A break with tradition::Gail McConnell’s post-conflict elegy.

Emerging from the rich and complex tradition of Northern Irish elegiac poetry, Gail McConnell’s 2021 poetry collection The Sun is Open unpacks the life and death of her father William McConnell almost four decades after his murder by the IRA in 1983. Navigating the difficulties of mourning post-conflict, McConnell interrogates the very structures that politicise mourning and make it difficult terrain to negotiate– even, or perhaps especially, post-conflict. This essay unpacks McConnell’s elegiac poetry, both The Sun is Open and its predecessor “Type Face”, to explore the politics of the archive and the dynamics of gender both within the context of post-conflict Northern Ireland and the elegiac tradition itself.