THERE are books about Seamus Heaney and “the crisis of identity”, Heaney and “the impress of Dante”, Heaney and “imagination and the sacred”, but there are no straight biographies available for the casual reader, even though Heaney has more of such readers than any other living poet – his titles now make up two-thirds of sales in that depressed market. Famous Seamus himself has said he likes it this way, and would prefer his life story to go unwritten “until after”, when he’s under the very dirt which has inspired so much of his work. As for his own memoirs, there may be no need for Heaney to put down in prose what’s already there in the poetry.
Next month, it will be 40 years since Heaney published his first collection, Death Of A Naturalist, which is being reissued to mark the occasion alongside his latest book, District And Circle. There is an entire career in the difference between them, and a potential case study in the question of whether poets improve or decline with age. More interesting though, and more satisfying, are the connections. At the age of 27, and on the prompting of Ted Hughes, this farmer’s son from County Derry made his poetry physical, a form of manual labour inherited from men who worked the land.
“Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests/I’ll dig with it, ” he wrote in that first sound statement of intent. Through his 30s and 40s, and his still-definitive collection North, Heaney considered the political – “the Irish thing”, he called it – and the impossible problem of holding up words against bullets. The Troubles were no-win for everybody, including the poet, who seemed from one side a Catholic romantic and from the other a remote voyeur, so clear and concrete in his ambivalence that it was taken as an affront.
“You confused evasion and artistic tact, ” Heaney wrote later in Station Island, turning the ghost voice of his own murdered cousin against himself. “The Protestant who shot me through the head/I accuse directly, but indirectly, you.” It was only later that Heaney started to use the terms Hughes always advised him against, addressing soul and spirit in lines less stressed than they had been, transforming his subjects from earth to air. As Heaney put it in Fosterling: “I waited until I was nearly fifty/To credit marvels . . . ”
In 1995 came the Nobel Prize for Literature, or “the Stockholm thing” as Heaney came to call it, carrying on almost regardless to become in his advancing years a poet of the synapses. His most recent verses have crackled and leapt from personal to universal, present to distant memory, solid object to abstract image, according to sudden and invisible intuitions.
And here, in District And Circle, may be the point where it all comes together. Heaney has made it explicit that these are the first words he has composed in “the post 9/11, post-Iraq invasion world of violent polarisation, crackdown and reprisal”, and the title sequence frames a journey on the London Underground in poetry as ominous and elegiac as that everyday commute has recently become. “And so by night and day to be transported/Through galleried earth with them, the only relict/Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward/ Reflecting in a window mirror-backed/By blasted weeping rockwalls/ Flicker-lit.”
There is real life going on down there, and Heaney represents it, but his allusive hero Dante might be riding in this same carriage through the underworld, alongside the poet’s old self, who worked a summer job in London as a young man, and took the District and Circle line every day. The title, then, might further refer to Heaney’s early reputation for provincialism, and his returning to the same places his boyhood farm, his “country of the mind” by the longest, most circuitous route.
If previous collections have seen breaks and changes in Heaney’s way of writing, there are tracks and traces of past life and work running right through this one. The opening poem, The Turnip- Snedder, describes that agricultural machine in such palpable terms that it might have appeared in Death Of A Naturalist “standing guard/ on four braced greaves” were it not for the cool and frightening suggestion of indifferent slaughter in its operation. “‘This is the way that God sees life, ‘ it said . . . as the handle turned/and turnip-heads were let fall and fed/to the juiced-up inner blades . . . ” The Blackbird Of Glanmore recalls Heaney’s brother’s death the subject of his most famous poem, Mid-Term Break amid the more oblique thought process of a much older man, the bird a local and traditional omen of death panicked away by the “clunk” of a modern automatic lock.
And in the best, most resounding of these pieces, The Tollund Man In Springtime, the ancient body in the bog that Heaney once obsessed over, now awakens to the sound of traffic, and rises to walk among us, passing “unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes”, a soul exceeding its circumstances. Some of this reads like Heaney repeating himself. Much of it is less subtle and numinous than his work seemed to become after he won the Nobel Prize, but the overall effect is a sense of reenforcement. The words are more practical and useful than they have been since Heaney first started using them as tools. In Poet To Blacksmith, his translation of an old Irish letter detailing the exact specifications of the perfect spade, Heaney also makes clear the kind of language that is now most needed, a “side-arm to take on the earth . . . The thing to have purchase and spring and be fit for the strain . . . And best of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell”.
Heaney has recently said that poetry is “a fortification for the self”, which must surely apply to the readers as much as the writer. This book is the sound of our favourite living poet working twice as hard to find strength, and to give it.
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