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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 category, 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 persistent research. From the outset, his interest has focused on the problematics 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 beginnings in the years immediately before the Troubles broke out, Heaney’s rural and Catholic background contrasts with their urban, Protestant ancestry. 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
