The many ways in which contemporary Irish women poets respond to the past is evidence of the significance of this negotiation for generations of writers, and its vital intersection with a range of themes and practices. All the poets featured in this study engage with different dimensions of memory, from explorations of key historical events to the recollection of the turbulent personal past; from shared networks of tradition to textual resonances from their own earlier work. Some of these poets first became established in the 1960s and 1970s, when feminist debates inflected how their work was read and received. The development of their poetry, politically and aesthetically, has not only helped to keep poetry written by women to the forefront of the Irish poetry scene but has also highlighted the significance of reflecting on this process of evolution within creative practice itself.

All acts of reading and criticism take place in time and they too must reflect upon the trajectories of such commentary. In this sense, we remember past reading experiences – poetic and critical – and bring these memories to our analysis of the texts we encounter. Eavan Boland's ongoing interrogation of silenced voices in narrative history has created an awareness of the partial nature of the official past; yet it has also highlighted the strategic character of some memory practices. In the presence of this repeated engagement, other women have traced oblique routes through personal and political histories, using the dynamics of place and belonging as a counterpoint. For poets such as Paula Meehan, Mary O'Malley and Eva Bourke, responses to the past – and the formal mechanisms deployed to explore them – are shaped by the landscapes and streetscapes of experience. The enduring links between temporal and spatial imagination for these poets has not limited their aesthetic development, instead it has emphasized their creative process as one of constant renewal.

The rich variety of work produced by women during this period emphasizes the interconnected nature of these voices. As some of these poets write out of a specifically Irish present, others move abroad to articulate an Irish experience that may be in the past, yet remains an important dimension of their identity.