Invoking Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s legacy in Northern Irish poetry by Simpson, H

“…Contemporary Northern Irish poets have repeatedly, even obsessively, invoked Samuel Beckett’s name in their work, from Paul Muldoon’s mock-heroic ‘His Nibs Sam Bethicket’ and Derek Mahon’s ‘Beckett’s bleak reductio’, through Leontia Flynn’s grotesque blazon of Beckett’s ‘palpitations, panic attacks, diarrhoea’ and Padraic Fiacc’s assurance that ‘Beckett welcomes you to Paris’, to Howard’s Wright’s foul-mouthed ‘Beckett in Belfast’. …”