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Orientation: Approaches to Place in Northern Irish Poetry ] 17
anomalous states of a population whose most typical experience may be that
of occupying multiple locations, literally and figuratively.”?®
Ihe experience of “occupying multiple locations” is rooted in the colonial
past and the postcolonial present of this particularly Irish kind that makes
discontinuity a prominent characteristic of culture. Lloyd throws light on the
literary consequence of this by admitting that “Irish poetry has notoriously
been as marked by the spectre of discontinuity as has the political culture.”**
Asalient aspect of discontinuity is the “separate cultural contexts of Northern
Ireland and the Republic" which, however, stem only in part from the separ¬
ate paths and dynamism of development following partition as that “mainly
exacerbated an already existing set of regional disparities.* There are older
and deeper running fault lines that cause the fragmentation and discontinuity
of the tradition and lead to the possibility of recognising the existence of more
traditions rather than a single one, yet as Lloyd notes, it is the diverging paths
of development of the Republic and of Northern Ireland in the course of the
1970s that account for the most salient difference in the poetry: “[nlot only
Northern Ireland’s integration within the United Kingdom, but also the con¬
tinuing cultures of resistance to that integration established the conditions
for a poetic practice that differed from those that prevailed in the South with
its waning postcolonial consciousness and distinct path to globalisation and
economic dependency.” That different poetic practice eventually legitimates
the idea of a specific tradition in the context of Northern Ireland, although
one that is not fully independent or separable from the broader Irish one.
As Smyth notes, “Irish poetry is widely construed as a discourse overdeter¬
mined by spatial concerns”,® fitting in with “an historical and philosophical
tradition which argues that the success of any work of art depends upon the
degree to which it is rooted in a familiar landscape.”** Although “landscape”
here is more broadly understood to refer metonymically to a located sense of
community and nationality, the spatial element is prominent in it in any read¬
ing of the term, making place an organic factor of literary works by connect¬
ing physical location and the realm of language. This is all the more observable
in Irish poetry: as John Montague observes, “the least Irish place-name can
net a world with its associations”.*° What Montague refers to is the tradition
of the dinnséanchas, the lore of place that constitutes the historical dimension
of place-names which, however, represents a complex experience: while place
names are repositories of stories of the past, the accessibility of that heritage
is challenged by the colonial act of linguistic dispossession which is also a
part of history itself, and so is the attempt of reclaiming that lost heritage.
38 Lloyd, Anomalous States, 3
% Lloyd, Counterpoetics of Modernity, 23
10 Lloyd, Counterpoetics of Modernity, 27
“1 Lloyd, Counterpoetics of Modernity, 27
#2 Lloyd, Counterpoetics of Modernity, 28
13 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 56
Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 57
15 John Montague, The Figure in the Cave and other Essays (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1989), 43
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