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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 cultural, 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 product 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 “spatio-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 postmodern 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 produces 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 indirectly) 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 understood 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 Displacement in the Poetry of Derek Mahon.” In: Neil Corcoran (ed.) The Chosen Ground. Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992), 87 58 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland 1968 - 2008 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 19 Alexander, Ciaran Carson. Space, Place, Writing, 37 55 56 59
