Oldal 13 [13]
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Orientation: Approaches to Place
in Northern Irish Poetry
Seamus Heaney claims in a 1985 essay that “[elach person in Ulster lives first
in the Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the
mind.”! In a telling manner, the full title of the essay is “Place and Displace¬
ment: Reflections on Some Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland”, indicating
the special importance of the concept of place in the cultural context of the
province. A number of other Heaney prose pieces also work with place as a
central orienting factor when addressing poetry written in Ireland, South and
North alike, and the idea of interaction between an actual and a mental loca¬
tion is already mentioned in his 1977 lecture entitled “The Sense of Place” in
the image of a “marriage between the geographical country and the country
of the mind.”* The insistence on the duality of the sense of location and their
relationship, with an acute sense of dynamism that such a relation implies,
is a clear indication of the importance Heaney attributes to place for poetry.
In an interview with Seamus Deane in 1977, Heaney recounted the origin of
his poetry in an intriguing way: “I think that my own poetry is a kind of slow,
obstinate, papish burn, emanating from the ground I was brought up on.”?
Although the scope of this idea is more inclusive by its hint at the communal
cultural significance of “ground”, its inclusion of place in that context is also
clearly formulated. His reading of other poets in the essays also pays atten¬
tion to the role of place in their respective works, which eventually allows
for a much broader application of his approach than the context of his own
practice.
Heaney’s assertion aligns with several critical positions that point out the
importance of place in Irish poetry. As Ailbhe McDaid notes with a general
reference, “[t]he well-recognised synchronicity between place and poet has of¬
ten provided the dominant critical paradigm of interpreting Irish poetry in
the 20" century.” Several studies include explicitly the word ‘place’ in their
titles, marking it as an essential component of the poetic practice of contem¬
porary poets, especially from Northern Ireland. Critical responses, however,
are stimulated by a long-standing relation between place and poet expressed
Seamus Heaney, “Place and Displacement: Reflections on Some Recent Poetry from Northern Ire¬
land”, The Agni Review, 1985. No. 22 (1985), 161
2 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations. Selected Prose 1968-78. (New York: The Noonday Press, 1980), 132
Seamus Deane, . “Unhappy and at Home’. Interview with Seamus Heaney.” The Crane Bag 1.1, 67
Ailbhe McDaid, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry. (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017), xii