Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuityí.^23
Heaney views the land as a stable and historical element that offers a
connection between past and present. Here, Heaney does return to the
soil and the historical victims who are buried within it.
Hence, Lloyd takes the easy example of Heaneyís well-known
early poem ëDiggingí (1966) as representative of an entire oeuvre to
argue that the poetry presents an ëunproblematic continuous originí, a
ëreturn to roots that are rural, Catholic and Gaelicí.^24 Lloyd begins his
discussion of ëDiggingí by arguing that

Heaney makes much play, both in his poems and in his prose writings, with the

deterritorialization inflicted both on a national consciousness by the effects of

colonization, and on the individual subject by acculturation. But in Heaneyís

writing such perceptions initiate no firm holding to and exploration of the

quality of dispossession; rather, his work relocates an individual and racial

identity through the reterritorialization of language and culture.^25

Later, Lloyd states that

ëDiggingí holds out the prospect of a return to origins and the consolatory myth

of a knowledge which is innocent and without disrupting effect. The gesture is

almost entirely formal, much as the ideology of nineteenth-century nationalists

ñ whose concerns Heaney largely shares ñ was formal or aesthetic, composing

identity of the subject in the knowing of objects the very knowing of which is

an act of self-production.^26

Lloydís discussion of ëDiggingí is persuasive and perceptive yet his
notion that the nation is something constant, given and located
beneath the colonial which is unproblematically presented in all of
Heaneyís poetry is misguided. There is a tension between Heaneyís
professed poetic project in the early essay ëThe Sense of Placeí and
the effects of his poetry. In his early prose, Heaney may appear to set
himself up as a ëcurator of a lost organic cultureí but the effects of his
poetry, when viewed apart from his posturing are not simply

23 Heaney, ëSense of Placeí, Preoccupations (London: Faber, 1980), pp.148ñ9.
24 Lloyd, p.20.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., p.22.