Reading these poems, one comes to suspect that the image of a truly safe and ennobling nation must be that of a mobile home; intimate, but open, playful, self-aware, and moving. Archer has written its lexicon out of idioms of displaced beings; remapping of boundaries would require a full transformation of English; of its grammar, its words, its punctuations, its letters, its spacing on the printed page. Archer joins Austin C...
Reading these poems, one comes to suspect that the image of a truly safe and ennobling nation must be that of a mobile home; intimate, but open, playful, self-aware, and moving. Archer has written its lexicon out of idioms of displaced beings; remapping of boundaries would require a full transformation of English; of its grammar, its words, its punctuations, its letters, its spacing on the printed page. Archer joins Austin Clark, John Hewitt, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, and Medbh McGuckian in generating new combinations that mark and baffle the old ones.
Victor Luftig
Nuala Archer's first book of poetry, Whale on the Line, (Gallery Press, 1981) won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Two Women, Two Shores, poems by Nuala Archer and Medbh McGuckian was jointly published by New Poets Series, Baltimore & Salmon Press, Galway, Ireland, in 1989. Pan/ama, a chapbook, was published by Red Dust, New York, in 1992. The Hour of Pan/ama was published by Salmon in 1992. She has taught at Yale University. She was also director of the Cleveland Poetry Centre and associate professor at Cleveland State University.
