Poetic place and geographical space: An analysis of the poetry of Máirtín O Direáin

People who have a strong attachment to particular geographical features such as rivers, mountains, an island, have a touchstone on which to base their emotions. The concrete thing gives them food for imagination which may never be called for if they stay at home all their lives; however, if they leave their mountain or river or island, then the geographical becomes imaginative and the heart begins to long for, imagine and recreate islands, rivers and mountains. Even a colour can thus become symbolically important, none more so perhaps than to the colour green to the Irish abroad. Poetry written by immigrants is full of rocks and lakes and geographical reference of all kinds. Sociologists may not always take creative literature seriously as evidence of the effects of leaving home, but that bias can be overcome if one sees literature not as dealing in ‘representations’ but rather as a means for working out life-issues in a communicative manner. We start absorbing the geography around us as children but only become aware of how important it is to us when we leave the home environment and suddenly start defining the ‘new place’ in terms of what is not present from the old familiar place.