A chapter based upon poets’ responses to works of art risks appearing passé: from Horace's ‘ut pictura poesis’ to J. D. McClatchy's Poets on Painters and beyond, the subject has been tackled extensively, if not exhaustively. In relation to Northern Irish poetry, Edna Longley's impressive ‘No More Poems about Paintings?’ would seem the definitive account. However, this chapter not only corrects certain misconceptions and inaccuracies in Longley's analysis, more importantly it offers a comparative study of ‘the gaze’ of both Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian. Rather than presenting a study comparing the compositional and technical similarities of poetry and painting, I shall discuss not only the poets’ reactions to other people's art but also how the different structures of looking embedded into their poems (scopic drive, voyeurism, zen-like trance, detached gaze, flickering glance) reveal subtle distinctions between their views on politics and gender. This approach does not mean that my focus is on artistic reference rather than intertextual relations; the poets often borrow from biographies and art criticism when composing. Although I intend to contrast the younger poets’ obliquity with Seamus Heaney's directness, the greatest difference between them is in their way of looking. I shall argue that Heaney's gaze is singular and self-affirming, engaged as it is in eidetic reduction, the phenomenological search for the Platonic eidos. In contrast, the younger poets’ points of view problematise this concept, demonstrating that the gaze is neither static nor passive. All three, however, share with Northern Irish visual artists a distrust of the supposedly objective media representations of the Troubles.

Photo-journalistic representations of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland are renowned for their political naïveté and tabloid simplicity; relaying clichéd imagery as a convenient substitute for investigative reportage, photographers have increasingly opted for ‘recognition and easy reflexive responses with the manipulative ease of the potboiler’. Ignoring the underlying complexities of the political situation, this unqualified ‘retinal re-portage’ has latched on to one-dimensional imagery, ‘massag[ing] the complex into simplistic formulae’. As one commentator has rightly pointed out, by ‘trading so unself-critically on the worst stereotypes of the situation, the images themselves have become increasingly bankrupt’. For visual artists, the chronic political instability has curtailed access to a realist aesthetic and they have been forced to subvert the fixed gaze of the camera by foregrounding both mediation and context ‘in the form of manipulated images, sequenced images, or combinations of image and text’.