POETRY
Between hope and history
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
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Seamus Heaney's latest work shows that the poet's spirit remains undiminished.
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District and Circle; Seamus Heaney, Fabre & Fabre, £12.99
IN his recent verse volume District and Circle, Seamus Heaney has fashioned a fiercely intelligent work that powerfully demonstrates how poetry necessarily moves between "hope and history". In the light of his prolific literary career, Heaney's 12th collection of poems shows the Nobel-poet reflecting on the tracks of his years, which have endowed him with faith in the `redemptive effect' of poetry.
Taking stock of his life and the uncertain conditions of our times, Heaney in one poem — a fine sequence to his own "Tollund Man" — significantly arrives at an epiphanic realisation, which is so finely expressed by the late Czeslaw Milosz that `the soul exceeds its circumstances'. Several poems in this new volume convey in some sense this acute self-awareness of the poet.
Bizarre meeting
Of his new poetry Heaney says, "there is some sense of menace and of the darkening of understanding. What we are all conscious of, from the American point of view, is the breaching of walls and the total trauma of security having gone". The title poem "District and Circle" describes a sinister journey into the underground unfolding a bizarre meeting with a busker and imaginatively takes you through a trip into an age of surveillance:
Another level down, the platform thronged./I re-entered the safety of numbers,... /Like a human chain, the pushy new comers/Jostling and purling underneath the vault, /On their marks to be first through the doors,/Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet... ...
The 40th anniversary of Heaney's groundbreaking "Death of a Naturalist" was celebrated this summer in Ireland / Britain. Since its publication in 1966, Heaney's verse still continues to stem from the pastoral landscape of County Derry in Northern Ireland where he was born and the farming life of his childhood. District and Circle displays an acute Larkinesque sense of absence of the country life in which Heaney grew up and now is completely gone. These marvellous poems on the vanished world of childhood are beautiful evocations of the landscape and there is a melancholic sense of valediction in their tone. The poem called "The Lift", for instance, can be read as an eloquent elegy of a dead country at one level and at another level it tells the story of a dead woman's funeral.
Whole requiems at the sight of plants and gardens... /They bore her lightly on the brier. Four women,/Four friends — she would have called them girls — stepped in/And claimed the final lift beneath the hawthorn.
Delicious lyricism is tempered by an everyday use of language that energises both sense and sound. The poems are immaculately crafted, poignant, feisty and full of surprise. This is Heaney in top form.
The volume also includes an eclectic range of prose-poems, translations, sonnets and lyrics. While the poems move in the extreme momentum in the telling and gather an exquisite lyrical force, a better structure of the staggering range is desired. The poem "Anything can happen" illustrates this tremendous lyric force and gives depth to Horace's translation which resonates deeply with the contemporary sense of terror:
... The Heaven's weight./Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid./Capstones shift, nothing restless right./ Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
The poignant closing poem of the collection "The Blackbird of Glanmore" shows Heaney looking at himself — assured and aware but disturbed by "circumstances" both personal and social. He describes himself standing like a:
Shadow on raked-gravel, in front of my house of life/I am absolute... /on the grass when I arrive/In the ivy when I leave.
Haunting poem
Here we see how the hiding powers of poetry escape from the twisted anxieties of our times and offer Heaney resistance to stand on his ground to hope in the mystery of life's renewals. So, what then is Heaney's role in our world of `newfound contraries'? Perhaps we can find some answers in the haunting poem "The Tollund Man in Springtime":
... Dust in my palm/And in my nostrils dust, should I shake it off/Or mix it in with spit in pollen's name/And my own? As a man would, cutting turf,/I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit/And spirited myself into the sreet.
Heaney's street is now not restrained by its Irishness alone or by the tranquil morning cattle market in Co. Derry. In District and Circle the former Harvard Professor's point of reference is America and his vision of the street widens to a transatlantic one.
With a certain amount of irony, the world after 9/11 is a unified one for Heaney as his poetry touches the "base of our sympathetic nature in response to an unsympathetic reality of the world". Entering his 70th year now, his head shining bright with a silvery mop — the poet's spirit remains undiminished and the poet's eye undimmed.
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