History Gasps: Myth in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry

Recent years have seen a very rapid development in women's poetry in Ireland, a development which is part of a much wider one in women's writing and culture. The prevalence of poetry and the relative scarcity of prose in this movement is specific to Ireland and a significant departure from the pattern elsewhere. The strength of the tradition of women's fiction and the fragmentary nature of the tradition in poetry have tended to produce first an increasingly self-conscious feminist fiction, then an upsurge of women's poetry which attempts to re-define the poetic tradition and women's relation to it.