Having read the Foster book on Seamus Heaney (see here) I went back to the poetry books themselves. I’ve been buying his volumes since university days in the nineteen seventies and thereafter as soon as they were published.
To start with they were small paperbacks with quite lovely, artfully designed covers. The last two are beautifully presented hard backs. I’ve also got his translations of Antigone and Aeneid but was not tempted by his Beowulf which I studied briefly a long time ago.
I like to read poems quickly. And once purchased read through a whole book of poetry relatively fast; in one or just a couple of sittings. And without reading anything about the poems; no reviews and critiques as I want my impressions to be just that – my own. Later I might read a review; but not always. I don’t want to have to study up to understand a poem. I’m interested in the beauty of the language chosen, the inventiveness of how words are put together, the images conjured up and what emotions the poet evokes.
Reading Foster gave me new insights – especially into the more politically charged poems. I’ve always focussed on the more pastoral poems; if that’s what they can be called. His evocation and appreciation of daily rituals, mundane objects, domesticity, ordinary people, the natural world, and the rhythms of rural life.
I read many of the poems referred to in Foster, and afterwards took some more time to re-read many in each of my books. I tried to select a favourite from each – a fools errand really as there are so many very wonderful poems. But I persevered! These are some that attracted me a second time around.
Death of a Naturalist
This was first published in 1966 but I would have bought it sometime in the 1970s. It cost me $7.75. It contains his most famous poem – Digging – in which he admires the skill of his father and grandfather using shovels to dig potatoes and peat; But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests, / I’ll dig with that.
And the titular poem is funny; about a boy collecting tadpoles in a jam far and being appalled when he finds the pond where he collected them full of gross-bellied frogs … / The slap and pop were obscene threats. Some sat / Poised like maud grenades, their blunt heads farting … / The great slime kings …
Mid-Term Break starts off clinically describing a young boy’s observations as he is taken out of school one day. It takes a while to see where it’s going, before delivering its final emotional punch. He is being recalled from school… In the porch I met my father crying– /He had always taken funerals in his stride- / And big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow, /… I was embarrassed / By old men standing up to shake my hand / And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’, / Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, / Away at school, as my mother held my hand / In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs./ …Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops / And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him / For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, / Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, / He lay in the four foot box as in his cot, /No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. / A four foot box, a foot for every year.
Wintering Out
First published in 1972 this one cost me $5.50. Its most well-known poem is The Tolland Man about the retrieval of the body of a man preserved in peat in Aarhus in Denmark. The poet talks about going to see his peat-brown head, / The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. The man has been executed and the poet is reminded of the killings in Ireland. Flesh of labourers, / Stockinged corpses / laid out in the farmyards. He concludes: Out there in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home.
Mother of the Groom is quieter but brilliantly evokes past and present: What she remembers / Is his glistening back / In the bath, his small boots / In the ring of boots at her feet. / Hands in her voided lap, / She hears a daughter welcomed. / It’s as if he kicked when lifted / And slipped her soapy hold. / Once soap would ease off / The wedding ring / That’s bedded forever now / In her clapping hand.
North
This was recognised when it was published in 1975 as being the most directly revealing about the situation in Northern Island; not that I focussed on those poems at first reading it. In Funeral Rites he compares the familiar funerals at which I shouldered a kind of manhood / stepping in to lift the coffins / of dead relations. Who’d been laid out properly with rosary beads in shrouds and quilted satin cribs and laments that Now as news comes in / of each neighbourly murder / we pine for ceremony, / Customary rhythms: / the temperate footsteps / of a cortège, winding past / each blinded home.
The poets anger about the deaths and hypocrisy surrounding the Troubles is palpable in Whatever you Say Say Nothing: … The famous / Northern reticence, the tight gag of place / and times … / Where to be saved you only must save face / And whatever you say, you say nothing. / Smoke-signals are loud/mouthed compared with us / Manœuverings to find out name and school, Subtle discrimination by addresses / with hardly an exception to the rule / That Ken and Sidney signalled Prod / And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape. / O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, / Of open minds as open as a trap/ … Competence with pain, / Coherent miseries, a bite and sup, / We hug our little destiny again.
Sunlight is dedicated to his Aunt and is one of many that celebrates the unspoken love that lies behind domestic life. There was a sunlit absence. / The helmeted pump in the yard / heated its iron, / water honeyed / in the slung bucket / and the sun stood / like a griddle cooling / against the wall / of each long afternoon. / So her hands scuffled / over the bakeboard, / the reddening stove / sent its plaque of heat / against her where she stood / in a floury apron / by the window. / Now she dusts the board / with a goose’s wing, / now sits, broad-lapped, / with whitened nails / and measling shins : / here is a space / again, the scone rising / to the tick of two clocks. / And here is love / like a tinsmith’s scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin.
Field Work
This includes three poems about the deaths, rather murders, of three different people. I didn’t dwell on these on first reading this book, published in 1979, but they are very powerful.
The Strand at Loughborough Beg is about his cousin. He tries to imagine the circumstances of the death: What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block? or was it in your driving mirror, tailing headlights / That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down. Then remembers walking with him at Lough Berg and I turn because the sweeping of your feet / Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees / With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes, / Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass / And gather up cold handfuls of the dew / To wash you, cousin … I plait / Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.
In A Postcard from North Antrim he remembers a person with whom he has had a more fleeting connection. A Social worker of the town / Until your candid forehead stopped / A pointblank teatime bullet ... whose voice was independent, rattling, non-transcendent / Ulster – old decency. And remembers that it was on your floor, / I got my arm round Marie’s shoulder / For the first time. ‘Oh, Sir Jasper, do not touch me!’ / You roared across at me, / Chorus leading, splashing out the wine.
In Casualty it is a fellow he knows from the local pub: He would drink by himself / … At closing time would go / In waders and peaked cap / Into the showery dark / A dole-kept breadwinner / But a natural for work / I loved his whole manner, / … His deadpan sidling tact, / His fisherman’s quick eye / And turned observant back. / Incomprehensible / To him, my other life. / … But my tentative art / His turned back watches too: / He was blown to bits / Out drinking in a curfew. The poet remembers (and I hear my father saying these exact words) ‘Now you’re supposed to be / an educated man,’ / I hear him say, ‘Puzzle me / the right answer to that one’. / … Dawn-sniffing revenant, / Plodder through midnight rain, / Question me again.
Again, I am drawn to the quiet recollection. In The Harvest Bow (as in many of his poems) he remembers his father: As you plaited the harvest bow / You implicated the mellowed silence in you / In wheat that does not rust / But brightens as it tightens twist by twist / Into a knowable corona. / A throwaway love-knot of straw. / … I tell and finger it like braille, / Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable, / And if I spy into its golden loops / I see us walk between the railway slopes / Into an evening of long grass and midges / Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges, / an auction notice on an outhouse wall – / You with a harvest bow in your lapel, / Me with a fishing rod, already homesick / for the big lift of those evenings, … The end of art is peace / Could be the motto of this frail device / That I have pinned up on our deal dresser- Like a drawn snare / Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn / Yet burnished by its passage and still warm.
Station Island
This was published in 1984. Station Island is a place of pilgrimage in Ireland. I imagine it’s similar to Lourdes where I once took an aged cousin of my mother. A path strewn with sharp rocks leads up to a statue; the really devout go up on their knees. Rather awful. I’ve actually written in pencil on the very long titular poem; meaning I must have read something about it. Which is necessary to understand it deeply, but not necessary to admire the virtuosity of a person recollecting snippets of his own life and imagining encounters with famous characters.
As he becomes a fasted pilgrim, / light-headed, leaving home / to face my station he encounters various people. Simon Sweeney is a woodcutter my pencilled note tells me and another bit is about William Carleton who I don’t know anything about. He converses with a person from his youth, a young priest, glossy as a blackbird, / as if he had stepped from his anointing / a moment ago … Then comes upon the poet Patrick Kavanagh his first girlfriend, more memories of the Troubles, and so it goes. A tour de force.
I love his rendering of James Joyce which, in a lengthy section concludes the poem: Like a convalescent I took the hand / stretched down from the jetty, sensed again / an alien comfort as I stepped on ground / to find the helping hand still gripping mine, / fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide / or be guided I could not be certain / for the tall man in step at my side / seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush / upon his ash plant, his eyes fixed straight ahead. / Then I knew him in the flesh / … His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers / came back to me, though he did not speak yet, / 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 basket / with his stick, saying, ‘Your obligation / is not discharged by any common rite. / What you must do must be done on your own / so 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 night / dreaming 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.’
Just a little more – because it captures my idea about what Joyce was like so well: That subject people stuff is a cod’s game, / infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage. / You lose more of yourself than you redeem / doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent. / When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim / out on your own and fill the element / with signatures on your own frequency, / echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements/ elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.’ / The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac / fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly / the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.
The Haw Lantern
This was published in 1987, and is the most ragged of my books seeming likely to fall apart every time I open it. I’m not sure why, not from extra reading. I love the poem Clearances written in memory of his mother which starts with this: She taught me what her uncle once taught her: / How easily the biggest coal block split / If you got the grain and hammer angled right. / The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, / Its co-opted and obliterated echo, / taught me to hit, taught me to loosen, / Taught me between the hammer and the block / To face the music. Teach me not to listen, / To strike it rich behind the linear black.
And includes this lovely recollection amongst other memories, until you get to the last killer line: When all the others were away at Mass / I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. / They broke the silence, let fall one by one / Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: / Cold comforts set between us, things to share / Gleaming in a bucket of clean water/ And again let fall. / Little pleasant splashes / From each other’s work would bring us to our senses. / So while the parish priest at her bedside / Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying / And some were responding and some crying / I remembered her head bent towards my head, / Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives – / Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
Seeing Things
Published in 1991, the last book published before he won the Nobel Prize. Lots of memories. In Markings he remembers setting up a game: We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts, / that was all. The corners and the squares / Were there like longitude and latitude / … Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field / As the light died and they kept on playing … It was quick and constant, a game that never need / Be played out. Some limit had been passed, / There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness / In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.
Then he moves on to other markings. His father’s lines pegged out in the garden, / The spade nicking the first straight edge along / the tight white string. Or string stretched perfectly / To mark the outline of a house foundation / … Or the imaginary line straight down / A field of grazing, to be ploughed open / From the rod stuck in one headrig to the rod / Stuck in the other.
Other poems are dedicated to people including other writers; Philip Larkin, Richard Ellman; I liked Casting and Gathering for Ted Hughes in which he sees two fishermen with very different approaches; one relaxed, one taut. One sound is saying ‘You are not worth tuppence, / But neither is anybody. Watch it! Be severe.’ / The other says ‘Go with it! Give and swerve. You are everything you feel beside the river.’ / I love contrariness. / Years and years go past and I did not move / For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers / And then vice versa, without changing sides.
In A Pillowed Head he writes about the birth of his second child: Matutinal. Mother-of-pearl / Summer come early. Slashed carmines / And washed milky blues. / To be first on the road, Up with the ground-mists and pheasants /To be older and grateful / That this time you too were half-grateful / The pangs had begun – prepared and clear-headed, foreknowing / The trauma, entering on it / With full consent of the will … self-possessed now / To the point of a walk on the pier / Before you checked in. Only to find that he himself half-fainted / When the little slapped palpable girl / was handed to me …
The Spirit Level
I didn’t know Heaney was one of nine children – like my mother! Knowing that (thanks to Foster) gives A Sofa in the Forties a bit more resonance. The poet remembers: All of us on the sofa in a line, Kneeling / Behind each other, eldest down to youngest, / Elbows going like pistons for this was a train / … First we shunted, then we whistled, then / Somebody collected the invisible / For tickets and were gravely punched in ... He goes on to remember other activities on the couch: When visitors endured it, straight-backed, / …When the insufficient toys appeared on it / On Christmas mornings / …and children growing up: …we sensed / A tunnel coming up where we’d pour through / Like unlit carriages through fields at night, / Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead, And be transported and make engine noise.
There’s a humorous recollection of his father, this time in his later years in The Sharpening Stone: He walked on air himself, never more so / When when he had been widowed and the youth / In him, the athlete who had wooed her – / Breasting tapes and clearing the high bars – / Grew lightsome again. Going at eighty / On the bendiest roads, going for broke / At every point-to-point and poker-school / ‘He commenced his wild career’ a second time / And not a bother on him. Smoked like a train / And took the power mower in his stride / Flirted and vaunted. Set fire to his bed. / Fell from a ladder. / Learned to micro-wave.
In The Walk he contemplates his long partnership while looking at a photograph: Black and white. A negative this time, in dazzle-dark, / Smudge and pallor where we make out you and me, / The selves we struggled with and struggled out of, / Two shades who have consumed each other’s fire, / Two flames in sunlight that can scar and singe, / But seem like wisps of enervated air, / After-wavers, feathery ether shifts … / Yet apt still to rekindle suddenly / If we find along the ay charred grass and sticks / And an old fire-fragrance lingering on, /Erotic woodsmoke, witchery, intrigue, / Leaving us none the wiser, just better primed / To speed the plough again and feed the flame.
District and Circle
This contains Anything Can Happen, Heaney’s response to the September 11 attacks in America. As usual he tells it slant; here it is in full: Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter / Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head / Before he hurls his lightning? Well just now / He galloped his thunder cart and his horses / Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth / And the clogged unearth the River Styx, / The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. / Anything can happen, the tallest towers / Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune / Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, Setting it down bleeding on the next. / Ground gives. The heaven’s weight / Lifts up of Atlas like a kettle-lid. / Capstones shift, nothing resettles right. Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
The title poem is set on a train in London’t Underground: So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,/My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail, / My father’s glazed face in my own waning / And craning…/ Again the growl / Of shutting doors, the jolt and one-off treble / Of iron, then a long centrifugal / Haulage of speed through every dragging socket. / And so by night and day to be transported / Through the galleried earth with them, the only relict / Of all that I belonged to , hurtled forward, / Reflecting in a window mirror-backed / By blasted weeping rock-walls . Flicker-lit.
The poems in this volume are reflective. Of school days. In Senior Infants he meets the adult Duffy / Whom I had known before the age of reason / In short trousers in the Senior Infants room and recollects a caning For dirty talk we didn’t think she’d hear. Remembers chewing tobacco for the first time at the urging of another school friend: The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to …’You have to spit,’ says Robert ‘a chow’s no good / Unless you spit like hell,’ his ginger calf’s lick / like a scorch of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent.
Of losing his religious belief. In Out of This World: Like everybody else, I bowed my head / during the consecration of the bread and wine, / lifted my eyes to the raised host and raised chalice, / believed (what ever it means) that a change occurred. / I went to the altar rails and received the mystery / on my tongue, returned to my place, shut my eyes fast, made / and act of thanksgiving, opened my eyes and felt time starting up again. / There was never a scene / when I had it out with myself or with another. / The loss occurred off-stage. And yet I cannot / disavow words like “thanksgiving” or “host” / or “communion bread. They have an undying / tremor and draw, like well water far down.
He returns to the death of his brother in The Blackbird of Glanmore: And I think of one gone to him / A little stillness dancer – Haunter-son, lost brother – / Cavorting through the yard, / So glad to see me home, / My homesick first term over / And think of a neighbour’s words / Long after the accident: / ‘Yon bird on the shed roof, / Up on the ridge for weeks – / I said nothing at the time / But I never liked yon bird’. Unlike the poet who now has a familiar blackbird around his home: I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself, / A shadow on raked gravel / In front of my house of life. / Hedge-hop, I am absolute / For you, your ready talkback, / Your each stand-offish comeback, / Your picky, nervy goldbeak – On the grass when I arrive, / In the ivy when I leave.
Human Chain
This is Heaney’s last volume of poems. Like his previous volume it focuses on looking back. Including on the ambulance ride in the aftermath of a stroke he had. Chanson d’Aventure: – Strapped on, wheeled out, fork-lifted, locked / In position for the drive,/Bone-shaken, bumped at speed, / The nurse a passenger in front, you ensconced / In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back – / Our postures all the journey still the same, / Everything and nothing spoken, / Our eyebeams threaded laser fast, no transport / Ever like it until then, in the sunlit cold / Of a Sunday morning ambulance / When we might, O my love, have quoted Donne / On love on hold, body and soul apart. …
In The Wood Road the poet conjures a broader history while describing a road: Resurfaced, never widened, …Special militiaman. / Moonlight on rifle barrels, / On the windscreen of a van / Roadblocking the road … Or me in broad daylight / On top of a carload of turn build trig and tight, / Looked up to, looking down, / Allowed the reins like an adult / … Then that August day I walked it / To the hunger striker’s wake, / Across a silent yard, / In past a watching crowd / To where the guarded corpse / And a guard of honour stared. / Or the stain at the end of the lane / Where the child on her bike was hit / By a speed merchant from nowhere / …Film it in sepia, / Drip-paint it in blood, / The Wood Rad as is and was, / Resurfaced, never widened, The milk-churn deck and the sign /For the bus-stop overgrown.
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So many lovely poems. I’m glad I’ve revisited them. Maybe this will encourage others to discover them for the first time. I recommend the book R. F. Foster on Seamus Heaney as an introduction. Or there is lots on the internet, including this New Yorker article.
Seamus Heaney died in on 30 August 2013. His final poem was published in the Guardian on 26 October 2013. It was for inclusion in an anthology marking the centenary of the First World War.
In a Field: And there I was in the middle of a field, / The furrows once called “scores” still with their gloss, / The tractor with its hoisted plough just gone / Snarling at an unexpected speed / Out on the road, Last of the jobs, / The windings had been ploughed, furrows turned / Three ply or four round each of the four sides / Of the breathing land, to mark it off / And out. Within that boundary now / Step the fleshy earth and follow / The long healed footprints of one who arrived / From nowhere, unfamiliar and de-mobbed, / In buttoned khaki and buffed army boots, / Bruising the turned-up acres of our back field / To stumble from the windings’ magic ring / And take me by a hand to lead me back / Through the same old gate into the yard / Where everyone has suddenly appeared, / All standing waiting.
His final words to his wife were noli timere latin for ‘don’t be afraid’.
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