Finished and Under Construction: Visual Representation and Spatial Relations in Post-Ceasefire Northern Irish poetry

This essay focuses on the work of three writers representing what has been termed the post-Troubles generation of poets from Northern Ireland: Leontia Flynn, Alan Gillis and Sinéad Morrissey. It demonstrates how their writing seeks possibilities for a new poetics to tackle the challenges of a changing society, and how the visual and spatial aesthetics of their work in particular mirrors and or interrogates the continuing (and evolving) tensions between social groups and conflicting interests. This poetry combines aesthetic ambition with an acute awareness of how spatial relations reflect the variety of ethical issues demanding attention in twenty-first-century Northern Ireland, and beyond its borders. The essay will pay particular attention to how, in many of the discussed poems, a visual-verbal aesthetics is employed to address or implicitly comment on the radical transformations in our current media environment, historically coinciding with the changes in the cultural, social and political landscape of post-ceasefire Northern Ireland.