Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney Faber & Faber 478pp, £20 in UK.
Contemporary literature is not well served by its critics. Much of present-day criticism is agenda-based, concerned with opinion rather than analysis.. The writer is seen as public man, and assessment of the text has yielded to speculations on personality. Seamus Heaney has been caught in a critical mine field for much of his career. He found his audience quickly, and the appeal of his traditional, memoir-based lyrics - "my tentative art", as he puts it in "Casualty" (Field Work, 1979) - led to charges that he had evaded his political responsibility. In Ireland, opinion remains divided, even confused; he has been widely praised and harshly dismissed, and often misread.
He is also perceived as presenting an internationally acceptable, romanticised version of rural Ireland. Perhaps more seriously for his reputation, at least among critics and academics, he was honoured mid-career by the Swedish Academy at the early - for a poet - age of fifty-seven.
More burden than gift, the Nobel Prize is now regarded as a political gesture. Yet as the political themes in Heaney's work have been frequently overlooked, a lopsided reading of his achievement has caused his countrymen to reject his representation of Ireland as cosily romantic and rural, while non-Irish readers are too easily comforted by the image of an Ireland they think still exists. In the introduction to Sweeney Astray (1983), his version of the old Irish poem Buile Suibhne, Heaney wrote: ". . . insofar as Sweeney is also a figure of the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance, it is possible to read the work as an aspect of the creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political and domestic obligation." Therein lies some of Heaney's dilemma, and indeed the dilemma of contemporary poetry in general.
The critical reception of Opened Ground, an updating of his Selected Poems 1966-1987, based on the poet's personal selection, has been more contentious than celebratory. Possibly the most widely read living poet, he is now being judged as a Nobel Laureate rather than a poet. Yet critics of his work in search of the epic are faced more often with the ordinary and the remembered.
This is a big book; approaching 500 pages, it includes 200 poems as well as Crediting Poetry, the text of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Hardly a retrospective, and neither a Selected nor a Collected, this uneasy volume does chart the development of a poet shaped by the diction of Robert Frost, the rhythms of Hopkins and the "placeness" of Kavanagh. The journey is interesting and enlightening in that it illustrates a greater stylistic diversity than Heaney is often credited with. It also shows the U-turns and side-steppings and repetitions in the work and, most importantly, the tensions between the soft lyric - his true home - and the uncomfortably conversational; between the formal and traditional, the colloquial rhythms of Northern speech.
Heaney as an artist is not given to reinvention. He can be consistent and is often conservative, but even a voice as apparently distinctive as his does betray mood shifts. At times, as may be seen in The Spirit Level (1995), the easy evoking of memories yields to the harsh exasperation of "The Flight Path", in which he is asked by what is obviously an IRA man: " `When, for fuck's sake, are you going to write/Something for us?' `If I do write something,/Whatever it is, I'll be writing for myself.' "
Much of the work is incidental, of the moment. The language is physical and the imagery is drawn from the natural, elemental world. Throughout this volume the reader is presented with Heaney's apparent thematic simplicity which conceals a highly sophisticated technique and subtle nuances. As Heaney matured, his personal poems became blurred as he turned chronicler rather than subject; there was also a sharpening of the political focus. "There they were, as if our memory hatched them,/As if the unquiet founders walked again:/Two young men with rifles on the hill,/Profane and bracing as their instruments." (From "Triptych", Field Work, 1979) It is as if the private man began to yield to the observer, the uneasy witness.
Earlier on, the publication of North (1975) marked Heaney's artistic coming of age. The political realities of Northern Ireland were filtered through narratives exploring an older, equally brutal past. Long aware of "the anvil brains of some who hate me . . . I am neither internee nor informer:/ An inner emigre grown long-haired/ And thoughtful: a wood-kerne/Escaped from the massacre." (From "Exposure", part six of "The Ministry of Fear", North, 1975), in "Funeral Rites" he balances the ancient and current hatreds: "Now as news comes in/of each neighbourly murder/we pine for ceremony/ customary rhythms . . ./ / I would restore//the great chambers of Boyne, prepare a sepulchre . . . Quiet as a serpent/in its grassy boulevard//the procession drags its tail/out of the Gap of the North/as its head already enters/the megalithic doorway." In "Punishment" he confronts his own passivity: "I who have stood dumb/when your betraying sisters,/cauled in tar, / wept by the railings// who would connive/in civilized outrage/yet understand the exact/and tribal, intimate revenge." That volume remains central to his work and contains many of his best poems.
At a time when many Irish novelists and dramatists are enjoying a honeymoon thanks to the current fashionable popularity of Ireland's arts scene, poetry continues to be treated at best warily, at worst dismissively - particularly by critics. Heaney has long been a victim of his own popularity, while the beauty of his early work has caused him to be caught in a time warp of sorts. As a young poet intent on the pastoral, he concentrated on the exploration of private space and memory. Somehow he has never managed to shake off the image of a pastoralist, despite his adoption of the role of observer of public affairs. "Casualty" offers an account of the random killing perpetrated in the North through the experience of a loner whom he portrays in almost neutral language: "He would drink by himself/And raise a weathered thumb . . ./He was blown to bits/ Out drinking in a curfew/Others obeyed . . ."
In the powerful and angry lamentation, "Ugolino", a reworking of a passage from Dante, Heaney demonstrates his linguistic versatility and ease with classical form: "The thought of having to relive all that/Desperate time makes my heart sick;/Yet while I weep to say them, I would sow/My words like curses . . ." (Field Work). Yet throughout the 1980s, although he began to draw on history and myth in his work, the view of Heaney as a lyric, pastoral poet persisted. A chronological reading partly justifies this. However, Seeing Things (1991), in which the poet of bog and water moved on to air and water, is of central importance. Like North, it marks a significant change of direction and technical innovation.
Where does Seamus Heaney stand now? This selection points to the shifts and changes as well as the returns in his work over the past thirty years. Yet overall, the book, as its title suggests, is concerned with openings rather than closures. Heaney's work is not yet done, as the increasingly rueful, thoughtful tone of The Spirit Level emphatically shows.