Ply the Pen

By WILLIAM LOGAN

For a poet, life after the Nobel can be pottering, or bookkeeping, or simply keeping busy its rarely full of radical departures or stunning new poems. (Eliot called the prize a ticket to ones own funeral, and indeed it proved the funeral of his poetry.) Even pottering can be difficult when you are constantly in demand to judge this prize or sign that public letter, to give a blurb to old X or a recommendation to young Y. For a poet, all life can be a distraction from the siren call of the page. When you read that Seamus Heaney has a secretary to help him answer correspondence, you wish he had half a dozen, and perhaps a few armed guards. Yet apart from Pasternak, who was bullied by his government, no poet has ever turned down the poisoned chalice. Enlarge This Image

Jemimah Kuhfeld

Seamus Heaney Heaney is the most popular literary poet since Frost, who managed to convince most of his readers that he wasnt a literary poet at all, that he booted up poems while mucking out a spring or driving a buggy and perhaps, in a way, he did. Readers often love in Heaney what they loved in Frost, the unassumed and unassuming wisdom. Heaney has rubbed shoulders, as Frost did, with some of the most important literary figures of his day; Heaney has spent a long share of nights in hotels and on the road, as Frost did; yet often they write as if, just out the window, the cows were bawling to be milked and the first green shoots were sprouting in the fields and as if neither man had spent more nights in a hotel than the Queen of Sheba. In Human Chain, Heaneys latest collection, the poet is again a child in the world of things, his attention drawn to objects common as a coal sack: Not coal dust, more the weighty grounds of coal The lorryman would lug in open bags And vent into a corner,

A sullen pile But soft to the shovel, accommodating As the clattering coal was not. In days when life prepared for rainy days It lay there, slumped and waiting To dampen down and lengthen out The fire, a check on mammon And in its own way Keeper of the flame. This isnt lump coal, the top screening from the mine, but the bottom-deck slack coal, the cheap bits and grindings that fall through the other meshes. This refuse coal trims the cost of the fire (hence the mention of the Bibles Mammon). Keeper of the flame is its own droll joke, as if the coal, like the poet, honors the dead. Heaney is not a plain poet, at least not as plain as he seems the poems often have to be prodded and stirred to yield their meanings. At times the Ireland of Heaneys poems seems trapped in amber. The boom years of the Celtic Tiger and the bursting of the bubble afterward have made little impression on his work. Yet this love of the things of this world has made a world, even if one somewhat sealed off (Susan Sontag once said to an American novelist that he was living in his own theme park, and Heaneys Ireland is sometimes like Disney Dublin). Human Chain is a gallery of things of the binder and the baler (the clunk of a baler / Ongoing, cardiac-dull), of the heating boiler and the mite box and the gold-banded fountain pen, possessions that also possess, things that seize the people who use them, like the boy Who would ease his lapped wrist From the flap-mouthed cuff Of a jerkin rank with eel oil, The abounding reek of it Among our summer desks My first encounter with the up close That had to be put up with. Given the poet, given the future, its hard not to think that the Troubles lie there before him. That would suit his passive temper. At ease with forgotten manners, at ease with a sentence winding toward two final prepositions, Heaney manages to stiffen his syntax with an Anglo-Saxon rectitude of rhythm; yet where most poets live by eye, Heaney likes to press the readers nose into the carnal stench of things. This love of the way things work, this delight in the hard practical craftsman, is very different from Audens boyish romance with mining equipment. Auden loved such machines partly for the rust. Heaney likes to see a task efficiently done, and his poems are full of characters who know a job of work. Like Virgils Georgics, his poems offer a quiet master-class on how a farm used to be run, the homage of someone who returns again and again to the Irish fields that bore him.

Lick the pencil we might have called him So quick he was to wet the lead, so deft His hand-to-mouth and tongue-flirt round the stub. Or Drench the cow, so fierce his nostril-grab And peel-back of her lip, so accurately forced The bottle-neck between her big bare teeth. Or Catch the horse, for in spite of the low-set Cut of him, he could always slip an arm Around the neck and fit winkers on In a single move. Perhaps we give too much respect to a poetry lost in pastoral its the strain of Romanticism most palatable to contemporary taste (palatable, and often deeply conservative). A lot of modern poetry comes out of Wordsworths leech-gatherer, and at times Heaney drags in too many old grubbers with dirt under their thumbnails. Lewis Carroll wrote a howling parody of The Leech-Gatherer (later titled Resolution and Independence), and I doubt he would let the Irishman off any more lightly. Yet Heaneys nostalgia is rarely simple he understands the cost of love too well.

Heaney has Frosts avuncular voice, the bootstrap wisdom, the love of the natural world caught and rendered; yet hes not really a teller of tales, and his poems are slow to draw the homilies beloved by Frost the endings are hesitant, unrevealing, morally ambiguous. One of the great virtues of Heaneys poems is patience when he lingers over a description of a shopcoat, he gives the thing edge and weight. (Frost never paused for such descriptions and had an aversion to ingenious metaphor.) However much this is poetry, it is not poetry, the long-winded sentimental bombast that makes schoolchildren run screaming from poems ever after. HUMAN CHAIN By Seamus Heaney 85 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24

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Books of The Times: Poetry Collections by Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon (September 17, 2010)

For decades Heaney has been a model citizen in the state of literature. He has produced useful translations (most popularly of Beowulf, a best seller), idiosyncratic anthologies, a respectable body of criticism and, every few years, a new book of poems. Hes unlikely to be remembered for more than the poems, and among the poems unlikely to be remembered for much written in the past 10 or 20 years. Theres a state of innocence poets need, a state hard to reach when theyve been frog-marched out of paradise to the memorial dinners and honorary degrees of experience. Many of Heaneys new poems start with the old flair and dash, but after a few lines they lose their way and sputter out. The late work has been solid, composed to a high level of craftsmanship; but

the poems are like footnotes to poems already written, with all of his mastery but little of his passion and less of his subdued outrage. They become that evil thing, poems written for the sake of writing poems. Human Chain is far from Heaneys best book the short and short-winded sequences rarely smolder like a peat bog afire underground. Hes still good at the character sketches from the Irish hinterlands, the deft evocations of common objects (the evidence of the ordinary bewitches him), the elegies and funerals that increasingly have dominated his work. Troubled by the losses memory is heir to, most moving on his fathers decline and death, the poems are evocations of a life now past. Heaney still has the great virtue of never saying too much, of letting the poem do so much work and no more. He can make buying a copy of Book VI of the Aeneid, that sturdy companion of young Latin scholars, as haunting as the visit to the Underworld within. For a poet of such ambition, Heaney has long given modesty a good name.