What does it mean to belong to a place — and what happens when that place is fractured by history, language, and identity? In Between Anchoring and Elsewhere: Aspects of Place in Northern Irish Poetry, Péter Dolmányos explores how Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and John Montague transform the idea of place into one of the defining principles of modern Irish poetry. Bridging geography, history, and imagination, the book shows how poetry becomes a means of negotiating between rootedness and displacement, memory and landscape, the local and the universal.

Combining close readings with insights from spatial theory and postcolonial thought, Dolmányos traces how these poets’ visions of Ulster move between the „anchoring” of home and the lure of „elsewhere.” His study asks how poetry can both preserve and question belonging in a world marked by boundaries, exile, and return — offering a nuanced and intellectually rigorous contribution to the study of place and identity in contemporary literature.

Péter Dolmányos is a literary scholar and critic, and Associate Professor of English Literature at Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Hungary. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Irish and British poetry, particularly on spatial poetics, regional identity, and intertextuality in the work of Northern Irish poets. He has published widely on Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and John Montague, and his work is noted for its philological precision, theoretical awareness, and sensitivity to the intersections of geography and poetic form.