How best to inhabit a shifting landscape? From terrain scarred by division and conflict, the writer seeks to claim new ground. In the north of the last century, the problem presented with especial urgency, as we learn in this excellent survey of its writing.
For many, the answer was exile, with all of the vexed critical distance it affords. The title is taken from The Stranger’s Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders, an institution the poet Tom Paulin encountered while astray on the streets of London, a city he had long considered, being of Loyalist stock, as his birthright.
For CS Lewis, a creative breakthrough occurred initially at Oxford, and culminated in the imaginative exile of Narnia, a place that had its source in ‘that part of Rostrevor which overlooked Carlingford Lough’. Poets like Heaney were best able to respond to the Troubles through the psychical excavation of iron-age sacrificial victims of the Nordic countries, while Derek Mahon broke ground, famously, in “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”.
Novels such as Brian Moore’s Black Robe, with its setting in the New World of the seventeenth century, probed the conflict from afar; while in Milkman, Anna Burns was able to examine the suffocating, identity-obsessed Belfast of her youth only by excising all the names and dates.
In all cases, Poots tells us, ‘an oblique approach was a response to that duty of care and nuance’. It is to his credit that he has discharged that same duty.
Words: Diarmuid McGreal
The Stranger’s House: Writing Northern Ireland
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Alexander Poots Image Credit – Jonathan Ryder
