THE POEMS OF SEAMUS HEANEY, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis
Seamus Heaney’s genius included a gift for dealing with binary conflicts, large-scale or personal or some of each. The fire of his ambition as an artist was balanced by a cool sense of absurdity, with flashes of gentle self-mockery.
This new collection of his great work, at well over two inches thick, is “great” in a workaday sense of the word, as well. That it might be called a “doorstop” is the kind of homely, conventional joke that would be more likely to amuse, rather than offend, Heaney’s many-minded imagination. His work is magnificent, to use a Yeatsian word, partly in its capacity to see human doings, such as books, in many ways at once.
“The Poems of Seamus Heaney” amplifies a reader’s understanding of the poet’s accomplishment by putting the meticulous grandeur of each book into the context of uncollected and unpublished poems, many of them excellent and all of them illuminating. With a lucid, chronological format for the Contents page, the volume’s editors invite readers to sample the honorable outtakes and preliminaries, the range-finding preparatory studies, that underlie for instance the haunted vision of “North” (1975) or the magisterial yet intimate scope of “Station Island” (1984).
Early on, the quite young Heaney had already mastered his distinctive combination of observant, nearly prosaic reporting with the chewable consonant clusters and ecstatic syntax of Gerard Manley Hopkins — as in “Digging,” the famous, beloved poem that opens his debut volume, “Death of a Naturalist” (1966), published when Heaney was not yet 30. The poem begins with much-quoted lines that are in a way all business and in another way happily flamboyant:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging.
And a few lines further on:
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
In the spoken idiom that Heaney called his “guttural muse,” the colloquial grace of this poem (“By God, the old man could handle a spade./Just like his old man”) is so well timed that it can seem effortless. The grace is hard-won, the product of high standards and exacting work at the craft.
That work is demonstrated by a vivid, previously uncollected poem in this large new collection, “Lint Water.” Like “Digging,” the poem describes farm work, the preparation by soaking in river water of fresh-harvested flax:
Toughened to sticks,
The stems were milled, spun, woven into fabrics.
The dam was cleared, poured down into the river
Its poisonous bellyful. “Lint water”
It was called. Across the stream it swirled brown froth
That scummed clean stone and sickened fish to death;
And if the drains were blocked, it still seeped down,
Filtering unseen contamination.
Putrid currents floated trout to the loch,
Their bellies white as linen tablecloths.
These fierce lines, daring any reader to allegorize them or not, are so well made that a poet might feel incapable of leaving them out of a book. But Heaney did just that. We can’t know why “Lint Water” was uncollected — Heaney, who died in 2013, can’t tell us — but there’s no harm in speculating: Does the poem raise its voice more than was right for the book “Death of a Naturalist” as a whole? The book’s title poem describes frog-spawn: stinking, rotten, menacing stuff of life that will become new frogs. Also stinking, rotten and menacing, as described by Heaney in “Lint Water,” is the “fouled water” created by treating the flax. Stacks of it are pitched out into the water “in sheaves like half-gone carcasses.” The stuff that will become linen tablecloths poisons the fish.
Maybe omitting “Lint Water” avoids repeating an effect that is performed more subtly, and with more meaning, in the poem “Death of a Naturalist.” Maybe in a book where physical details always suggest moral or social equivalents the language of “slime and smut” is simply too loud. Guesswork aside, that Heaney could put aside such a striking poem as “Lint Water” is a measure of his serious purpose, and the accomplishment of his first book.
In the crossroads book “Station Island,” in a section also called “Station Island,” the poet is on a pilgrimage, isolating himself on the island also known as “Patrick’s Purgatory.” There, Heaney encounters 12 dead people and, like Dante in the “Inferno,” he converses with each one, among them a friend and football teammate, “big-limbed, decent, open-faced,” who recounts his own murder in the course of the Troubles, the verse in Dantean tercets:
His brow
was blown open above the eye and blood
had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’he said, ‘it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw
after a football match.’
The final encounter is with the shade of James Joyce. In a daring marvel of introspection and drama, Heaney in the persona of Joyce admonishes himself and encourages himself. The shade of Joyce advocates the life’s work of being multiple and unique, Irish and oneself, a mortal and a poet. Joyce speaks in:
a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,
cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
and suddenly he hit a litter basketwith his stick, saying, “Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you must do must be done on your ownso get back in harness. The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.”
There on the celebrated religious pilgrimage island, the form and mode of the Catholic epic of Dante, Heaney lectures himself in the voice of the great rebellious and secular and tremendously learned writer. Heaney’s Joyce advocates for freedom and autonomy. Heaney, responding, refers to the passage from Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” where the pretentious, bossy Dean mistakenly supposes that the English word “tundish” must be Irish. That Stephen knows better confirms the “Feast of the Holy Tundish.” Joyce’s reply to Heaney is mocking and reassuring:
“Who cares,”
he jeered, “any more? The English language
belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires,a waste of time for somebody your age.
That subject people stuff is a cod’s game,
infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.”
The implicit self-mockery here is also a vow of confidence, a hard-won triumph over the stereotypes and clichés of a time and place.
Again, the background of uncollected poems is helpful, giving “Station Island” an amusing, possibly clarifying light. “An Open Letter,” a poem of 33 numbered stanzas, prances expertly in a zany, demanding rhyme scheme as Heaney explains to the editors at Penguin Books why he will not allow his poems to appear in a collection entitled “Contemporary British Verse.” The adjective “British” will not do.
The bravura execution of the rhyme scheme, the airy prolongation through 33 stanzas, emphasized by their Arabic numerals, the realistic concession that as an eminence (who would win the Nobel a decade hence) Heaney is now in a good position to refuse inclusion as a British poet — all of that makes for a witty, worldly footnote to Joyce’s “Station Island” lecture. I recommend “An Open Letter” as great fun.
Heaney was a reliably generous friend, as many of us who knew him in Berkeley and Cambridge can affirm. An attentive spirit, kind and shrewd, with a mensch’s kind of laughter to match. In the deftly courteous and satirical “Open Letter,” you can hear that laughter — directed at the Penguin editors the Irish poet addresses, at the codes and boundaries of nations and even, somewhat, at the poet himself. For a taste of that virtuosic laughter, I’ll quote the first verse:
1
To Blake and Andrew, Editors,
Contemporary British Verse,
Penguin Books, Middlesex, Dear Sirs,
My anxious muse,
Roused on her bed amid the furze,
Has to refuse.
And the last:
33
Need I go on? I hate to bite
Hands that led me to the limelight
In the Penguin book, I regret
The awkwardness,
But British, no, the name’s not right.
Yours truly, Seamus.
This uncollected context provides air and light, justifying the bulk of more than 1,200 pages. Doorstops, after all, are used to keep doors open.
THE POEMS OF SEAMUS HEANEY | Edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 1,231 pp. | $60
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