Death of a Naturalist
London: Faber and Faber
57 pages $3.10
Door into the Dark
London: Faber and Faber
56 pages $1.75
Wintering Out
London: Faber and Faber
80 pahes S3.30
North
New York: Oxford University Press
73 pages $3.95
Field Work
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux
66 pages $8.95
Seamus Heaney matters, perhaps even more than he should, to many who are interested in poetry, in Ireland, or in both. For many critics the two blur. Of North, for example, Conor Cruise O’Brien said, “I had the uncanny feeling, reading these poems, of listening to the thing itself, the actual substance of historical agony and dissolution.” It is perhaps difficult to imagine how a poet of excellence with a national voice could be said to receive too much attention, raise expectations too high for his poetry, that is for verbal models of peaceful settlement of Ireland’s long disease: political-religious-regional differences. However, it is just this mix of poetic and political expectations in some of Heaney’s critics that creates maps of misreading.
At forty, Heaney is Ireland’s first poet. A Northern Catholic farm boy from the depths of Derry, Heaney has transformed himself into a poet of international importance with five books: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), and Field Work (1979). He has taught at Berkeley and Harvard. In 1972 he moved South, to the Republic, first to rural Wicklow, then to suburban Dublin, where he now lives with his family, where he teaches and heads the English Department at Carysfort College of Education, and where he writes. Since he is a poet of sustained achievement and since his life has touched so many sides of Ireland—North-South, rural-urban, violent-pacific—he is contended for, like a valuable piece of land, by squads of contrary critics. The intensity of these critical responses suggests how much his poetry, as well as the political situation he sometimes describes, affects.
Some critics have attempted to remove Heaney from his native grounds where political conflicts have been known to debilitate poets. For Harold Bloom (TLS 2/8/80) and Denis Donoghue (New York Times Book Review 12/2/79), it seems, Heaney would be safer in Axel’s Castle, far from madding crowds, not locked up in tome Irish keep, looking at the world through slits in stone as Yeats did for a time at Thoor Ballylee in Galway during Ireland’s Civil War. Bloom argued Heaney’s poetry was international and urged him “to transcend the vowel of earth,” to fly by the nettles of Irish place. Donoghue saw Heaney as writing “perennial poetry,” not occasional verse. For Donoghue “the kind of poetry he wants to write can’t be written by accepting the public terms in which a tribal conflict is foisted upon him.” For both Bloom and Donoghue, Heaney is a poet, not a prophet, not a healer; they would hold the poet discrete from the snares of political sectarianism that surround him in Ireland.
Yet those who would have Heaney as an unacknowledged legislator of mankind tum up on both sides of the Atlantic. A recent novel, In Guilt and in Glory, by a former public relations officer of the Irish Tourist Board, David Hanly, makes this clear. His characters are given to debating the state of the nation. At one point a pacifist government minister from the South, another C.C. O’Brien, argues with a militant Republican over the conflict in the North. Like the Troubles, their argument cannot be resolved, though they do conclude on a note of agreement in their mutual respect for the poetry of Heaney. That is, Heaney’s poetry is seen as a mode of accord when all other rhetorical means fail.
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