this could refer to the lie of the land or the lies of the land. If the lie of
the land is a lie then its demarcations are not to be trusted. The poem
depicts an external landscape that is internalized or an internal land-
scape that is externalized, whereby the inner boundaries of thought
spin out of control due to a strong current of water, while the external
demarcations of the terrain are transgressed by a speaker who is lost in
transit.
Providing crossings between inner and outer worlds, the poem
depicts an existential landscape where the imagery of rivers of
thought, territorial, intellectual and emotional barriers, disallows a
clear demarcation between poetic self and world. The poem presents
the subject lost in space and lost as space. In Bodyspace (1996) Nancy
Duncan argues that keeping the environment on the outside is a reflex
used by the subject in order to preserve mastery over space and this
draws a solid division between the subject of consciousness and the
external landscape.^52 ëPolesí destabilizes how we usually understand
subjectivity and space as two separate and self contained entities with
the effect of disrupting the polarity of Cartesian thought by which
Enlightenment reasoning operates. Rather than sticking to maps of
Ireland or the US, Berkeleyís poem charts an unheimlich elsewhere
where clear divisions between the body and space are undermined.
The image of ëher watersí turning ëto follow the mooní is
evocative of a monthly menstrual cycle. Whereas the journey from
north to south is linear, the turning of ëher watersí is cyclical. The
feminine is often associated with the moon and with water as in
Bolandís ëAnna Liffeyí (1995), Irigaray, and Kristevaís theorization
of fluidity alluded to by Meaney in ëHistory Gaspsí (1995).^53 How-
ever, the waters become frozen and the ëcold lies flat along the
groundí can be read as cold lies or untruths or as frost laying. The
imagery becomes polarized as the landscape presented oscillates
between the binaries of ëblack and whiteí. ë[B]lack and white from
52 Nancy Duncan, ed, Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and
Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1996), p.49. Such a geography has been
contested by radical geographers including Edward Soja in Postmodern
Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London:
Verso, 1989).
53 Cf. Discussion of Eavan Boland in Chapter Four and Medbh McGuckian in
Chapter Five.