Faultlines, limits, transgressions: a theme-cluster in late twentieth-century Irish poetry

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Robert Welch

It had, of course, to be the North where the faultline opened again, because that was where the problem was located. Internal pressures in the emotional economy came out. When poetry is functioning in its most characteristic mode, it is always searching out privacies and hidden dimensions in personal matters and in public affairs. In a sense all poets are public poets, because their special responsibility in relation to language is to try unceasingly to make it correspond with the actual nature of situations as they emerge in the cascade of lived events. This is not to say that the function of poetry is to be clear and dutiful--it may mean the opposite--but it must attend to what is happening. Thus, it had to be the case that for a time, indeed for most of the last thirty years, the center of gravity of poetry in Ireland moved north. That this is now beginning to change only confirms the North's preeminence over the recent period.

Montague's depictions of the resurrection of the Irish conflict in the North in The Rough Field and in subsequent collections, such as Mount Eagle (1989) or Border Sick Call (1995), are carried out in an exact and formal syntax of curt utterance. His philosophical mood is one of resigned acceptance of what he calls the "structure of process" in The Dead Kingdom (1984:18). Races and nations are each "locked / in their dream of history" (1984:18), while generation after generation go to meet their fate of failure, extinction, and oblivion. Montague has learned from Beckett; in both there is the iron resignation and sadness of a Roman patrician, a Cicero, or, better perhaps, a Seneca. There's no point in protest or in prayer, longing and hope are futile, and Montague's verse eschews the comforts of outrage and the satisfactions of blame. This is the way things are, the Tyrone man seems to be implying, and you can't change them by wishing otherwise.

If Tyrone gave the Northern trouble a Senecan stoic, then South Derry gave it a Pythagorean or Plotinian oracle in the form of Seamus Heaney. However, Heaney's oracular skills are not intent on transmitting closed and fixed verities; his writing is entirely in touch with the risky and transgressive openings that were disclosing themselves in the work of Foucault, for example. In Foucault's dazzling and baffling essay entitled "Transgression," written in 1963 in homage to the outrageousness and daring of the French eroticist Georges Bataille, the philosopher hammers out a defiant sentence describing the kind of philosophy he wishes to practice, a philosophy which is

   an affirmation that affirms nothing ... a philosophy which questions
   itself upon the existence of the limit [and] is evidently one of the
   countless signs that our path is circular and that, with each day,
   we are becoming more Greek. (1977:36-37)

Heaney's poetry returns again and again to limits, lines, the question of the origin, faults, tracks, footpaths, the straight line of a thatcher's cut, and to Greece. At the heart of all these lines and pathways, "stations," turning-points, and demarcations, there is an open space, a clearing, a clearance, as in "Station Island" (1984). Such ideas are returned to in "Clearances" in The Haw Lantern (1987), which picks up and transforms lines from the earlier poem: