Electric
Light, by Seamus Heaney.
(Faber ISBN 0571207626, Farrar, Straus &
Giroux ISBN 0374146837, published 2001)
Review by
Philip Harvey first published in Tin Tean.
Seamus
Heaney keeps rolling along. His ordered cadences and grounded tones, we can
also say ground tones both in the sense of gravelly and well-honed, come at us
familiarly in this new collection. Linguistically, Heaney continues to behave
as though the major poetic fashions of his own lifetime never happened. At
times, the brilliant and meticulous measure of his lines sound like the last
word in Johnsonian impeccability. We always find him with both feet firmly on
the earth, a case of gravity empowering gravity. Certainly, at the end of the
20th century, it’s a relief to find a poet who remains so
consistently sane.
Some of
those infamous preoccupations, synonymous with being Heaney, occupy these 79
pages. First, there are the wily analogies he uses to talk of Ireland, “the
child that’s due” as he says in ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, the poet wishing to
“sing / better times for her and her guardian.”
Second,
there are the memory poems, normally not so much autobiographical excursions as
attempts at moments of presence, of meaning drawn back from chaos through the
existence of others, family, friends, even strangers and saints. Take ‘The
Clothes Shrine’:
It was a
whole new sweetness
In the
early days to find
Light white
muslin blouses
On a
see-through nylon line
Drip-drying
in the bathroom
Or a nylon
slip in the shine
Of its own
electricity -
As if St
Brigid once more
Had rigged
up a ray of sun
Like the
one she’d strung on air
To dry her
own cloak on
(Hard-pressed
Brigid, so
Unstoppably
on the go) -
The damp
and slump and unfair
Drag of the
workaday
Made light
of and got through
As usual,
brilliantly.
This poetry
often depicts a safer Ireland of childhood and youth, pre-bookish,
pre-academic, and significantly, pre-Troubles. In a recent interview in The
Irish Times Heaney even points to a state of being that brought this poetry
about. “It’s a ruminant book in the sense of chewing the cud. It is stuff
that’s in the system, in the memory, that is being revisited.” He also says, “I
think that post-1994, post the cessation of violence, the cessations, something
changed in me, something changed in everybody. Things were restored to a more
equable condition. Actually, I realised how deprived we had been really for 25
years,” and later he continues, “... in the 1970s and 1980s, the inner being of
anybody conscious and answerable on the island was cornered in a different way
than now. The spirit is in a different posture, and now it’s opener, it’s less
battened down, less huddled.” That the poetic content is becoming nostalgic,
even sentimental round the edges, may be a sign of age, and of living in a more
comfortable Ireland, where such memory play is indulged rather than purely
valued. It puts in a new perspective his large corpus of personal memory
poetry, the staking out of a value system learnt in childhood and put to the
test by extreme circumstance. His poem for Brian Friel (‘The Real Names’) on
the poet’s classmates playing Shakespeare opens up the comic and sweet ironies
of Ulster children getting the hang of perfect
Englishness. How, after a staging of ‘The Tempest’ or ‘Macbeth’, in refectory
“we, in fourteens, moon-calves, know-nothings, / stood by our chairs and waited
for the grace.”
A third
preoccupation is Heaney’s conversation with literature, which takes a risible
turn this time around when, like the uncle in ‘The Cherry Orchard’, he
addresses his bookcase. Unlike the Chekhov character, Heaney knows the contents
very well, quoting Bede, for example, who wrote that “...scrapings off the
leaves of books from Ireland / when steeped in water palliate the effect / of
snake-bite. ‘For on this isle’, he states, / ‘almost everything confers
immunity.’” This powerful preoccupation with the European inheritance blossoms
anew. Conversations with ancient civilizations, in this book especially with
the Greeks, free him too from the claustrophobia of the trying Irish questions.
In the interview he observed, “I suppose there’s more subjectivity in the book.
It’s readier to go down into the bedding in the mind, instead of building it
into a shape.” One other sign of Heaney’s age is the second section, comprising
elegies to poets and old friends. His poem to Ted Hughes places Heaney firmly
outside mere Theory with its opening line, “Post-this, post-that,
post-the-other, yet in the end / not past a thing. Not understanding or telling
/ or forgiveness.” Reading this, we know he’s for real when he says elsewhere,
“I believe in the flow of rage and trust that goes on underneath.”
In a world
where it’s almost a sin to be critical of a Nobel Prize winner, it may seem
errant behaviour to admit that at times Heaney’s verse weighs its arguments too
carefully. Will he ever again take the risks that kept us up all night reading
‘North’ or the great Sweeney sequences? Some tricks start to show themselves
and the woof and weft, “the must and
drift”, “the bob and flash” can look more like padding than filigree. All the
same, to be in the presence of a great Heaney poem, and there are several in
this book, is to be lulled anew by his
“old sense of a tragedy going on / uncomprehended” and his undemonstrative way of
taking us to the centre of that concern. It is to renew our acquaintance with
an imaginative journey. As he says himself in the same interview, “the quest of
writing poetry has allowed the first part of me not to be lost, and I hope to
keep some kind of pace, keep some kind of co-ordination with the second, third,
fourth, the developing part of me because I think that any consciousness, if
it’s going to keep itself integrated, has to keep moving out and at the same
time mustn’t utterly lose its first point.” That he could never abandon or neglect
his gift is evinced when he states that “poetry tries to keep the most intimate
and most inquisitive intellectually imaginative part of yourself together in
some kind of balance. To try and be a whole person and at the same time
acknowledge all your different bits.”
Nostalgia
and books, but what then to make of Heaney’s own estimation of the collection?
“The poem in the book that to me is new and different is Out Of The Bag which
goes back almost to the origins of consciousness; my own child imagining where
I came in the doctor’s bag. .... He went up to the room, then when he came down
a child would be there. In those days that was a sufficient explanation.”
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