The strangers' house Writing Northern Ireland

Former bookseller Poots debuts with a lyrical ode to Northern Irish literature. Through close readings of literary heavyweights (C.S. Lewis, Seamus Heaney) and overlooked talents (Forrest Reid), Poots surveys the writings and history of a region known for fraught "political positions and cultural identities." He contends that homesickness "pervades the writing that has emerged from Northern Ireland over the past century," and unpacks Tom Paulin's poem "An Ulster Unionist Walks the Streets of London" to illuminate how even Irish unionists could feel out of place in both "Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain." Biographical background on authors highlights the relationship between their writings and history, with an account of poet Patrick Kavanagh's youth serving as a window into the Irish independence struggles of the 1910s and '20s, during which he cut telegraph wires until the onset of the civil war, when he spent isolated years honing his poetry. Poots demonstrates a masterful knowledge of Northern Irish authors and his prose is at turns funny and poetic, suggesting that Lewis's prim child protagonists act like "bank managers in training" and that poet Louis MacNeice "describes his childhood with tactile care, as if he were running his hand up the bannisters of the rectory once again." This powerfully evokes the beauty and complexity of Northern Ireland and announces Poots as an author to watch. (Mar.)

A highly learned but lightly worn literary history of Northern Ireland that reaches beyond books into political and cultural turmoil. Belfast bookseller Poots opens his brightly opinionated study with the titular Strangers' House, a long-ago London hostel for foreign sailors. In a poem by Tom Paulin, an Ulster Unionist--a supporter of a Northern Ireland joined to the U.K.--ended up there with "the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere." Stressing that the divisions in Northern Ireland center on "access to good land and decent employment, combined with competing ideas of what and where home is" more than on religion or ethnicity, Poots draws on literature, beginning in the early 20th century, to examine responses to such matters. It's often forgotten, for instance, that C.S. Lewis, though a renowned Oxford don, was from Northern Ireland. Writing to an Irish friend in England, he lamented that as much as he loved his home, he despaired of "the invincible flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race." It took Ireland decades to admit that Oscar Wilde was one of its own, and Poots does admirable detective work. He recounts how the lawyer who brought about Wilde's downfall by exposing still-illegal homosexuality went on to found the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force but, on the Republic of Ireland's achieving independence in 1920, "found that he had presided over the creation of a strange new country, a Protestant statelet that no one could have envisioned at the turn of the century." Louis MacNeice, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and many other writers figure in the narrative before Poots arrives at the modern triumvirate of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon, who created a literature that, while Irish, was also universal and nonsectarian--and thankfully so, for, as Poots writes, "In the hundred years of Northern Ireland's existence, there has not been a single poet or novelist of any worth who has succumbed to the cosy certainties of the tribe." An essential guide to contemporary Irish letters. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.