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24 | Péter Dolmanyos
variety and control of his medium reflect his attempt for order in the shifting
matrix of relationships that place involves.
The fact that Seamus Heaney addressed the category of place in essays be¬
sides his poetry indicates the practical importance and at the same time the
complexity of the concept in the Northern Irish context. An assessment of his
prose reflections on the meaning of place in poetry and its relation to his own
poetic practice constitutes the subject of the first essay, serving as the start¬
ing point for the exploration of the concept in a broader field. Heaney’s secure
sense of his grounding in a particular spatial and at once social context pro¬
vides him with an anchor which is at the same time a safe point of reference
for the exploration of other aspects of those places and subsequently of other
places as well. Heaney’s reflections on places are constructed out of lived as
well as learned experiences, and the dynamic relationship between these two
shaping forces runs through his entire oeuvre with the use of characteristic
motifs that recur, as indicated by the poems selected for analysis.
The examination of the approaches to place of Derek Mahon and of Michael
Longley follow in respective essays. Despite their similar urban and Protes¬
tant background, there is a marked difference between Mahon’s and Longley’s
positions. Mahon’s declaredly less assured stance in relation to his own com¬
munity and its spatial foundations shows a substantial contrast with Long¬
ley’s safe sense of his place reflected in his concepts of the well-defined spatial
context of home and home from home. The speakers of Mahon’s poems of his
early and middle phases” are characterised by an aloof position, they con¬
template places in specific moments and conditions in which they retain their
distance from the observed phenomena without their causal involvement in
what surrounds them. Longley’s observing speaker recognises and acknowl¬
edges the malleability of the impression of places as he constructs his vision
of the western cottage of Carrigskeewaun in the course of repeated visits that
represent a continuous concern throughout Longley’s whole oeuvre. The im¬
age of the cottage, a country retreat located far, in all senses, from the Belfast
home of the poet, also invites the involvement of the pastoral in his poetry,
yet Longley’s focus does not ultimately coincide with that particular tradition.
The pastoral tradition and its presence is the subject of the essays that fol¬
low the piece on Longley’s poetry. John Montague’s poetry contains elements
from the pastoral tradition as part of his reflections on locations revisited in
journeys that target later returns to his native place dealt with in two of his
major volumes, The Rough Field and The Dead Kingdom. The omnipresence of
change, however, compels the poet to reconsider the adequacy and eventually
the capability of the pastoral to address the differences observed in that par¬
ticular mode of discourse. Heaney’s poems focusing on the Glanmore cottage,
permanent residence at first, rural escape later, also involve the pastoral in
the assessment of the place, and in a characteristically Heaney-esque manner
76 There is a marked shift observable in the position of Mahon’s speakers in his later poetry that leads
to a different focus for his poems, adding a strong ecocritical element to those late poems, which is
not dealt with here.