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Orientation: Approaches to Place in Northern Irish Poetry ] 23
beneficiary of the 1947 Butler Education Act he had access to secondary and
later tertiary level education, opening the possibility of a different life from
that of his forebears. Heaneys poetry was strongly anchored to specific places
from the outset, with a strong regional affiliation", conducting enguiries
into various aspects of his environment, with an increasingly explicit tribal
element that would also open up the category of place for him. His concerns
with place validate the claim of the poet as geographer,” and his examina¬
tion of the heritage preserved in place names as well as his dialogue with the
pastoral reflect his understanding of space as product and place as a complex
of spatial and temporal constituents. By employing different approaches and
tactics in handling place he also demonstrates a strong sense of self-reflection
which becomes especially apparent when he returns to specific places in dif¬
ferent contexts in different phases of his career. In addition to the importance
of place in his own poetic practice, several of his essays deal with the concept
both in general and in the particular context of poets, reflecting a life-long
concern with the category and a willingness for reassessment in connection
with it. The generic and formal variety of his poems that address place also
indicate this openness to the concept of place.
Michael Longley (1939-2025) hailed from a Protestant urban context, and
as a child of English parents living in Belfast his background represents a dif¬
ferent experience. As a Belfast resident, his sense of home appears solid, yet
his act of establishing a home from home in the West of Ireland testifies to his
understanding of the interrelation of places, with a special emphasis on their
mutual role in their definition. In Longley’s poetry the observing speaker re¬
ceives a major role in setting up and defining the relative position of places as
well as in intimating the possibility of discovery and surprise in the process of
contemplation. This openness is coupled with a preference for measured and
disciplined forms in his poetry, which creates an intriguing dynamic relation¬
ship between speaker and utterance and results in a specific lyric voice.
Derek Mahon (1941-2020) shares a Belfast Protestant background with
Longley, although Mahon’s working-class family configuration and his subur¬
ban affiliation mark some differences from the experience of the other poet.
Mahon’s ambivalent relation to his community is also well-documented as
several poems express his uneasiness with the specific Protestant tradition
that he comes from. This sceptical position coupled with his broad range of in¬
ternational experience results in his peculiar sense of place: he demonstrates
the most apparent awareness of the dynamic nature of places, of the network
or matrix of relationships between and among places as constitutive of their
respective understanding. Several of his poems are built on the premise of
the active relation between different places for their respective definition and
description, and it is in his poetry that the notion of places as spatio-temporal
events is demonstrated in the most salient way. Mahon’s impressive formal
™ cf. Richard Rankin Russell, Seamus Heaney’s Regions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
2014), 1-15
cf. Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 65
75