tradition as they excavate a hidden indigenous history rather than
providing a model of cultural negotiation between developing
histories. However, Andrew Murphy argues that translating, in the
first line of the poem, the title ëBroaghí into ëRiverbankí, ëwhat
Heaney creates [...] is a kind of common language community that
unites colonizer and native.í^65
Yet the word ëbroaghí has a ëgh the strangers found/ difficult to
manage.í^66 Murphy concedes that this aspect of pronouncing the word
serves simultaneously to unite the divided communities of the North
and to set them apart from the English community. For the English
reader the ëcommon languageí of ëBroaghí is not so common since it
is a language from which s/he is implicitly excluded as a ëstrangerí
and the gh is difficult for an English tongue to pronounce. The
example of ëBroaghí illustrates how Heaneyís poems both bring
communities together and drive a wedge even deeper between them
which is also typified by the effects of ëMaking Strangeí. The poetry
remains undecided: when opposing identities are brought together,
they can either form a bridge between one another or the very bridge
they attempt to form bears out the radical estrangement between them.
This is demonstrated in a different way in an earlier poem
entitled ëThe Other Sideí from Wintering Out. In his lecture ëFrontiers
of Writingí, Heaney describes this poem as ëa moment of achieved
grace between people with different allegiancesí whereby a
Presbyterian farmer standing in the yard at night, does not go into his
Catholic neighboursí house until he has heard them finish their
prayers.^67 According to Heaney, the poem is indicative of the redress
of poetry or going beyond sectarianism into political reconciliation.
This poem about the relationship between neighbours is evocative of
Robert Frostís poem ëMending Wallí, and Edna Longley sees it as
asking whether there can ëbe communication, community, even
communion founded on a shared landscapeí.^68 If the landscape of the
North of Ireland was truly ësharedí there would be more chance of
ëcommunioní, although this is far from the case when one section of
65 Andrew Murphy, Seamus Heaney (Plymouth: Northcote, 1996), p.27.
66 Heaney, Selected Poems, ëBroaghí, Wintering Out, p.66.
67 Heaney, ëFrontiers of Writingí, p.194.
68 Longley, Poetry in the Wars, p.201.