Seamus Heaney-Classic or Dud (RIP)

I don't think he's 'selling nostalgia'. Or maybe I do. Maybe he writes nostalgia, and then it sells. Maybe I mean that any nostalgia in his work is real, and not merely done for commercial effect.

For all his success, I don't think of him as a calculating, mercenary figure. (Perhaps that's the point.)

>>> is he a continuation of the romantic movement of woodsworth and co. ?

Yes, I think so; or, he thinks so, and says so.

>>> how does he relate to Yeats, to Joyce, to Kavanaugh(sp), to the rest of irish literuture (sp)

It's complex, but simple. It's whatever it looks like. He relates, they relate back, he relates it to us. The relations are as many as you like. They're hidden, and displayed; closed, and open. The topic is nearly, or really, endless.

I could go on. So could you. So could he. He does.

>>> does anyone else compete with such intense pastorals ?
(are they really pastorals with the muck and the death)

I imagine that they are, eg. in the first volume. But the idea of counter-pastoral might be relevant.

>>> does the poverty become less real and more cute (wrong word, twee, kitsch, something else, thinking of frank mccourt)

Where does he write about poverty, exactly? He does idealize the rural, that's true - but I'm not sure he makes a big deal out of being poor. I'm not sure he *was* poor.

>>> did he deserve the nobel?

If any poet did, let's say he did.

why did he deserve the nobel ?

Thinking about it, I'm not sure that is a big problem though. May be a red cod.

If I apply your post to North, TH, it seems to make some sense. Maybe even good sense.

As far as I can see your ignorance has not shown yet.

Perhaps it will later.

I suppose it's stating the obvious to say how much less personal than Patrick Kavanagh he is, Kavanagh tended to see Ireland and the areas around him more in terms of their effects on him, and perhaps found the things Heaney cherishes stifling, but I am more familiar with Tarry Flynn than anything by either man and perhaps am just projecting that into my answer here.

I think Heaney is as much trying to show the beauty of simple domestic life as being nostalgic. As I say it's been a few years and this thread is a bit intimidating but that's my two cents nonetheless.

Revive because I was reading a little bit of Heaney and out of everything The Harvest Bow just kicked my ass, again. Especially this bit:

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 the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

That line about already homesick for the big lift of these evenings is just something though. It's like a punch in the stomach and a kiss combined. I think the original poster has all this anxiety that the world Heaney writes about doesn't exist at all, that it's a touristic fiction, but it feels real to me, and similar enough to my childhood.

He peaked in 1979, alas, but, wow, until then he improved with each volume.

My favorite:

The Otter

When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
Your fine swimmer's back and shoulders
Surfacing and surfacing again
This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me.
The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
Thinned and disappointed.

Thank God for the slow loadening,
When I hold you now
We are close and deep
As the atmosphere on water.

My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable, lithe
Otter of memory
In the pool of the moment,

Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck.

And suddenly you're out,
Back again, intent as ever,
Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,
Printing the stones

I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges

This picture is so perfectly described

(You've connected the dots, as far as the original poster goes, right?)

oh yeah

similar spelling

ie, why I missed this thread first

So it's interesting, from my alien perspective which I more or less hate to bring into this conversation, that what you're liking is how familiar everything rings.

where would a person start with heaney?

xpost Probably, the stuff I like least is the really Northern Irish stuff, which I can't relate to really, but the stuff about old women and bicycles and the countryside feels so primal.

I'd say Field Work has my favourite stuff, especially the harvest bow.

Agree on Field Work as his best ("The Otter," "Glanmore Sonnets," "A Dream of Badgers"). You can find a cheap used copy of the 1987 collection easily.

Thanks guys!

The Skunk is amazing, and a much sexier Heaney than I'm used to.

The Skunk

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble
At a funeral mass, the skunk's tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.

The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
My desk light softened beyond the verandah.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
I began to be tense as a voyeur.

After eleven years I was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the word 'wife'
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and air

Of California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
Ordinary, mysterious skunk,
Mythologized, demythologized,
Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

It all came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Sorry the page it was on was horrible

loads of bouncing ads

His name is SO FUN to say

"sheerrrrmussss heeeeaaaarnnny"

I may be alone on this one, but his translation of 'Beowulf' was excellent. Gave it the playfulness that had been missing from it, and his verse just flows so beautifully, it's like I'd never read the poem before.

I named one of my cats after Seamus Heany

I agree with VegemiteGrrrl about his Beowulf. It was quite an artful rendition and makes the poem both accessible and alive.

Seamus Heaney

was just gonna link you this

ok then.

And though I was reluctant
I turned to meet his face and the shock

is still in me at what I saw. 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...'

hmmm thread's short but on-point, note to self, read heaney. Any further perspectives?

With ikr, obv (always, p much)- if you're from rural ireland you'll recognise heaney's scapes, they're maybe idealised but they're far from invented.

sorry for xp breaches stet hasn't seen fit to code for nokia 5230's yet etc

RIP.

one of the greatest i think

Aw man RIP

Oh shit. RIP.

Met him once, totally embarrassed myself by blurting something 'amusing' about how he'd even managed to bring the depressing South Armagh shithole my mother was from into one of his poems; he fairly gently reminded me that the poem was about his cousin being murdered. Bought me a drink all the same. He seemed a good man from that evening.

North is one of my favorite volumes of poetry of the 20th century. His technique was considerable.

Being honest I never really learned to love his work even though I bought most of what he published and tried to get into it. But I had massive respect for his skill and integrity and he always seemed such a kindly, decent man.

In the years after uni I stayed in touch with a fellow student who was starting to attract some attention as a promising young poet, and he used to send me drafts of his work for comment. (I also sent him some stuff but I was playing at poetry by comparison). Then out of the blue he sent me a letter saying he'd forwarded some of his stuff to Heaney, and had had a very friendly reply with some very thoughtful, constructive criticism of his work. So I was in the slightly bizarre situation where my friend was getting his work critiqued by two people, me and Heaney. Bit like getting tips on composition from Bernstein and the kids' piano teacher down the street.

clearly a v gentle, nice person.

darraghmac's point about this

if you're from rural ireland you'll recognise heaney's scapes, they're maybe idealised but they're far from invented.

feels right (tho i'm not from rural ireland). the land is potent with things that aren't visible in it in Heaney, but *feels* right (the colours, the sensations), as if you're standing in it.

been a while since i've read any, seems like an opportune if sad time to do so this evening.

RIP Seamus

again, it's great that every single thread about an individual on the board is eventually gonna end with RIP. wtf

You had perhaps envisaged......?

the Elvis thread doesn't tbf

The Otter:

When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
Your fine swimmer's back and shoulders
Surfacing and surfacing again
This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me.
The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
Thinned and disappointed.

Thank God for the slow loadening,
When I hold you now
We are close and deep
As the atmosphere on water.

My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable, lithe
Otter of memory
In the pool of the moment,

Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck.

And suddenly you're out,
Back again, intent as ever,
Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,
Printing the stones.

Did he write anything about death being the ultimate accomplishment, as ILX thread titles seem to "envisage"?

Morbs i agree with you, i don't see why it has to be appended to the thread title especially since that only applies to people who die whilst ILX is functioning

classic or dead

We read this in second class in secondary school. last verse gets me every time.

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

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.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and 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.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

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.

always liked this one

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.

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

You were a poet, Seamus. RIP.

Such a sensual versifier. Ever read "Glanmore Sonnets" aloud? Damn.

didn't know he was so popular!

He was rare among modern poets in that not only the vast majority of critics and academics praised him, but millions of readers also bought him. By some estimates he was the best-read living poet in the world in recent decades.

Writing in the english language gets you more potential readers than polish or lett, plus he was not a 'difficult' poet and wrote of accessible subjects in ways people could understand. This assists popularity greatly.

i think the key part of that is the 'not only'

i mean lots of ppl write accessible english poetry.

Thank you for a great Beowulf translation, Mr Heaney. May you rest in peace.

That Beowulf translation is all I've read of his, but holy fuck. The stuff posted in this thread is great; I'll have to grab up a couple of books.

good thing is his stuff is always in used bookstores.

My uncle has a postcard from him complimenting one of his poems which was kind of a riff of one of heaney's. lovely warm jokey scribble in green ink on a soggy card sent from an imperial garden somewhere on an amused whim and signed off with a scrawled "seamus h". what a treasure.

hopefully we'll get a Collected Poems in book form now, the reader in me has never succumbed to the lure of the CD set

Unless Heaney bounced around among several high end publishers who cannot agree how to share rights so the project can proceed, I'm guessing we should be able to buy a Collecetd Poems before Christmas of 2016.

he's got two volumes of selected poems which together go for $10 on Amazon.

here's where I admit: unless the poet wasn't prolific, I don't like those bricks called collected poems.

the size of the Geoffrey Hill collected poems paperback on my shelf, for example, is perfect.

I kind of like them. They are like crawling around in a kid's fort made of cardboard boxes that grew to absurd proportions.

Wrote a quick obit.

yeah, i get those big "collected works" volumes and then am intimidated by them. i'm more likely to pick up and finish a chapbook

for heaney you could do worse than "field work"

aside from his poetry enjoy reading interviews with this guy, he's gentle yes but also had a mind like a fist --just brilliant.

FROM THE FRONTIER OF WRITING

The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration--

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

Writing in the english language gets you more potential readers than polish or lett, plus he was not a 'difficult' poet and wrote of accessible subjects in ways people could understand. This assists popularity greatly.

He also wrote in a persona that – it is comfortable to imagine – reflects one's own personality: down to earth, sensible and honest. That's one powerful bait. Then we transfer these qualities on to the man, which encourages us to read further poems of his favourably. And that's another. Also he is from a sad place where bad things happen because of a war, so when the narrator of a poem talks about soldiers pointing guns at him, we assume the author must also have had guns pointed at him, making him sympathetic to us: and that's a third.

If you cut through all that, it frees you up to ask whether there aren't a lot of emotional snares in several of his most celebrated poems:

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.

Everything in my italics is a cliche - a stock phrase. And the rhythm of the poem comes to several satisfying stops - little moments of summing up. I'm emulating it here - you see what I mean.

I'm not, as it happens, limbering up to call Seamus Heaney a 'dud', but if we look at what the poems do, rather than what they say, they prove to be quite manipulative.

I kind of like them. They are like crawling around in a kid's fort made of cardboard boxes that grew to absurd proportions.

this is it. the collected Ted Hughes is ridiculously unwieldy for many purposes but i love these things as model universes to be visited at will.

i'm not sure it's a bad thing for poets to make some use of cliché, obviously you wouldn't want the poetry to be stuffed with it since they are kind of the enemy of poetry in the end. it's true he doesn't really toy with them there.

he is an emotional writer. there is pathos and melodrama in his work. he does seek "effects." i also think there is a lot of invention and play. and as populist as he was, or appeared to be, i don't think his body of work is without its challenges. so overall i'm not sure it's fair to accuse him of pandering, or "manipulation" (always a fraught word). i mean, there's a reason he's revered among his peers, and it isn't because he's the thomas kinkade of poetry.

You can write your second paragraph about Robert Frost and it still works.

who IS the thomas kinkade of poetry, though?

http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2013/08/30/i-must-google-seamus-heany-later-and-pretend-to-like-his-work-thinks-waterford-man/

Cardamom what you do and dont consider to be stock phrases seems completely arbitrary to me tbh

no he's right, I'm always on about weeping soldering irons.

http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2013/08/30/i-must-google-seamus-heany-later-and-pretend-to-like-his-work-thinks-waterford-man/

― Old Boy In Network (Michael B), Saturday, August 31, 2013 9:08 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

xp

Sorry cardamom, that was a bit brusque, (& I made gender assumption). But I think you're being a bit unfair. Because… (give me 15 min, need to put prac crit hat on)

a bit… a bit… tsk.

lso he is from a sad place where bad things happen because of a war, so when the narrator of a poem talks about soldiers pointing guns at him, we assume the author must also have had guns pointed at him, making him sympathetic to us

This is reductive, both of what Heaney does in his poems & of reader's responses to them: he's making complicated meshes of sound, symbol and meaning in response to deep historical, cultural and political faultlines. Should a NI poet just ignore the experience of living in the province? Is trying to find a way into it or through it, without falling back on polemic or partisan poses out-of-bounds? And why shouldn't readers want to engage with that? Is poetry meant to be outside history, politics, personal experience?

Deems otm, I don't get your idea of 'stock phrase'. 'peeling potatoes' is, to me, a widely understood way of saying 'peeling potatoes', 'parish priest at her bedside' is again plain language, weeping's a striking compressed image when pulled for falling solder, And why didn't you highlight 'hammer and tongs'? That's an actual cliche that he's deliberately dropped in (not sure why - wants to catch some casual demotic note while recalling masculine forge-labour in opposition to the intimate & domestic potato peeling space maybe? Also picking up Door into the Dark, his blacksmith poem.)

Are they cliches because they're Irishry? As ppl argue upthread in response to the original post, it's not the Quiet Man - but if you want to draw 50s farm life in Ulster, there will actually be priests and potatoes and mass. Though I guesss early Paul Muldoon might be an answer to that.

Everything in my italics is a cliche - a stock phrase. And the rhythm of the poem comes to several satisfying stops - little moments of summing up. I'm emulating it here - you see what I mean.

Well the little stops are fairly carefully placed - the most obvious one 'And again let fall.' is an attempt to mimic the dropping imo (I am a bit distrustful of that kind of reaching after physicality in verse, but Heaney is very good at it, and seems to know that there's something quixotic about it, it'll always fail in the end) . And he's doing that broken rhythm before hitting the rush of the long sentence with full rhymes that he carries through the sestet, & breaks at the end for the final line, reaching for surprise more than satisfaction I think - an up-in-the-airness, a moment out of time.

Which isn't disagreeing you maybe - there's deliberate rhetorical effect here - but what you're calling 'manipulative', I see as artful, or well-made, or a good-faith attempt to use the tools of poetry to bring together and be true to thought, memory, language. And what sort of poetry wouldn't be manipulative in one way or another?

I've got my own reservations about Heaney - he does feel a bit narrow sometimes, like there are too many dad-on-the-farm anecdotes, then a bit too statesmanlike, steady and predictable as he got on, but he was a remarkable poet (and translator and essayist).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzJgbNANzk

Posts itt

tbf to cardamom it wasnt like heaney was ranked to the dogs and back in that post. i just disagreed with almost all of the workings shown. such is the delight of art i suppose, very little valid nor otherwise that evokes thought or depth or feeling,or, especially, an interesting analysis or discussion.

I am always somewhat amused when 'deems' occurs outside of ilf btw

Like if yr dad started calling you by yr school nickname or something

think heaney wrote a poem about that

i wish there were more opportunities to see poets read stuff on TV that wasn't some poorly recorded CSPAN thing

yeah, i get those big "collected works" volumes and then am intimidated by them. i'm more likely to pick up and finish a chapbook

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Saturday, August 31, 2013 2:26 AM (18 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is why i like thin little 'selecteds' even more, feels like a tightly edited best-of.

i was never really into his stuff. i don't like or dislike any of u enough today to be arsed getting into it tho, but probably for reasons not a million miles away from some things touched on itt

props tho for his interest in contemporary verse in translation & currents of poetry in folk rhyme. books like the biggest egg in the world and the rattle bag had a big influence on me

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/818963/seamush.jpg

i'm not sure it's a bad thing for poets to make some use of cliché, obviously you wouldn't want the poetry to be stuffed with it since they are kind of the enemy of poetry in the end. it's true he doesn't really toy with them there.

I agree. Cliches aren't immediately a problem - there are whole schools of poetry that work around the use of stock images. It's just that those that are there in Heaney's work are very rarely mentioned, and not just now in obit season either.

he is an emotional writer. there is pathos and melodrama in his work. he does seek "effects." i also think there is a lot of invention and play. and as populist as he was, or appeared to be, i don't think his body of work is without its challenges.

Yup

so overall i'm not sure it's fair to accuse him of pandering, or "manipulation" (always a fraught word). i mean, there's a reason he's revered among his peers, and it isn't because he's the thomas kinkade of poetry.

See I think there's room to place him as both 'manipulative' and also, as you say, as having invention, play, challenges.

(IMHO there is no actual Thomas Kinkade of poetry in published, talked-about poetry, the schmaltz is much more insidious than that)

The Hallmark Greeting Card Company might be considered as the equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade of poetry.

I didn't see this thread had been revived, v glad despite sad circumstances

There's a turn of phrase that he has that feels like, this is what it might sound like if my grandmother wrote poetry. Remembering old days, but being sentimental about v abrupt things like the death of a child, or your closest moment peeling potatoes. Idk, it all feels very true to the heart of that generation, that ~kind of life~, esp farm life. The familiarity of how those experiences *feel* is the thing I like about his poetry.

*dabs eye with hanky*

@Woof - broadly agree with yr disagreements with my original post

Agree very much with statesman like

Paul Simon weighs in:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/another-kind-of-music/?emc=edit_tnt_20130831&tntemail0=y&_r=0

Woofs post so good

Pinefox in brusque detached lecture mode also so good

Still looking for that definitive edition of his collected poetry. I am guessing his various publishers must be loathe to cede rights so as to allow the project, because finding an editor ought to be fairly simple.

Very kind 2018 post above from Darraghmac.

A little of the specific analysis of Heaney I'd wondered about, can be found above.

I maintain that in much of the later work I can't see the tautness or design. Maybe even in some earlier work too. Something I have wondered about for years.

The LRB podcast on Heaney was good: https://www.lrb.co.uk/2019/05/30/lrb-podcast/heaney-overheard

There's a series of these; they've just 'done' Lowell.

Yes the selection of authors did look appealing (or: standard and familiar to me).

I own Electric Light and Field Work — any recommendations as far as where to go from there?

Station Island for the first half.

I’ve always liked North, though a large part of it is that I really like his bog body poems. Probably because it’s landscape I’m familiar with and it feels so visceral. And North has Mossbawn, which always packs a punch years after I first read it. Well, the first part anyway. Makes my chest loosen up and tears prick at the corners of my eyes.

We had Scaffolding read at our wedding; obvious choice but everyone loved it and it made me think of my nana, who would have loved it too.

I have Seeing Things but I’m too stuck on Lightenings to give an unqualified recommendation. That’s not a condemnation of the rest, but every time I look at it I go to part viii and just marvel all over again.

At its best his precision is breathtaking. Few poets rely on four- or five-word verse sentences that sing with odd meters without lapsing into the merely conversational.

I used to teach "The Skunk" about 15 years ago when I still got poetry classes. The opening!

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble
At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.

Or this excerpt from the first of the "Glanmore Sonnets":

Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs.

The Harvest Bow, fuck.

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,

Heaney's continual rewriting of his father (and, by extension, what he stands for in his personal and wider mythology) is like a counterpoint to Beckett who said he couldn't write about his father, just walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.

That 'sootfall' in the Skunk is, well, what is it - it's precise, it's hot, it's a deferred, private eureka. Damn.

By the by, I wonder if it's a direct reference to Lowell's skunk?

it sure is!

He has a beautiful essay on Lowell in The Redress of Poetry.

I read that in a blur a while back. I need to read it again. I have Finder's Keeper's on a shelf in front of me, unfinished.

Read the Redress of Poetry in a blur, I mean - I don't remember the Lowell essay at all!

My bad! It was "Lowell's Command," published in the late seventites.

Which is in Finders Keepers it turns out! Will have a read.

Reading Follower again, I wonder if there's some direct dialogue with Beckett's comment about his father in there or if it's just a more common trope about loss and parenthood.

I doubt that Heaney had even really read Beckett then! (The marvellous interviews book STEPPING STONES might confirm.)

I do like a lot of the STATION ISLAND part 1 poems, and then I like much of the big part 2, ie: title section. I don't know the Sweeney material so well but I ought to.

On reflection that volume's almost my favourite Heaney book. But I also always like what I find of THE HAW LANTERN. The abstract allegorical poems in that are something else.

I do too, especially "From the Frontier of Writing."

Alphabets
Terminus
From the Frontier of Writing
The Haw Lantern
The Stone Grinder
A Daylight Art
Parable Island
From the Republic of Conscience
Hailstones
Two Quick Notes
The Stone Verdict
From the Land of the Unspoken
A Ship of Death
The Spoonbait
In Memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald
The Old Team
Clearances: In Memoriam M.K.H.
Clearances 1
Clearances 2
Clearances 3
Clearances 4
Clearances 5
Clearances 6
Clearances 7
Clearances 8
The Milk Factory
The Summer of Lost Rachel
The Wishing Tree
A Postcard from Iceland
A Peacock's Feather
Grotus and Coventina
Holding Course
The Song of the Bullets
Wolfe Tone
A Shooting Script
From the Canton of Expectation
The Mud Vision
The Disappearing Island
The Riddle

I think that is quite a list.

The four 'From' poems are indeed what I was getting at - the first two at least tremendous.

I think he wrote the second for Amnesty.

I come back - when I actually read him - to the fact that Heaney, much more especially late Heaney, has certain obsessions that he unabashedly indulges, primarily:

1: his rural childhood (I don't especially see the father as central to this; more place, objects, etc) -- and various named local characters, who are by definition unknown to almost all readers

2: the classics, ie: poetry, mythology or whatever from ancient Greece, maybe with Rome and old Norse also thrown in. There must be a fair number of people who see this stuff and think: YES - HEANEY'S REWRITING VIRGIL'S LAST WORK! But then a majority must be like me and have no idea of any of these works, and no identification, unfortunately, with the passion that presumably draws Heaney to them. He must LOVE this stuff, love engaging in depth with it, to go on about it SO MUCH.

You can say that 2) shows the limits of the audience, it's our fault, and Heaney is prompting us to learn. That's reasonable and optimistic. Most of us won't learn that much.

1) meanwhile can't be blamed on the reader, ie: you could only know who those people were if you read an in-depth biography of him.

What would be an equivalent? Maybe ... a contemporary person writing about their childhood friends from 20 or 30 years ago, and going on and on about things like ice lollies, Space Hoppers, Bros, Pokemon, etc -- and then, the rest of the time, going in for endless rewrites of a certain body of culture -- like, say ... STAR TREK. So every poem that wasn't about lollies or seeing Bros on TotP in 1988 would be eg: 'The Search For Spock, Scene III', in verse form.

This is a way for me to perceive and to say that despite my great affection for Heaney, I find his actual poetic choices, of subject etc, often dead ends, private obsessions. Suppose someone did write lots of poems about Bros (I can imagine it) - they would have some fans but might they not be seen as narrow unless they worked to show its importance and invite a broader readership to understand it?

It's funny, then, that he is also seen as such a public poet - for good reason, to be sure.

PS / I do think that is mainly a statement about LATE Heaney -- I don't really recall WINTERING OUT and NORTH being like that at all. It's ELECTRIC LIGHT, DISTRICT AND CIRCLE et al, that are.

A recent death had me remembering:

I.I.87

Dangerous pavements.

But I face the ice this year

With my father’s stick.

A late turn toward the classics is a hallmark of that generation's aging poets. I think of McClatchy, Wilbur, Hecht, etc. Only Merrill avoided it because he's too weird and camp.

Christopher Logue, though War Music was ongoing, I think. Edwin Morgan followed a similar path, mostly, with his later focus on translation. Perhaps age returns you to make use of the stuff you pushed against in your youth.

Also Tony Harrison (for a long time), + Don Paterson (a bit younger), Paulin I expect, + others.

Unsure though this was something they had pushed against. In Heaney's case at least I think he was always at home with it, and indulged himself in it more and more.

I suppose if you were a classicist to any degree you could see it differently. A bit like I do Ciaran Carson's ALEXANDRINE PLAN, the translations from French Symbolism - a project that did mean something to me, in a way that classics don't.

'Pushed against' is too hard, you're right. But they weren't neo-classicists, I guess.

is there anything to be said for the important thing being the expression of love for or engagement with classics or local characters rather than a case for their unlensed-through-heaney importance one way or the other, that heaney (or any writer) either has confidence in his ability to encapsulate the experience of himself-as-vehicle for (or the universality of) the emotions or knowledges or experiences themselves separate to lobbying for the actual focii

we dont need to have dug heaneys spuds to appreciate his telling of digging for spuds. to push it out again we can never have dug a spud at all and still have our own resonant facsimile of spud digging.

side: am i the only ilxor to have dug spuds

I don't really think I go along with that argument, because when he rewrites the classics, or talks about local characters, they don't do much for me, where on your reading, they should do, because of his love for them.

re digging, if you mean the actual poem 'Digging', then one of the reasons it works is that it's about multiple things: writing; generations, father and son; the difference between the manual and intellectual / lettered worker; and even the faint hint of violence in the gun (though risk of pre-Troubles anachronism here). We can think about them and not think much about actual digging - as I don't.

xp otm & no.

New thought I had is that insofar as late Heaney, on my reading, happily goes on about private obsessions that don't really interest a reader, and makes the reader do all the work of trying to find a point in this private stuff --

in that, he is curiously like an avant-garde type, of the Prynne School, Keston Sutherland, or whoever - people who 'don't compromise with easy readability', 'pursue an uncompromising intellectual agenda and rewrite the contract between author and reader', etc.

Which is droll in that, as a great Faber poet, he is not much someone they would identify with.

I have dug for spuds every year

well its a good discussion anyway

My families Dundonian, so I've picked a fair few tatties (though as a Fifer berries were more common).

I met Heaney a couple of times. Patient, but not warm (I might just have that effect on people).

An uneducated guess might be that this was nothing to do with you (though I have no idea of you or your relation to him), but just that Heaney, as someone very often required to meet strangers at public events, had become guarded about it and treated it as a professional duty. Rather as a Queen or President could.

I have the impression that he was warm with people he knew and liked a lot. As of course most of us try to be.

I expect many of us have particular stories of meeting writers and what they said. Perhaps it is or should be a thread.

I don't like Andrew O'Hagan but his memoir about touring Ireland and Scotland with Heaney and Karl Miller has some interest for the personal Heaney element.

Darraghmac, I think you would still need to enter the thought experiment of reading someone who wrote many poems about Bros and Commodore 64s, and many other poems about STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE, and finding that they generated a warmth, love and fascination that was not connected to these particular contents but was a matter of the way the poet loved these things, which was something that anyone could identify with.

I think I can imagine that, and I could get on board with the Commodore 64 poems for at least a couple of poems -- but I maintain that it would be viewed as oddly narrow if it went on for book after book, and the 5th book exciting readers with SPOCK REDIVIVUS and 'BONES' IN SPACE.

A couple of specifics:

In ELECTRIC LIGHT: the poem 'Known World' seems to me very slack -- literally reproducing material from an old notebook, and not doing anything decisive or poetic with it.

'The Clothes Shrine' on the other hand I find worthwhile:

The clothes shrine

It was a whole new sweetness
in the early days to find
light white muslin blouses
on a see-through nylon line
drip-dying in the bathroom
or a nylon slip in the shine
of it's own electricity-
as if St. Brigid once more
had rigged up a ray of sun
like the one she'd strung on air
to dry her own cloak on
(hard-pressed Brigid, so
unstoppably on the go)-
the damp and slump and unfair
drag of the workday
made light of and got through
as usual, brilliantly.

-- as it is talking about something recognisable, in fact even something quite subtly important (to do with sharing a life with a member of the opposite sex) and taking it somewhere, making the everyday into something more interesting; and as the language is dense or pleasing enough ('rigged up a ray of sun' with 'brilliantly' a mildly punning final echo of the light).

Though I also fear in this poem a risk of tweeness, especially '(hard-pressed Brigid, so / unstoppably on the go)' - a sense of chuckling gaily at the feminine presence rather than honouring it as the main tone suggests. I don't greatly blame Heaney for this, the poem is well-intentioned, but I think this unfortunate resonance may come across.

heh, a most curious experiment proposal alright and i will attempt it at some stage today amidst my usual thought experiment of trying to get into the mindset of somebody enthusuastic about sharepoint

'Turpin Song' is yet another poem about an object in the house when he was growing up, but does have the peculiar interest of bizarrely bringing in Kubrick's 2001.

Read Field Work over the last couple of days. I mean, first thought is how dazzling it is as a collection - how free it is, ranging. Oracular, even? I made some brief notes as I read and wondered at the frequent recourse to the mouth the tongue and, not that it particularly needs a rosetta stone, if a phrase from the second Glanmore Sonnet might be the heart of it: 'words entering almost'. It's a loose theory but the book opens with a fierce act of eating ('Oysters' - 'I ate that day/Deliberately, that its tang/ might quicken me all into verb, pure verb') and closes with an image of eternal devouring in 'Ugolino' and there is frequent reference to mouths and speaking: 'my tongue was a filling estuary', 'my tongue moved, a swung, relaxing hinge' 'your voice was a harrassed pulpit'. Even a forehead is modified with the adjective 'candid'.

I suppose it's something of a cliche to consider Heaney's move to Wicklow as a kind of retreat or exile, a place where he was given the space for voices to come, bidden or otherwise but the title of the book does give that sense of him making recordings or soundings of his personal mythology.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Also, jesus christ the Harvest Bow.

That’s interesting, I’d never put the tongue imagery together like that, but it’s entirely true. It’s a very personal collection. I need to reread properly as you have done, but I recall it’s pretty political (even his scattered but repeated mentions of the hedge school tap into the past of Irish children not being permitted to be educated) but it’s also tinged with sex; The Skunk and The Otter most obviously, but even The Guttural Muse when he is watching young people after a night out. There’s lots of animal/naturalistic imagery too, the bag of flies as “policeman run amok” being particularly sharp. I am also amused by his quiet embarrassment when he is reminded that he is more removed from the world than he would like to think (talking to the man in the pub in Casualty, the third-last and penultimate stanzas in An Afterwards).

My only contribution to this thread is that today I discovered two of the hunger strikers AND Dominic "Mad Dog" McGlinchey grew up in the same village as Heaney. Seems a pretty hardcore place!

Biden likes to quote that bit Hof Heaney's Sophocles translation

It’s funny, early in the Inauguration gala, I mentioned to someone that Heaney/Sophocles “when hope and history rhyme” poem has become as much of a ceremonial standard as “Hallelujah.” And then Lin Manuel-Miranda delivered it...

I was blown away by it, first time I read it in DoubleTake magazine, and then in as part of NY Times poetry op-ed page.

I'm quite conscious of speaking from a position of ignorance with regards to Irish politics gyac, so tend towards keeping my gob shut (apt, given what I was babbling on about earlier)! But yes, the book is full of elegies for the dead and missing. There's one particularly vivid image of tanks rolling down the Toome Road, camouflaged in alder branches, which is striking for so many reasons: the idea of camouflaging a tank (itself a kind of silencing, however pointless), the appropriating of the landscape, the echoes of the English forces marching on Dunsinane in Macbeth.

Totally agree on how erotic it is. 'The sootfall of your things at bedtime' is about as erotic a line as I can think of in poetry ( I vaguely wonder if Bill Callahan nicked it for 'All Your Woman Things'?

Yeah The Toome Road is actually great in giving that sense of suppressed but still strongly felt anger (“How long were they approaching down my roads as if they owned them?”) iirc Colm Toibin said when Heaney died that he liked that “In a time of burnings and bombings he used poetry to offer an alternative world...” and I’m like, bitch, have you ever read Heaney? The anger is still there, he wishes for peace but he is still from Derry and it colours his poetry every now and then. How could it not?

Is the Music of What Happens worth a look? It's back up on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bxwv/seamus-heaney-and-the-music-of-what-happens

I watched this ^^. It's goodly. Heavy focus on the poems but mostly via interviews with his immediate family and photography of Ireland - so no real critical component at all (despite the presence of Helen Vendler) if that's a deal breaker.

It’s not, but also I’d forgotten about this so I appreciate the reminder!

I enjoyed it; there is indeed not a great critical component, but I doubt it would've fell in its place in this doc. There's a serene quality to the imagery of days past paired with hearing his poems. And I appreciated hearing the family members just talk about Heaney.

From a young age, Seamus Heaney was friends, and then sometimes collaborator, with the poet and critic Seamus Deane.

Seamus Deane has just died aged 81.

It is incredible - in a good way, for once - to observe the official recognition from the Irish head of state, let alone other literary people:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/president-leads-tributes-to-seamus-deane-1.4564086

Literally unthinkable that the UK head of state or head of government should offer such a response in an equivalent case.

“The death of Seamus Deane is an incalculable loss to Irish critical writing, indeed Irish writing in general,” the President said, “as his passing represents not only the loss of a foremost critic but of a distinguished poet, novelist and internationally acclaimed university teacher.

“Seamus Deane’s contribution to critical and creative writing was delivered, not only at home in Ireland but in some of the most prestigious universities of the United States of America, be it Berkeley, Notre Dame, Indiana, Oregon. In such universities, news of Seamus Deane’s participation in a seminar immediately drew huge interest from scholars young and old, partly due, no doubt, to the sheer breath of the materials he would cover, but also due to the unique connection he would make between the life and the work.

“To Derry he leaves the incomparable legacy of the life, the writing, the concerns, the despair and the hope, that he shared with its people and to which so much of the work would respond.

“Few cities have a writer more embedded in its people, its history, its challenges, its hopes and its humour.

“There are, to me, parallels between Seamus Deane’s relationship to Derry and, in his time, Sean O’Casey’s relationship to Dublin in the way the full experience of its peoples are placed at the centre of the writing. All of the living is allowed its place.

“Seamus Deane was, too, a leading part of the great burst of intellectual revival that led to the Crane Bag, the Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature and many other innovations, which will be recalled as examples of the collaboration he had with his scholarly neighbours, and others, in giving a valuable affirmative to the importance and energy of Irish writing. When reasonably criticised for omission in a work he replied with the candour of a critic who had become himself the subject of a legitimate criticism. This was typical of the scholar in him.

“The price paid for a great talent, such as Seamus Deane had, was high and is revealed, I believe, in his work, including his fine novel, Reading in the Dark.

“That work too was delivered with a truth that combined the word, the place, the history, the lives, and the power of communal humour in the act of survival.

“All of this is put so well, for example, in his poem Derry, which opens with the lines:

The unemployment in our bones
Erupting on our hands in stones

The thought of violence a relief,
The act of violence a grief
Our bitterness and love
Hand in glove.

“Eternal peace be with our great writer and critic Seamus Deane. Sabina and I send our sympathies to his family, the people of Derry and his friends and former students at home and abroad. Siochán síoraí dá anam lách.”

Today I cannot stop thinking about how the line “The end of art is peace” in The Harvest Bow feels like a pause, a sigh, an exhalation to me even though the sentence continues. Sometimes you read something written short sharp sentences, like the writer is spitting the words at you, but it’s rarer to find something that feels like a pause as this does IMO.

It’s like

“The end of art is peace…”
breath
“…could be the motto of this frail device”

And that breath is the poet slipping from the mundane to the divine as he has been going all throughout the poem for barely a fraction of a second, before reality calls him back.

I'm reading *Seeing Things*. I've not quite made my mind up about it as a collection, but so many moments catch my breath. The back half of the book is a series of 12-line poems called 'Squarings' and this is buried in there.

Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty shins.

In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting

For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original

Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.

original/ripple internal rhyme so cool

That phrase 'dainty shins' has been pinging around my head all day.

rattle bag is my all-time favorite poetry anthology, even if it has a few too many limericks

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

ooh

For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened

jesus

I'm conscious of clogging the reading thread with my Heaney blatherings so will just leave some of his ruminations on the creative process here, all taken from the Dennis O'Driscoll interviews. Although I suspect they don't bear close examination, they make me feel like my skin is covered in little lights.

Put it this way: some poets and poetry you admire in the way you admire produce in a market. Natural, beautiful stuff, delightfully there in front of you, thickening your sense of being alive. But you're still looking at it. You're savouring it but you can move on to the next display. Then there are other poets and poetry that turn out to be more like plants and growths inside you. It's not so much a case of inspecting the produce as of feeling a life coming into you and through you. You're Jack and at the same time you're the beanstalk. You're the ground and the growth all at once. There's no critical distance, as yet.

The early-in-life experience has been central to me all right. But I'd say you aren't so much trying to describe it as trying to locate it. The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it. But once you do, it's like putting your hand into a nest and finding something beginning to hatch out in your head.

[talking about the poem 'The Salmon Fisher to the Salmon', from his second book Door into the Dark'] 'it started where I always like to start, in the ground of memory and sensation...but there wasn't enough self-forgetfulness'

The ultimate Frostian sensation of the poem coming to itself like a piece of ice on a hot stove.

...material that has been in my memory for so long it has almost become aware of me.

Lorca... implying that poetry requires an inner flamenco, that it must be excited into life by something peremptory, some initial strum or throb that gets you started and drives you farther than you realised you could go.

I'm reading that book now, thanks to the thread.

I was going to put a 'sorry for spoilers Alfred!' message but figured the extracts were more like breadcrumbs than spoilers.

It's meant to be dipped around. I'm reading about Bill Clinton's dinner with him.

I like the book. It has many moments to enjoy.

One is where O'Driscoll rather demandingly gets him to give examples of categories that are something like Public, Social, and Political poets, and in the first or second category he says something like: 'Dare one say Philip Larkin?' - and explains the answer well.

(That's an inexact memory.)

I've often said that he is (was) fabulously elegant, on a level unknown to almost anyone I can think of. In a way, Chinaski's quotations support that.

Coincidentally I've just been reading Bono writing about Bob Geldof being fabulously eloquent. Not quite so sure about that.

Geldof and Heaney both have heinous tastes in haircuts. Seamus Heinous more like. Is it an Irish phenomenon through the early '90s?