To contain myself, I run
Till the fawn smoke settles on the earth.^21The place in the poem is evocative of Belfast at the time of the Orange
marches when bonfires are built in a provocative celebration by
unionist members of the community. The speaker worries whether the
smoke can be contained and asks if the wind will ëhold/ That snake of
orange motion to the hills/ Away from the houses?í At a metaphorical
level, the poem asks whether violence can be controlled within a
heated and volatile situation. The speaker is portrayed running from
potential violence and through an unnamed territory. Describing
her/his fear s/he says: ëI am unable/ to contain myselfí, which alludes
to the subliminal borders of the self and the positioning of the poetic
ëIí in the poem. There is an implicit analogy between the speakerís
self and the fire, with the worry that neither may be contained; the lid
may come off and fire or madness may be released. The barely
controlled tone adopted by the speaker gives the effect of listening to a
poetic voice that is just about contained within the curt stanza form.
The poetic speaker is in transit, ungendered and unlocated in either
community. This lack of representative space is due less to the effects
of a postmodern condition identified by Docherty, and more to a lack
of representative space that is symptomatic of a history of colonization
in Ireland. The poetic speaker of ëSmokeí illustrates an interest in self-
consciously exploring the limits of geographic and personal space.
Exploring the limitations of space has political implications for poetry
from the North of Ireland, especially when personal and geographical
borders are put under pressure.
A border in the poem also exists between the urban houses and
the country hills. Rather than being read according to the overtly
political, the poem can be read at another level as a nature poem
describing the autumnal experience of bonfires being lit. A reader
without knowledge of Ireland would not necessarily pick up on
McGuckianís allusions to Orange Day. McGuckianís poem is secret-
ive rather than obscure as it is written for a specific readership and the
poem protectively guards its meaning against uninformed outsiders
who may be lost by a failure to recognize the background from which
21 McGuckian, ëSmokeí, The Flower Master (Meath: Gallery, 1982, 1993), p.11.