evaluate Innti the journal as a means of reading Innti as a movement.
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Référence papier
Pádraic Lamb, « Inside Innti: A New Wave in Irish Poetry, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Tristan Rosenstock (eds.) », Études irlandaises, 50-2 | 2025, 172-174.
Référence électronique
Pádraic Lamb, « Inside Innti: A New Wave in Irish Poetry, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Tristan Rosenstock (eds.) », Études irlandaises [En ligne], 50-2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 05 décembre 2025, consulté le 22 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/21274 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15aa9
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