The Northern Irish Renaissance that brought Seamus Heaney and other poets to prominence in Belfast in the 1960s has been much debated, but another story might begin in Dublin in the 1960s with the meeting at Trinity College of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Eavan Boland. As Northern Protestants, Mahon and Longley found confirmation of their own complicated sense of belonging in the poetry of Louis MacNeice, while Boland, as a Catholic in the Republic, sought space for her voice in a culture of female passivity and in a poetic tradition still dominated by W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. In the intellectual ferment in Dublin in the 1960s, the three poets would share a deep and sustaining interest in the classics and in modern European and American literature, drawing on these resources in ways that would reshape and redirect contemporary Irish poetry. This would be a well-travelled, international poetry. Mahon’s work would be written in London and New York, but also reflect upon his time in France and Italy; Longley would return to Belfast, but also draw inspiration from summers spent in Mayo and from memories of a visit to Japan; and Boland, having already spent part of her childhood in London, would eventually settle in California.

For Mahon and Longley, the replenishment of the imagination through the contemplation of isolated landscapes and seascapes became a salutary and necessary activity as sectarian violence disrupted any secure sense of attachment to Ulster. Poetry might be elevated and energised by a bold encounter with the ferocious political energies of the Troubles, but in such a precarious context it also ran the risk of exhaustion and extinction.