For all his good humour at a reading of his new work, Seamus Heaney shows a melancholic concern for the world, writes Eileen Battersby
Dublin's streets are currently illuminated by the face of Samuel Beckett peering out at a world that has become stranger than even he had suspected. His fellow Nobel Literature laureate, Seamus Heaney, shares his concerns.
The poet who filled the Abbey Theatre on Sunday evening for a reading from his new collection, District and Circle, his first in five years, retains his benign accessibility and lyric grace, an ability to comfort and to prod the reader. This is a bardic artist who has become increasingly aware of the menace undermining society, the global as well as the local. As for the personal - he has been attuned to that since the beginning of his career, 40 years ago, with the publication of Death of a Naturalist, an anniversary celebrated this month.
That he had come at all in a dark week in which he had buried three of his friends (including John McGahern), is indicative of the seriousness with which he holds his responsibility as a poet.
He looks to memory but he watches the present and fears for the future. Standing on the Abbey stage, against an appropriate backdrop of upheaval, the set of The Bacchae of Baghdad, he looked like the kindly schoolmaster he once was. He was introduced without ceremony - after all, how would one attempt to introduce Heaney to an Irish audience?
Yet for all the characteristic good humour and the ease of one among his people, there was a melancholic concern caused by "cold deeds" and the "destruction of the planet". He referred to Czeslaw Milosz's comment about a poet's abiding need for "a level of awareness" without which, "it is not good poetry".
Heaney is more than aware. The collective classical spirit of Homer, Virgil, Horace and Dante inform his intelligence. Death emerged as a theme. He joked about dedicating poems "to people who are elsewhere" such as Milosz and Ted Hughes, but that elsewhere has become too final and his sense of this is real.
The local remains vital. If on first glance District and Circle evokes images of the London Underground network, there is the greater relevance of "district" as in local terrain, and "circle" as in enduring themes - "old themes" - and their respective importance in Heaney's work. Underground also equates with underworld, and no poet approaches this without shouldering the legacy of the plight of Orpheus and his desperate recovery of Eurydice as chronicled by Virgil and Ovid. Heaney has always looked to Dante, whom no poet ignores.
The physical and the mythic, the essential soil of his work, is countered by the long slow anger directed at terrorists amok in the North of Ireland, or suicide bombers in New York and Baghdad. The first new poem, The Turnip-Snedder, with its compound nouns and earthy traditionalism, traces the natural process of a turnip as charted . . .
"In an age of bare hands
and cast iron,
the clamp-on meat-mincer,
the double-flywheeled water-pump,
. . . 'This is the way that God sees life,'
it said, "from seedling-braird to snedder.' "
The ritual of a traditional rural practice is both remembered and honoured. So too is speech.
In Anahorish 1944 the simple practice of recalling what exactly was being done at a moment of great importance is reported:
"We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.
A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood
Outside the slaughterhouse . . ."
ARTISTS TEND TO walk a tight rope between adulation and resentment. Ordinary, extraordinary, non-theatrical, Seamus Heaney, famous since almost the beginning of his career, has experienced some misreading of his political engagement but his status as artist has seldom been disputed; his ability to nudge language into discovery is singular.
At the Abbey reading there was a feeling that here was a moment built on a remarkable continuity of meticulous artistic endeavour.
He has achieved this many times before in an individual work, yet it was this quality of artistic continuity of vision that shaped the reading.
District and Circle as a collection was celebrated before it was formally published. The reviews, even by the standard of a poet so long established and critically acclaimed, have been tests of how eloquently superlatives may be delivered. It is another bench-mark achievement just as North (1975) was, which was a remarkable collection and well followed by Field Work (1979). Seeing Things (1991), a confirmation of the power of personal investigation, was another major step, as was The Spirit Level (1996). In District and Circle, one poem, Anything Can Happen, defines the moment, not only of an artist lamenting his world, but of a prophecy fulfilled, a statement made - dread has been recognised and realised.
Throughout the reading, the audience responded to the warmth and wit of Heaney, the familiar, the beauty of ordinary objects described as if seen for the first time. To borrow a Heaney phrase, "he was one of their own".
There was also the nostalgia of memory in the memorials To Mick Joyce in Heaven; an exquisite elegy The Lift; and the Home Help poems. Heaney went on to describe how in The Midnight Anvil Barney Devlin "hammered/the midnight anvil" to mark the new millennium. Here the voice of an earlier poet, distanced by some 200 years, is heard again: "ringing sweet as a bell".
But the full weight of the artist alert to the insidious dangers in a damaged world resounds through every line of Anything Can Happen. It is the poem which reiterates how this consummate poet of the personal, the colloquial and the rhetorical, so easily grasps the monumental, that it reveals the lyricist as outraged seer.
"Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to
gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and
his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth . . ."
Listening to these apocalyptic lines rendered from Horace with their images of upheaval reiterated the fact that Heaney the witness has watched as closely as he has imagined. A similar sense of the aftermath of disaster was evoked in a beautiful version of a work by Rilke. The poem told the story of a house fire and the impact the devastation had on a young man and the perception of him in his community. "And he was changed: a foreigner among them" (from Rilke: After the Fire).
A MORE PERSONAL sense of terror shapes Höfn, describing a plane journey across an Icelandic glacier known to be melting: "I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,/Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff."
A further personal moment was recaptured in the rhythms of the Hopkins-inspired In Iowa when the poet recalls the moment he saw "abandoned in the open gap" a mowing machine which made him think of the role it had once played in other lives.
District and Circle plots journeys into the underworld; a simple tube ride does carry the import of travelling beneath the earth. Two of the five poems in the sequence had actually been written prior to last July's horrific incidents in London. It is as if Heaney has become entrusted with terrifying bulletins.
His return to the subject of Tollund Man, the iron-age survivor with a story to tell, first encountered by Heaney in North, confirmed an artist's gift for making the familiar new. This time the subject, long contained in a Danish bog, becomes speaker when given a dream-mind:
"History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim . . . In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers . . ."
The reading was a narrative shaped by anecdote and the new poems. The collection emerged as a conversation from a seeker who continues to search. When he came to read Planting the Alder, "For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped/And pigeon-collared", it was possible to sense the poet's delight in the image he had forged.
Quitting Time sums up the final activities ina farmer's daily routine, the hosing down of the yard, ". . . More and more this last look at the wet . . .". The farmer he had written it for was in the audience, and he hoped he wouldn't mind if he had to share the dedication with another farmer who had died - John McGahern. The close of the gate, rendered as "The song of a tubular steel date in the dark/As he pulls it to and starts his uphill trek", saw a simple gesture become a memorial.
The Blackbird of Glanmore is another Heaney witness celebrated by a grateful poet aware of the presence "On the grass when I arrive,/In the ivy when I leave". Seamus Heaney read the words, evoking memories from his earliest work, and left the stage.
