Landscape, language and history

From the beginning of his career, Heaney has mapped out a territory that allowed him represent his heritage and the fissures of a society in conflict, writes Peter Sirr

TWO YEARS AGO I was driving along a country road near Strokestown in Co Roscommon. It was dark and I was slightly nervous because I didn't know the road well and I was looking for the local secondary school in whose assembly hall Seamus Heaney would be giving a reading. Suddenly out of the darkness loomed a huge ash tree on whose branches I could make out a large cardboard sign with the words "Seamus Heaney" in luminous paint and an arrow pointing to a lane on the right. The improvised sign, the reading that followed to a packed and enthralled audience, and the excitement afterwards, testified to a popularity and a rapport with readership and audience very unusual even in a country which grants occasional notice to poets and poetry. John Banville caught this aspect well in the foreword he wrote to the edition of Seamus Heaney that the Guardian issued in its Great Poets of the 20th century series. "Few poets find a way into the inner ear of the multitude," he said.

Banville's point was also that it's unusual for a poetry of this order to insinuate itself into the public affection, a poetry that offers complex witness to the physical and psychical disturbances of violence at the same time as lyric celebration of the familiar, poems than can be, as the poet himself has put it, "odd as odd and hard and contrary".

From the outset Seamus Heaney was a poet of extraordinary materiality: the visible world swarmed in to be reconstituted in dense stacks of language - those processions of thickly textured nouns and adjectives, that lust for exactitude, for a language that answered the demands of memory and clanged with the force of hammer on anvil. District and Circle is full of the physicality and richly textured responsiveness that announced itself forcefully in Death of a Naturalist, the poet's first volume, published in 1966 by Faber and Faber.

What is it about this poetry that appeals to so many and that has, from the outset, earned itself critical acceptance and admiration of a kind rarely seen, establishing a consensus perhaps best summarised by Christopher Ricks when he called Heaney "the most trusted poet of our islands"?

Part of the appeal, certainly, lies in the subject matter. Heaney's consistent imaginative attention to his rural Co Derry upbringing affords many readers the sense, perhaps, that the life he expresses is part of a collective life of the spirit, the life of an Ireland that belongs to our sense of the past. The verbal gifts that he brings to bear on his subjects gives the work a sensual presence and an appeal to what he himself has called "the auditory imagination" that is hard to resist, in the way that Wordsworth, Hardy or Ted Hughes are hard to resist. There is the rich variety of the work: the poems of nature, the love poems, the poetry of memory, the translations, the essays. And yet, from the very beginning, a current of unease runs through the work, a sense that poetry, for all its aesthetic compensations, may not be enough, that the poet is poised, uncomfortably, between "politics and transcendence", between realism and celebration or between "the atrocious" and the counterlife of imaginative faith.

The narrative of Heaney's poetic career runs parallel to the political disintegration of Northern Ireland and the ensuing violence, and the uncertainty principle is closely linked to the poet's struggle to come to terms both with the violence itself and the poet's response to it. Heaney has had to bear the weight of public expectation - an expectation as ill-defined as it was pervasive - that poetry should somehow answer to violence, division, rupture, that the poet speaks out of the public domain, that his voice must somehow be representative.

Fruitful contradictions are at the heart of Seamus Heaney's work. To understand Heaney it is necessary to appreciate the complexity of his situation - on the one hand the background as a rural, Catholic nationalist, on the other a powerfully intense relationship with the English language and its poetry tradition. The complications and tensions come gradually into focus. The early work offers a first flourish of the gift, a laying down of the world of childhood in dense, heavy textures. The first thing you notice is the intense physicality and natural finesse of the language:

All year the flax-dam
festered in the heart
Of the townland...
Bubbles gargled delicately,
bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze
of sound around the smell.
(Death of a Naturalist)

That's what poems like Blackberry Picking, Death of a Naturalist, Churning Day, The Early Purges do - they weave a strong gauze of sound as they recreate the sensations and rhythms of a farm childhood, as they look for a language that matches the bountiful and yet threatening natural world, that sets it down with a kind of absolute finality. The vision of nature is both realist and numinous - the sense of energies about to break through, or the sense of an alternative configuration of energy, a world near yet remote.

The poems are also concerned with art and its making, the articulation of his own search for a distinctive voice. The very first poem is Digging, a self-conscious account of the vocation of art and a realisation of how that calling will separate him from the world that the poems evoke: "Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I'll dig with it."

The lines seem canonical now, but Digging was a kind of initiation for Heaney; written in the summer of 1964 it was, he has said, "the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words"and "the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrangement of words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into real life".[i] It's a prophetic poem in that digging, in the sense of excavating, unpeeling layers of the past, is at the core of the work.

Throughout his work memory is a trigger and a release into a sense of doubleness, of the intersection of the ordinary and the mysterious which comes through strongly in a poem such as The Diviner, whereas in The Forge in Door into the Dark, an unnamed custodian of a profession that seems to border the real and the imaginary goes about his business until "The rod jerked with precise convulsions,/ Spring water suddenly broadcasting/ Through a green hazel its secret stations."

HEANEY HAS SAID that in his earliest poems he tended to turn away from the immediate tensions - sectarianism, underlying violence - of Northern Ireland in favour of the impulse to write a more personal kind of poem, with Ted Hughes as a strong influence: "one part of my temperament took over: the private County Derry childhood part of myself rather than the slightly aggravated young Catholic male part".[ii] Yet one of the most striking poems in Door into the Dark, Requiem for the Croppies, is an explicit identification with his nationalist heritage. Written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, it returns instead the 1798 rebellion, and presents an image of continuity and resurrection through the voice of a dead croppy. "The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley -/ No kitchens on the run, no striking camp -/ We moved quick and sudden in our own country."

The worsening political situation in the North meant that such explicit gestures became problematic and for nearly 30 years Heaney didn't read Requiem. If he has sometimes tended to read a reluctance to deal explicitly with the contemporary political situation as a suppression of part of his temperament, we need to remind ourselves that poetry doesn't easily accommodate the kind of commentary sometimes expected of it, but we also need to pay due attention to the nature of his imagination.

Requiem for the Croppies is a powerful poem not simply because the poet is writing out his nationalist heritage but because he creates an unforgettable image of endurance out of the "greatcoats full of barley":

Terraced thousands died,
shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked
in our broken wave.
They buried us without
shroud or coffin
And in August the barley
grew up out of the grave.

Heaney's world is now so familiar to his readers that it's important to understand the degree to which his poems map experiences that were not readily available in Irish literature. He has talked of how, for instance, the poetry of Louis MacNeice still felt distant to him, made him feel that he was still "up against the windowpane of literature".[iii] The world of poetry and literature seemed remote from "the world of state scholarships, the Gaelic Athletic Association, October devotions, the Clancy Brothers, buckets and egg-boxes where I had had my being".[iv] This is why Patrick Kavanagh was such a vital figure - he gave Heaney permission to trust his own experience, to make poems, as had Kavanagh, out of "the unregarded data of the life I had lived", and "to dwell without cultural anxiety among the usual landmarks of your life".[v] The crucial collections of the 1970s, Wintering Out (1972), North (1975) and Field Work (1979) see a deepening sense of the poet's vocation, accompanied by the opening out of the poems' perspectives with their forays into history and myth and also by a more charged sense of the poet's role and responsibilities. The poems are prompted by archaeology, philology, the lore and lure of placenames on their borders of language: Anahorish, Broagh, Toome, Moyola. A new formal pressure is also evident: tense, four-line quatrains, a sort of stubby enjambment, thickness of texture, a slowing down, syntactic complexity. Landscape, language and history are intimately connected in these poems, and in them we can read the beginning of a certain kind of public poetry, as Heaney seeks ways to represent his own heritage imaginatively and to begin to cope with the fissures of a society now in deep conflict. In the central sequence of Station Island (1984) the poet, like Dante in the Commedia, encounters the shades of the dead and must go through an ordeal of self-examination. Station Island creates a worrisome zone which continually seems to posit an impossible choice between action and art.

The central struggle in Heaney's work has been "to make space in [his] reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous."[vi] We see this struggle again and again. Seeing Things (1991) offers a double vision, the things that are seen, witnessed, materially present, including the finiteness of life itself, and seeing things in the sense of the glimpsed, imagined, hoped for. The poems in Squarings, one of the freest, most adventurous and unpinnable-down of his works, are happy to remove themselves from the provable, the concrete, and dwell in the realm of the spirit, in "anglings, aimings, feints and squints".

In some ways Heaney's is a remarkably consistent work. The reach and ambition might grow from book to book but the poetry is faithful to the territory mapped out from the start, and each collection continues to circle obsessively round the source.

Again and again, memory is the trigger that releases the poetry. Heaney is like a still life artist who needs to arrange the loved and familiar world so that it can shine back its power and strangeness. The later books all draw from the well of the past, and often revisit his own previous configurations of it, so that there is a constant dialogue with himself as poet.

The poems in the later books are also sharpened by their awareness of mortality. Part of Heaney's backward glance is a consolidation of faith in the face of obliteration, as in the memorable image in Clearances of the felled chestnut tree, which had been planted at his birth, "its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,/ A soul ramifying and forever/ Silent, beyond silence listened for."

A persistent vein of elegy makes itself felt. District and Circle, in particular, is haunted by death; there are elegies for Czeslaw Milosz, Ted Hughes, George Seferis, and the superb The Lift for his sister. One of the difficulties of writing about Seamus Heaney is that inevitably you end up talking a lot about the themes and concerns of the work. This is fine on some levels; there is, after all, a distinct Heaney set of concerns, a distinct trajectory and narrative where each collection can be slotted, and because the work itself is highly reflexive the different stances and arguments are actually embedded in the poetry so that you could very easily only discuss the content and subjects. This can make it easy to miss what is truly valuable and unmissable. We don't go to poets for the whole story of their work; we rarely even go to poets for the specifics of what they say. We go because we are led by our ears, our instincts, because of the way a particular configuration of language operates on mind, heart, body and won't let us go. We go because a particular arrangement of lines seems so absolutely true and unimaginable in any other way that we want to look and listen repeatedly.

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in
the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket...

(from Mossbawn, I. Sunlight)

Everyone will go back to their own poems for their own reasons; there is an astonishing richness of work to choose from. Again and again the poetry of Seamus Heaney discovers the release into pleasure that is one of the truest sources of all poetry, and if we attend to it we might learn, like the poet, to be in step with what escapes us.

This is an edited version of an introductory essay to Seamus Heaney: Collected Poems, a 15-CD box set of Seamus Heaney reading his 11 poetry collections, published by RTÉ. €74.95

[i] Seamus Heaney, 'Feelings into Words' in Finders Keepers, Selected Prose 1971-2001, Faber and Faber, 2002, p14 [ii] Seamus Heaney, 'Unhappy and at Home,' interview by Seamus Deane, Crane Bag 1:1 (Spring 1977), p63 [iii] Seamus Heaney, 'The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Patrick Kavanagh' in Finders Keepers, Selected Prose 1971-2001, p139 [iv] Ibid, 139 [v]Seamus Heany, 'Crediting Poetry' in Opened Ground Poems 1966-1996, Faber and Faber