'There are of course many Belfasts," says Terence Brown in his essay on Stewart Parker, included here; hence the plural cities of the title. There are also many approaches to Belfast, some more tortuous than others.
Of the 15 essays which make up this collection, some are spirited and illuminating, and some are not. The signs are clear. When you get "foreground" and "critique" cast as verbs, and references to a poem's "spatial and material metaphoricity", you know you're in for a stretch of benumbing obfuscation. Academic expertise is one thing, a clogged presentation another.
The book considers aspects of Belfast, from its involvement in the 18th-century Caribbean slave trade ("Belfast and the Black Atlantic"), to the avant-garde "installations" signifying something or other about the proletarian localities in which they are situated. A street sign, for example, bearing the words "eggy tunnels", is not, as you might think, an official marker of an oddly-named quarter, but part of an artwork affirming the dynamism of locally-named landmarks. One would not wish, perhaps, to inquire too deeply into the origin of the term, "the feeley wall".
One submerged feature of Belfast was its accommodating attitude to the Irish language, and this is well covered in a couple of essays. It is good, too, to have our attention redirected to the works of the forgotten playwright Gerald MacNamara (1865-1938), who provided a northern riposte to the succulence of Synge.
Mary Burgess, the author of the MacNamara essay, reminds us that "there was an important northern dimension to the Irish dramatic revival" - even though it was plain from the start that "Celticist peasant drama was not going to work with Belfast audiences". Quite. The realism of St John Ervine, and the exuberance of Gerald MacNamara - with his incidental swipe at Synge, in the 1909 parody, The Mist That Does be on the Bog - struck a keener chord in the North.
Belfast, then, was, and is, a city "various, contradictory and alive", as Nicholas Allen describes it.
Writing about literary activity in Belfast during the second World War, Allen singles out the essayist, wit and social commentator Denis Ireland, whose position as a "white blackbird", a Protestant republican, exemplifies just one of the city's pungent anomalies.
Belfast, indeed, was never as straightforward in its allegiances or its idées fixes as the stereotype would have it.
What else? Terence Brown's essay on Stewart Parker contains some evocative passages describing East Belfast in the 1950s - foggy murk, shawlies teeming around the gateway of the ropeworks, the gleaming Holywood Hills - and Eamonn Hughes provides an insightful appraisal of poets, from MacNeice to Ciaran Carson. But it's the poets themselves writing here - Gerald Dawe, Tom Paulin - who come closest to identifying the riches, the singularity and the shifts in outlook that have made the place what it is today. You have only to look around you to see what's wrong with Belfast: catastrophic redevelopment, sectarian consolidation, cultural discords expressed as writing on a wall. But against this, you have "the lough, hills and surrounding countryside"; you have the legacy of Belfast's "formidable scientific culture" and its egalitarian ideas; you have its pragmatism, its go-ahead mentality and its vernacular energies.
In short, you have enough to build on to suggest the possibility of a culturally inclusive, non-sectarian future for the city, or the cities, of Belfast. The question remains, though, as to whether it can ever get shot of its "eternal factions and reactions" (Louis MacNeice's phrase), or employ its famous hard-headedness in the service of tolerance and enlightenment.
Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Her biography of Brian Moore was published last year
The Cities of Belfast Edited by Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly Four Courts Press, 252pp. £19.95