Station Island
Garrison, David
Books: TRANSIENT FIXITIES / think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity - it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost...
...There are twelve poems, or "stations," here...
...a friend murdered by Protestant men whom he knew well, whom he recognized from his bedroom window...
...Keats at one point in his brief career worked up the nerve to ask in a letter if perhaps the spirit presiding over his quickly maturing verse might be Shakespeare's...
...Remember everything and keep your head...
...and concludes with a group of songs written for a Sweeney-like sensibility (and voice) that finds itself in our world at our time...
...another friend, an archaeologist who died of illness at thirty-two — "familiar stone/had me half-numbed to face the thing alone...
...And yet the poet's voice has begun to rise of its own, and to find, like his masters', his own songs and his own visions...
...The whole is a gift to and a love of language...
...Here indeed are the finest poems in a fine book...
...STATION ISLAM) Seamus Heaney Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $11.95,123 pp...
...Soft thumps on the ironing board...
...and that great master of the ways of words urges the pilgrim-poet on: Your obligation is not discharged by any common rite...
...David Garrison It is in the first group of lyrics, before the sustained "Station Island," that one finds the clearest, least complicated evocations of place, object, and word...
...What you must do must be done on your own so get back in harness...
...I would like to say more, but, to invoke Keats again, the poem should speak for itself...
...As the long poem and the pilgrimage come to an end we have the sense of a strong young poet led as far as possible by penitence and preparation...
...Keats (in a letter, 1818) WHAT Keats knew Seamus Heaney knows...
...Ronan flies again, this time in the spirit of the modern poet...
...The effect is not unlike Dante's confrontations with the real figures of his own world...
...To test its heat by ear she spat in its iron face or held it up next her cheek to divine the stored danger...
...The seventh-century Ulster poet-king changed into a bird by the curse of St...
...Through all of these and more the poet is drawn on, his purpose ' 'to salvage everything, to re-envisage/the zenith and Commonweal: 410 glimpsed jewels of any gift/mistakenly abased...
...and each discovers a dream-like confrontation with events and people — some literary — of Heaney's past...
...I can perhaps illustrate this best by quoting one short poem, "Old Smoothing Iron": Often I watched her lift it from where its compact wedge rode the back of the store like a tug at anchor...
...To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it...
...It is in these poems that Heaney confronts the ghosts inextricably part of his calling: Old William Carleton, who had written of his youthful pilgrimage (ca...
...The range of topic here is great — from a visit to Thomas Hardy's birthplace to a poem about a widgeon — but always the concern is the connection between the world, perception, and language...
...Feel dragged upon...
...His poetry surprises us into remembering at least three things easy to overlook in our mobile lives: how much we are creatures of place, how much we are defined by the objects around us, and just how much those fixities and definitions arise from the language of our lives...
...I shall speak briefly of each section...
...Those familiar with Sweeney Astray will welcome the new songs in the last section of the book, "Sweeney Redivivus...
...The character of Sweeney appears throughout the book, but these last poems especially are the bird-man's songs, the lyrics of "a lookout posted and forgotten...
...a prepschool master...
...There is consistently such a palpable density to his language that the words themselves seem opaque...
...In Station Island, his seventh book of poems, following hard on the publication of Sweeney Astray, a translation of that mythic Irish tale of a king, Heaney continues to surprise us with the poet's songs about the world around and within us, a world we "almost" remember...
...over and around the continually wonderful poetry of Seamus Heaney preside equally powerful masters of language — Dante, Joyce, Yeats, and many others...
...The title poem takes its shape from the Irish tradition of a penitent pilgrimage to Station Island, also known as St...
...Her dimpled angled elbow and intent stoop as she aimed the smoothing iron like a plane into linen, like the resentment of women...
...I yearned for the gannet's strike, the unbegrudging concentration of the heron...
...And buoyant...
...In his strongest poems he gives us all at once image and object and word...
...These poems give us the poet in contemplation and separation, sorting through the facts of a world that reveals everything "astray," everything in need of penitence and preparation, especially the poet himself...
...1820), and who advised the poet to ' 'make sense of what comes...
...The main thing is to write for the joy of it...
...The book contains as well a cluster of new, less intrinsically bound poems, which prepare the reader, indirectly, for "Station Island...
...Books: TRANSIENT FIXITIES / think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity - it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance...
...As Heaney separates from Joyce, we are purposefully reminded of Dante's separation from Virgil, the younger poet to be led on now only by the enviable — and inevitable — hope of sunlight...
...And it is precisely the search for such an appropriate act of penitence that leads the poet through the twelve eventually cleansing poems of "Station Island...
...the poet's own cousin, also murdered, who accuses him of a retreat into poetry: "you whitewashed ugliness and drew/the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio /and saccharined my death with morning dew...
...in several spots, in fact, Heaney directly invokes the Commedia...
...They are a kind of litany of the poet's state, the difficulty, among many bird-poets, of making matter into song: The guttersnipe and the albatross gliding for days without a single wingbeat were equally beyond me...
...There are three distinct sections to the new book...
...and yet, the objects or places he writes of convert themselves richly into meaning, into emotion, into relationships...
...His last confrontation is with James Joyce, one of the inevitable "old fathers" of contemporary Irish literature, of all literature in our age...
...Patrick's Purgatory...
Vol. 112 • July 1985 • No. 13
