Coming Back from Chile or the ‘Original Sin’ in Harry Clifton’s Poetry: Longing for Southern Yellow and Light within an Everyday Northern Greyness - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2018

Coming Back from Chile or the ‘Original Sin’ in Harry Clifton’s Poetry: Longing for Southern Yellow and Light within an Everyday Northern Greyness

Résumé

The contemporary Irish poet Harry Clifton evokes South America as a sort of lost paradise, a pre-lapsarian world he would never enjoy, and as an unwritten yet fantasied alternate history, “A past alive in a haunted future / long before [he] was born” (The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass, 2012, “The Rain Shadow”, 86). His parents met in northern Chile, “in the desolate port of Antofagasta, […] on the edge of the Atacama desert” where his Irish father worked as an engineer for three years overseeing water supplies (“Coming Home, Home to nowhere”, Irish Times, The Home Place, 2006, 7). In an article where he questions the notion of home and the concept of “a literature of coming back or coming home”, he writes: “I was the only child in the stifling years of midcentrury Ireland for whom the poem Tháinig Long ó Valparaiso had a literal meaning.” (“Coming Home, Home to nowhere”, 15, 7).) After having similarly emigrated he also came back to Ireland, hence repeating the sin of returning, as if he were condemned to re-enact it. The perception of having returned to a home which was not a home, “home to nowhere” seemed to have triggered a lack, a sort of hauntingly evocative perspective, expressed through his quest for light, for the sun, for yellowness. Throughout his poetry, of which geography is a central element, the South is continually opposed to a grey Ireland, to the North, the cold and the rain. The poet seems to be constantly looking for love, presence and a sense of home which he associates with yellow and light. The yellow he describes is pure and powerful yet fragile and can only be briefly experienced before dislocating itself again within a fractured everyday greyness. This presentation mainly focused on these aspects and on the (re)creation of maps, of a new geography.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-02523975 , version 1 (30-03-2020)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-02523975 , version 1

Citer

Cathy Roche-Liger. Coming Back from Chile or the ‘Original Sin’ in Harry Clifton’s Poetry: Longing for Southern Yellow and Light within an Everyday Northern Greyness. Images and Perceptions of South America, Central America and the Caribbean in Irish Culture, Estelle Epinoux; Frank Healy; Brigitte Bastiat, Dec 2018, Limoges, France. ⟨hal-02523975⟩
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