Blog - Page 12 of 21 - Connecting with Seamus Heaney

Keeping Going

For Hugh A significant ‘sandwich’ of six poems dedicated to the poet’s younger brother Hugh. Whilst the top and the bottom layers are warm, compassionate and palatable pieces addressed to Hugh himself, the ‘filling’ is disturbing. Background: Short of living the experience is difficult for outsiders to appreciate the perseverance, determination and tact Hugh Heaney required both during and after the ‘Troubles’ period to cope with the entrenched stances and sensitivities of families on both sides of the sectarian divide within a narrow radius, the danger of saying things unguardedly, the bitter, enduring legacy of events and his perceived need to live alongside those same people from one day to the next. In the concluding piece Heaney, who sometimes hinted […]

Two Lorries

In this virtuoso piece Heaney adds the challenge of the sestina form to a creative routine that establishes a symbolic base, builds a structure that expresses the message it carries, makes appropriate choice of vocabulary and syntax, weaves together an interplay of senses and emotions that are essentially his own, scores the music of the poetry with assonance and alliteration and adds a ‘musical’ dynamic of light and shade, loud and soft to enhance the spoken word. Heaney creates two short screenplays, the first a cheerful harmless flirtation in the 1940s featuring his mother in her prime, the second a horror nightmare with ghosts and images of death and destruction, requiem for a mother now passed away and a local […]

Damson

The three-part sequence depicts people, circumstances and associations linked to the title-fruit. Background: for Heaney as a boy of five or six years old the bricklayer he knew best was king of local post-WWII building sites and child’s-eye giant of the world. Mick Joyce portrayed anonymously in Damson was Heaney’s uncle who married one of his father’s sisters. He first appeared in The Demobbed Bricklayer of Sandpit (from Station Island, 1984), his friendly cheerful personality celebrated by ‘merriment in the spirit level’s eye’ and the ‘song of his trowel’. His final appearance comes in ‘District and Circle’ of 2006, an elegiac sequence of 5 sonnets To Mick Joyce in Heaven. Heaney commented that the sheer weight of his tools required […]

Weighing In

Something has lodged itself in Heaney’s nose and he ends up venting his anger against the forces seeking to perpetuate disregard for his minority Catholic community. He uses an everyday weight of defined mass to expose the political and sectarian imbalance in Northern Ireland and the need for very elusive compromise. The sequence is to do with weights and balances, dead weights and spaces for reason to intervene; ‘weighing’ has to do with balancing forces against one another or adding force to an argument so as to tip the balance; contestants ‘weigh in’ before a contest; ‘weighing in’ suggests ‘actively taking sides’. The unyielding, inflexible block (56 lb. weight … solid iron) is not an object that affirms much (unit […]

St Kevin and the Blackbird

The diptych focuses on an event from medieval Christian legend centred round the sixth-century Irish saint of Glendalough translated into a parable of self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness which may also be read as a figure for the way the imagination can be totally possessed by its object. NC (p190) Images of St Kevin of Glendalough are plentiful. In his published Lectures Heaney referred to the poem indirectly as an example of poetry’s “angelic potential” and of ‘its function as an agent of possible transformation, of evolution towards that more radiant and generous life which the imagination desires’. The man he describes has placed himself in testing circumstances. The event he is remembered for made the reputation of humble Brother Kevin! The […]

The Flight Path

The Flight Path poems make a considerable contribution to the collection. Heaney selects a title suggestive of set routines that expose countervailing forces – movement across space and time, guided movement, movement determined by outside forces and personal time-lines. The metaphorical implications of ‘taking flight’ are also represented, not least the spiritual uplift expressed in the final line. In the six-poem sequence the planned course of an aircraft acts as a metaphor for the journey linking his early life with academic positions that took him to and from the USA linking with a life-journey that also took him from Belfast to the Irish Republic in 1972 into a life of self-employed poet. The clockwork of events led an unpleasant confrontation […]

An Invocation

The poem was published in the London Review of Books on August 6 1992. In this three-poem elegiac sequence Heaney invokes hard-line Scottish communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid; he recognises a kindred empathist for causes (with the difference, perhaps that MacDiarmid reacted much more radically than Heaney in his own Scottish nationalist way against the perceived injustices of government from Whitehall). The pieces are written in memoriam. Heaney seeks a gesture of recognition (Incline to me, MacDiarmid, out of Shetland) acknowledging that due regard might be hard come by from a Scot as uncompromising as the landscape around him (stone-eyed from stone-gazing), a boozer (sobered up), a man of natural ill-temper (thrawn). Heaney is not seeking the acknowledgement of MacDiarmid the […]

Mycenae Lookout

Heaney’s mini-epic in 5 parts showcases his scholarship as a classicist and translator (what he modestly describes as ‘a certain amount of book work’) and his creative talent. Following the end of the Trojan War Heaney’s watchman follows the return to Mycenae of Agamemnon and his murder at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. The fineness of the writing, the density and sustained intensity of the narrative, the richness of its symbolic plane and allegorical possibility, its shifts in structure, tone and style place the sequence at the very highest level of late twentieth century poetry. Background to its composition: in conversation with DOD (pp349-50) Heaney revealed the event that triggered the sequence; in doing so […]

The First Words

Heaney offers a version of a Marin Sorescu poem printed in ‘The Biggest Egg in the World’ (Bloodaxe 1987). Sorescu a Romanian from a humble farming background similar to Heaney’s is commenting on repressive political circumstances in his own particular way. He uses his ‘spirit level’ to establish just how much things are weighted against in a Communist state. A poet assesses the gap between what was promised and how things have turned out; it centres on corruption (the first words got polluted) – Heaney ‘s preference for ‘got’ over ‘were’ has something peasant-class, blunt and as-everyone-round-here-knows-very-well about it. The changing content of flowing water offers a ready- made metaphor for contamination (river water in the morning / flowing with […]

The Gravel Walks

Heaney pens an elegy to the loss of an irrecoverable resource. In an interview he added that ‘The Gravel Walks’ ‘ is about heavy work—wheeling barrows of gravel—but also the paradoxical sense of lightness when you’re lifting heavy things. I like the in-between-ness of up and down, of being on the earth and of the heavens’. Heaney in the Harvard Crimson of Oct 2008. The poem’s most memorable line linking Heaney’s voice and his mid-Ulster heritage will appear on his headstone in Bellaghy church-yard. Heaney focuses on his cherished Moyola river and on the visible elemental inter-reaction of stone and water (river gravel) since time immemorial (in the beginning, that). At a time when water levels were depressed (high summer) […]

Whitby-sur-Moyola

Heaney’s ingenious poem conflates two sites miles apart in space and time (Whitby a seaside town in north-east England and the Moyola river that flowed close to Heaney’s childhood home mid-Ulster) and two individuals one of whom became a saint and the other an anonymous Mossbawn cowman who shared Caedmon’s veterinary talents. The poem is topped and tailed with direct reference to 7th century poet-herdsman, Caedmon, working in a north Yorkshire abbey whom Heaney came to know (alongside Beowulf) through his Old English undergraduate studies. Similar characters frequented Heaney’s Mossbawn farm not least Irishman John Dologhan ‘the best milker ever to come about the place’ in Montana from the Electric Light collection. The standards of perseverance and compassion amongst cowmen, […]

The Thimble

Helen Vendler identifies the geographical context for the frescoes as Pompeii (‘Seamus Heaney’ p.134); the thimble becomes the ‘absent centre’ around which Heaney constructs his vignettes; A study in balance … Heaney reveals how simple things, such as a thimble or a swing, can hold the weight of history – and how history can alter the emotional weight of an object. Noonday Press blurb of June 1996. The small closed-end cap (familiar since the late Roman period) worn traditionally over the finger-tip to protect it, for example, when pushing a needle through tough fabric is the unifying factor of a sequence of five short pieces. 1 Focus on a sexually explicit fresco (in the House of Carnal Murals) conjures up […]

The Butter-Print

Prompted by the sight of an old-fashioned farmhouse utensil used to decorate pats of butter Heaney revisits the lost domain of childhood . The Heaney family produced its own butter on the family farm (see ‘Churning Day’ from Death of a Naturalist, Heaney’s first collection of 1966). Heaney shakes his head at the woodworker who carved the print’s circular, sunny disposition (round open face) with a barbed design (cross-hatched head of rye, all jags and bristles) emblazoning the tasty substance (soft butter) with a skin tearing image (sharp device) recalling the damage incurred by a saintly figure (breast … scored with slivered glass). The poet reveals that his personal reaction stemmed from a childhood crisis (I swallowed an awn of […]

Remembered Columns

Things that survive displacement and re-creation, Heaney seems to be saying, may confidently be regarded as true. The poet’s writerly anxiety is to do with alphabet and by extension language – he imagines a film-like animation in which written characters fly away – his delivery and reassurance derive from a Catholic legend in which something similar is said to have happened with a felicitous outcome. The components of language with which hitherto Heaney has felt secure (solid letters of the world) were suddenly unsteady (grew airy). The sturdy architecture of written letters (marble serifs … clearly blocked uprights) that this seasoned wordsmith has underpinned (built upon rocks) and elevated (set upon the heights) suddenly took to the air (rose). A […]

Poet’s Chair

The 3-poem sequence is dedicated to Carolyn Mulholland, born in Lurgan, Co Armagh in 1944; she studied at the Belfast College of Art from 1962 to 1966, where she was awarded the Ulster Arts Club prize for Sculpture in 1965. Something borrowed from da Vinci’s notebooks enables Heaney to hail the momentousness of works of art – be they a piece of sculpture, a painting or a poem – that result from a spiritual journey undertaken by their creator. According to Leonardo the universal source of light perceives no shade (the sun has never seen a shadow). This prepares us initially for the world of light, dark, and changing perspective within Mulholland’s mind (Now watch the sculptor move) as she orbits the concept that forms the centre of her […]

The Swing

A sequence evoking a mid-Ulster time, a place and a child-centred activity. In the 1940s a large open barn in the Heaney farmyard at Mossbawn in Northern Ireland featured a swing that distracted Heaney and his siblings (the ‘herd life’ Heaney talks about in ‘Sofa in the Forties’ and his Nobel acceptance speech) and brought a mother’s presence to bear. The sequence moves back and forth between the extraordinary and the commonplace, the heavenly and the earthbound, idealized artistic representations and sheer down-to-earthness. * Learning to swing well is a metaphor for all manner of things not a means to successful independence. An early introductions to the laws of Physics: swinging was about maintaining impetus – the poet points out […]

The Poplar

Multum in parvo! This short piece goes to the heart of matters of alignment and balance. Heaney, a close observer of nature, is quick to perceive the previously unseen and consider whether it signals dramatic shifts in human affairs, themselves shaped by powerful forces. Heaney addressed the issue with Henri Cole in Harvard’s Paris Review: “The needle is always swinging between two extremes with me. One is the gravitas of subject matter, a kind of surly nose-to-the-groundness, almost a non-poetry, and the other is the lift and frolic of the words in themselves”. Heaney reflects on something he has not noticed before: a sudden rush of wind (shakes the big poplar) exposes as if by alchemy (quicksilvering) the lighter-shaded underside […]

Two Stick Drawings

Two vignettes borrowed from the lost domain of childhood portray youngsters in circumstances that to Heaney’s eye provided them with uninhibited pleasure. Walking-sticks form the main props to the action. 1 Heaney reflects on the actions and responses of a playmate (Claire O’Reilly) wilful enough to misappropriate her granny’s stick for her own purposes – its shape (crook-necked) ideal for blackberry-picking expeditions (snare the highest briars) and providing a solution to Claire’s refusal to be denied access to the best fruit (always grew the ripest blackberries). In comparison the fate of a ‘heroine’ of Greek mythology (Persephone) was much less fortuitous (in the halfpenny place compared to Claire), Claire’s nature ignored regulation (she’d trespass and climb gates) or danger (walk […]

A Call

The first of two rueful poems in which Heaney recalls incidents from the time when his parents were still alive. In A Call he is in telephone contact with them. Heaney had left the family home (after seven years of boarding-school experience) to go to university, after which he worked, married, travelled and brought up children in locations distant from his roots, initially in Belfast then after 1953 in the Irish Republic. Heaney’s mother has answered the phone and responded to his request to speak to his father (‘Hold on’ … ‘I’II just run out and get him). The elderly man still takes every opportunity (took the chance) to engage in the habits of a farming lifetime – fresh air […]

A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

in memory of Donatus Nwoga Heaney pens an elegiac tribute to Nigerian scholar and critic Donatus Nwoga who was a fellow student at Queen’s University, Belfast, in the 1950s. He reworks an Igbo fable from the Nigerian folk lore of Donatus’s roots in which Humanity fails in its attempt to make earthly death anything other than an irreversible state. When men realized they were mortal (found out about death) they appealed to the highest Igbo authority via Man’s so-called best friend (sent the dog to Chukwu with a message). They urged the supreme deity to make death temporary and reversible (they wanted to be let back to the house of life). They were unhappy with the idea that their souls […]

M

The monogram represents iconic Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam much admired by Heaney for resisting the repressive Eastern European political machines that sought to silence him. The poet allegorizes his conviction that men of Mandelstam’s stature will ensure that truth will always come out. Heaney’s publisher of messages, a magician/contradiction in terms (deaf phonetician), has developed a method of bringing his patient’s interior monologue to light despite the vocal silence imposed by outside forces. He smuggles out what cannot be heard using touch (his hand over the dome of a speaker’s skull) – his skill at unraveling speech formats (diphthong … vowel by the bone vibrating to the sound) has made the unfeasible feasible and defeated censorship. Heaney’s speaker […]

An Architect

Evidence suggests that the unnamed Architect is Robin Walker who died in 1991. Heaney’s poem becomes an elegiac tribute to one of Ireland’s most eminent 20th century architects. He paints the portrait of a man in his professional and personal spaces. Observation of the architect’s demeanour and environment confirms an artistic kinship sensed by Heaney even acquaintance without implying close friendship. The architect’s success in life is predicated on his personal traits: healthy mind in healthy body (he fasted); special talent (gift); self-motivation (exacting more); a sense of self-preservation (minding) when for example indulging his taste for Japanese design (boulder and … raked zen gravel). A man equally full on (no slouch either) when consuming the ‘hard stuff’ (whenever it […]

The Sharping Stone

Five poems are triggered by the discovery of a gift in mint condition lying forgotten in a drawer. The fourth piece identifies Heaney’s late father-in-law Thomas ‘Tommy’ Devlin and clues suggest that he is the centrepiece. Heaney zooms slowly in on the whetstone: from the furniture in which it was discovered (an apothecary’s chest of drawers), a quality piece (sweet cedar) of modest provenance (purchased second hand) to its specific location in a drawer (one of its weighty deep-sliding recesses). Therein the object itself (sharping stone) and recall of its original intended recipient who for the moment will remain anonymous (our gift to him). In mint condition (still in its wrapping paper). Too late to deliver now (Tommy has passed […]

The Strand

A poem of love and loss – Heaney’s ageing father once left signature markings on a Dublin beach; inevitably washed away by the next incoming tide they will never be obliterated from the poet’s memory. As they took the air together once on Sandymount Strand the point of Patrick Heaney’s stick left a trail (the dotted line my father’s ashplant made). As long as Heaney lives nothing the all-powerful sea can do will succeed in effacing that visual memory: something else the tide won’t wash away. dotted line: literally the line of marks imprinted by the stick on soft sand; metaphorically the space left on a form or letter upon which a person leaves his signature; Strand: a Dublin beach […]

The Walk

Twin sonnets of love – the first for parental devotion and guidance – the second, a ‘longshot’ contemplating his marriage to Marie that has lasted more than three decades. The first ‘photo’ is ‘fixed’ (his parents are no longer of this world), the second a black and white negative from which positive prints are plentiful and on-going. Fifty years on Heaney’s childhood Mossbawn walks with his mother and father still shed a magical light (glamoured) on time and place (the road, the day) and them (him and her), wherever they might take him (everywhere). The elements mixed and merged – solid mineral and liquid (cobbles were riverbed), what they breathed associated with spiritual day (Sunday air) beneath the dome of […]