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Seamus Heaneys Senseof Place ] 31 manner for a "marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind.”' Itis this relationship that Heaney finds the central element of the experience of place and its expression in poetry. Heaney’s own poetry is generally seen as strongly grounded in place, especially due to his early poems that are deeply rooted in his experience of the environment of the family farm. References to places are present throughout his poetry although his poem titles include such spatial elements on a much less frequent basis than they can be found in the poetry of his contemporaries Michael Longley or Derek Mahon. While some titles explicitly name locations, offering clearly defined and delineated places, there are several instances in which the evoked locations are generic rather than specific. Such places are introduced with features that tend to be indicative of certain phenomena rather than being characterised by concrete and specific details of the given location, and such places tend to remain unnamed beyond their rather general geographical marker that merely provides a broad orientation for the type of place that is evoked in the text of the poem. Mossbawn is the setting of several of Heaney’s poems, especially the early ones, due to its function as the formative environment of his childhood. Despite its underlying presence, there is little description of the place itself in traditional terms - what is presented is more of a metonymic relation between the described events and routines and the place, which suggests the unconscious and lived experience of place rather than the learned one when assessed against the two ways Heaney outlines at the beginning of his essay. Although the connection between the speaker of the poems dealing with the experience of the place and the place itself is subtle and deep, Heaney does not attempt to create a conventional pastoral impression of the country location and his vision is not altered by affection towards the place stemming from its significance as the family home. Heaney’s interpretation retains a balance between the pastoral potential of the place and its actual features that include the hardships which characterise agricultural realities, and there are several instances in which the latter outweigh the former. The experience is subjected to reflection but the speaker’s point of view preserves its essentially naive position that does not process the tackled information in a sophisticated interpretive framework informed by learning. The name Mossbawn only appears explicitly in one poem title and even that is symbolically situated: the dedicatory opening poems of the volume North create what Michael Parker terms “a past perfected, a tangible world of warmth, solidarity and almost mellow fruitfulness.”™ As the collection was written in another well-documented location of Heaney’s life, the isolated cottage of Glanmore, the dedicatory poems imply an intention of linking the current location with a pastoral-like evocation of a golden age of a Northern elsewhere that sharply contrasts both with the actualities of the Troubles and 10 Heaney, Preoccupations, 132 4 Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney. The Making of the Poet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 126
