IN 1984, when the paramilitary conflict in Northern Ireland between the Protestant Unionists and the Catholic IRA had already gone on for sixteen years and would run fourteen more, Seamus Heaney wrote an essay entitled “Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland.” For all its literary acumen, the essay is something of a cri de coeur, a testament to Heaney's faith in poetry's transformational possibilities in the face of extreme violence, as well as a “fuck you” to extremists on all sides of what was simply called The Troubles (a shruggingly ironic term that I've always felt showed off Ireland's genius for down-home unrhetorical wit). Bombs planted in residential streets and shopping centers or hurled at British Army barracks and at Royal Ulster Constabulary police stations, neighborly assassinations in which you might well recognize your murderer just as he shot you dead—this was the bloody subtext fueling Heaney's essay.
I had met Heaney in 1983 when he was teaching at Harvard, and he invited me to visit him in Dublin the following year. He showed me the essay over coffee in his home and then he took me to Glasnevin Cemetery. First we visited the common grave of the Jesuit fathers, a large granite cross inscribed with several hundred names, including in tiny script; and then he showed me the memorial to Bobby Sands and his nine fellow IRA hunger strikers, all of whom starved themselves to death in 1981
