Leaves of Hungry Grass

Taking poetry as an act of witness and restorative memory, this essay traces the development of poems relating to Ireland's Great Hunger from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. An international landscape of connected experience emerges through the work of Eavan Boland, Alan Shapiro, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Paul Celan and many poets in Ireland, the U.S., Germany and Australia.



In examining a world of poetry, the connections and parallels to contemporary famines and migrat...