Seamus Heaney

Selected Poems, 1966-1987

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$20.00

I have often passed Seamus Heaney making his way up the incline of Plympton St. towards the Yard and wondered what he was doing in Cambridge. The broadbacked poet looks as though he should be among the gnarled stiles of an Irish hillside, not the parking meters of a street in Harvard Square.

Heaney's poetry, though, has never really left Ireland, despite the fact that its author has been Boylston professor of rhetoric here for the past six years. Unlike William Butler Yeats, whose far-roving mind soon strayed from the lake isle of Innisfree, Heaney is a stationary poet, taking few side-trips to Cambridge or California, let alone Byzantium. His verses are circumscribed by the ancient parameters of the Celtic-Norse world, borders that almost everyone else has forgotten.

But to call Heaney's poems circumscribed is not to say that they are in any way of merely parochial or national interest. His newest book, a selection of poems written over the first two decades of his career, proves concisely and convincingly that Heaney deserves to be ranked with Yeats not just as an Irish poet, but as a voice of persistent and international relevance.

In fact, it is precisely because of the limits he places on his poetic demesne that Heaney gains an almost unlimited expressive control. For instead of moving outwards, he burrows "inwards and downwards," sifting the Irish soil and Irish soul for meaning and metaphor, retraversing locales and themes until the subtlest shifts and shadings take on great meaning. He delves, too, into his own and his country's past and finds them richly veined with continuities.

Fundamental to Heaney's success is his ability to recreate his native landscape on the page. The smoothness of the hills and the scuff of gravel under thick-soled shoes make themselves felt not just in the words' literal meaning but in the assonance and consonance of their sound. It is a world whose outer forms are rounded, full with what lies beneath. This external landscape then becomes a thing to be explored, dug into, its inner forms revealed.

This task is laid out in the first poem in the book, "Digging" (1966), which is one of Heaney's most famous works. It is also one of many that directly address the writing process itself:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

And Heaney does literally dig in many of his poems, stripping away the soil layer by layer and showing us the peat, potatoes, bones, down to the "wet centre" of "Atlantic seepage."

Through this sort of excavation, Heaney argues that the outer contours of the present landscape are simply the surface form of an inner, accumulated past. It is an appropriate theme for a poet whose homeland continues to suffer from deep-rooted and ancient political conflict.