9 - Ciaran Carson: The New Urban Poetics

Summary

Heaney's statement in his essay ‘The Sense of Place’ that it is to ‘the stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuity’ suggests a basic opposition: the land as timeless constant, the image of the past, the place of traditional ways, of all that is human and natural, the organic society; and the city as flux and change, the engine of progress and modernisation, the route to the future. Referring to the city, Raymond Williams draws attention to how ‘within the new kind of open, complex and mobile society, small groups in any form of divergence or dissent could find some kind of foothold, in ways that would not have been possible if the artists and thinkers composing them had been scattered in more traditional, closed societies’. City-life complicates traditional monolithic nationalisms, whether Irish or unionist, because it gives a foothold to other forms of struggle – class or gender, for example – which cut across the traditional divisions and oppositions. Drawn to the ‘stable element’, Heaney, we can agree with Eamonn Hughes, has difficulty engaging directly with the metropolis, for what is notable about Heaney's treatment of the city is his tendency to mythologise or allegorise it, as seen from the iconic portraiture of the early ‘Docker’ to the construction of Belfast as the city of plague in ‘A Northern Hoard’ in Wintering Out (1972). Through a series of hallucinatory images, Belfast is pictured as a diseased and blood-soaked city, ‘Out there … / Where the fault is opening again’.