Giving a voice to forgotten women poets
Supporting herself through youth work as well as being writer-in-residence at Tigh Filí in Cork, D’Arcy’s gamble to become a writer has paid off. Not that she is materialistic but she now has the freedom to concentrate on writing having been granted an award worth €94,000 by the Irish Research Council (IRC) which will be paid out over the next four years, covering university fees, accommodation expenses, writing equipment and expenses for attending literary festivals.
Having completed an MA in UCC’s English department on Irish women poets writing in the 1930s and 1940s, D’Arcy is now going to explore the topic further, using long-form poetry, for her doctorate at the university’s creative writing department, introduced last year. D’Arcy will be the first scholar to undertake a creative writing PhD at the new department.
D’Arcy has been writing poetry since childhood and had her first collection of poetry, Encounter, published by Lapwing Press in 2010. Her critically acclaimed second collection, The Wild Pupil, was published by Bradshaw Books in 2012.
D’Arcy’s doctorate has two elements. It will consist of a long sequence of original poetry, in which she will re-imagine the little-known experimental work of Irish women poets writing from 1930 to 1960, using formal and thematic experimentation and developing new poetic techniques. The second element will be a comprehensive work of critical reflection on the topic.
D’Arcy says Irish women poets from the 1930s and 1940s have been written out of history. She read an article about them and became fascinated with the subject.
“I was astounded to find out just how many of them there were and how they challenged the norms of form and also of society. It was astonishing how they had been erased from the canon of Irish literature. The poets I have a particular interest in are Sheila Wingfield, who was one of the viscountesses of Powerscourt, and Blanaid Salkeld, who was Brendan Behan’s wife’s grandmother. You find out about these women through the important men in their lives, unfortunately.
“I’m also interested in Mary Davenport O’Neill and Rhoda Coghill, a composer, who was the national accompanist for Radio Éireann from 1938 to 1968, before taking up poetry when she suffered ill health. It has been really difficult to find out anything about these women. I had to meet their relatives to research them.”
D’Arcy admits that initially, she, like a lot of people, thought the women poets didn’t survive in the canon because they weren’t very good. “But that’s not the case. They were very good, better than a lot of their male peers.”
D’Arcy describes the poetry of these neglected women as subversive. “It’s hard to untangle how exactly they’re being subversive. They wrote about themes that people would have expected such as religion, nature and being mothers. But, for example, Sheila Wingfield has a poem about her daughter. It’s like a lullaby. But then, she tells the girl to hush and go to sleep because soon her tongue won’t matter and she’ll be choked.” D’Arcy hopes her doctorate will give a voice to the forgotten women poets that have been silenced.
