Selected Poems, 1966-1987
Wheeler, Edward T.
BOOKS With roots in the bog SELECTED POEMS, 1966-1987 Seamus Heaney Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20, 256 pp. Edward T. W3teeler o read Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems is to be inundated:...
...We adored...
...There is little to laugh over in these poems, straining as his lines often do in an iambic harness against the traditional forms he so easily adapts...
...262: Commonweal or again: Broagh its low tattoo among the windy boortrees and rhubarb-blades ended almost suddenly, like that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage...
...This is the logic of the Enlightenment's notion of progress, which subordinated public life to private desire, shrinking the citizen into the consumer...
...No birds came, but I waited among briars and stones, or whispered or broke the watery gossamers if I moved a muscle...
...What we are to make of the antiphonal qualification, "although it is the night," finally comes to some dark sense in conclusion to "Station Island" XI: Hear it calling out to every creature And they drink these waters, although it is dark because it is the night...
...Edward T. W3teeler o read Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems is to be inundated: bogs threaten, well bottoms reflect, and Ireland as a place seems to exist only as skin on the Atlantic Ocean...
...It is full of sorties and byways, ven- tures into economic theory, social criticism, 264: Commonweal and democratic doctrine, with brief essays, as polished as cameos, on figures as diverse as Jonathan Edwards, Henry George, Georges Sorel, and Martin Luther King, Jr...
...And we lifted our eyes to the nouns...
...Insatiable desire came to be regarded as natural and welcome, the motive force of a process that made old luxuries into present neces- sities...
...All I believe that happened there was vision...
...Quite a bardic stance...
...He creates a simultaneity: mythic past and bloody present, Celtic or Viking violence and prod or provo death squads...
...Today, Lasch argues, that terrestrial highway is coming to a dead end as human beings face the finitude of the planet and its fragility...
...BACK TO THE FUTURE What we admire in all this, he tells us most clearly in "The Master": Deliberately he would unclasp his book of withholding a page at a time, and it was nothing arcane, just the old rules...
...Lasch takes his title from Hawthorne's "Celestial Railroad," but Hawthorne him- self looked back to Bunyan, so it is appro- priate that Lasch begins by tracing his own quest for the intellectual grail: The True and Only Heaven is a Pilgrim's Progress for the late twentieth century, its theme defined by Lasch's inquiry into the idea of progress and its critics...
...continue, hold, dispel, appease: Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground Each verse returning like the plough turned round...
...In "The King of the Ditchbacks" what starts as close observation of water fowl becomes obsession and then transformation...
...This is "Disappearing Island," the last poem in the volume, and it embodies most of what makes Heaney so terribly good a poet: vision, sense of place, of barbaric origins and of Latin roots...
...THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN Progress and Its Critics Christopher Lasch Norton, $25, 591 pp...
...Everywhere his landscape overcomes him, makes him define his poetic vocation almost in terms of possession, by words, by signs: Sensings, mountings from the hiding places, Words entering almost the sense of touch Ferret themselves out of their dark hutch-"These things are not secrets but mysteries...
...Ban Hus or bone house or "man": a spelling way to create a self, to rescue from Irish/English past a workable relationship to today...
...And to read even by carcasses the badgers have come back...
...Heaney pulls out of a primor- dial soup a unique creation...
...That subject people stuff is a cod's game, infantile, like this peasant pilgrimage...
...At a second house I listened for duntings under the laurels and heard intimations whispered about being vaguely honored...
...In the same way that he can be said to be post-Romantic, Heaney is post-Catholic, indebted but capable of using the old forms of discourse only to respond to a former self...
...Tell the truth...
...You are raking at dead fires...
...The Badgers" mixes the shapes of those slain in sectarian violence with the shapes of returning badgers and moves to a question: "How perilous is it to choose/not to love the life we're shown...
...he writes fluidly of mined summer holidays, marital tiffs, the trials of being a famous Irish poet and fair game for reporters hungry for copy, but his poetry is almost always sacred text...
...Come back to us," they said, "in harvest, when we hide in the stooked corn, when the gundogs can hardly retrieve what's brought down...
...A priestly mission, a humble plodding simile, a poet of land and mystery who faces an imminence at once holy and yet never divine...
...In that hard singing school of Irish poets, Heaney has learned all the lessons...
...he forms himself and his world from Irish peat by speaking enlivening words...
...With the consciousness of blood, of bone, of language and religion, he can reflect on his earthly home, that muddied bog and if only for a moment give us a pure source: That eternal fountain, hidden away, I know its haven and its secrecy although it is the night...
...The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm Only when we embraced it in extremis...
...and even the range wall of the promenade 19April 1991:263 that I press down on for conviction hardly tempts me to credit it...
...And that truth he tells us perhaps comes most pointedly home in "Haw Lantern," which reads the sign of the shriveled fruit of the hawthorne tree, "a small light for small people...
...There is a unitive way in his contemplation of nature, but the book of creation can suddenly turn the writer into the text he creates...
...And I saw myself rising to move in that dissimulation, top-knotted, masked in sheaves, noting the fail of birds: a rich young man leaving everything he had for a migrant solitude...
...But not its source because it does not have one, which is all sources' source and origin although it is the night...
...And so we learn the price of sacrificial oblation...
...fill the element with signatures on your own frequency echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements, ever-gleams in the dark of the whole sea...
...Ultimately, in Station Island, twelve poems linked to the ancient "penitential exercises" conducted on that island and to Dante's Commedia, a Joyce-cum-Virgil admonishes the poet to return to the world and believe: "The English language belongs to us...
...Do not be afraid...
...Moreover, the Enlightenment's combination of individ- ualism and universalism, liberating desire in the service of humanity, implied con- tempt for the bonds of family, community...
...The verbs assumed us...
...Meanwhile, the large-scale organizations and governments associated with the pursuit of growth are top-heavy schools of human debilitation, caught in a dialectic that sets domination from the top against servile irresponsibility below...
...Heaney can be, almost, conversational...
...Literally unbelief...
...As a poet Heaney has had to decide on what his roots into that Irish bog mean: Irish/English is a linguistic dilemma no matter what it is as a political one...
...He knows his sources, the liturgical roots of his style and poetic: Intransitively we would assist, confess, receive...
...Sandstone Keepsake" begins with the thing, "chalky russet/solidified gourd," returns to the sand- stone rock's place of discovery at Inishowen and then through .9 llusion to Phlegethon and to Guy de Montfort's damned red heart opens to a thoroughly contemporary and military perspec- tive: Anyhow, there I was with the wet red stone in my hand, stating across at the watch-towers from my free state of image and allusion, swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars: a silhouette not worth bothering about, out for the evening in scarf and waders and not about to set times wrong or right, stooping along, one of the venerators...
...The haw fruit becomes Diogenes's lamp lighting his quest for the honest or just man: he holds up at eye-level on its twig, and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone, its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you, its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on...
...Altar stone was dawn and monstrance noon, the word "rubric" itself a bloodshot sunset...
...BOOKS With roots in the bog SELECTED POEMS, 1966-1987 Seamus Heaney Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20, 256 pp...
...Reading Seamus Heaney's poems leaves you mired with the sense of Adam before a fallen world, and washed in the con- sciousness of what is justly gone...
...The terror gives way to the adult accommodation but leaves the imprint of a sacramental vision...
...Heaney works over the Old English kenning, ban hus, and gives another example of his playing with language to get at his poetic self through "antediluvian lore": I push back through dictions...
...The toil of life becomes some- thing like that of refiguring what was said behind those closed gates and, despite fratricide, signing the truth of mortality...
...What can any merely natural world be in contrast to this found- ing vision of signs operating beyond sense, of transubstantiation by efficacious word...
...In this view, in fact, there is no luxury, strictly speaking: The idea of excess implies limits in nature, a human place in the order of things, where modemity's mainstream held that if there is any such order, it is morally nugatory, since human beings are not to obey nature but to rule...
...You lose more of your self than you redeem doing the decent thing...
...He writes of a boyhood lived in devout terror, at faith itseff and at Catholicism in Northern Ireland...
...Wilson Carey McWillinms l[ l~ or almost three decades now, Christopher Lasch has been taking the measure of America's political soul, writing with grace and learning and relentless integrity, an academic Orwell, eccentric in the best sense, the voice of no party and for all seasons...
...In the coffered riches of grammar and declensions I found ban hus...
...We hear again and again moving assertions of the efficacy of signs, especially of words: Visitations are taken for signs...
...He was professor of poetry at Oxford for good reason...
...In such a world the poet can only hope to raise a voice which might...
...But in, the moral vision that Heaney speaks "when your breath plumes in the frost," seeing the thing is reflection and judgment...
...He offers not so much a Wordsworthian myth of memory as a salvation history--up to a second Fail...
...In a fundamental way, as in his translation of the old Irish Buile Suibhne (Sweeney Astray), Heaney renames himself, to face that Celtic self and not choke on English words...
...I am repining for this living fountain Within this bread of life I see it plain although it is the night...
...Growing out of the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the doctrine of progress reflected the new conviction that human beings could and should aspire to master nature...
...The poet self-deprecatingly reads in response to the Joycean celebration of"signatures of all things.., seaspawn and seawrack" the ineffectual sign of the self in time...
...The vision can mount affirmation, but the affirmations ride at the edges of apprehension: Once we presumed to found ourselves for good Between the blue hills and those sandless shores Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil...
...That tension gives us poems which speak the poet who lovingly parses the sound of the Irish proper names for English ears: Anahorish, soft gradient of consonant, vowel meadow...
...To the scops's twang, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line...
...Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth And hung out cauldron like a firmament, The island broke beneath us like a wave...
...His latest, The True and Only Heaven, is a grand, rambling book--or even, several books...
...Heaney is at his most impressive when he tunes his "frequency" to a reception of simultaneity, connecting "ever- gleams," myth, history, and "the troubles...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 8
