2 - Mapping the Geographies of Hurt in Barry MacSweeney and S.J. Litherland

Summary

Barry MacSweeney's Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems (2003) and S.J. Litherland's collection The Work of the Wind (2006) explore the same ‘territory’, in many senses of that term. According to its publisher, Litherland's book ‘charts the hurricane years [1993–2000] the author shared with her fellow poet Barry MacSweeney’, while MacSweeney's Selected contains three major late sequences – Hellhound Memos (1993), Pearl (1995/1997) and The Book of Demons (1997) – which cover the same period. This essay mainly discusses connections between the two books, using what I call the ‘geographies of hurt’ to explore the way each person in the relationship presented in the poetry perceives the other within the context of an ‘imagined geography’ of north and south. I try to show how these perceptions are intricately bound up with both a need to hurt and the sense of being hurt. The formulation ‘imagined geography’ is my own slightly modified version of Rob Shields's term ‘imaginary geography’, which, though useful, perhaps too readily implies that the divisive north/south geographical model of the UK is entirely a construct by which ‘places and spaces are hypostatised from the world of real space relations’, providing a ‘spurious homogenised identity [for places]’. On this basis, the ‘imaginary geography’ can always be deconstructed and defused by the provision of detailed, objective data and rational analysis. The substitution of the word ‘imagined’ for ‘imaginary’ recognises that we always have to imagine and (re)construct what is real, as we do, for example, when we relate an incident that took place at work, or, for that matter, analyse literary texts. No untangling of the ‘real’ from the ‘imaginary’ (however rigorous its procedures) can ever be definitive, and the best role of theory is to clarify questions rather than pre-empt answers.

With these caveats in mind, I will begin by saying that MacSweeney is a ‘northerner’ from Newcastle, and Litherland a ‘southerner’ from Warwickshire (Coventry and Leamington Spa, to be precise). Whether the Midlands is really part of the south (or, for that matter, the north) is, of course, debatable, and it really depends on where you are looking from. For, as Rob Shields also points out, the north is said by a few ‘to include even the Midlands’.