Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space This Page Intentionally Left Blank Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space

Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space This page intentionally left blank Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space

Adam Hanna IRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University College Cork, Ireland © Adam Hanna 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-56786-7 ISBN 978-1-137-49370-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137493705 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hanna, Adam, 1980– Northern Irish poetry and domestic space / Adam Hanna, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Aberdeen, UK. pages cm Summary: “Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space explores why houses, in some ways the most private of spaces, have taken up such visibly public positions in the work of a range of poets from Northern Ireland: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Medbh McGuckian. It reveals the ways in which poetry set in and around houses has reflected the intimate, pervasive nature of Northern Ireland’s territorial politic, but it also argues that the public side of these spaces only constitutes one part of their story. The attributes of houses that are frequently brought to the fore by poets are their privacy and containment, as if they are braced against the currents of public events. In this way, houses have affinities with lyric poetry: both offer a personal space for private expression, and both can provide a position from which to engage with the world.”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English poetry—Irish authors—History and criticism. 2. English poetry— 20th century—History and criticism. 3. Dwellings in literature. I. Title. PR8781.D84H36 2015 821'.9099416—dc23 2015019268

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. For Isabella This page intentionally left blank Contents

Acknowledgements ix Preface xi

Introduction: Politicised Houses and Poets 1 1 Seamus Heaney: Neighbours and Strangers 11 2 Michael Longley’s Home Away from Home 57 3 Derek Mahon: Rented Home 86 4 Medbh McGuckian: Interior Designs 113

Notes 133 Bibliography 167 Index 184

vii This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the efforts of countless people. I am very happy, in a small way and (in some cases) after a long time, to acknowl- edge just a few of them. I am grateful to Palgrave Macmillan, especially Ben Doyle, Paula Kennedy, Tomas René and the anonymous reader, for all their advice. Thanks are due to the AHRC for funding the doctorate on which this monograph is based, and to Danny Riddel at Gracehill Gallery and Dennis Orme Shaw for their permission to reprint the cover image. I am especially grateful to Frances Tye for her superb copy-editing. The University of Aberdeen’s Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies has been an invaluable base while I wrote this book. My thanks to Michael Brown, Cairns Craig and Patrick Crotty for their stewardship of the Institute, and for all their help. I also owe thanks to Jinty Adams, Shane Alcobia-Murphy, Jackson Armstrong, Tim Baker, Tom Bartlett, Liz Curtis, James Foster, Donald Givans, Andrew Gordon, Marjory Harper, Sandra Hynes and Patience Schell. Though I never had the good fortune to meet George Watson, the books that he left to the Institute, with their thoughtful annotations, have been stimulating companions while I wrote this book. Thanks are due to many at North East Scotland College, and especially to John Davidson, Antony Togneri and, above all, Vance Adair. From beyond my home institutions, Edwina Barvosa- Carter, Fran Brearton, Patrick Brennan, Scott Brewster, Mary Burke, Matthew Campbell, Gerald Dawe, John Wilson Foster, Hugh Heaney, Edna Longley, Claire Lynch, Caroline Magennis, Peter McDonald and Michael Parker have all at various times provided much-appre- ciated encouragement and advice. I am also very grateful to Bernard O’Donoghue, Hedwig Schwall, Christabel Scaife and Kevin Whelan for all their help and generosity. While writing the doctoral thesis in which this book has its origins at the University of Bristol I benefited from the patient and insightful supervision of Stephen James and Jane Griffiths. During this time I was encouraged and helped in all kinds of ways by Andrew Bennett, Stephen Cheeke, Richard Holmes, Danny Karlin, John Lee, Margery Masterson, Kat Peddie, Laurence Publicover and Tom Sperlinger. David Hopkins, Stacey McDowell, Ellen McWilliams and Tim Webb were, and continue to be, especially encouraging and resourceful presences.

ix x Acknowledgements

The friends I made at school and the University of York, especially Ben Clover, Matt Daw, Frances Lecky, Oli Mould, Toby Steedman and Michael White, have all been hugely supportive of me while I wrote this book, as have Fred Bosanquet, Ed Dearing, Katie Hole and Jackie Penlington. My tutors at York, especially Kate Davies and Hugh Haughton, set standards in teaching that I try to meet. My schoolteachers Andrew Rattue, Mike Paterson and James Hansford, by taking the time to discuss authors with me and lending me their books, set me on the path that resulted in this book. From this long perspective, I see that it has been my great luck to have come into contact with so many humane, curious and enlightened teachers. I am tremendously grateful to my family: Rebekah, Erika, Josh, Logan, Ivy and my mother and father, Rosalind and David. My mother, in particular, has been an indispensible help in preparing this book. Above all, though, this book could not have been written without Isabella, and so it is to her that it is dedicated. Preface

When Seamus Heaney visited an archaeological site in the west of Ireland near the village of Belderrig in County Mayo in 1973, he unex- pectedly found himself at home. He was shown around the site beside the Atlantic Ocean by Seamus Caulfield, whose father, while cutting turf in the 1930s, had discovered the first parts of a complex of houses, tombs and fields from over five thousand years ago. The excavated footprint of a rectangular Neolithic house, with its small chambers and indoor hearth, may have touched memories of the Mossbawn farmhouse in which Heaney had lived as a child, and that had been demolished in the 1950s. The Stone-Age west of Ireland might have also been drawn into association with Heaney’s own twentieth-century County Derry by the ancient, perpendicular stone field walls that criss-cross the Belderrig landscape into rectangular plots. For whatever reasons, at the heart of Heaney’s poem recording this visit is an acciden- tal discovery that he made that day about the name of Mossbawn. But physical similarities were not the only connections between the prehis- toric site and the present-day Derry countryside to which Heaney was receptive. During his visit, Caulfield explained that the stone structures that were uncovered were so unexpected that, for a time, the settlement was ‘thought of as foreign’. The possibility that the most ancient settlement in Ireland was built by ‘foreign’ Neolithic migrants from Europe brought Heaney yet another echo from Northern Ireland, a place that was at the time convulsed by a conflict whose origins lay in questions of native and settler. As Heaney’s poem recording this visit shows, his attempt to understand this mysterious place led him to the politics of Northern Ireland, and also led him back to his first house. Heaney’s trip to this Neolithic site did not just raise questions of where the boundaries lay between the Irish and the foreign: it also called into question the borders that divided the past from the present, and the personal from the national. North (1975), in which ‘Belderg’ was published, is replete with poems that, like ‘Belderg’, contain discoveries from under the ground that provide analogies for present-day discords and for Heaney’s own unsettled inner life. In the case of ‘Belderg’, the bridge between the excavated site and Heaney’s personal experiences of the divided Ireland of his time was provided by the name of Mossbawn. The archaeologist Caulfield made an incidental suggestion that the

xi xii Preface name of Heaney’s own former home might, like the site itself, have origins beyond Britain or Ireland:

He talked about persistence, A congruence of lives, […]

So I talked of Mossbawn, A bogland name. ‘But moss?’ He crossed my old home’s music With older strains of Norse.1

The ‘So’ in Heaney’s ‘So I talked of Mossbawn’ suggests a logical chain of connection for what is actually an unexpected leap. The only expli- cable link between Mossbawn and the artefacts that Caulfield describes is that both represent an idea of continuity. The linguistic inheritance that the house’s name represents might perform the same function as the excavated objects in signalling a ‘congruence of lives’ between the past and the present. Before this visit, Heaney had thought that Mossbawn signified a mix of influences that had their origins in either Great Britain or Ireland. This much is indicated in his 1972 piece for The Guardian, in which he wrote of the linguistic confluences and confusions that underlay his native place. It gives a good idea of what Heaney might have told Caulfield on the day of his visit:

Moss, a Scots word probably carried to Ulster by the Planters, and bawn, the name the English colonists gave to their fortified farm- houses. Mossbawn, the planter’s house on the bog. Yet, in spite of this Ordnance Survey spelling, we pronounced it Moss bann, and bán is the Gaelic word for white. So might not the thing mean the white moss, the moss of bog-cotton? In the syllables of my home I see a metaphor of the split culture of Ulster.2

The name of Mossbawn was, to Heaney, evidence of the links between Derry’s past and present divisions. Before his visit to Belderrig, the question that the name of Mossbawn presented was whether its final syllable indicated the whiteness of bog cotton (with its connotations of unsoiled, national purity and the persistence of the Irish language) or whether it, rather, belied Heaney’s origins in a colonised, fortified and exclusionary space, at variance with his own perceived cultural identity: bán or bawn.3 Preface xiii

At Belderrig, however, Heaney discovered both the music and pressure of new Norse ‘strains’ (mosi means ‘lichen’ or ‘swamp’ in Old Norse).4 Before, the word ‘Mossbawn’ had represented a confusion between traditional opposites: between words that came from Great Britain and Irish ones, and therefore between settler and native. After Heaney’s visit to Belderrig, however, this symbolic role was disrupted by Caulfield’s identification of a possible Scandinavian influence in the farm’s name. A space is opened for a history from beyond Great Britain or Ireland through the name of Heaney’s former home. The poet, however, did not unequivocally welcome this unexpected broadening of his horizons. As the poem subsequently shows, Heaney both embraces this new knowledge yet, somehow, wishes to ignore it, saying he could:

[…] make bawn an English fort, A planter’s walled-in mound,

Or else find sanctuary And think of it as Irish[.]5

In the poem, Caulfield follows this line by reminding Heaney of the ‘Norse ring’ to the name of his farm. By positing a possible connection between the farm’s name and the Norse invaders that marauded over Ulster in the centuries around the end of the first millennium AD, a glimpse is given of a new and further shore on the cultural landscape. Caulfield’s gentle reminder at once brings a breath of fresh air and a gust of cold wind from a place whose resonances lay beyond these original dualistic understandings. In the next few lines of ‘Belderg’, however, Heaney’s identification of these alternative ways of thinking about his place of origin not only recapitulate his 1972 Guardian piece, they rehearse ways of thinking about Ireland that have a very long pedi- gree. His understanding of his place of origin as potentially ‘English’, colonised and compromised, and as an expression of an autochtho- nous Gaelic culture, would have been familiar to James Joyce in his investigations into the origins of the homely word ‘tundish’ during an earlier critical era in Ireland’s history.6 But whereas Joyce was surprised by the English roots of a word for funnel that he had expected to be derived from Gaelic, for Heaney the surprise came from learning that the ‘moss’ in ‘Mossbawn’ might come from over a much further hori- zon. To Heaney, the complexity of Ulster’s toponymy is matched by the complexity of the emotions that are invested in it. xiv Preface

Perhaps because it represents an unwelcome interruption to Heaney’s settled ways of thinking, his first response to the connection that Caulfield makes between Mossbawn and the Norse linguistic tree appears to be to pretend he has not heard it. Heaney’s ambivalence between two very different ways of thinking about Ireland are reflected in the subtleties of his word-choices; the statement that his home’s foundation in a contested Ulster is as ‘mutable as sound’ contains the instability it describes. If ‘sound’ is thought of as ‘solid’, then Heaney is here drawing attention to the potentially treacherous instability of the resonances of his home-place and, by extension, his cultural identity. However, if ‘sound’ is interpreted in its sonic sense (mutable when expressed aloud), then perhaps Heaney is here raising a more positive idea: that of the bog-like shiftings that his place of origin is capable of under the pressure of poetry. Read in this way, the ‘mutable’ qualities of ‘Mossbawn’ contain the potential to shape old ideas anew. In their undecidability, these lines draw attention to a central ambiguity of the poem: the desire to think beyond the Irish/British conflict that had conditioned Heaney’s upbringing, and an attachment to these conflicts and the known ways of thinking that go with them. By the end of this poem, Mossbawn, with its possibilities of Planter and Gaelic origins and its third, newly discovered, and unconnected ‘Norse ring’, symbolises both alternatives. It can represent both the known and the unfamiliar: the name ‘Mossbawn’ has come to provide a way of exploring Northern Ireland’s existing cultural debates and of looking at possibilities beyond them.

The path back to Mossbawn is one that Heaney frequently takes in his writing – but especially when he encounters experiences that are at the limits of his existing comprehension of the world. In his poem ‘Known World’ (Electric Light, 2001), his memories of a trip to Yugoslavia in the late 1970s are interspersed with images of the houses that were abandoned in the ethno-religious conflicts that erupted when the feder- ation dissolved into warfare between its constituent peoples just over a decade later. This, of course, has analogies with the Northern Irish conflict that Heaney knew only too well – but engagement with Yugoslav violence also represented an excursion into an unknown history and culture. As when Heaney faced the mysteries of the Neolithic world at Belderrig, the synthesis in ‘Known World’ between the unknown and his own experiences is found in memories of Mossbawn. Preface xv

Ireland and Eastern Europe are entangled in his memories of the sticky flypaper that was left dangling in Mossbawn’s abandoned kitchen after his family had left the farmhouse:

At the still centre of the cardinal points The flypaper hung from our kitchen ceiling, Honey-strip and death-trap, a barley-sugar twist Of glut and loathing… In a nineteen-fifties Of iron stoves and kin groups still in place, Congregations blackening the length And breadth of summer roads. And now the refugees Come loaded on tractor mudguards and farm carts[.] […] I see its coil again like a syrup of Styx, An old gold world-chain the world keeps falling from[.]7

Once more, visions from Mossbawn interpose themselves between Heaney and what is in front of him. This points to an important aspect of Heaney’s aesthetic: his need to match new experiences and informa- tion to those whose sensory traits were laid down in memory. In other poems Heaney uses the image of a door-latch to latch on to his past, but in this case he uses a coil of flypaper coated in adhesive ‘syrup of Styx’ (an image at once homely and fantastical). This twist of flypaper is analogous to the Yeatsian gyre, unspooling the past into the present. As it twirls, about it spin the remembered Derry farmhouse and the black-clad congregations on the roads around it. These memories from his former home adhere to Heaney’s memories of pilgrims, crowding the roads of Yugoslavia, whom he saw when visiting there in the 1970s. These two places which were known to him (1950s Ireland and 1970s Yugoslavia) then become part of how he imagines the Yugoslavia of the 1990s, with its crowds of refugees fleeing from its civil war. Imagined by way of Mossbawn, an unknown world becomes known. As in the poem ‘Belderg’, Mossbawn is a fixed mark for orientation, at ‘the still centre of the cardinal points’, a place whose memory pro- vides a way of assimilating complexities and confusions at the edge of his understanding, and that makes places and states of being that lie outside his comprehension part of his ‘known world’. Conversely, Heaney’s continuous restless engagement with new places and ideas xvi Preface frequently brings the demolished house back to light. This is a contrary process, whereby new discoveries go hand in hand with the rescue of old memories from oblivion. Both the house and the poems exist at points of tension, where the private and individual cross into the arena of the communal, and where memories cross with the present. § The role of Mossbawn in the poems ‘Belderg’ and ‘Known World’ illustrate how the intimately personal ideas that are typically connected with inhabitation are, in Northern Ireland, entwined with others that are inescapably political. The prominence of houses on the wider Northern Irish literary landscape – a prominence that is recognised in Hugh Haughton’s observation that ‘many of the landmarks of modern Irish poetry are literally landmarks’ – owes much to the interplay of personal and political understandings of these dwelling places.8 Some of the most prominent topoi of poets from Northern Ireland include Seamus Heaney’s Mossbawn and Glanmore Cottage; Michael Longley’s cottage at Carrigskeewaun; Derek Mahon’s unnamed suburban dwellings in east Belfast and Glengormley; and Medbh McGuckian’s Marconi’s Cottage and house in Belfast. The attributes of these houses that are frequently dwelt on in their depictions in poetry are their privacy, enclosure and containment, as if they are somehow braced against the currents of public events and represent an escape from them. They are the physical embodiments of a ‘sanctuary’ that translates readily into psychocultural terms. Yet, alongside this, in the case of each poet their depictions of the house contain an alertness to the politics of inhabitation that is informed by a notion of the house as territory, and territory as a site of public, political contestation. The title of an essay by the politician John Hume encapsulates many of these themes: ‘Everything is Political in a Divided Society’.9 This includes the address of a house, the ornaments and pictures in it, and the books and newspapers that can be found there.10 As is the case with writers from other contested places, the house in the work of poets from Northern Ireland stands for more than just a personal or a familial shelter: it is a place where questions of belonging, rights over territory and cultural continuance all impress themselves upon the imagination. In other words, it is somewhere that public issues might be engaged with subjectively. The nature of the house parallels that of lyric poetry itself – a form that compels by offering a personal space for private expression, but which holds the potential to be a space from which to engage with the world. Possibly the most prominent example in poetry, and certainly in Irish poetry, of how a mind’s movements over both public and private events Preface xvii can find correspondences in a domestic space is Yeats’s transformation of his tower into The Tower (1928). In this late masterwork, the poet’s personal history, awareness of the transitory nature of bodily existence, consciousness of contemporary events, historical preoccupations and immersion in literature all find associations in the ancient stones of his dwelling. The vaunting pride and time-worn vulnerability of both house and poet mutually inform each other in an inextricable series of metaphors. While Yeats has been influential to different extents on later writers, his work exemplifies an idea that is applicable to all of the poets whose work I examine in this book: that the flow of a mind, in all its obliquity, intangibility, invisibility and evanescence, desires identification with the limits, undeniable presence and comparative permanence of the spaces it perceives. Yet all spaces are not the same: if, to generalise, natural landscapes draw those who contemplate them to consider the insignificance of an individual lifespan in comparison with this more continuous, ancient and stable element of the physical environment, then the forms of buildings, by contrast, sharpen, enlarge and give a focus to ideas of human activity.11 Though several prominent poets have made houses central to their work, most criticism of Irish literature that has considered place and space has looked out of doors. This is not only true of literary criticism: to a large extent, politicised outdoor landscapes rather than built and indoor spaces have been the focus of analyses of space in Irish history and culture. The Irish landscape, as a link between the past and the present, carries a web of historical and mythical associations, and there has been a trend across the disciplines in recent decades to read and decode these associations in books, journals, conferences and study centres.12 In his Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (2001), Gerry Smyth writes of the lack of work on built space that in part is the result of this focus on the landscape: ‘in so far as space is an issue at all, most accounts of ideas of space in Ireland tend to focus on aspects such as landscape and “home”, where the latter signifies less the built than the topographical environment’.13 Scott Brewster, too, has remarked on the relative lack of attention paid to indoor space, writing that the subject of built spaces is ‘curiously overlooked’ and that greater attention has been paid ‘to landscape rather than to buildings’.14 Of course, buildings are part of the landscape, too. F. H. A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan and Matthew Stout’s Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (reissued in 2011) contains an ample section about houses, and Marie Mianowski’s edited volume Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts (2012) contains a section devoted to essays on the built environment.15 These books, however, have kept the focus out of xviii Preface doors by elucidating the role of built spaces and houses as elements of the lie of the land. The houses that have played the largest role in the Irish national self- image have tended to be rural, thatch-roofed and whitewashed. They exemplify an essentialised idea, and perhaps ideal, of Ireland as anti- urban, anti-industrial and agrarian – a notion that, at certain times and in certain contexts, has been energetically promoted by the Irish state from the 1920s onwards.16 These dwellings have not just been important in the imagery of the state, however: as Elmer Kennedy-Andrews has pointed out, they have a private, familial significance to many people of Irish descent, for whom they signify rootedness in the soil and ancestral belonging.17 These cottages are as much touchstones of national identity in Northern Ireland as in the Republic, as the thatched dwelling at the centre of the Ulster Folk Museum attests. It is in the nationalist tradition, however, that these houses have gained their most potent political charge. Firstly, their rural situation and the craftsmanship that went into building and roofing them were both perceived as facets of an Ireland that was rural in character, and the opposite of a more urban and mechanised England.18 In the modern era, the simplicity and poverty of these dwellings were the illustration of two very different nationalist arguments. The first was based on the lack of means and sophistication that they betrayed: features accounted for by the rapacious landlordism that had, in post-conquest times, reduced Ireland to the status of a peas- ant, tenant nation.19 In this reading, the cottage was the opposite of the Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’ – not coincidentally, the other type of dwelling that became a focus of critical attention.20 These elite dwellings first appeared in the wake of the conquest of Gaelic Ireland and flourished in the eighteenth century. The story of occupation, exploitation and subsequent decline that they embodied was the corresponding opposite of the narratives of immemorial, tenacious presence that the cottage signified.21 As the writings of Daniel Corkery show, in the nationalist imagination these cottages were revered for the distinctive way of life and cast of mind that they represented.22 The gleam of their whitewash was undoubtedly in Eamon de Valera’s mind’s eye as he pictured ‘a countryside bright with [the] cosy homesteads’ of ‘a people […] satisfied with frugal comfort’.23 Irish nationalism could be inspired by the image of the cottage both because it was a symbol of a people that stood outside the corruption and materialism of the modern era and, conversely, because it represented the consequences of historic exploitation. The centrality of the rural cottage to Irish culture is reflected in the fact that no fewer than three of the poets in this study – Seamus Heaney, Preface xix

Michael Longley and Medbh McGuckian – have been preoccupied with writing retreats in remote cottages in the countryside. While they all occupy or occupied more typical suburban dwellings (Heaney in Dublin, Longley and McGuckian in Belfast) most of the time, their houses in outlying locations appeared to act as the guarantors of alternative identi- ties and as symbols of different, perhaps ideal, selves.24 The poems that they set in and around these out-of-the-way dwellings might be thought of as a new, and distinctively Irish, take on the country house poem.25 Traditionally, the country house poem was a means by which poets thanked their patrons by complimenting them on their grand houses. These poems presented a holistic vision of poet, patron and public in organic community, and showed the links between private, domestic virtue and its public manifestations.26 Though gratitude to the friends who are associated with the houses are frequently part of Heaney’s and Longley’s poems, the modern Irish version arises out of a very different set of conditions and associations. Heaney, Longley and McGuckian have all, as I shall explore in my chapters on their work, at various times seen their respective writing retreats as places at a distance from the preoccupations of national politics. However, because national politics has drawn so heavily on imagery taken from the rural and domestic (and in particular from the rural cottage), retreats out of and into issues of national contestation have at times been the same thing.27

§ As his poem ‘Belderg’ indicates, competing ideas of the house as a shelter from political pressures and a space in which they might be engaged with inform the work of the most prominent poet of his generation, Seamus Heaney, whose work I discuss in Chapter 1. Part One of this chapter explores the ways in which the farmhouse at Mossbawn, in which he spent his childhood, is presented in his work at once as a resistant, firmly bounded familial shelter and, conversely, as a site of interplay and engagement with the world beyond it. It argues that his opposing understandings of this site are closely related to his conception of his poetry: his uncertainty over political engagement often expresses itself through depictions of the house’s occupants and the neighbours who visit them hesitating at the threshold. These liminal encounters also often reflect Heaney’s conflicted stance towards the Northern Ireland of his time, and are closely linked to his internal debates on the extent to which accommodative or resistant impulses should guide him in his writing. These ideas are developed in Part Two, which examines the political and personal associations of Heaney’s poems that depict xx Preface the tuning of a radio. It discusses both the pervasive issues of national identity and marginalisation that Heaney associates with this means of communication, and the radio’s non-political significances to him as a symbol of inspiration. This leads to the argument that its prominence in Heaney’s poetry is linked to his self-questioning as to the extent to which political concerns should be a part of his private, interior world. Part Three reveals how Heaney’s concerns with the nature of the intersection between the personal and political persist with remarkable continuity in his later poetry set in Glanmore Cottage and his house in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. It also for the first time demonstrates how Heaney’s later depictions of these houses were influenced by the ideas of Gaston Bachelard, who has provided Heaney with a framework for understanding the mutually informative relationship between the material reality of inhabited space and the consciousness that perceives it. At the same time, Heaney’s work was influenced by that of the religious historian Mircea Eliade, whose work explores the correspondences between the dwelling of consciousness in the body and the body’s dwelling in the house. Heaney’s varied sources help him, in his last volumes, to draw on current and remembered houses to explore both personal wonders, like the transient residence of consciousness in the body, and contemporary public issues. In drawing attention to the complexity of the influences on Heaney’s house-based poetry, I question charges that his recurrent domestic focus is intrinsically naïve or nostalgic in nature. The house, and especially a cottage in the townland of Carrigskeewaun, also features as both a refuge and a place of engagement in the poetry of Heaney’s contemporary, Michael Longley. My analysis of his work in Chapter 2 is concerned with the links between his many domestically based poems and both national and ecological politics. To Longley, ‘home is a hollow between the waves’, and throughout this chapter I highlight the longstanding primacy in his imagination of ideas of temporary inhabitation and transient status. Part One explores the large body of Longley’s poetry that is set in and around his borrowed holiday cottage of over forty years in Carrigskeewaun in the remote Connemara landscape. It draws attention to the consciousness of outsider status that is a significant element of these poems, and discusses how Longley’s sense of being an Ulsterman out of his element in the Irish West rehearses many of the same perspectives and dilemmas that he has experienced as some- one who grew up in an English household in Ulster. In exploring this, it links Longley’s focus on this traditional dwelling in the west of Ireland to his own powerful yet consciously tangential relation to existing notions Preface xxi of Irish identity and poetic tradition. As in the case of Heaney, the borders of Longley’s domestic spaces parallel those of wider political divisions. It also examines how consciousness of the Troubles affected Longley’s pres- entation of the cottage, arguing that Longley’s frequent domestic focus during this conflict was at least in part expressive of a politically engaged desire for a salutary alternative to public narratives. Part Two examines Longley’s poems in which houses are subject to surveillance and violent invasion, arguing that his poems written during the Troubles that feature houses often reflect his dilemmas about his competing duties towards public and private realms. Part Three examines how Longley’s political preoccupations have been increasingly augmented by an ecological consciousness that expresses itself through repeated concerns in his recent poetry with the wildlife he can see from (and, occasionally, in) the Carrigskeewaun cottage; with the rising water levels around the house; and with the necessity of handing over this borrowed inhabitation, like the world itself, to its next occupants. To Longley the house, like the poem, constitutes an enclosed space that makes possible a rapt attention upon the minute and particular, and a space whose depiction as separate from the political world does not necessarily mean that it is not respon- sive and restorative to it. Chapter 3, on Derek Mahon, begins in a very different Ireland to the rural locales typically celebrated by Heaney and Longley: the neat, unshowy, suburban domestic spaces in the predominantly Protestant suburbs of north Belfast. Part One of this chapter argues that Mahon’s depiction of these undramatic surrounds is evidence of a sensibility attuned to the potential of the wondrous to inhere in the seemingly mundane: one that possesses (in a phrase of Nabokov’s that Mahon is fond of quoting) ‘that real sense of beauty which has less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying pan’.28 It further argues that his detailed evocations of his childhood houses in Belfast, and the echoes of the city that can be heard in his poems about his long succession of far-flung temporary dwellings, are indicative of a more sympathetic scepticism about his place of origin than some critics have detected in his work. Part Two explores how Mahon’s focus on the intimately known and cherished has persistently come at the price of self-accusations of indifference towards urgent political questions (both to do with Ireland and with the ecological consequences of private habits of consumption), and argues that the dilemmas that result from his warring impulses between immurement and receptiveness account for much of the vitality of the eerily sentient xxii Preface and neurotic domestic objects that have inhabited his poetry since his earliest volumes. Finally, Part Three examines the increasing domestic focus of Mahon’s volumes since the mid-1990s, and argues that this is indicative of an increasingly intense attempt to understand the outer world through exploration of the inner. For Medbh McGuckian, the subject of Chapter 4, as for Longley and Heaney, a house in the country that is the escapist counterpart to a suburban house has been central to her poetry. However, this place is not a listening post or redoubt in the same way as Heaney’s and Longley’s respective cottages at Glanmore and Carrigskeewaun. In McGuckian’s poetry her cottage, like the other houses she depicts, frequently bends, flexes and disintegrates, reflecting her tendency, I argue, to reimagine the solid, the immobile, the given and the containing. To put it another way, in her poems about shape-changing houses, McGuckian tests the power of words to reshape the world. The idea that houses represent the bounds of the possible is central to my analysis of McGuckian’s depictions of them. In Part One of this chapter I illustrate her understanding of the house as a site of female limitation and confinement, arguing that the often-alluring ways in which houses are presented in her works serve to highlight the traps of domesticity. Part Two, drawing on a new interview with McGuckian, adds depth to current understandings of her lifelong sensitivity to the histories and associations of the houses in which she has lived. In particular, it brings to light the sense of historic sectarian grievance, discomfiture and betrayal that she links in her poetry with her Belfast house. The third part of this chapter contrasts the darkness and narrowness that are frequently a part of her poems about her Belfast house with the light, freedom and inspiration that she associates with her former seaside holiday home, Marconi’s Cottage. This chapter advances a new argument that McGuckian’s wayward, fluxional domestic imagery is influenced by her collagistic composi- tional practices. These forays at the edges of accepted poetic practice, I argue, themselves constitute a kind of holiday home and a sphere of freedom. Throughout, this chapter pursues a theme that is relevant to all the poets whose work is examined in this book: that representations of houses in Northern Irish poetry are testimony to the inescapability of the communal identifications and traumas that exist in the most intimate places, and to the continuing desire to escape these. § The private mysteries of McGuckian’s work raise with unusual urgency questions of what we are looking for when we read poetry. Yet all poems Preface xxiii contain the promise of acting as windows onto the private, internal worlds of the people who wrote them, and deny the same promise. They repel questioning as much as they invite it, and excite the desire to understand other minds and other states of being just as they frus- trate these same desires. In this way, they are like the lit windows that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of in The Great Gatsby (1925): each attracting the curiosity of the passer-by, yet each contributing ‘its share to the human secrecy’ that impresses itself on them.29 Charles Baudelaire, too, evokes the beguiling power of windows in terms that might be applied to poetry itself:

what one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.30

Something similar might be said of the black (or luminous) squares that poems can form on the page: each contains intimations of both the enchantments and the elusiveness of knowledge, and each perhaps hints at how much there is still to know by reminding readers just how little it is that they know. Elizabeth Bishop ended the accumulating mysteries of ‘Sestina’ with the image of a child drawing ‘another inscrutable house’.31 In children’s drawings of houses, the eye-like windows and mouth-like doors all suggest a human communicativeness, yet the horizontals of the frames of these apertures suggest an unfathomable impassivity. The inscrutability of houses is intensified by their secrecy and enclosure, and by their maintenance of a mysterious silence. To their inhabitants, this silence can often be made more tantalising by the fragmentary clues that the people who have passed through the same place might have left: a surviving scrap of wallpaper, a tile of linoleum, a ghostly impression in a wall that was once a door or window, a mark to chart the height of a child. No less than these marks left by inhabitation, the shape of a house, the materials used to construct it, the ways that space is divided within it, and its position on the landscape, all tell a silent story. Houses and poems are both visible, enduring products of their time and place: they elicit questions about provenance, evoke memories and invite speculation – and maintain their inscrutability. It is apparent that, during the crisis that enveloped Northern Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century, what appealed to many poets from there was the solidity, rootedness and in-placeness of houses. By acting as the witnesses and recorders of the details of these private xxiv Preface spaces, poets spoke about their own starting points and standpoints. The poems produced by writers from this time and place, often framed by the wintry backdrop of civil war, themselves remain as landmarks on the literary landscape. While certain interpretative ways of approaching them are possible, they remain sites of fascination that are not stand- ins for politics, nor laudable interventions into them, nor irresponsible flights from them, but are, rather, themselves: ultimately irreducible.