‘Routinely Herded Grief Can Never Feed the Livingsmothered’—Modes of Inarticulacy as Resistance in Maggie O’Sullivan’s murmur

• Published in: Journal of British and Irish innovative poetry 2017-04, Vol.9 (1)
• Main Author: Perry, Eleanor Jane
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Grief; Literary studies; O Sullivan, Maggie; Poetry; Syntax; Text analysis; Writing
• ISSN: 1758-972X; 1758-2733; 1758-972X
• DOI: 10.16995/biip.24

This exploratory article considers Maggie O’Sullivan’s 2011 poetry sequence murmur: tasks of mourning and the possibilities that are opened out for the text if it is read as an elegy. Through close analyses of selected passages from the sequence, the article will argue that O’Sullivan uses modes of inarticulate expression as a form of resistance against an institutionalized conception of mourning as the linear progression from a space of crisis to one of recovery. Further, it will explore how the text offers inarticulate modes of expression as a counterpoint to the rationalized and bureaucratized language which such conceptions promote. Beginning with a contextualization of the text within O’Sullivan’s body of writing more broadly, the article will examine the ways in which O’Sullivan explores modes of articulacy and their relation to the grieving body; and how these relate to patterns of harm and partial recovery which are present within the work. Finally, it will examine how murmur’s refusal of monolithic interpretation operates as a further resistance to the notion of mourning as a linear progression; a resistance which gestures towards an understanding of recovery as continuous and continually shifting.