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36 | Peter Dolmänyos The exploration of the bog is thus a likewise temporal mission with the uncovered elements providing a near-mystical result: Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards, Every layer they strip Seems camped on before. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.” The realisation of the repeated discovery of an earlier layer immediately below the currently explored one coupled with the constantly evolving nature of the bog eventually fuses the two ways of approaching place since the experience of the physical exercise of uncovering is complemented by the recognition of the historical and cultural heritage of the uncovered site. Heaney’s poems dealing with the bog bodies preserve this understanding of the bog and build on its implicit presence as the spatial context of his motif. As the bog poems focus on the underlying mythic element the discovered bodies uncover, the location itself is less prominent as an explicit presence in the texts. In the final piece of the sequence of the bog poems, entitled “Kinship”, in the volume North, however, there is close attention paid to the place with its directly experienced features: Heaney’s speaker explores the bog as actual location, connecting his sensory experience with a broad range of cultural aspects associated with the bog, which eventually testifies to the simultaneous and essentially complementary presence of both the instinctive and the learned understanding of place. ”* A number of unnamed locations involve the coast and employ a broadly generic approach that provides descriptive items which appear ubiquitous rather than definitive of a particular identifiable place. The frontier-like nature of the coast marks a zone of continuous interaction between land and water, each relying on proper definition for the other, and this marginally positioned dynamic environment of constant conflict and change facilitates vision or revelation as a result. Daniel Tobin calls attention to Heaney’s frequent use of the “solitary driver” image in several poems linked to specific places,” yet perhaps this is more accurately understood as a solitary observer figure, either a driver or a pedestrian, who is placed in such locations to experience what the place imprints on him. The experience presented in the poem “The Peninsula’ is set in such a situation with a solitary observing character in a coastal setting. The place itself is 21 Heaney, Door into the Dark, 55-56 for aspects of Heaney’s treatment of the bog motif see Péter Dolmanyos, “Present Buried in the Past. The Bog Poems of Seamus Heaney.” The Anachronist 2001. pp. 120-143 Daniel Tobin, Passage to the Center. Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 45
