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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 besides 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 starting 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 provides 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 Protestant background, there is a marked difference between Mahon’s and Longley’s positions. Mahon’s declaredly less assured stance in relation to his own community and its spatial foundations shows a substantial contrast with Longley’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 contemplate 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 acknowledges 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 image 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 follow 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 particular 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.
