by way of contrast, McGuckian imagines the daughter arriving from a
French sea to reclaim her fatherís inheritance.^30
In stanza two the figure, who might be either the daughter or the
father, is imagined resting: ëIn a city that has vanished to regain/ Its
language [Ö]í. The poem shelters in a space that is uncharted by
cartographers and which is comparable with the secretive space of
ëThe Over Motherí which was written six years later. The message
here is that a person or a place must first lose their name in order to
regain their language or identity, which is a message that defies the
ability to communicate since to forget names is to let go of both
language and identity. The figure in the poem occupies insecure and
ëinvisibleí territory, and the poem imagines a representational space
which is alternative to our normal maps of spatial existence. The
stanza enacts this by presenting us with an indeterminate figure in a
poem where there are unclear pronouns, where there is uncertainty
who is speaking or observing and who is acting. The figure whose
identity is unclear throws her/his ëwatch, the heartbeat/ Of everyone
present, out into the snowí. This indicates a loss of time and a loss of
landscape since the snow blanks out the distinctive features by which
the landscape may be identified. As traditional conceptions of time
and territory are abandoned like the discarded watch, the poem lays to
rest both colonial and nationalist preoccupations with history and
geography. In the poem landscape and history are eroded by the sea
which is described as ëthe old escape/ Of waterís speechí which is
ëfaithless to the endí. The water allows for a fluidity of meaning but
this is ëfaithlessí, and verging on the inarticulate.
In ëThe Heiressí a sense of the unheimlich was introduced with
images of the woman walking along the shore. Imagery of the
seashore as dispossessed periphery is also introduced in ëOn Bally-
castle Beachí and Muldoonís ëIdentitiesí, and it is interesting to
investigate the different associations the sea and the beach evoke in
literature and theory.^31 The sea tends to be associated with freedom
from social constraints. Alternatively, the sea can be understood in
terms of a pre-Oedipal and unconscious realm which is supposed to be
unwritten by the social, and is evocative of Freudís oceanic feeling. A
30 Wills, Improprieties, pp.184ñ5.
31 Muldoon, ëIdentitiesí, New Weather (London: Faber, 1973), p.22.