reproduce the visible ñ it makes visibleí.^67 In Paulinís poem ëThe
Stingí, the male figure is stung in the eye by a wasp only to see:
ñ too crystal clear ñ
that something has broken through
the riotshield that jigs
between self and reality (p.88)Likewise, the washed vision of ëThatís Ití fulfils its revelatory title
and reports of a preoccupation with seeing things through the eyes of
ëñ a man in the process of deciding/ that heís begun to make old
bonesí. This is comparable with Heaney in Seeing Things where he
waited until he was nearly fifty to ëcredit marvelsí and to see that:
ëThe stoneís alive with whatís invisibleí.^68 Concern with different
perspectives is also found when Heaney brings together two different
realities in ëLighteningsí: the monks at Clonmacnoise are presented
with the vision of the ship in the air while the sailors in the ship view
the praying monks, and so two different realities collide and are
crossed. As Heaney and Paulin move from the ground of Irish politics
towards a concern with the visual and the visionary, their drifting
away from the national question does not mean that their poetry
becomes apolitical. Paulinís journey into less obvious political realms
still has a politics and this changes the way in which his positioning as
an ëunderground resistance fighterí may be understood.
Questioning the Real
Lyotardís writing on the avant-garde celebrates the necessary
questioning of ideological reality. He refers to the work of CÈzanne,
Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky and Klee as they put under some
67 Ibid., pp.261ñ2.
68 Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber, 1991). Cf. ‘Fosterling’, p.50 and
‘Seeing Things II’, p.17.