Although it isn't easy to see from this side of the Atlantic (at least not yet), something new is happening in Dublin. While Dublin has long been considered an important literary city, it has only occasionally been an exciting place for experimental writing, and is perhaps better known as a place experimental writers leave than a place they come to write. Joyce and Beckett are the most famous examples of expatriate Irish experimentalists, but they are by no means alone Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, among others, joined the Stephen Dedalus-like flight to other shores. But in the last few years a number of exciting experimental poets have been returning to the city after years abroad. A creative nexus has begun to develop, based in Dublin but with branches reaching out to England and to other parts of Ireland.

"We're finally beginning to feel some synergy" says Trevor Joyce, a poet and long-time advocate of alternatives to mainstream Irish poetry. This sense of creative synergy among poets like Joyce, Billy Mills, Catherine Walsh, Maurice Scully, Randolph Healy and Geoffrey Squires promises to open new possibilities for an Irish poetry that has, in the last few decades, produced stunning achievements in virtually all areas but formal innovation. The new Dublin poetry is "outside poetry" in two senses. Firstly, it takes place outside the formal range of the old poetry, and secondly, it is being made outside the embrace of the city's literary institutions. Micro-publishers like Wild Honey Press and the revised New Writersâ Press have been willing to take risks that others have not, and these presses and the poets they support have become the agents of innovation in Irish poetry. It is this "outside poetry" that promises, in that now-old modernist gesture, to take a distinguished literary tradition and make it new