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Preface | 9
Carrickfergus, and Dublin or Sligo, albeit always with a northern outsider’s
eye. Thus he was quite suitable to be a kind of ancestor, a father figure for the
new generation of poets. Though not exclusively. He was looked upon by
Michael Longley as Patrick Kavanagh was by Heaney.
This also shows that, although Northern Irish Poetry is a controversial cat¬
egory, it is for this same reason that its boundaries are flexible, open. Northern
Ireland as a geographic and political entity has created a distinctive poetry.
Péter Dolmanyos captures the essence of Northern Irish poetry when he
makes aspects of place the organising principle of his study. In the book,
he examines the work of four Irish poets, John Montague, Seamus Heaney,
Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All four have recently completed their
oeuvres. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that they themselves created the
core of what is by critical consensus regarded as Northern Irish poetry. They
did it, above all, by the way in which the theme of place, fraught with tensions
and prejudices, endangered but with the hopeful possibility of transcending
conflicts, appears in their works.
Peter Dolmänyos’s book is the result of two decades of systematic and per¬
sistent research. From the outset, his interest has focused on the problem¬
atics of the specificity of Northern Irish poetry. In his book he summarises
his research in eight separate but closely related studies. Rather than drawing
portraits of poets or writing a history of poetry, he explores how the four
emblematic poets developed their own notions of place that is reflected in
their poetry, and what differences and correspondences exist in the interplay
of their oeuvres which are drawn from different backgrounds and elaborated
distinctive poetics.
The introductory chapter clarifies the sense in which the term ‘place’ is
used, separating it from the overlapping terms ‘space’, ‘ground’, ‘location’. It
relates the concept of place to the medieval Irish topographical poetic genre,
the dinnséanchas.
The next chapter elucidates Seamus Heaney’s sense of place as he addressed
the issue in a series of landmark essays. Dolmanyos forcefully argues that
Heaney, thoroughly reading his predecessors and contemporaries —while also
relying on his personal experiences — comes to the conclusion that there exist
two complementary concepts of Ulster, the region in its geographical reality
and its culturally constructed mental imprint, the ‘image’ of the place that
he calls “Ulster of the mind”. Although Heaney and two of his close fellows,
Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, are closely linked by their common be¬
ginnings in the years immediately before the Troubles broke out, Heaney’s
rural and Catholic background contrasts with their urban, Protestant ances¬
try. This, it goes without saying, is not a sectarian division yet as Dolmanyos
demonstrates in his meticulous analyses, makes itself felt in their respective
poetics. Mahon’s scepticism concerning the relationship between place and
community in Ulster leads him naturally from the disused shed in Wexford
to international scenes. For Longley, the equivalent of place is ‘home’, but his
sense of home seems to be doubled by his second home in the West of Ireland