Colonized, then sentimentalized and commodified perhaps as much as any place on earth can be, Ireland has of course been written, painted, and sung about in manifold ways. What the essays collected in Out of the Earth begin to demonstrate is just how much Irish writing of the last century or so has been “strongly oriented to nature,” as John Elder puts it in his introduction. This volume’s eleven chapters span a wide range of Irish writing: fiction from George Moore to Roddy Doyle and Edna O’Brien, poetry from Michael Longley to Paula Meehan, and drama from Synge’s Riders to the Sea to McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inismaan. Eóin Flannery contributes a study of colonial and touristic travel posters. A concluding interview with Tim Robinson widens the volume’s scope to include this fascinating figure whose work combines cartography, local history, and prose in works such as The Stones of Aran and Connemara: Listening to the Wind. The material discussed may be Irish, but most of the contributors are American, writing mainly from colleges and state universities (does this say anything about the kinds of places where ecocritical writing has found the warmest welcome so far?) Several of the essays connect ecocritical with postcolonial themes in relation to the history of representations of Ireland. As John Elder describes it, such “affinities between ecocritical concerns and current approaches in postcolonial studies” suggest “a literary turning in which the appreciation of more lyrical forms of ‘nature writing’ has been balanced by an emphasis on environmental justice.” From George Moore’s “untilled fields” in the years after the famine to the more recent spectre of industrial pollution and suburban sprawl in the “Celtic Tiger” years, the land is always at stake in these discussions. Three of the essays on more recent writing articulate a strong sense of interconnectedness, or dissolution of boundaries, between the human and the nonhuman. Donna Potts suggests that “while Michael Longley’s emphasis on interconnectedness obviously suggests an alternative to Northern Ireland’s legacy of sectarian violence, his frequent references to biological interconnectedness suggest that along with his need to traverse social, cultural and political boundaries is the need to challenge the boundaries traditionally posited between self and nature.” Karen O’Brien argues that “the representational and structural strategies in The Cripple of Inismaan activate interconnectedness in a way that resonates with the promise of strengthening ecological bonds between the human and nonhuman world and of promoting an overall engagement with issues of environmental sustainability and equilibrium.” Finally, in “‘Becoming Animal’ in the novels of Edna O’Brien,” Maureen O’Connor writes that in her late novels “O’Brien not only confronts but transcends what can be a problematic ‘feminisation’ of the ‘other’ by fusing man, woman and animal in the narratives’ most affecting moments of grace, however fleeting they prove to be.” Even though ecocriticism now has at least a thirty-year history, occasionally an essay in this collection slips back into terminologies and usages which are being redefined and analyzed THE GOOSE 47 ISSUE 8 FALL 2010 anew elsewhere in the same volume. In such cases, terms such as “natural beauty” or “traditional cultures” come trailing clouds of the very ideologies and mystifications such a collection aims to defeat. Fortunately, this happens rarely. The instance I refer to here comes at the end of an otherwise illuminating and worthwhile analysis of the child’s-eye view of disappearing open spaces in Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. It is in the conclusion of this chapter that Miriam O’Kane Mara seems to revert to an uncritical use of terminology when she writes: “The wheels of progress turn quickly and problematically in Paddy Clarke’s world to erase all vestige of Ireland’s natural beauty and its traditional culture.” Is this the same “natural beauty” framed and sentimentalized by generations of colonizing landscape painters and, later, tourism promoters? While most of the texts studied here employ recognized genres—the lyric, the drama, the novel, or the short story—Tim Robinson’s work offers an inventive blend of mapping, oral history, and literary creation which yields what the Irish poet Moya Cannon calls an “interface between language and landscape.” In the interview included here, Robinson is astute in recognizing that no matter how directly and sensuously he interacts with the Irish places, or “echospheres,” he evokes, only “prose, and prose at length, recursive and excursive” can “act out the building-up of the overarching, underpinning, encircling, realities of sky, land and sea out of uncountable glints of detail.” For Robinson, only extended prose can communicate these “places that are at once deeply humanised and richly natural.” While the essays in this collection offer several valuable looks back at the ways Irish texts have engaged with nature, in the redefined senses that ecocriticism confers that term, Robinson offe

LITERARY CRITICISM: Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts Edited by Christine Cusick Cork University Press, 269pp. €39 ECOLOGICAL APPROACHES to the arts have been developing worldwide since the 1960s, although ecocriticism, an umbrella term, was coined only 15 years ago. A recent exhibition, at the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar, of disturbingly beautiful images that had won the Prix Pictet – Earth competition gave harrowing visual evidence of the havoc man is capable of wreaking upon Earth. The publication of prize-winning novels by Barbara Kingsolver, JM Coetzee and Ian McEwan provides familiar literary examples on environmentalist themes. In the academy, Mary Immaculate College in Limerick recently hosted an ecocriticism conference. Thus this volume of critical essays on Irish texts, written almost exclusively by academics at American universities, is part of a thickening strand of responses to the interaction between culture and nature. The ecocritic views this connection as it specifically relates to man’s stewardship of Earth past and present, although some would quibble with the implications of the term stewardship, as it privileges humankind above all else in nature. The writers under consideration are either of the late 19th or 20th century, and a single essay concentrates on visual images. Some of the choices are more obvious than others. Irish readers would expect to find essays on Lady Morgan, that quintessential rambling man JM Synge and the poets Michael Longley and Richard Murphy, whose poetry often thrills with minutely observed flora and fauna. More intriguingly, one also finds in these pages Martin McDonagh and Roddy Doyle. The Cripple of Inishmaan is evaluated in the light of its comic subtext – a lacerating treatment of Robert Flaherty’s manipulation of the human, animal and botanical ecology of the Aran Islands in his film Man of Aran . Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is viewed as a critique of unplanned urban sprawl and its demoralising effect on those forced to live with the detritus. Rather than centring exclusively on bucolic regions or texts, ecocriticism can show us how deracination can come in newer guises: “There were fields past the Corporation houses but they were too far away now. Past the Corporation houses. Somewhere else.” The beam shone on these works occasions a thought for a mystifying omission from this collection, and a genuine lost opportunity. Derek Mahon’s body of work, more than that of any other living Irish fiction writer, addresses the global and historical implications of the destructive material excesses of modernisation. He is unusual in that this is one of his declared subjects, yet there is no perspective on his work in this volume. Also missing is any sustained look at Seamus Heaney’s bog poems, in which humans and the earth metaphorically or literally share organic substance. Other ecocritical approaches explored here can be harder for the general reader to accommodate and include the zoomorphic treatment of women in the work of Edna O’Brien and Paula Meehan, which situates them in closer relation to nature and in opposition to patriarchal hierarchies. The connection of land and the self in both Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction and non-fiction is essential to the extent that she believed that, when missing, the result was stunted personality, and a failure to thrive. Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination , one of the bibles of ecocriticism, is applied to the work of Michael Longley, linking his nature poetry to the historical and political reality in which he lives. Such writing “relies on the nonhuman environment not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history”. The Romantic origins of ecocriticism are visible to the reader in the black-and-white reproductions of commercially sponsored travel posters of the postwar era, most of which feature the tame and surprisingly 19th-century views of lakes and mountains, contrasted with Dunluce Castle sublimely perched high above a tumultuous sea. The botanically named John Elder (who lives, appropriately enough, in the Green Mountains of Vermont) provides a brief introduction to ecocritical thought, explaining that this undertaking is part of its second ideological wave and moves beyond aesthetic response to ethical concerns. The volume concludes with an interview with the pioneering cultural cartographer Tim Robinson by its editor, Christina Cusick. Robinson, who seems wary of incursions from the academy, leaves us with the firm suggestion that literary critics should enter into environmental studies only in “muddy boots”. At the very least the contributors to Out of the Earth seem to have put their wellies on. Christina Hunt Mahony directed the Center for Irish Studies at the Catholic University of America and is the editor of Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry (Carysfort Press)