RE-INSCRIBING IRISH HISTORY IN THE LANGUAGE OF POST-COLONIAL GEOGRAPHY
RE-INSCRIBING IRISH HISTORY IN THE LANGUAGE OF POST-COLONIAL GEOGRAPHY

Summary/Abstract: The paper will broach first the two versions of the Irish modern identity, as testified by the landscapes chosen for poetic debate, in some peace-making poems written in the two Irish traditions: the nationalist and the Anglo-Irish. More famous, the nationalist Seamus Heaney, who speaks in the good old tongue of the Hiberno-English dialect, sets his terms for peace by evoking history, but only in order to penetrate beyond it, and reach rural, geological and archetypal settings – that head for lyricism on a grand scale. Less famous, but more accessible for the cultivated, gnomic or culturalist mind, Derek Mahon's Anglo-Irish language uses the modern Western commonplaces to forge an urban and urbane kind of peace in the Irish lingo. Mahon manages to do this by rejecting the uncouth corridors of history and their haunting grasp upon the mind. The Romantic and the Classical paradigms and minds of modernity are seen to breathe side by side in the post-colonial Irish landscape, being used in order to make sense of the same inherited world/space. In the theoretical part of the paper, in postmodern or heterological terms, this world of the new, local sense is assessed. In the last part, a practical and descriptive narrative connects the lesson of theory with the practices of poetry.

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