Abstract: During the past twenty years, little known poets who were not mentioned in Beckett’s (1995) Anthology have been overthrowing the established order, questioning the past and the present and refusing to be satisfied with words that do not critically engage with the tensions among the Islands. Their lyrics often conceal a therapeutic irony (verbal and situational). For Hölderlin “distress” was spiritual, historic and linguistic. For the authors of the archipelago, distress is also identitarian.
