The Fluid Poetics and Liquid Landscapes of Jessica Traynor and Mary O’Malley

No longer an emergent trend within global ecocriticism, blue humanities scholarship still retains an emergent status within Irish literary studies, despite the prominence of ecocritical methodologies in the latter field. Notable recent interventions by scholars such as Nicholas Allen, Ellen Howley, John Brannigan, and Claire Connolly et al. are the most substantial, but there has not been a sustained study that embraces the diversity of hydrological ecologies. Such critical dearth is surprising given the richness and variety of contemporary Irish poetic representations of bogland, riverine, estuarine, coastal, and oceanic topographies. The “blue” poetics arrayed across this essay impress the ways in which Irish culture is thoroughly enriched by hydrological ecologies, at the same time this writing is alive to the alarming precarity of riverine, coastal, marine, and oceanic ecologies. Encounters with littoral and marine ecologies have long been registered by Irish literary artists as inspiring, uncanny, spectral, humbling and terrifying. But, this does not mean that the ecopoetry retreats to a poetics that is simply content to mediate and showcase the affective imprints of the externalities of marine and riverine ecologies on the anthropocentric lyric “I.” Such impacts cannot be avoided entirely, but the poetry considered here by Jessica Traynor and Mary O’Malley also differentially dignifies the more-than-human otherness encountered in a range of aquatic environments. While both poets avail of a blue poetics, or a “liquid” poetics, Traynor’s works of fluivial poetics center primarily on the riverine ecologies of Dublin, while O’Malley’s familial background on the Western seaboard of Ireland animate her more maritime or oceanic poetics.