Devotion and 'The Queer Body in Elegy: Two Approaches'

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The project is comprised of a creative component, Devotion, and a corresponding critical component, 'The Queer Body in Elegy: Two Approaches'. Devotion is a poetry collection that as its centrepiece has a queer retelling of The Keen for Art O'Leary by Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill titled 'Keen for A-'. Broadly speaking, the creative component depicts various forms of devotion, and the subsequent auspices of the love poem and the elegy therein. Poems consider aspects of theological, familial and domestic devotion, and with its central keen, asks the question 'Who can Irish literary tradition actually represent?' 'The Queer Body in Elegy: Two Approaches' examines Mark Doty's and Marie Howe's aesthetic approaches to the American AIDS crisis by reading their elegies for and about the dying bodies of their loved ones. The thesis contends that to elegise the legions of those dead from the HIV/AIDS virus successfully, and go beyond mere testimony, each poet has to subvert or alter the elegiac form. To that end, Mark Doty's Camp register and Marie Howe's embodied, metaphor-less poems are read as a transgressive method of elegising what was then unspeakable.All my best,