after death, a person is cut off and detached from the world of the living, yet simultaneously remains visible, as if preserved behind glass:
You've gone through the glass and into the arms Of the children who cried to break into your body. Your mother will be young again.
No negotiation from this side in – The glass descended and shimmered open
And then froze hard again beyond all normal view. No doubt your own face changed.
No doubt memory followed you. (53-60)
While the idea of an afterlife “through the glass” might be seen as a consolation, by the end of this poem, the speaker struggles to accept any such comfort:
And even the knowledge that sometime, way back, Both of us were moon-eyed children
Who played together in the land of glass
Won't kill the awful hush of your departure... (68-71)
Between Here and There, as the collection's title suggests, explores various places, ranging from Belfast to America and New Zealand, as well as Japan, which appears as the title of Part II of the book.82 Part I, however, opens with two poems about Belfast, which consider the city and its recent history with a mixture of Mahonian irony and seemingly heartfelt tenderness. “In Belfast” is a poem in two parts,83 the first of which gives a broad view of the city as it “is making money / on a weather-mangled Tuesday” (7-8), and ends with an image of “the river / […] simmering at low tide and sheeted with silt” (11-12). The second part of the poem focuses on the speaker's personal history, revealing that she has “returned after ten years” (13) after having experienced “a delicate unravelling of wishes / that leaves the future unspoken and the past / unencountered and unaccounted for” (18-20). Although not an elegy as such, the mournful tone is in keeping with Northern Irish elegy, as the poet's personal losses are tied up with the experiences of the city:
This city weaves itself so intimately
it is hard to see, despite the tenacity of the river
and the iron sky; and in its downpour and its vapour I am as much at home here as I will ever be. (21-24)
This final thought, while it seems to respond to the wish at the end of Mahon's poem
“Afterlives”, that “I might have grown up at last / And learnt what is meant by home”, displays a different relationship with the city.84 “Tourism” displays a mixture of grief and anger at the painful history through which Belfast has lived, and which it now seems to sell as a cultural
82 Morrissey, Between Here and There (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002). 83 Between Here and There, 13.
84 Mahon, “Afterlives,” Collected Poems, 58-9. Morrissey speaks about the difficulty that she has with identifying herself as a Northern Irish poet (in her interview with me).
186
experience:85We take them to those streets they want to see most, at first,
as though it's all over and safe behind bus glass
like a staked African wasp. Unabashedly, this is our splintered city... (10-13)
The speaker's bitter tone seems directed at her own people, rather than at the tourists: “Our talent for holes that are bigger / than the things themselves / resurfaces at Stormont, our week- kneed parliament...” (19-21), although the tone at the end of the poem seems to mock the European visitors that it purports to welcome: “So come, keep coming here.” “Diffuse the gene pool, confuse the local kings, / infect us with your radical ideas...” (26, 28-29).86 While at times the bitterness and irony seems to echo that of Mahon, there is a difference of tone. The first person pronouns throughout “Tourism” are plural: the use of “we” and “our” implies that the speaker, despite feeling a sense of detachment from the city, is nevertheless accepting Belfast as an aspect of her identity.87
“In Need of a Funeral” links Morrissey to both Heaney and McGuckian.88
The title of the poem, which also becomes its refrain, is reminiscent of lines from Heaney's poem “Funeral Rites”, which struggles with the way in which ordinary mourning practices were put under extraordinary pressure as they were called upon to deal with the losses of the Troubles. As mentioned above, McGuckian deals with similarly difficult emotions as she attempts to pre- empt her grief for her dying parents. This constant anticipation of bereavement must be
common in Northern Ireland, as a result of the continual losses experienced during the Troubles. Morrissey's poem seems to deal with a similar emotion, as she begins:
Even though no one has died and there is no one to touch in the coffin the way my brother touched the dead-man relation
whose name we didn't know […] I have need of a funeral. (1-4, 6)
This unexplained sense of loss appears to be something the speaker has lived with from an early age; the tone of the opening lines sounds almost child-like, and the third stanza corroborates this, as the speaker remembers that she “stole communion in the cathedral, / not knowing what to do...” (13-14). The fact that, a few lines later, “the man” who “tipped wine / and crushed bread” (16-17) gives her advice, reveals that she only “stole” in the sense that as a child of atheist parents, she was not accustomed to the Christian ritual. The “milk teeth” in line 22 also add to the idea of a childhood memory. However, the second stanza of the poem seems to
85 Between Here and There, 14.
86 Conversely, the ending of the poem might be read as Parker does: “The irony and indignation seem to run out in the last two stanzas, which voice what seems to be a genuine appeal for the European tourists to keep coming, to radicalise the locals, and to endow the province with ‘new symbols’ and a new identity,” Northern Irish Literature, II, 227.
87 This might be linked to the problematic relationship between the poet and the community heard in Heaney's “The Strand at Lough Beg”.