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10 | (a ‘home from home’, i.e. country house, holiday cottage). An island of peace in contrast to tormented Belfast. His tusculanum, leads on to the next two chapters, which discuss the presence and meaning of pastoral poetry, first in Montague’s The Rough Field and then in Heaney’s version of a pastoral, the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’. Since Virgil’s eclogues, the pastoral tradition has turned to the idyll of peaceful life in times of threat of violence. Pastoral scenes are places of the mind in contrast to the real ones that had fallen victim to the devastations of war. Idylls, so to say, bear a political message of resistance. The penultimate essay examines how the radical appearance of otherness and elsewhere in Mahon’s poems offer an approach to the question of place in Northern Ireland, as also does Montague’s poetic transgressions of boundaries. These two essays, while providing a conclusion to the profound research carried out in the book, also open it up for further considerations regarding the four emblematic poets treated here or even beyond their generation. The double merit of Péter Dolmanyos’s set of essays is their firm structure and the impressive amount of up-to-date literature that support his argument. The external eye, since, after all, he is conducting his research in Hungary, will hopefully provide readers of this book with new perspectives. Győző Ferencz Executive President of Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts
