SOURCE: “Donald Davie and Ireland,” in Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature, edited by George Dekker, Carcanet New Press, 1983, pp. 49-63.

In the following essay, Martin analyzes Davie's complex relationship to Ireland and how it affects his poetry.

In February 1980 Donald Davie published two poems side by side in the San Francisco journal Inquiry and coupled them beneath the caption, ‘English in Ireland’. The caption is subtle, because it refers, I think, to language as well as to people and history. The collocation of the two poems, one written eight years later than the other, marks and defines a significant phase in the English poet's dialogue with Ireland, its people, landscape, historical remains, literary traditions, its tragic politics. This dialogue which has, over twenty-five years, been mostly tender and contemplative, has once or twice taken on the violence and rudeness of a lover's quarrel. The first of...