Seamus HeaneyKirja-arvosteluja

I read Heaney for the first time more than 12 years ago now (thanks Mr. Masterman!) Death of a Naturalist was probably the second poem I can really remember thinking hard about. I wouldn't say I'm a poetry guy, but Heaney's command of sound and imagery gets me. Take Blackberry Picking, or The Gravel Walks; he can pull out feeling from the simplest of scenes. I'll add some thoughts here as I am reminded of particular pieces.

Digging
Mid-Term Break
Requiem for the Croppies
A Call

It almost seems irrelevant to write a review of this book. I mean, Seamus Heaney can’t get any better known or loved by me saying *I love this book*.

But I do. Just as I am stirred by his words, his perceptions, his way of capturing a thought or juxtaposing two things I would never think to put together (and no, I'm not carried off by every single one of these 100 poems, but by many, *many*, I am), I am also grateful to him. For his honesty, his vulnerability, his tenderness for selves and technologies and humans and leafy spaces that no longer are or are not yet, as in a poem to his toddler grandchild in later years. He has room for all of these in him, and I recognise my own complexity reflected in his, and am grateful for this gentle companion in life.

I am going to miss sitting on Seamus Heaney's shoulder. For some reason I never did hear him live, though I saw many fine poets read in the 1980s/90s.

Heaney's family agreed to support and facilitate this project where necessary under the strict understanding no letters to family or close, non-public, friends appeared. The majority of the correspondents are poets, translators, editors and others in the publishing world. The thing that becomes most quickly apparent is that Seamus had a great gift for friendship, even if there isn't a letter in the volume that doesn't begin with an apology for the lateness in his reply to their letters.

The second thing is the great richness in attention he pays to the work sent to him by his friends, and that received by him (not included) by them, his gratitude is deep and buoyant.

Reading a lifetime's creative arc is fascinating, informative, invigorating. In Heaney's case though the success ultimately crowded out the silent time for writing poetry. It wasn't until late in his life that he learned to say no to the invitations to teach and speak around the world, and then it was his health that made it near impossible for him to write, as physical problems led to bouts of deep depression. Despite this though, his body of work is substantial.

Breaking the rigid agreement the last entry is a text to his wife Marie, as he was being wheeled into surgery 'Noli Timere' (do not be afraid). He died before reaching the operating theatre.

I prefer the original but this was well done.

NF, poetry Irish,

The early stuff is quite good, mostly because it's simply about nature and life and the things done in life and nature. Once Heaney seems to have made the decision to become an Irish Poet (TM), I lost interest. I can't fault him for making his poetry local or reflecting his experiences as an Irishman, but somehow it just wasn't that interesting to me, especially after the solid stuff earlier on in his work.

The overtly political stuff is completely without interest to me, and not the sort of thing that makes for good poetry; it didn't work for Dante, for Milton, for Shelley, or for any number of poetasters of the last century. Politics in poetry is only manageable when it is masked in allegory, the way of The Faerie Queene or Absalom and Achitophel.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/death-of-a-naturalist-by-seamus-heaney/

I met Seamus Heaney only once, a chance encounter in a pub (the Foggy Dew in Temple Bar in Dublin, some time around 1989); he offered to buy me a drink on the basis of having known my parents in his Belfast days, but I was too shy to accept. I wish I had. I would have learned something from even ten minutes’ conversation with him. I also once sat opposite his wife Marie at a dinner, but did not pluck up the courage to say much to her.

He came from Bellaghy, 30 km up the River Bann from my own ancestors in Aghadowey, and this first collection is very much about growing up there and growing into his role as a poet. I knew a few of them from school days: the opening “Digging”, where he sees his vocation as poetry rather than agriculture:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

The heart-wrenching “Mid-Term Break”, about the death of his younger brother in a car accident:

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.

The rather regrettable “Docker”:

Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views

Reading the full collection is well worth it. There’s a real underlying narrative, of a shift from his family heritage on the farm and boyhood fascinations with the land, to adulthood and poetry, There are some lovely natural images, such as “Waterfall”:

Simultaneous acceleration
And sudden braking; water goes over
Like villains dropped screaming to justice.

And romance in a sequence beginning with “Twice Shy”:

Her scarf à la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.

And at the end, another moment of self-dedication in “Personal Helicon”:

I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I don’t read a lot of poetry, and I should read more.

perfect study

"...So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me,
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall,
Confident that we have built our wall."
("Scaffolding," p. 13)

"We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening -
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon..."
("Bogland," p. 20)

"Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous
Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times...
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
...
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap..."
(from "Whatever You Say Say Nothing," p. 43-44)

"And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens."
("Song," p. 73)

Summary: A selection of the poetry of Seamus Heaney from previously published works between 1966 and 1987.

My one previous encounter with Seamus Heaney was his rendering of Beowulf, a powerful version of this Old English heroic narrative. I’ve long wanted to explore his poetry and a while back picked up this collection, gathering a number of poems from the first half of his writing career (subsequently, an edition covering 1988 to 2013 was released).

The poems in this selection come from the following works:

Death of a Naturalist
Door in the Dark
Wintering Out
Stations
North
Field Work
Sweeney Astray
Station Island
The Haw Lantern

How does one summarize and review all this? One reviewer described reading Heaney as “muddled clarity.” I would agree with this assessment. Heaney demands multiple readings and this was merely my first taste. In the middle of a poem, you wonder what he is saying, and then a phrase leaps out and rivets your attention.

His work evokes the land–the bogs and trees, the fields and hedges, the broagh or riverbanks, that together create a sense of place. He captures the people–the farmers, the roof thatcher, and the Tollund Man, a mummified corpse found in one of the bogs. He remembers the dead, from Francis Ledwidge, who died in World War I to his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney (“M.K.H”) in Clearances that evoke all the memories of a loved one, the parting of death, and the awareness of our mortality.

The violence present in Northern Ireland is a frequently present backdrop to his poetry as is the imagery of Irish Catholicism from missals to masses. Much of this comes together in the last poem in this collection, The Disappearing Island:

Once we presumed to found ourselves for good

Between its blue hills and those sandless shores

Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil.

SEAMUS HEANEY, P. 261.

The collection includes selections from Sweeney Astray, Heaney’s version of the Irish poem Buile Shuibhne, the Glanmore Sonnets, and Station Island.

One should have a phone or computer handy to look up words and references that may be obscure to one. Perhaps some day, an annotated version of Heaney’s works will do this work for us. But for now, we are left to do the work for ourselves. Some will pass this up, but some of the richest readings are the ones that have required me to dig. Heaney’s works seem to me to be among these. In this we join Heaney who compared his work to that of his potato farming father:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests

I’ll dig with it.

SEAMUS HEANEY, “DIGGING,” P. 3.

My favourite book of poetry. However, may I correct the info for the book; it is edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. Yeah, pedantic, so what? It was mainly Heaney's effort, hence my correction ;) Anyway, wondrous poems from all around the world. A beautiful collection.

A pesares da mala tradución, e unha escolma moi desigual, este volumen bilingüe non deixa de mostrarnos unha parte da obra dun poeta grandioso. O Nobel irlandés demostra esa máxima de Vázquez Montalbán de que incluso a política, as ideas, a ideoloxía e a crítica histórica poden ser materia poética.

Heaney's childhood growing up on an Irish far is apparent in this collection, as farm motifs are the unifying theme. His knowledge of raising animals, harvesting peat, and growing potatoes are tinged with echoes of hardship as he recounts the potato famine, the horror of a frog invasion, and the drowning of kittens (seen as pests on a working farm) which seems to create the title imagery. His wonder at the natural world as a child has been affected to the point where he sees the death in it as much as the life, and so his instinct to become a farmer (ie a naturalist) is lost. This is further supported by his taking up the pen as his chosen implement (rather than a shovel/spade), and his acceptance of the office-based "modern" world where nature has no place except when confined to words on a page.

Even having read and enjoyed a number of Seamus heaney's other collections of poetry, North was complicated to digest. Not only does Heaney employ a distinctly dialectical vocabulary centred in his Irish roots which is alien (though beautiful) to foreign ears, he also steeps it in a tone that portrays a sense of distance from the reader. We may be reading his words and connecting with them on some level, but this group of poems really seems to remain rooted in the poet's ind. Last/this year I read Edward Rutherfurd's Dublin Saga which gave me more of an understanding of the social and political history of the country than previously, but these poems strike a much more nuanced tone as they blend history and the current experiences of the author. He touches on the fostering system, echoes the republican conflicts, and explores the Irish funereal experience, but the poem that I kenned to was unsurprisingly "Bog Queen." The poem holds a certain brutal, yet beautiful quality that to me embodies what I know of Irish history, culture, and mythology. The land (as embodied through the Queen) is undoubtedly beautiful, yet its pagan roots have pockets of darkness, and even the apparent illumination of Christianity and learning were tempered by the brutality of many waves of invasions (both physically, spiritually, and culturally). The Bog Queen herself is a magical being from the past (the buried queen of Ireland's first settlers lost?), yet her current persona has no less impact even though time has done its worst to her. Beware, Heaney seem to be saying, or glory? Look to the last, but be sure not to unearth what should stay buried.

When I first read Seamus Heaney's poetry I was blown away. His artful use of dialogue, rhythm, annd description are the perfect tools for crafitng poetry. Yet, I felt that this collection fell short of my expectations. His telltale skills are still present, but I felt that the scope of the subject of this collection was far too broad. He focuses on "normal" life in Ireland, but he stretches it all the way from the legendary Tollund Man (a historical subject) to modern city infrastructures. The dichotomy of the two subjects could easily have complimented eachother artistically, but I don't think Heaney quite managed to bridge that gap. The closest he got to bridging the past and the present were the poems to and about other Irish poets like Auden and Hughes, and that's really just name dropping, even if he is connected to them in the Irish poetic traditions.

NA

I really don't understand the later works of Seamus Heaney.
He's clearly a master craftsman, his poems are beautifully constructed. But I just cannot understand what it is that they're saying most of the time.

For me, much more accessible than his later work. Some of it is still a bit too far out and obtuse though.
Standouts are; Digging, Blackberry picking, Early purges, Midterm break.

Far too clever for me to get much from it. The writing is beautiful, but so complex I was spending so long working it out that the poems didn't really get a chance.

Beautiful and boggy.

2010 (my attempt at a review can be found on the LibraryThing post linked)
http://www.librarything.com/topic/90167#2169945

I haven't read everything in here but I've read quite a lot. They're not bad, they're just not for me. I'm not a huge fan of poetry anyway and Heaney's poems are just all too similar, almost feels like I'm reading the same thing dozens of times.

Heaney's first collection of poetry includes some of his most well-known pieces. It also contains 'Scaffolding' and 'Personal Helicon', two very touching poems. This is a wonderful, short selection of works that pre-date many of Heaney's works about nature and time, but that nonetheless showcase his young talent.

And the poet draws from his word-hoard a weird tale
Of a life and a love balked, which I reword here
Remembering earth-tremors once on Dartmoor,
The power station wailing in its pit
Under the heath, as if our night walk led
Not to the promised tor but underground
To sullen halls where encumbered sleepers groaned.½

Brilliant, made me want to write poetry.