Poetry: The Nobel laureate displays a voracious alertness to the post-9/11 world, writes Chris Agee.
In his "Report from Ireland" in the Spring 1965 issue of Chicago Review, the Irish critic Augustine Martin remarks on the magazine appearance of several poems of "rough human vividness" by a most talented 26-year-old Belfast poet, Seamus Heaney. Heaney has a visual and tactile imagination in describing homely experience unequalled since the early Kavanagh.
Quoting from one poem, Death of a Naturalist, he goes on to conclude: "There is revealed here, I think, a rich primitive sense of language, and the frogs themselves take on primordial significance . . . in that recollected epiphany of childhood".
The next year, the collection Death of a Naturalist appeared, and the rest is history: concentric ripples of achievement travelling outwards from that first splash in the literary pond, and now culminating in District and Circle - a volume of incontestable weight and majesty, arguably unsurpassed, in universal relevance, by any of its predecessors.
"The bastion of sensation" in all its visual, tactile, cultural and psychic particularity: this sensual perspicuity has always been the foundational territory of Heaney's ground-breaking muse, the district whose rounds he has done for more than 40 years. I once heard a scholar say that about half of all Heaney's poems were imaginatively rooted within a short radius of his family's smallholding in Co Derry; and this remains true here, if one reckons its poems on farm implements and household objects - a harrow-pin, a scuttle, a sledgehammer, a stove-lid, a spade - by which Heaney amplifies and mediates the "age of bare hands/and cast iron" which first formed him as a countryman.
As always for me with Heaney, the Contents produced surprise at the rare-hoard effect of his titles. And if it's true that all his collections evince a very fitted line-up, it seems even more intensely so with this book - so that there are not only many connections between poems, and self-echoes deep or fleeting from earlier work, but also a magisterial unfolding of thematic suites that creates a distinct superaddition of contemporary meaning, a sum greater, even, than the discrete ensembles emerging from the beauty of individual poems.
Voraciousness, artistic and intellectual, has always been a prime characteristic of Heaney the Maestro; here, one senses especially a voracious alertness to the post-9/11 world, a global weather-eye leaving its trace elements across the snail-track of the poems. One reading of the title, then, might be the interplay of continuity and evolution.
A host of old Heaney things are modulated in new ways: the handling of objects as if messengers of talismanic lore, bearing "the tackle of the mighty, simple dead"; the quick density, the clotted swiftness, of his style increasingly; an intensified telegraphese of notation, catching ever more exactly the actual arabesques of consciousness; fresh proofs of his innate mix of eases and facilities, whereby a rich workaday demotic is fused with the heights of literary sophistication, as if a master dowser had tapped into a singular way of seeing and hearing and handling the primal energy in language.
The opening poems harken back to early memory. To find a correlative for the newly menacing, but anciently cognate, historical weather at the start of our century, he returns to the apocalyptic last years of the second World War. Something fear-haunted and "fly-by-night" in existence, felt by the child - epiphanies of darkness, cheek by jowl with first things - is, for him, now apt to remember.
They annunciate a newly dark note carried through the collection: a heightened feeling for the eternal destruction that is existence, the silencing of all human endeavour by the dragon of time. In one, an antique farm contraption voices proxy metaphysics on the natural history of destruction; in another, a garden daydream morphs to Polish transports under an indifferent sky; in a third, the exquisite The Aerodrome, the massed spectre of American airpower set down in Derry countryside, belonging to "wherever the world was", is offset by a tightened hand, his sister's tiny gesture of love.
Often overlooked - due to Heaney's more obvious persona as a venerator, whose main duty is to "watch my words" in work that "pinpoints dark" - there has always been a tough historical barb running through his poetry and prose, nowhere more so than in A Shiver. Writing out of a veteran awareness of Irish history, his description of a sledgehammer's destructive action becomes a kind of flattened meaning in itself, by simply relating what's there, what's experience:
Its gathered force like a long-nursed rage About to be let fly: does it do you good To have known it in your bones, directable, Withholdable at will, A first blow that could make air of a wall, A last one so unanswerably landed The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?
Yet is there not also an unmistakable allusion, bordering on coincidence, to the double-blow to the Twin Towers, and the historical shiver it initiated; and thus an intimation, directed at America especially, that even historical destruction, and the human enmity it manifests, can issue in the "good" of self-awareness, both personal and collective?
Further poems pitch more directly into the contemporary weather. His child-self, a "homunculus/from the age of blackout", shape-shifts, in Anything Can Happen, to the classical translator of an Horatian ode where hubris is struck down by "stropped-beak Fortune"; the North's "fireman-poet", working in "hammered iron", well-used to the historical forge in Helmet, reappears in Out of Shot as both remembrancer of "Norse raids" and bifocal onlooker "thinking shock/Out of the blue or blackout" - or stunned, like Lowell before the TV in a famous Vietnam poem, by "the staggered walk/Of a donkey" in a devastated bazaar.
But the book's steadfast omphalos remains the home place. Several marvellous prose vignettes and a riff of poems on the townland of childhood remind us just how much Heaney has always done the rounds as local historian, ecologist, narrator, lore-man. A number of harrowing nature lyrics on "the planetary stand-off" and the "great vowel shift" of ecological destruction, full of unexpected vehemence, also illustrate the degree to which Heaney has been, all the while, one of the age's finest poet-naturalists.
Likewise, the many delicate poems on relations with the living and the dead - familial, personal, literary - make abundant the homage to personality that from the start was one of his very greatest themes. Unrivalled too is his ability to conjure the depths of emotion, especially grief, as in two thorough-going masterpieces, The Lift and The Blackbird of Glanmore, which recall his long-lost brother and late sister.
In the title-poem's sequence, the London Underground - shades of Orpheus - functions as an image for the way we travel daily into the underworld of memory, even as we live above in a "resurrection scene". The fundamental architectonics are Eliotan: all the living who will one day be dead throng the Tube; but Heaney himself, passing Charon the tin-whistler, is unready to pass over, "flicker-lit" by his departed loved ones, "the only relict/Of all that I belonged to".
As if cognate with the vivid feeling for destruction, some air of a practitioner's credo also takes shape. It might be described, neatly, as more metaphor than metaphysics; To Mick Joyce in Heaven makes plain his long- standing humanistic wager on the placeless heaven of the imagination - perhaps suggesting some antechamber to a religious notion, perhaps not. In the Catholic autobiography of Out of this World, he remains, as ever, wholly reticent on such points, displacing any full-throated metaphysics from his own voice; only fleetingly is speculative feeling entertained, as in the magnificent end-stop to his poem for Auden: "Think of dark matter in the starlit coalhouse".
Towards the end, Heaney turns to the staying powers, in himself and others, attendant on age. A sonnet-sequence of fantastic beauty, The Tollund Man in Springtime, reawakens the bog-body of an early poem into the dream-mind of the Man himself. No metaphysical claims are made - he is "neither god nor ghost,/Not at odds or at one", merely an image of the obliteration of the human past, which art may still approach.
The dusty voice of the Tollund Man, become part of history, an object in a display case or a poem, falls away into the joie de vivre still vouchsafed by the natural world, the daily glory of being-in-time; and Heaney, poet of "the old man-killing parishes", dwells on the aftermath of that famed Danish quest, interrogating the uses to which we put the past: is it mere dust to be shaken off, or the very stuff to handle with the spit of life, the working seed of some new fertility going on? As both countryman and artist, his response was never in doubt.
Chris Agee is the editor of the journal Irish Pages. He is currently completing his third collection of poems, Next to Nothing
District and Circle. By Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber, 77pp. £8.99