Building, Dwelling, Moving: Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and the Reverse Aesthetic

This essay explores figurations of the house, the shelter and the resting-place in the work of the Northern Irish poets Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin. It puts Heaney and Paulin in dialogue with Bachelard and Heidegger in order to examine the relationships between refuge and incursion, homeliness and estrangement that have been negotiated to an acute degree in the North over the last thirty-five years. The chapter first traces how Seamus Heaney develops a sense of dwelling that is future-oriented rather than regressive, and in which the poetic self experiences the intimacy of homelessness. No matter how far Heaney’s poetry has travelled, it has constantly circled back to the omphalos of the farmhouse, the heimlich habitation commemorated in the early essay ‘Mossbawn’. Tom Paulin’s work has shown an increasing preoccupation with the potential of makeshift and prosaic locations, spaces where belonging and identification are apparently refused, yet spaces which represent the very condition of living ‘in’ history, with its terrors and possibilities. The neglected interiors and peripheral structures that litter these poetic landscapes challenge the desire for rootedness and authenticity, but such buildings can nonetheless “quicken into newness”.