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Orientation: Approaches to Place in Northern Irish Poetry | 19
forces echoes the concern that Norman Vance calls attention to in the
overall context of Irish literature, namely the writer’s mediation between
two communities: “a community of origin and the larger community which
supplies the audience for his work.”** This is more emphatically present in the
case of Northern Irish authors asa result of their specific cultural context, and
with the advance of globalisation and its consequences, social as well as cul¬
tural, there is a markedly broader second community with an increased range
of mutual influence for the poetry. In a complex process this undermines the
validity of earlier essentialist concepts of identity stemming from rootedness
in a particular territory with its consequent authenticity, and a part of this
process is the recognition and acknowledgement of a different understanding
of place as a constituent of identity: “[p]lace is increasingly viewed as the prod¬
uct of global, interconnecting flows of peoples, cultures and meanings - of
routes rather than roots.”
The approach to space as product, presuming also the importance of the
process that results in that product, and the understanding of place as a “spa¬
tio-temporal event” create a dynamic framework for the addressing of place
in which interdependence and mutual influence are involved to balance the
earlier concepts of fixity, solidity and self-contained definition. Observed in
the context of Northern Ireland, the idea of place seen in its relation with
other places?’ is now understood as part of a broader and more general post¬
modern condition - as Kennedy-Andrews concludes, “[pllaces are inevitably
more or less hybrid, their character always influenced by relations with
other places.” When place comes to be rendered in literary representation,
this network-like characteristic of locations mobilises the category and pro¬
duces at the same time a self-reflexive exploration of the relation between
physical, mental and social space. In the resulting representation reality and
imagination are involved in a mutually influential relation: “[...] symbolic or
metaphorical representations of space are inflected and conditioned (often in¬
directly) by the material forces and affective qualities of the physical spaces
to which they respond and refer. But equally, such mental projections of ideas
and images also act upon and influence (again, indirectly) the lived experience
of social space.”°? The constitutive and constructive power of social relations
for place eventually destabilises the concept of home, the commonly under¬
stood ultimate spatial reference point, as well, endowing it with “polysemic
53 cf. Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry, 12-13
54 Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History. Tradition, Identity and Difference (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 1999), 211
Kennedy-Andrews, Northern Irish Poetry, 2
Massey, for space, 130
57 cf. Hugh Haughton, . “Even now there are places where a thought might grow’: Place and Displace¬
ment in the Poetry of Derek Mahon.” In: Neil Corcoran (ed.) The Chosen Ground. Essays on the Contem¬
porary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992), 87
58 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968 - 2008 (Cam¬
bridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 19
Alexander, Ciaran Carson. Space, Place, Writing, 37
55
56
59