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26 | Péter Dolmanyos supposed to address as its principal concern.”? Although the tracing of historical and political elements affecting identity represents a more apparently determinist and generalising critical principle that tends towards an alignment of poetic practice with the established patterns of social division in Northern Treland,®° place is not an altogether neutral category from this particular aspect either as the social foundations of its understanding indicate. Nevertheless, the traps of substituting identity discourses for reading poems can be avoided by due attention paid to the poems themselves instead of asking them to conform to prefabricated patterns and positions determined by preferred critical agenda or culturally or politically induced ideas and ideologies. While Edward Said rightly insists on the idea that “texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted”,®! the act of reading that social world as a text allows the poet to engage with or refuse to comply with explicit notions of allegiance and thereby forge their own concept of place which, as a result, can prioritise aesthetic considerations instead of socio-cultural expectations formulated in advance. The poets discussed provide different illustrations of this. Montague’s recognition of the failure to reconnect with places from his childhood is a tacit admittance of the invalidity of cultural determiners presumed to be relevant and effective in the face of the richness of personal experience. Heaney’s experiments with various traditions, his revision of those very traditions and subsequent preference for personal empirical experience of places indicate a similar path of aesthetic liberation. Longley’s home from home in the West is a deliberate move beyond expected affiliative attitudes, and Mahon’s various places observed from a measured perspective also strive to keep distance from limiting socio-cultural, historical or political expectations with their prescriptive agendas. Heaney’s observation on the experience of the Northern Irish population of simultaneously living in two places at once is a more complex idea with a farther reaching scope than its casually elegant rhetoric would imply at first glance. The bifurcated situation of living in the actual present and in some mental construct at the same time does not only insist on the importance of place but calls its absolute position into question by the same token. The experience of place per se, as a given spatial context, is something to investigate and open up for experimental assessment, rather than to be comfortably taken for granted as an uncontested constant. The immediate physical reality of place is neither desirable nor possible to dismiss since it constitutes the world of the actual present, yet the experience of that is assessed through the mediating presence and assistance of the mental place, and it is the dynamic 79 cf. Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities. Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1-19 80 cf. Gail McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 29-35 81 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 4
