Bringing It All Back Home: The Influence of Robert Frost on Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon

Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature

“…139 In line with Belfast's reinvention as a "globalised everycity," 140 albeit in the interests of a select few, the Agreement's tenor for reconciliation and rapprochement is predominantly economic-driven. Caught in a tight spot of geo-economic isolation and communal closures, post-Agreement Belfast has become a vulnerable site that is subject to capitalist (and sectarian) coordinates drawn along the lines of "the motors of progress [that] are driving the city forwards" 141and into an are(n)a of non-history.…”

“…It is this subtlety with which Patterson does indeed critique post-Agreement Northern Ireland's status quo, for, in the end, the traces of the past are no longer suspended, which they surely had been, but are allowed to enter the 'cultural corridor' of Number 138 McNamee complies with the rumour that Nairac's body was disposed of in a meat factory nearby the border. 139 However, there is just as little evidence to support the myth of the meat mincer as there is to tell us the actual circumstances of Nairac's killing. Instead, the offi cial (real-life) version of the story has it that Nairac was abducted from a pub in County Armagh during an undercover operation and subsequently killed by the Provisional IRA (PIRA).…”

“…138 In that sense, the politics of post-Agreement poets are rather complex and convoluted; in keeping with the motifs of home and away, they seek to "question the offi cial maps, cross borders, break up consecrated ground, take roads less travelled by." 139 In doing so, the poets chart new spatio-temporal coordinates that enable them to unburden themselves from previous generations of Northern Irish poets. Unlike Heaney, for instance, post-Agreement poets do not 'dig' into the ground for traces of home but, quite literally, perform a counter-movement to Heaney's artistic archaeology.…”

“…Thus, as disposable as life may be, it does remind him of how he got 'sucked' into Pumpgirl's rape by his lads who, in his dream, are depicted as "a load of guys hanging on to this giant rope. "139 Though the lads try to pull him over, Hammy plunges towards the plughole, resisting the collective force of his so-called friends. Indeed, for him, the dream marks his "fi rst time out of the shallow end," 140 bringing him closer to what he experiences as emancipatory alternatives to a claustrophobic life.…”