Seamus Heaney said famously of his first four volumes of poetry “Up to North, that was one book”. In Late Heaney, Nicholas Allen is concerned with the last four of Heaney’s twelve individual volumes, from The Spirit Level in 1996 to his last published volume Human Chain in 2010.
This makes for a convenient early-middle-late division of the volumes in three quartets. Allen, without labouring the correspondences, sees the last quartet in relation to the volumes up to North against the background of the changes in Heaney’s circumstances and writing life.
As he says at the outset, a great deal more has been written about the work before the Nobel Prize in 1995 than after it. Part of the point of this book is to redress the balance, showing how the late books draw on the same settings and concerns as the early poems but with a new luminosity as well as a new awareness of mortality which Allen calls “an alteration of the light”.
In a brilliant phrase, he calls the way the same themes occur in the last volumes as in the early ones a “cross-hatched technique”: the way a late poem like Eelworks links back to the Lough Neagh Sequence, or the way we are back on the bank of the Moyola/Moyulla in District and Circle in 2006. Part of the power of the late poems is the way they “regather” images in the earlier work in poems open to the elements of a different world.
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There is an associated irony too which Allen does not let us forget: as Heaney’s subject moves past the violence and horrors of the Troubles into a world less marked by “neighbourly murder”, other perspectives, both personal and public, darken the mood with the poet’s ill-health and the “near collapse” of the ecology of Lough Neagh until it becomes a “memorial to the necropolis of the earth that future generations will inherit”. (Necropolis inevitably recalls Heaney’s darkest remark in the Nobel address – that “history is about as instructive as an abattoir”.)
Some crucial events and personal moments are proposed as what Allen calls “waypoints”. He begins with what he sees as the most important of these for the period of the late poems, the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the year before the first of the last four books The Spirit Level.
The period in the mid-1990s was crucial in other ways too: for the ceasefires in Northern Ireland in 1994, and, Allen claims, Heaney’s late but intense familiarity with the culture and landscape of Greece. The title of his first chapter Stockholm in Pylos brings the Nobel and Greece together, and the importance of The Spirit Level makes the next “waypoint” the poem The Gravel Walks and the poems around it.
A second significance of the Nobel moment was it provided Heaney with the occasion to write a speech which Allen examines as a guideline to Heaney’s work – as near as he ever gets to writing a manifesto.
In considering Heaney’s work in relation to place which from the first was a major subject for him, Allen makes effective use of his own familiarity with the world of Heaney’s childhood in an area which is his place of origin too. In another luminous phrase he writes of Heaney’s “love for the sideways talk of his home place”. A central part of this is “hydroculture”, the flow and lift of the watery spaces which constitute the feeling of the landscape.
This is Allen’s established subject: in his brilliant book Seatangled concerned with Ireland, Literature and the Coast, among the writers he discussed was Heaney in a chapter called Heaney Offshore; the second chapter in Late Heaney Landscapes, extends this to onshore Heaney, the inland waters around Lough Neagh and the Bann.
In the 12 years since his death there have been several attempts to categorise Heaney’s late writings. Does Allen find a common factor in the last four books in the way the books up to North are “one book”? He does this very movingly in proposing as a common subject the “literary experience of ageing and illness”. In addition the last chapter on “the Riverbank Fields”sees the riverbank as a locus of elegy (in Virgil as well as Heaney) among loved places and people. Heaney’s great gift is “to gather a series of impressions, drawn over time, in a suitable place” which is a fixed place.
Allen emphasises his elemental practices – things that take their bearings from the surrounding elements: water, light, air “by riverbank and field, in company of presences we might know as ghosts if the poet had not already banished the dark”. The enduring spirit of Late Heaney is elegiac but it is positive and inspirational too.
Bernard O’Donoghue co-edited with Rosie Lavan The Poems of Seamus Heaney (Faber, 2025)
