that had toppled overí because it is fragile and easily smashed.
Distinctions are not easily made and the male figure wonders ëwhich
side, if any, he should be oní. This suggests that the figure is on ëno
sideí, while the words ëif anyí hint that he may intend to join neither.
The poem leaves the figure in a ëdis-positioní which is difficult to
locate.
Timothy Kearney remarks that Northern poetry turns on the
individual endeavouring to find a community in the force field of
intractable tensions: ëIn other words, the crisis issues not only the
question ìto which community can I best belong?î but also the more
searching question ì[c]an I belong to any community at all?î.í^32
Kearney argues that such a discrepancy between the individual and
her/his community is one we have grown to accept as integral to
postmodern literary traditions.^33 Muldoon has already commented that
he has no tribe for which he can be a spokesperson. This questioning
of the relationship between the individual and the community
undermines the identity politics of post-colonial nationalism as it
looks to establishing a secure national ground with which the indi-
vidual can identify.
ëThe Boundary Commissioní articulates ambivalence over
national space. The Partition has been drawn, constructing an
apartheid between terms. However, this division is also undermined as
the figure in ëThe Boundary Commissioní chooses neither side of the
lane and opts for a disappearing middle. It would be assumed though,
that the ëdifferent statesí of the Republic of Ireland and the North are
politically distinguishable from one another since one place is a
British colony, the other, a post-colonial republic. But in Muldoonís
poem, these differences are elided into a situation where the speaker
stands in the middle ëfor agesí wondering at the relative differences
between the two sides and refusing to join either. The speaker could
reside in a space comparable with Richard Kearneyís notion of Mide
or the fifth province, except that Muldoonís middle offers no sense of
balance in terms of the resolution that lurks in Kearneyís theorization
32 Timothy Kearney, ëThe Poetry of the North: A Post-Modernist Perspectiveí,
The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, eds., Mark Patrick Hederman & Richard
Kearney (Dublin: Blackwater, 1982), p.466.
33 Ibid., p.465.