ABSTRACT
This essay analyses contemporary poetry by Irish and Galician women and assesses how it is affected by tensions between national discourses and those that reach beyond the nation. Gender and national identity are permeated, to various degrees, by transnational ideologies such as feminism, Celticism and Catholicism, but these are transformed by the sociocultural specificities of each community. Local interests move to alliances with other nations which are seen as sharing similar objectives, while language choice, torn between the vernacular and the global, becomes a decisive constituent of the writers’ self-image. The study demonstrates that many Irish and Galician women poets express their disaffection towards national and transnational discourses that construe them as symbolically central but grant them little social agency.
