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Notes from 21 South Street: "The Now or Never Whelm" Where does a poet go over a decade after winning the Nobel Prize? In the case of Seamus Heaney, not very far. His last book before being awarded the world’s top literature accolade was 1991’s Seeing Things, which contained two highlights of his career. “Squarings” was a set of forty-eight poems of four tercets each, divided into four sections (‘Lightenings,’ ‘Settings,’ ‘Crossings,’ and ‘Squarings’). Ostensibly elicited by the passing of his parents, it is a structural masterpiece that cerebrally interrogates abstract questions of death and the afterlife. Seeing Things also included a continuation of the “Glanmore Sonnets,” which first appeared in 1979’s Field Work. Mark Rudman, reviewing The Haw Lantern (1987) in he New York Times, argues, “Clearances,’ [an elegy for his mother] along with his earlier ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ rescues an outworn form from cliché and stands among the best sonnet sequences written in English in this century.” In contrast, Heaney’s next two volumes, The Spirit Level (1996) and Electric Light (2001), have seen Heaney sticking to his guns and mining the memories of Irish farm life upon of which he built his reputation. Surely he has matured enough in 40 years to paint his rural scenes in light of changes both personal and political and on a few occasions in District and Circle, he does just that. “The Aerodrome” enters a reverie from 1944, where the aura of war “Watched and waited – like me and her that day / Watching and waiting by the perimeter.” Heaney’s delicate shift from public emotion into private emotion concludes with an elegant dissertation: “If self is a location, so is love: / Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, / Options, obstinancies, dug heels, and distance, / Here and there and now and then, a stance.” This is an observation earned by years, not understood on that youthful day ensconced in memory. “The Nod,” meanwhile, tackles the legacy of Irish sectarian violence, a naturally divisive subject in Heaney’s oeuvre, where he seems to lament more than take a stance (for the record, he is a Catholic born in Northern Ireland). While the monumental IRA ceasefire of the early ‘90s was conclusively dealt with in “Mycenae Lookout,” the standout poem of The Spirit Level, such a traumatic era nevertheless creates lingering memories. A trip to the butcher shop, the meat “Like dead weight in a sling,” turns into an uneasy confrontation with “the local B-Men,” Protestant policemen who often engaged in hostilities with Catholics: “Some nodding at my father almost past him / As if deliberately they’d aimed and missed him / Or couldn’t seem to place him, not just then.” The arbitrary ambiguity of that era, when a nod merely prefigured a bullet and innocence or guilt made no difference, is still enough to haunt years later. The subject of family is somewhat fruitful, with tender elegies for dead and dying relatives picking up the slack of “The Real Names,” a poem from Electric Light that insisted upon using actual names of friends and family to describe a long swath of memories from childhood to the recent past. “The Lift” frames a traditional Irish funeral in a progressive light, the final lift of his sister’s coffin performed not by men, but by “Four women, / Four friends – she would have called them girls.” In “Home Help,” the reader will have to excuse sentimentality as he confronts aged domestic life, and “Quitting Time” sees Heaney’s brother “a home-based man at home / In the end with little” for having chosen to stay with tilling the soil. But Heaney has earned the right to pepper his book with a few of such portraits. He left his birthplace, Mossbawn farm in County Derry, for university; for teaching posts the world over at Oxford, Berkeley, and Harvard, where he is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet-in-Residence; and for seclusion in the countryside of County Wicklow when the violence in the north was too much. His poetry has also traveled far afield in 40 years, delving deep into mythology, medieval and ancient history, and purely abstract territory. Consequently, returning to assess County Derry toward the end of his life is a helpful update to the subject matter with which he launched his career, rather than an unneeded repetition.
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