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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 separate 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 continuing 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 overdetermined 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 reading of the term, making place an organic factor of literary works by connecting 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 44
