Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Another voice, an inner ëmiddle voiceí, advises the speaker to be
ëboldí, imploring him to ëlove the cut of this travelled oneí and ë[g]o
beyond whatís reliableí. The imperatives and repetitive incantatory
phrases in stanza five are written as if to give strength to the speaker
in an embarassing social situation where worlds he has kept separate
suddenly collide:

Go beyond whatís reliable

in all that keeps pleading and pleading,

these eyes and puddles and stones,

and recollect how bold you were

The speaker has made ëdeparturesí from the place that he ëcannot go
back oní and so he must be ëadeptí, (an adjective turned into the noun
of ëadeptsí in Heaneyís lecture ëFrontiers of Writingí delivered in
Oxford), and adapt. In this way, he articulates a bridge between
himself, the stranger and the local man who is so far removed from the
stranger as to be mute and ësmilingí like a person in need of a
translator.^61 By adopting the middle voice between the local and
standardized, the poet begins to ëmake strangeí what has been taken
for granted.
Here it is worth bearing in mind Heaneyís background, and the
way in which he, like Seamus Deane, was part of the first generation
of children in the North to profit from a better education than their
parents who were from farming backgrounds. The speaker in ëMaking
Strangeí becomes as chameleon-like as the son in the poem
ëClearancesí, from The Haw Lantern (1987), who is adept and adapts
to his motherís way of speaking:

I governed my tongue

In front of her, a genuinely well-

adjusted adequate betrayal

Of what I knew better. Iíd naw and aye

61 Notice previous quotation from Heaneyís essay ëFrontiers of Writingí, where
he comments in a self-reflective way whilst lecturing in Oxford, how in the
North the ëwhole population are adepts in the mystery of living in two places at
one time.í Heaneyís poem ëMaking Strangeí attempts to be ëadeptí in a
comparable way.