Adam Hanna

Seamus Heaney: Neighbours and Strangers

The word ‘neighbour’ consistently exudes a sense of menace in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. ‘Funeral Rites’ in North (1975) contains a reference to ‘each neighbourly murder’; in the same volume, in ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’, Vikings are described as ‘neighbourly, scoretaking / killers’.1 Later, when Heaney has a vision of the nineteenth-century novelist William Carleton in Station Island (1984), the ghost raves of ‘yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour / among them, hammering home the shape of things’.2 Heaney relocates Carleton’s experience of being intimidated by neighbours to his own home-parish of Bellaghy in County Derry and brings it into the twentieth century by telling the ghost of the novelist that he, too, has seen ‘neighbours on the roads at night with guns’.3 More recently, in District and Circle (2006), ‘The Nod’ features ‘Neighbours with guns, parading up and down’, while the young Heaney’s first taste of tobacco in ‘A Chow’ results in the metaphor ‘the roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to / At the burning-out of a neighbour’.4 In Heaney’s last volume, Human Chain (2010), an armed neighbour is glimpsed in the moonlight, patrolling the highway outside the Heaneys’ farm in ‘The Wood Road’.5 Even in poems in which neighbours from across the religious divide come to his family’s threshold in friendship, Heaney never depicts them crossing over into the house itself.6

Michael Longley’s Home Away from Home

The features of a ‘white cottage in its little bumpy square of fuchsia hedges and stone walls’ have, piece by piece, become visible to readers of Longley’s poetry across a period of over forty years.1 The cottage from which these poems take their inspiration stands alone, the only one in Longley’s locus amoenus, Carrigskeewaun, a sandy sea-bordered wilderness that occupies not much more than two kilometres square of County Mayo.2 The cottage, as Longley writes, is screened by a fuchsia hedge, and whitewashed gateposts flank the entrance to its garden. Between these is a galvanised gate that is tied with red string.3 Longley sometimes pictures this cottage peopled with family and friends, and his more recent works have shown an interest in the house’s former residents, the O’Tooles.4 The cottage, though, has been as much, if not more, associated with non-human as with human life: he depicts the house as lying at the end of a zig-zag path through a field that is frequented by hares, stoats, otters, and many kinds of birds.

Introduction: Politicised Houses and Poets

So wrote Michael Longley in a verse letter to Derek Mahon after the two young poets had picked their way through a Catholic neighbourhood which had been reduced to streets of gutted shells by recent sectarian attacks. The destruction that they saw there was on a scale that the city, and indeed Europe, had not seen since the Second World War, and was a stark symbol of the human costs of Northern Ireland’s unresolved conflicts.2 The house-burnings of August 1969 were the latest incident in several years of escalating violence that had begun in the mid-1960s, but they were also the latest of the spates of open antagonism that had interspersed centuries of mutual suspicion between Belfast’s mainly Protestant descendants of the settler population from Great Britain and the population of the city that is Catholic and mainly identifies itself as Irish.3

Derek Mahon: Rented Home

In the section of his autobiography entitled ‘A Child of the Empire’, the Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe looked back in detail at the Protestant, working-class home in Belfast in which he lived during the 1950s and ’60s. As he recreated that house in memory, the broad perspective that maturity and distance in time made possible enabled him to see underlying patterns that had been invisible to him at the time he lived there. Facts that had held no wider significance for him at the time, like the brands of jumpers and biscuits and the labels on tins, became joined to form a narrative that was no longer just that of a single childhood, but that of a people in a place: [England was] the cyclorama to our lives. We listened to BBC on the radio, and watched BBC and ITV when the time came. Our house retained the blackout blinds from World War II up to the late 1950s. The bottled sauces and Indian tea, Camp coffee and medicines, brandnamed jumpers and socks, Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup with its sleeping lion and sleepier slogan, Christmas cake and boxes of biscuits were all British made. My toys, too, and comics and footballs.1

Medbh McGuckian: Interior Designs

In a study entitled About the House (1995), the anthropologists Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones discuss how phrases from around the world that are associated with houses often connote ideas of hardness, security and permanence.1 In English, for example, there are ‘bricks and mortar’ and ‘safe as houses’. The tendency of houses to act in the imagination as metaphors for durability was recognised by Gaston Bachelard, who wrote in The Poetics of Space (1958) that ‘a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’.2 Similarly, Henri Lefebvre wrote that a popular idea of the house is that it is ‘the epitome of immovability’, an anchor amid the perpetual flux of human existence.3 Accordingly, to write of houses, as the poet Medbh McGuckian has done frequently over several decades, is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure.

The poetry of Paul Muldoon

Premier amour and ‘L’Expulsé’. They are shown to contain many literal translations of English phrases, resulting in ‘forms of misuse [cf. the 1937 letter to Axel Kaun] that had previously remained excluded from his realm of investigation’ (57). Morin discovers similar ‘acts of translation’ in the French trilogy, revealing that earlier drafts of the French Molloy more openly engaged with Ireland than the published text. A bilingual approach of the trilogy as a multiple rather than single entity reveals quite a few ‘cultural reversals’, including an added ‘Irish flavour’ to the English texts. Morin discusses this feature in the light of Theodor Adorno’s reading of the Beckettian subject, which ‘no longer corresponds to closed and coherent forms of meaning, but rather, to that which Adorno defines as non-identity or, in this instance, the splintering of consciousness into disparate elements’ (63). She concludes that ‘the lack of a teleological structure of translation in the trilogy may be read as an adaptation of certain devices of translation used by Revivalist writers in their search for means of representing an Irish voice’ (72). The third chapter continues this line of argument and is devoted mainly to the tension between specificity and universality in Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Morin draws attention to the similarities between Endgame and Lady Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward on the one hand, and Godot and Yeats’s Purgatory on the other, suggesting that ‘if Beckett rejected the naı̈ve idealism of the early revival period, he remained attached to its manner of encoding complex political issues within minimalist settings’ (103). However, Morin immediately downplays these similarities, adding that ‘if there are Irish inflections to Waiting for Godot and Endgame, they are never free-standing, but always re-thought and activated in relation to another context, that of France, and another language, French’ (116). Pitted against Beckett’s earliest plays are four is his later ones: Eh Joe, Not I, That Time and Footfalls. Their abstract nature is contrasted with the poetics of composer Arnold Schönberg and painter Wassily Kandinsky, whose work Beckett knew well. The geneses of these plays reveal Beckett’s efforts to obscure any traces of Irishness. According to Morin, this compositional pattern is the result of a lengthy reflection upon the nature of abstraction that is evident from his art criticism. She concludes her analysis by stating that ‘it is precisely in relation to this tension between representational and nonrepresentational forms that the Irish dimension of his own writing articulates itself, as a part of a wide-scale experiment with forms of distortion, fragmentation and erosion’ (160). Phrases like these are very much characteristic of Morin’s lucid style, which makes this book a pleasure to read.

History And Art

Trevor Fawcett’s The Rise of English Provincial Art: Artists, Patrons, and Institutions outside London, 1800 – 1830 (1974) was groundbreaking in the way it rebalanced attention between the metropolis and the regions. In its wake a few studies of specific British provincial centres have appeared, but the only notable Irish investigation heretofore is Peter Murray’s Illustrated Summary Catalogue of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery: Incorporating a Detailed Chronology of Art in Nineteenth-century Cork and Biographies of those Cork Artists Represented in the Collection (1991). Tackling the other end of the island, Dr Black, a curator of fine art at the Ulster Museum, deals with the context of the Belfast art world in general and the history of attempts to set up cultural institutions there in particular. This is on the grounds that a ‘skewed picture’ would emerge from a study restricted to the small number of artists active in the town in the period in question. The narrative starts in a somewhat barren period around 1760—the first fifty years are dealt with in fourteen pages. The earliest of the numerous plans for libraries, art galleries and art schools which came, sometimes briefly flourished, and then went, dates from the 1820s. Dr Black narrates the long series of ploys and pleas to establish such institutions. The turning point came in 1870 when a group of private subscribers scraped together the funds to establish a School of Art, the direct antecedent of the present School of Art and Design of the University of Ulster. The story finishes on a high point with the opening in 1888 of the Free Public Library, Art Gallery and Museum, the town becoming a city in the same year. A lot of ground is covered en route, including the emergence of Belfast artists, auctioneering, dealing, collecting and patronage and allied activities in the print trade. In the 1850s the development of art in Belfast was still poor. According to the 1851 census, Plymouth, with a population of 90,000, supported thirty-six artists but Belfast’s 103,000 only eight. In 1858 a touring exhibition of decorative art drew over 55,000 visitors in Dublin and 13,998 in Clonmel but only 3,322 in Belfast. A poor example was set by the caution of the Belfast civic authorities, summed up by Thomas Verner, the mayor in 1855. When other towns and cities were embracing the opportunity to set up libraries and galleries funded through the rates following the 1845 Museums Act, he declined to do so saying: ‘I should hesitate before I should call upon the inhabitants to tax themselves for the establishment of an Institution, however worthy of support.’ The spending of individual philanthropists may often have been directed to humanitarian rather than cultural needs but Belfast was an increasingly wealthy town: in 1855 the customs revenue was £363,000; by 1886 it was £1,635,000. Even the very rich such as Sir Edward Harland gave only small sums to encourage the fine and applied arts. Belfast must have envied the generous civic