In the face of a catastrophe of great magnitude the first literary genre to bear witness is often poetry, for the obvious reasons of its linguistic economy, aided by rapid publication on online platforms. And so, when COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the WHO on 11 March 2020, and as it started to severely hit one country after another, numerous poetry initiatives were launched to record how that precise historical moment was being experienced by diverse communities and individuals. Former British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Manchester Metropolitan University, for example, set in motion Write Where We Are Now, a project that brought together poets from all over the world to reflect directly on their lives during lockdown and features poems written from the earliest moments of the pandemic up until 30 June 2020. As can be read on their website, their aim was to create “a living record of what [was] happening as seen through poets’ eyes” (Write). In 2020 several poetry anthologies were published in book format, some of them amplifying the global character of the pandemic by including poets from across geographies (Cotter 2020; Stavans 2020), and some limiting their selection to a specific national context (Quinn 2020). The pandemic was also the focus of entire collections by individual poets. In the UK, for example, Lesley Saunders published Days of Wonder (2021) and in Spain Begoña M. Rueda’s Servicio de lavandería (2021), a poetic diary of lockdown, was awarded the prestigious Hiperión Poetry Award. The value of artistic records such as these should not be underestimated: on the one hand, the voices of poets articulate an alternative perspective – sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary – to that offered by the official – be it scientific or political – history of a given community; on the other, they prevent the erasure of events that may be too painful or too shameful to remember in the future.

In Ireland several schemes were also initiated to create an archive of the pandemic. University College Dublin Library, for instance, launched its “Poetry in Lockdown Project”, a call for poems written between May 2020 and October 2021 by any member of the UCD community (students, staff, alumni) about the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (Poetry in Lockdown);[1] on 1 June 2020 RTÉ Radio 1 dedicated The Poetry Programme to Poems in a Pandemic, which brought to the audience a selection of texts responding to lockdown, social distancing and self-isolation by Irish poets like Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Jane Clarke, Keith Payne and Jessica Traynor, to mention but a few; and The Arts Council launched its “COVID-19 Crisis Response Award” to fund writers and artists across disciplines to produce “new and original work during the period of COVID-19 isolation” (2020).[2] Celia de Fréine was one of the poets awarded funding by The Arts Council, which allowed her to complete the sequence of poems Léaslíne a Lorg / In Search of a Horizon, published by Arlen House as an individual collection in 2022 in bilingual format (English and Irish). Although de Fréine has written in every genre (from poetry to plays, short and long fiction, opera libretti and scripts for television), in dealing with the pandemic, poetry “seemed the natural way to go”, more so than memoir or diary-keeping, as she explained in an interview following the publication of In Search of a Horizon (González-Arias 2022: 3:00-4:46). While it is important to differentiate the poetic persona in a poem from the poet who wrote it, the 18 poems that make up the collection do invite an autobiographical reading as they come out of the direct experience of de Fréine during the lockdown of 2020. As such, they function as a poetic archive of the time as lived by the protagonist-narrator-poet. To enhance the autobiographical nature of the book, de Fréine includes in it 12 photographs depicting personal objects (clothes, hat, shoes, pens and candles), family members, her own foot stepping out the door on the first day after lockdown (Figure 1) and parts of her house, including the locked back gate as a symbol of seclusion (Figure 2).

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vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvFIGURE 1. Foot / Cos. Photograph by Celia de Fréine.

(de Fréine 2022: 46; reproduced with kind permission of the poet)

The aim of this essay is to look critically at de Fréine’s In Search of a Horizon in the context of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland and to consider the book as a complementary source of information to the scientific discourse that was so pervasive during those days – focused as it was on the behaviour of the virus and the search for a vaccine. De Fréine’s poems contribute to the understanding of the social, cultural, historical and gender components of the lived experience of the pandemic and my analysis will touch upon issues as relevant as the supposed objectivity of the scientific discourse around the virus, the human-nonhuman connection, environmental damage and the historical links of the COVID-19 pandemic with previous health crises lived in Ireland, specifically the Hepatitis C Scandal. This, then, demands my analysis to adopt both a national and a transnational perspective, as the poems illustrate the porosity of borders in a global pandemic and also the relevance of the cultural specificities of each national context. This essay is philological in nature but is framed within the area of the Medical Humanities, as its ultimate aim is to look at the virus within its socio-cultural dimension without disregarding the biomedical narratives around it.

Against Dehumanisation: Poetry as a Complement to Biomedical Discourses

Fear and intense feelings of uncertainty were pervasive during the first wave of the pandemic. As a result, the global population was exposed to what has been called “infoxication”, that is, an excess of information about the new coronavirus that was unprecedented in previous health-related crises.[3] Information came from various sources: biomedical literature published in high-impact journals such as The Lancet, institutional websites of regional, national and international public health services, the daily news and, of course, the internet. In general, the flow of information, particularly data coming from public health services, was fast and characterised by its asepsis. For the narrative to be as reliable as possible the style adopted in these informative pieces was, in general, that of the supposed objectivity of technical and scientific reports. Although news reporters often shared the individual tragedies of people affected by the virus, arguably the greater part of the information that the public craved adopted the form of the depersonalised narrative of the experimental sciences, deprived of emotional load and overloaded instead with early-day figures of deaths and preliminary results of tests carried out in laboratories. On the other hand, there was a sense that literature and the arts were perceived by the general population as simply tools at our disposal to overcome the boredom of lockdown and the lack of social interaction. While it is true that initiatives all over the world, such as granting free access to films, documentaries and books on the internet, helped us live through our isolation, providing the warmth and company the pandemic had snatched from us, it can also be contended that the instrumentalisation of the humanities and the arts translated into their silencing with respect to discourses around the pandemic. The production of knowledge happened in the biomedical arenas, leaving the personal, the emotional and the socio-cultural outside of the official record. The subjective, so to speak, belonged to literature and, as such, was not an urgent matter for consideration.

In “Facts” / “Fíríci” (2022: 16-17)[4] de Fréine addresses the saturation of information experienced during the first wave of the pandemic and offers a counter-narrative to the privilege of the sciences as the only reliable source of knowledge. This is the second poem in the collection, placed after “Advice” / “Comhairle” (12-13), which is dedicated to the art of poetry in general and to de Fréine’s return to it, her “preferred field”, after a period of work “in the fields of drama and prose” (12). It is not infrequent for a book of poems to open meta-poetically with a text that focuses either on the writing of poetry itself or on the role of the poet in their society. As such, “Facts” can be said to be the first poem in the sequence that addresses lockdown in its content and it thus functions as a declaration of intent. In the Cambridge Dictionary, the noun “fact” is defined as “something that is known to have happened or to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information”. Facts are related to numbers, figures and statistics in their naked representation of what we call reality, and information described as factual is assumed to proffer an objective truth. However, the biases of scientific methods of research have been exposed on numerous occasions, the COVID-19 pandemic being no exception. For instance, many research papers were published after the outbreak of the pandemic about the need to take into serious consideration gender, racial, ethnic, environmental and social issues that were not being sufficiently discussed in international conversations about the morbidity and mortality rates caused by the virus (Copat at al. 2020; Lewis 2020; Sze 2020; Wenham et al. 2020).

The title of the poem, “Facts”, takes us directly into that world of supposed precision and exactness. Although the numbers of the pandemic are described as “relentless” and “accurate” by the poetic persona, this accuracy is also questioned in the poem as those same numbers are “not definite / in that they might not indicate / the full extent of the disaster” (16).[5] The choice of the conditional verbal tense, which is sustained in the four stanzas of the poem, interestingly situates the narrator in the area of possibility and probability, rather than certainty. Against the generally assumed objectivity of the scientific discourse, de Fréine’s protagonist embraces uncertainty as a more comprehensive source of data. In line with Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge”, the narrator of “Facts” emphasises the subjective nature of narrative by inscribing the emotional and the affective (particularly grief, mourning and loss) into the official discourse about the pandemic. The particularities of each individual life, “the way he might doff his hat, / the way she loved to go dancing” and the small details of her “taffeta gown / and patent leather shoes” (16) thus proffer another level of accuracy that complements the scientific picture outlined by the scientists.

“An Ability Such as This” / “A Athghin Seo De Chumas” (42-43) also explores alternative ways of apprehending the world, this time through the senses. In spite of the apparently capricious behaviour of the virus in each individual body, in the early days of the pandemic it was discovered that loss of smell (anosmia) and distortion of our sense of taste (dysgeusia) were two common symptoms present in patients with COVID-19,[6] the sense of sight being, in principle, unaffected. The visual has generally been favoured in different philosophical traditions of the western world – through the metaphysics of presence, in other words, the “I-see-it-therefore-it-exists” principle – as well as in theoretical approaches to the corporeal such as psychoanalysis – which bases its canonical narrative about the formation of subjectivity on highly visual processes like the mirror stage. As a result, sound, smell, taste and touch have been traditionally conceptualised as less reliable sources in the reproduction of reality, that is, as less objective. However, in “An Ability Such as This” the poetic persona focuses on the potential of smell to communicate meaning, even though its value cannot be validated by conventional standards of measurement.[7] The olfactory dysfunction provoked by the COVID-19 virus is transformed in the poem into a superpower developed by the poetic persona and one for which no scientific explanation can be provided: when watching television, she can “smell the odour from the location / in which the onscreen event unfolds” (42), she can perceive the smell of brine on the coast or garbage in an urban street after a crime. Far from being considered as a sufferer of a mental disorder, our character is encouraged to trust her sensory intensification on the basis of the interconnectedness between all the senses we humans employ in our experience of the world: “one sense can often awaken another” (42), confides a friend to our protagonist. Rather than conceptualising sensory perception in a vertical hierarchy, the poem inscribes instead a horizontal axis that suggests multiple contact zones between the senses. The visual initiates perception in the poem, but its input is complemented by the olfactory dimension of the image and this, indeed, provides the final meaning.

This interesting conceptualisation of the senses invites another layer of interpretation in the poem, as the olfactory oddity of the protagonist triggers her empathic response in the face of the many deaths that happened during the first wave of the pandemic. As such, she wonders how she can account for her capacity to “smell the freshly-sawn pine / in the coffins that hold the unclaimed bodies / about to be buried / three deep in rows of two / by men in hazmat suits on Hart Island” (42). Philosopher Elaine Scarry, in her ground-breaking study on pain, contends that “[pain brings about], even within the radius of several feet, [an] absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons” (1985: 4). For Scarry, pain happening in someone else’s body is not only unshareable but also language-destroying (4). As she explains, psychological suffering, “though often difficult for any one person to express, does have referential content” (in other words, we feel sorry for something/somebody or angry about something or with somebody), “is susceptible to verbal objectification, and is […] habitually depicted in art” (Scarry 1985: 11; original emphasis). However, physical manifestations of pain and distress, she argues, have no referential content outside the body of the sufferer, are more difficult to articulate linguistically and, as a result, accentuate the gap between the self (sufferer) and others (the community) (11). Therefore, she concludes, “to have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt” (Scarry 1985: 13; original emphasis). However, for de Fréine’s protagonist the sight of mass graves on Hart Island, New York, connects her with the stories of loss they represent, bridging the gap Scarry theorises about. This empathic response on the part of de Fréine’s poetic persona is mainly channelled through the sense of smell, which is articulated in the poem as a very reliable source of emotional and physical knowledge and, ultimately, as a complement to the information provided in the news. In the closing lines of the poem, she tells her friend that, despite the intensity of her sense of smell, “[i]t is unlikely, though” that either of them “will come up with a satisfactory” explanation for this superpower of sorts (42). However, the bases for an alternative source of knowledge have already been solidly laid.

Environmental Awareness: Human and Nonhuman Connections

The narrative pertaining to the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been multifarious. Although part of the initial conversations moved between conspiracy theories (some of them still active, such as the belief that the virus had been maliciously fabricated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China) and distrust of health systems (particularly supported by those who were reluctant to maintain social distances or to be vaccinated against the virus),[8] the general concern during the first wave was the finding of an antidote. However, as Richard Kock and his team have contended, though vaccines are a therapeutic response to pandemics, the international community of scientists and politicians needs to invest more energies in preventing them, which will only be possible with a strong focus on the “human-animal-environment disease interface”, very relevant to research on COVID-19 as supposedly originating in an initial zoonotic spillover event and subsequent human-to-human transmission (Kock 2020).

Associating the appearance of epidemics to the inadequacies of interactions between humans and nonhumans is not new. In his 2012 article for The New York Times, “The Ecology of Disease”, Jim Robbins had argued that most epidemics – he was at the time referring to Ebola, AIDS and Lyme disease, among others – are the direct result of “things people do to nature”, concluding that “disease […] is largely an environmental issue” (2012). However, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific literature did not pay sufficient attention to the role that environmental factors and climate change may have played in its inception, transmission and development. It is mainly in the poetry shared online or published during the first wave that we find strong links between the appearance of new viruses, the degradation of human health and the damage we inflict on our landscapes, seascapes and nonhuman life.

In her poetry and public interviews, Celia de Fréine has often expressed her preoccupation with the neglect of the environment on the part of humans, emphasising the urgency of monitoring the interconnection between the different species. While acknowledging that it might be difficult to ascertain “whether they parallel each other or whether they converge”, she has expressed her belief that “physical, ecological and urban damage are streams that occur side by side without the realisation that each impacts on the other” (Palacios-González and González-Arias 2020: 109). Certainly, planetary and ecological concerns are very present in contemporary poetry, even though, as the poet has contended, in an Irish context poems inspired by ecological disaster “may have been thrown out of kilter by preoccupations with nationalism and feminism caused as a result of recent historical commemorations”, such as the centenary of the 1916 Rising (Palacios-González and González-Arias 2020: 105).[9] The pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus, however, has reactivated this long-standing interest in de Fréine, who reflects on such issues in several poems included in In Search of a Horizon.

In “My Carbon Footprint” / “Mo Lorg Carbóin” (40-41), for example, the poetic persona admits to travelling a lot thanks to her writing career. In an interesting reversal of classical roles, the female protagonist does not relate here to the waiting of Penelope but to the mobility of Odysseus. These journeys have made it possible for her to meet many people, visit many countries and, as she relates, “write books about my adventures” (40). However, the pandemic has not only brought her voyages to a halt and her professional life to an impasse – poetry readings became virtual events, lectures were delivered online, and kisses were gestures sent “from server to server” to land “sanitised, on colleagues’ cheeks” (40) – but it has also awakened an environmental awareness that was previously timid. With the exceptional circumstance of her moving between countries for love, the poetic persona is committed to the “yards of restraint” that will limit her movements from now on, thus reducing her eponymous carbon footprint. The poem implicitly links the origin and spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the damage humans inflict on the planet. However, rather than launching a catastrophic message, the poem ends with a statement about the power of the imagination to substitute for real travelling, thereby fostering creativity all the more and intensifying the senses. As was the case in “An Ability Such as This”, smell here again becomes the agent that transforms the limitations of lockdown into an unlimited emotional life that equates to the intensity of lived experience: “I shall imagine myself step / onto the Roman Bridge, / allow the scent of world mint guide me / as far as the back meadows of La Ballestra” (40).

De Fréine continues her reflection on lifestyle and environmental awareness in “Those On-Screen Streets” / “Na Sráideanna Úd ar Scáileán” (18-19), where the poetic persona is in lockdown and daydreams about walking down Grafton Street, the most commercial area in the capital city of Ireland. Remembering Christmases long ago, when “everyone stayed at home / and shop windows flaunted their wares – / ready for the sales to begin” (18), she longs for the streets, and for the fresh air of open spaces, the music of birdsong and some contact with nature. The reference to the absence of birdsong turns the time of lockdown into a silent spring, reminiscent of the eponymous book that American biologist Rachel Carson published in 1962 about the indiscriminate use of pesticides and its devastating effects on the environment. At this point in the poem the silence de Fréine’s protagonist desires to end is not due to the disappearance of birds but rather to the inaccessibility of their song as long as the “back gate remains locked” (18).

However, the next stanza explores the “silent spring” of 2020 in more depth by referring to the regeneration of animal life after humans from all over the world are confined to their homes. Part of the collective memory of lockdown are the viral images of dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice or wild animals walking around urban areas, often claiming back habitats that humans had taken from them. Similarly, in Ireland foxes took advantage of the deserted city of Dublin and strolled down Grafton Street at leisure. However, as Stef Craps has contended, such images of wildlife in urban sites around the world triggered, paradoxically, a resistance to mourning the ecological loss that characterises the Anthropocene, and ultimately resulted in the lack of any sustained action against climate change or environmental destruction (2023: 70). If, regardless of what we do to it, nature can recover so easily, the situation may be reversible, these images seem to spell out. However, in de Fréine’s poem the poetic persona resists such optimism and envisages a post-pandemic time of continuous natural degradation: “One thing I am sure of”, she states with the confidence of a twenty-first century prophetess:

as soon as my soles touch

those cobblestones

the crowd will be there before me,

fumes will have invaded the air,

birdsong will have died out,

the fox will have returned

to his lair in the suburbs. (18)

In this way, “Those On-Screen Streets” questions the general assumption that humans will modify their relationship with the natural world after the health crisis and predicts a return to the pre-pandemic lifestyle of consumerism and planetary damage. The final lines, however, open up some space for change, albeit on the small, individual scale: although the back gate is still locked (Figure 2), keeping the inhabitants of the house in seclusion, “pears bud in the garden” and “clematis wavers on the railings” (18).

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvFIGURE 2. Gate / Geata. Photograph by Celia de Fréine.

vvvvvvvvvvvvvv(de Fréine 2022: 38; reproduced with kind permission of the poet)

The balance between the triumph of life in the midst of the pandemic and the urgent call for environmental awareness is also the focus of “Eva: Meaning of Life” / “Éabha: Brí na Beatha” (48-49), the poem de Fréine dedicates to her eponymous granddaughter, born during lockdown. In the opening lines the poetic persona finds a tiny feather while sweeping the floor and decides to keep it, wondering where it could have come from. In her introduction to Evocative Objects Sherry Turkle states that objects connect us to the world. Far from being considered as empty materiality or mere aesthetic containers, she defines them as “companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought” (2011: 5). As such, objects are part of our biography and can trigger affects of great intensity. Accordingly, the presence or loss of objects, she explains, is experienced in similar ways to the presence or loss of the people we associate them with (Turkle 2011: 9). In de Fréine’s poem the “snip of feather” (48) becomes a companion for the convoluted emotional life of lockdown, somehow calming the restlessness associated with the impending birth of Eva. However, in the poem it also functions as a sign whose meaning must be decoded as the mystery of its origins becomes resolved.

The opening line of the second stanza – “The signs are remarkable” (48) – establishes a connection between the little feather and elements of the natural world, namely “basking sharks […] off the west coast, / orca whales [that] forage in Strangford Lough, / swans [that] glide along a canal in Venice – / all testing the waters, as it were, / before you [Eva] swim ashore” (48). Feather, sharks, orca whales and swans thus become linguistic signs that matter, in other words, they become signifying elements spelling out a message that goes well beyond their material reality. The not-yet-born baby is inserted into the order of nature, as one more element in the chain of life, an image reinforced by the parallelism between the amniotic liquid she swims in and the seas and oceans where the aquatic creatures move. The poem deconstructs in this way the hierarchy of the species that situates humans at the top by virtue of their rational capacities. As was the case in “Those On-Screen Streets”, here too a strong call for a more reciprocal relationship between humans and nonhumans is articulated by means of a horizontal axis of interconnectedness.

The mystery of the feather’s origins is solved at the end of the poem as it transpires that it was Eva’s “guardian angel / who sent the snip of feather floating down – / she who will stay by your side long after the swans, / sharks and orca whales have headed off” (48). The feather acquires protective qualities for the baby but its powers will not be extended to the other elements of the natural world. As in “Those On-Screen Streets”, in “Eva: Meaning of Life” Celia de Fréine also envisages the eventual disappearance of the aquatic animals as soon as lockdown comes to an end. The poem celebrates life but does not fall into facile optimism, and ultimately points towards the difficulties of ever reversing the environmental damage of our current times.

A Global Health Crisis: National and Transnational Perspectives

Lockdown was lived in the privacy of the home, as the poems above indicate. As such it was primarily experienced as an individual and familial ordeal. But the COVID-19 pandemic was also a collective happening in that the virus moved freely across the globe, providing evidence of the porosity of geopolitical borders. This conferred an aura of uniformity on the health crisis that often concealed the impact of gender, racial, ethnic, socio-economic or geographical factors on the lived experience of lockdown and on the contagion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Against simplistic views of the pandemic as a homogeneous health crisis, In Search of a Horizon reflects on the singularities of the Irish context – where historical traumas impinge on the individual and collective perception of the health emergency – without underestimating the diverse responses to the new coronavirus across the planet. The poems in the final section of this essay invite both a national and a transnational reading, proving that disease always has a socio-political dimension that directly affects its morbidity, mortality and cultural stigma.

In “You Know” / “Is Eol Duit” (20-21) de Fréine addresses the implications of living with ill health in the context of the Hepatitis C Scandal in Ireland, which she then connects with the COVID-19 crisis. In the late 1970s thousands of Irish citizens, mostly women, were infected with a contaminated blood product known as Anti-D agent. This product had been very successful in the prevention of rhesus disease[10] but proved calamitous for the patients who received the batch manufactured in 1976 by the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) from a donor who had infective hepatitis. A good number of women were diagnosed with various diseases, such as lupus, jaundice and fatigue, but the connection between their ill health and the toxic agent was not at first established. It was only in 1994 that the scandal was made public when evidence was provided that the BTSB had been alerted to the possibility of contamination, only to disregard the warning. Celia de Fréine was one of the women infected with the contaminated batch after she gave birth in a Dublin hospital. As a result of that experience she wrote Blood Debts, the only artistic articulation of the Hepatitis C Scandal in Ireland to date,[11] where the poet looks at the physical, sexual, social, familial, legal and political dimensions of living in illness.

The opening lines of “You Know” situate the reader in the midst of the hepatitis C crisis, whose mismanagement destroyed the protagonist’s trust in the health and political systems of Ireland: “You know how it feels / to have your health taken from you. / To know you were healthy / before those in whom you trusted –/ in whose care you had been placed – / robbed you of your strength” (20). The poetic persona refers to herself with the second person pronoun which, on the one hand, helps her find some distance from the traumatic episode and, on the other, prevents the erasure of that shameful episode of medical and political malpractice by turning it into a narrative to be told and re-told, not only to readers but also to herself. Trust is fundamental in health-related issues. In the clinical encounter, for example, the patient puts their life in the hands of a system that is expected to care for their well-being (González-Arias 2021: 280). For Nickel and Vaesen, trust is a “morally loaded attitude, in which one has a moral expectation that one takes it to be the responsibility of the trusted person to fulfil” (2012: 858). However, in “You Know” the poet-patient’s expectations about the medical and political systems meet with profound disappointment. The opening line in the second and third stanzas is phrased identically – “Not a day goes by you don’t” (20) –, which shows that the consequences of contamination with hepatitis C linger in the protagonist’s present and have determined all aspects of her life since:

Not a day goes by you don’t

feel the hurt of that loss,

nor imagine the life

you might have led. (20)

Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hepatitis C Scandal only affected one country, Ireland, and one specific group of its population, mainly the women who were contaminated with the toxic agent after giving birth.[12] However, both episodes were similar in their life-threatening potential and in the generalised feelings of fear and uncertainty they elicited, particularly during their initial phases. Although decades apart, the poetic persona indicates, in the closing lines of the poem, that her perception of the COVID-19 emergency is necessarily mediated by her experience as a victim of the hepatitis C crisis: “you must now trust in those / in whose care you have been placed” (20), she concludes. Her lack of trust is thus reactivated. The solid “must” that accompanies the verb “trust” is a poignant reminder that now, the same as then, she is vulnerable to those in power and, accordingly, cannot actively participate in the taking of decisions about her own health.

“Because Your Forebears Died of Hunger in a Land of Plenty” / “Toisc gur Bhásaigh do Shinsir den Ocras i dTír na Flúirse” (50-51) further explores the links between past and present in the experience of the COVID-19 lockdown, in this case revisiting the national trauma of the Irish Famine. The poem enacts a visit to the supermarket in the first days of the pandemic. In the midst of uncertainty about a possible lack of supplies, citizens took to panic buying, leaving shops virtually empty of essential products. Wheeling her trolley down the supermarket aisle, the poetic persona remembers hearing the voice of the girl “who gave her share that a younger sister might live – / advise you not to panic” (50). The reference to potatoes at the end of the poem, the scarcity of which triggered the big hunger, contributes to strengthening the links between the historical trauma and the current health crisis. As the poet has put it, this poem “suggests the spectre of the Famine never leaves us and may, in part, explain the pressure to panic buy” (de Fréine 2022: 66). The ghostly presence of the young girl is sustained throughout the text and she witnesses the delicacies on the poet’s table to celebrate Christmas in the present. The poem ultimately exposes the unethical implications of comparing a famine situation with a global health crisis that did not involve scarcity of supplies or starvation in the first world. The spectre of the famine girl’s mother closes the poem by inviting the poet to even more food: “another potato? more / gravy? a slice of ham? There’s plenty in it” (50), evidencing the contrast between the two historical periods. The poem also shows the different ways in which national histories impinge on the lived experience of the pandemic. Panic buying might have been a transnational experience but the singularity of each geopolitical context definitely influenced the emotional dimension of the action.

In “Disease Knows No Border” / “Ní Aithníonn Galar Teorainn” (28-29) de Fréine continues exploring the tension between national and transnational factors in the experience of the pandemic. The title makes a direct reference to the porosity of borders in the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and makes geopolitical divisions sound artificial and irrelevant in the face of illness. However, the word “border” in an Irish context immediately invokes the separation between Northern Ireland and the Republic arising from the 1921 Treaty and brought to the fore by the conflict known as The Troubles. The opening stanza sets the tone of the poem. The tension between the two sides of the divide is mirrored by the different political decisions taken on behalf of their citizens: “The authorities fail to agree” and “[d]ifferent rules are introduced North and South”, the narrator explains. But in the meantime, “[d]isease spreads” (28), regardless.

The second stanza further inscribes the conflict in the North by making reference to some of its main symbols, namely the murals on the walls of Belfast and Derry and the balaclavas worn by those who actively participated in street riots. However, the poem records a new trend in the public messages of the North: “As lives are lost”, declares the poetic persona, “street artists take to the walls / covering balaclavas with masks, / combats with scrubs” (28). This radical change indicates that what had been the main political preoccupation in Northern Ireland for generations is now shadowed by the immediate threat of the virus, so that facial masks and scrubs, symbols of the National Health System (NHS), and pervasive during the pandemic, come to the forefront. Even the sectarian bonfires of the past are now “rearranged / to create the letters NHS”, relates the poetic voice. On that account, as the end of the poem reads, “the disease has done / for the people of the north / what the Good Friday Agreement / failed to achieve” (28).

But “Disease Knows No Border” also invites a transnational reading in its deployment of war images and symbols. During the first stages of the COVID-19 crisis politicians from all over the world compared the pandemic to a war that we would win collectively, and in their public appearances they were often accompanied by members of the police or army to reinforce this message of unity against a common enemy. We are very familiar with the war metaphor to discuss illnesses, particularly cancer and COVID-19. As Susan Sontag had eloquently contended in Illness as Metaphor, we rarely think of cancer as a disease but rather as a figure of speech or metaphor, especially through images of war and conflict that, as she maintained, do not help the patient on their path to recovery or healing (1978). Although it is outside the scope of this essay to look into the metaphorisation of illnesses in depth, Sontag’s critical view of the war metaphor and military imagery to talk about disease has been adopted by later critics who are reluctant to equate a war situation with a health crisis. Similarly, in “Disease Knows No Border” de Fréine demarcates a clear-cut division between the armed conflict in the North, whose symbols are balaclavas and combats, and the health crisis, represented by facial masks and the scrubs of the medical establishment, thus participating in international debates on how not to represent the experience of being ill.

Conclusions: Against Amnesia

For a writer used to inhabiting liminal spaces (moving between languages, poetic traditions, genres and geographical locations), in In Search of a Horizon Celia de Fréine lives primarily inside the home to reflect on what life in lockdown was like. However, the poems discussed in this essay complement the biomedical discourse around the SARS-CoV-2 virus not only with the private but also with the local, national and global dimensions of the pandemic so that different layers of experience co-exist to offer a comprehensive and informative record of the health emergency. This essay is written in post-pandemic times. When the world population was confined to their homes it felt as if we would never forget the time of lockdown, as if the lessons learnt would make us better humans. But from a 2024 perspective, that time seems to be fading away. The obvious advantage to collective amnesia is that it is easier to go on and walk into the future. However, the main danger of oblivion is that history will repeat itself. In “For Future Generations” / “Do na Glúnta atá le Teacht” (62-63), the final poem in In Search of a Horizon, the poet addresses an imaginary audience from the future and explains the reasons for writing these poems about “a pandemic / consigned to the history books” (62). Connecting once more the COVID-19 with the Hepatitis C Scandal, this poem evidences the need to make stories visible lest we forget. For de Fréine, recording the past is as important as planning for a hopeful future: “Sometimes all we have are stories / and the need to share them” (62), the closing lines read. The poems studied in this essay are an archive of living memory and, as such, play their part in the polyphonic representations of the COVID-19 pandemic. Against the danger of amnesia, the power of poetry.

Acknowledgements

The author of this essay wants to acknowledge her participation in the research project “End: Illness in the Age of Extinction”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (ref.: PID2019-109565RB-I00/AEI).

Notes

[1] A sample of the submitted poems – 98 people contributed with over 200 poems – is available on the UCD Library website (Poetry in Lockdown).

[2] As a result of this call, 334 writers and artists (out of a total of 956 applications) from all over Ireland were funded. Although the awards were meant to fund work produced during lockdown, most of it would presumably also be about the challenges of that time.

[3] The global population was also susceptible to the rapid spread of disinformation and misinformation in the form of fake news. For an analysis of the impact of fake news on the COVID-19 pandemic, see Nyilasy, Greg (2020). “Fake News in the Age of COVID-19”. Pursuit (April 10). Accessed May 19, 2023. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/fake-news-in-the-age-of-covid-19

[4] The poems studied in this essay will be referenced with their English and Irish language titles on their first occurrence to respect the dual language format of Léaslíne a Lorg / In Search of a Horizon. Quotations from the individual poems, however, will be reproduced only in their English language version, as that is the primary source for the analyses.

[5] It is worth noticing that the numbers of the pandemic were normally given by health and political institutions whose reports were often explicit about the inevitable incompleteness of their data.

[6] For an early review study on anosmia and dysgeusia in COVID-19 patients, see Meng, Xiangming, et al. (2020). “COVID-19 and Anosmia: A review based on up-to-date knowledge”. Am J Otoralyngol 41: 102581. Accessed August 30, 2022. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7265845/pdf/main.pdf

[7] For an acute study on the assumed privilege of sight over other modes of perception, see Jay, Martin (1994). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press).

[8] For a study on how conspiracy theories jeopardised the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, see Hartman, Todd K., et al. (2021). “Different Conspiracy Theories Have Different Psychological and Social Determinants: Comparison of Three Theories About the Origins of the COVID-19 Virus in a Representative Sample of the UK Population”. Frontiers in Political Science (June 2): 642510.

[9] For an interesting analysis of the presence of nature in recent Irish poetry of female authorship, see Palacios-González, Manuela (2009). “The Course of Nature: An Ecofeminist Reading of Contemporary Irish and Galician Women Poets”. Writing Bonds: Irish and Galician Contemporary Women Poets, edited by Manuela Palacios and Laura Lojo. Bern: Pater Lang. 77-96.

[10] The Anti-D agent is given to women with rhesus negative blood who have given birth to rhesus positive babies in order to prevent damage to the foetuses of subsequent pregnancies.

[11] Blood Debts was originally published in the Irish language in 2004 as Fiacha Fola (Connemara: Cló Iar-Chonnachta).

[12] For an analysis of the gender imbalances in the clinical encounter in Blood Debts, see González-Arias 2021.