Faber £12.99 pp86
The title poem of Seamus Heaney’s powerful new collection unites the three themes that now dominate his poetry — the past, death and myth. Heaney, or his poetic surrogate, embarks on a journey by Tube. Going down the escalator, he hears a busker playing a tin whistle far below, and fingers a coin in readiness — a gesture that, for the myth-minded, may already suggest Virgil’s underworld and the ferryman who carries souls across the Styx. As he mingles with the jostling throng on the platform, it grows clearer that that is where we are, and stepping aboard to join other strap- hangers he grabs a “stubby black roof-wort” — less a customer convenience than a fungoid outgrowth from hell’s ceiling. Then, as his tumbril gathers speed, he recognises his father’s dead face in the reflection of his own face flashing across “blasted, weeping rock-walls. Flicker lit”.
Nobody can feel quite the same about Tube travel since July 7 last year, but few, I imagine, mull over Virgil’s Aeneid VI as they eye fellow-travellers’ knapsacks. For Heaney, though, it is an entirely natural mind shift. You could say that his whole poetic mission has been the retrieval of the past. His translations — Sophocles, Dante, the Beowulf poet — reconnect us with ways of facing a human predicament that is not foreign or extraneous but our own. Another poem in this collection (Anything Can Happen), which seems to be about our modern nightmare of nuclear terrorism, turns out to be a translation of one of Horace’s odes. In Heaney’s perspective, past poets are as alive as the living, and have indelibly changed the way the living see. A poem about Wordsworth’s ice skates, on display in a glass case, dismisses their dusty material reality, and switches attention instead to their poetic counterparts in The Prelude, which “flashed from the clutch of earth” and left a lasting mark on the world, although they were only made of words.
Many readers, of course, especially younger readers, will know nothing about The Aeneid or the skating episode in The Prelude, and still fewer will recognise a line from George Herbert’s poem Prayer that pops up out of the blue in the middle of a poem about a blacksmith. Such allusions risk an obscurity that Heaney’s earlier poetry seemed determined to avoid. But what is a poet to do? Should he deny the things that matter most to him because others have not bothered to read them? How else but by celebrating them can he hope to get them read again? Besides, there is plenty in this book that is direct and personal and needs no background erudition. Retrieving the past has always, for Heaney, been most vividly bound up with reliving the richly frugal routines on his father’s farm in County Derry, and that continues here. He teaches that the past is not something the present replaces. Rather, it is what our minds are made out of, and its images are all we have for seeing the present with.
So the district these poems circle round is, as ever, Mossbawm, where the Heaney farm was, and Anahorish, where a wartime aerodrome was built, and where American soldiers were (“not that we knew then”) in training for the Normandy landings. They seemed just fit young men, generous with sweets and gum, but ominously on the day they arrived pigs were being slaughtered at the farm, and the gutters ran with blood. Less dark are his memories of primary school, and of being given an emetic slice of Warhorse Plug chewing-tobacco by a classmate, and of his scalp’s first meeting with the village barber’s “cold smooth creeping steel”. These flashbacks might be trivial but for the dense linguistic impasto that is Heaney’s unique gift. Nobody has ever got so close to turning words into granules of solid matter, and those who admire him just for that are in the right, because it rescues language, as only poetry can, from the pallid simulacrum that daily use reduces it to. Nothing is immune to his linguistic make-overs — the “flinch and crunch” of a gravel path, or the “articulated whops” of a helicopter, or windscreen wipers’ “strong absolving slumps and flits”, or hay being pulled from a manger — “the fluster of that soft supply and feed”. Anything that goes into his poetry comes out more insistently and resoundingly itself.
Repeatedly his words aspire to the condition of metal. He translates an old Irish poem requesting a blacksmith to fashion a spade for the poet’s use, and remembers the hammered-iron spikes from harrows that his father used to collect, and that, for him, symbolised virtue more sturdily than any word. A grandiose line from WH Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, about the “mass and majesty of this world”, is rewritten as a defiantly low-life celebration of the cast-iron stove they had at the farm, and of the cleverly hooked handle that lifted the lid from its “fire-fanged maw”. For those who love this strain in Heaney, the most popular poem here will be the first, The Turnip-Snedder, which describes an ancient machine for mashing up turnips in language that relishes every slurp and gurgle. But, as often in this book, the linguistic feats are tinged with something darker. For what the turnip- snedder says as its handle turns, and the turnip heads fall is, “This is the way God sees life.”
It seems like a cold blast from Thomas Hardy, and no doubt we should remind ourselves that it is the turnip-snedder, not Heaney, who says it, so it may merely signal the metaphysical limitations of turnip-snedders. All the same, the question of what Heaney’s religious beliefs are is a nagging one. He had a good Catholic upbringing at his boarding school, St Columb’s, and seems to have been devout as a teenager. One poem here recalls officiating at Lourdes as a stretcher-bearer, responsible for laying the sick in the precincts of the shrine. The collection Station Island recorded his going on a pilgrimage, but the ghost of James Joyce, whom he met, derided him for being there, and, like other ghosts in the poems, may not have been been a ghost at all but just one part of Heaney’s imagination arguing with another part.
Something that looks more like faith appears in the last poem in this book, which harks back to what, for me, was his first great poem, Mid-Term Break, published in 1965, about the funeral of his four-year-old brother who was knocked down by a car. In the new poem he drives over to the old farm and finds himself thinking, in the silence, of his dead father and of the lost brother who has “gone to him”. But as always with Heaney there are other ways of reading the poem than the simplest one. He avoids dogmatic certainties, and not being sure is part of his integrity. If anything can be added to his stature, this new display of his strengths will assuredly add it.
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