Oldal 22 [22]
20 | Péter Dolmanyos
character”® and acknowledging its nature as being “produced out of the en¬
counter 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 prac¬
tical 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 prov¬
ince 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 legiti¬
mate 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 promi¬
nently 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 spe¬
cial 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 dia¬
logue 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 el¬
ements 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