... Union punishes its mother from within and threatensits father, too, ‘‘across the water’’ (). The ‘‘legacy’’ () of force andviolence, the poem suggests, is more of the same: the crossing of twocultures ... brutality.Now, more than thirty years after the renewal of ‘ the troubles,’’ itmay be difficult to read the ‘‘legacy’’ of the Act of Union in any otherway. The terms that Heaney’s poem deploys, ... Myeffort to reconfigure the questions that we pose, and how we pose them,constitutes the basis for the way in which the arguments of the bookunfold; in what follows, I sketch some of these scholarly...