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The Comhra (Conversation) took place at my mother's home at Booterstown, Dublin, on December 18 and 19, 1992. I was home Forman my graduate studies at Columbia University, where I'd just begun work on a dissertation on Celtic resistance to anglicisation. The free-ranging discussion I was about to witness between Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, two poets whose work has been deeply significant to me, was the fulfilment of what must be a common fantasy among lovers of literature, to be party to a conversation between revered authors. Everything seemed ripe for the occasion--McGuckian's and Ni Dhomhnaill's expressed delight about the prospect and the timing of the event--and I felt sure it would produce a document of historic importance. Not only had I the good fortune to listen in on their conversation, but I would come away with a "primary source," one of those elusive literary treasures academics dream of unearthing to add originality to their work. It would be as sweet a find as the discovery of conversations between, say, John Keats and the Shelleys, Aogan O Rathaille and Jonathan Swift, or Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, to pair off some figures discussed below.
The seed of the comhra had been planted when Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill said at a poetry reading in New York that Medbh McGuckian's use of the poetic line had influenced her own work. The remark had intrigued me, because although I was a great admirer of both poets, they inhabited separate spheres of my imagination, isolated from each other by language and by tradition. McGuckian writes, in English, out of her life in Belfast, whereas Ni Dhomhnaill, who composes in Irish, draws inspiration from the oral tradition of the West Kerry Gaeltacht where she spent part of her childhood. I was surprised to learn about McGuckian's technical influence on Ni Dhomhnaill because I had thought of their literary domiciles as polarized cultural enclaves, set apart by Ireland's colonial history. In a different vein, however, I anticipated strong solidarity between them, since they, along with Eavan Boland and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, were the pioneering generation of major Irish women poets. While the previous year's debate over the underrepresentation of women writers in the Field Day Anthology had shown the obstacles...