Oldal 22 [22]
OCR
20 | Péter Dolmanyos character”® and acknowledging its nature as being “produced out of the encounter with other places, languages and histories, in the process of which the opposition between home and away, self and other, rootedness and itinerancy, is inevitably revised.”*" As place becomes a dynamic concept, a shifting and mobile one, the need for some anchor for proper orientation appears all the more important. The poetry of Patrick Kavanagh as a forerunner with his claim for the significance of real, lived local experience provides an example of enquiries into the practical experience of place, but with the specific historical dimension of place and its “religious geography”® Northern Ireland proposes a challenge for a simple emulation of earlier poetic practice. The peculiar situation of the province prompts poets to employ some kind of system, with a tentative bow to as well as a polemic with Yeats. As Andrews notes, John Montague and Seamus Heaney follow in the footsteps of Kavanagh in terms of their knowledge of their landscapes, yet their understanding of place differs as they “are drawn into the mystique of the tribal, the mythic and etymological, a landscape of numinous places telling of dispossession and disinheritance”,“? as opposed to Kavanagh's directly personal focus of experience, stemming partly from their different educational background which has the potential of alienating them from their communities.®* Nevertheless, Kavanagh’s work proves the legitimate claim of the local for the attention of serious poetry and for acting as a solid point of reference, exemplified by Montague’s and even more prominently by Heaney’s childhood home, with its pump in the yard identified as the “omphalos.”® Others, such as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon follow different paths by conducting enquiries into the nature and dynamism of the relationship observed between locations that create them as distinct ones in relative terms. In spite of differing approaches, all these poets attribute special importance to place in their poetries and each of them recognises the dynamic nature of the concept of place as they deal with it, entering into dialogue with various aspects of place as well as whole traditions centred on places such as the pastoral or the particularly Irish one of dinnséanchas. The influence of the English topographical or loco-descriptive poetry is also observable that stems from the specific Northern cultural context with its (post-)colonial elements which, in Brendan Kennelly’s view, results in a more complex web of Alexander, Ciaran Carson. Space, Place, Writing, 16 Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home, 18 62 cf. A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground. Aspects of Ulster 1609 - 1969 (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1977), 179-182 Elmer Andrews, . “Introduction”. In: Elmer Andrews (ed.), Contemporary Irish Poetry. A Collection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 12 64 cf. Andrew Murphy, Seamus Heaney. 3" ed. (Horndon: Northcote House Publishers, 2009), 11 cf. “I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door.” Heaney, Preoccupations, 17
