known/ already.í^52 Stepping into ëfree spaceí, the poet experiences his
first flight. Yet in the sectarian context of Belfast, free space is hard to
find since territory is often patrolled and controlled in intimidating
ways. Returning from the island to the mainland of Ireland with a
fresher vision, the poet is not unaware of the ëbattlefieldsí or
attachments, but is more confident about the possibility for
imaginative flight out of a torn community. On the one hand, this
could be read as necessary escapism or self-preservation rather than as
decolonization as it seeks to free the land from colonial violence. On
the other hand, Heaneyís imagery of free space connects with the
nationalist political ideal of free territory or a United Ireland. As
Corcoranís revised study of Heaney in 1998 notices:
The crossing of the frontier of writing, which is a crossing into the space made
accessible by generous imagination, a space crossed over into ñ ëtransgressedí,
it may be ñ from social and political constriction, is proleptic of the better
political reality at least conceivable in Northern Ireland. The literal frontier here
is the Irish border, ëa frontier which has entered the imagination definitelyí, but
which may nevertheless be erased by the act of writing [Ö] the ultimate
condition to be outstripped by this poetic imagination is the condition of
fracture represented by the Irish border.^53This is a post-colonial redress of poetry that attempts to transgress
Partition at a literary and symbolic level.
The idea of deconstructing the dominant language in an attempt
to create a more liberated imaginative space for oneself implicitly
questions the adequacy of the identity politics already in place in
Ireland. Refusing containment, the poet as bird-king can be imagined
drifting or coasting in a quick silver world of air and water, refusing
the limits, boundaries, lines, lie or lies of the land. From Station
Island, Heaneyís poems take flight paths out of Ireland, and his
concern is with migration and displacement as opposed to digging for
an authentic past.^54 Kearney argues that Heaneyís ëjourney workí is
nowhere more evident than in his relentless probing of the hidden
ambiguities and duplicities which enseam the very language in which
52 Heaney, ëStation Islandí, Station Island, p.93.
53 Corcoran, Seamus Heaney, p.216, p.218.
54 Of course, this movement out of Ireland was also taken by Heaneyís
predecessor, W.B. Yeats, in his Byzantium poems.