Kinsella's Dublins and the Stone Mother

摘要

Although awarded the Honorary Freedom of Dublin in 2007 and widely proclaimed as a city-, specifically a Dublin-, poet, Thomas Kinsella departs from modernist post-industrial representations of the city to project a view of Dublin as 'a separate world with a … feel of the country.' Into an evolving representation of Dublin, Kinsella imports the dark presences of ancestral females, while in poetic accounts of his later life in Baggot Street and Percy Place, his wife Eleanor joins in association with the poet's mother and other mysterious female figures to represent the urbanization of the Cailleach in her different adaptive emanations. Although represented fleetingly in Kinsella's poetry, the most significant of these figures is the stone mother, the sovereignty figure associated with the Irish landscape.