The last poem Seamus Heaney completed appears towards the end of this magisterial book. It was commissioned by the National Gallery to celebrate its 150th anniversary. The final draft of the poem was delivered on August 20th, 2013, 10 days before Heaney died.
A response to a painting, Banks of a Canal by the Impressionist C, this poem is suffused with subtle cadences, soft vowel sounds, calm rhythms.
The sky in the poem is “not truly bright or overcast”, and it is here, in this in-between space, that Heaney manages what he did for more than 50 years – to find an undertone that holds much emotion, that controls the feeling and keeps it still, thus allowing the energy of a poem to emerge guardedly, and all the more powerfully for that.
Banks of the Canal is not, however, the last poem in the book. Near the very end, after most of the copious notes and footnotes, there are 25 poems that have been chosen by Heaney’s family from “the large number of unpublished poems in varying states of completeness dating from all stages of the author’s life”.
Colm Tóibín on The Poems of Seamus Heaney: ‘A process of finding echoes and associations’
A Family Succession: Arthur Edward Guinness gives a sober account of his family’s history
Fractured France by Andrew Hussey: Half-analysis, half-memoir, highly enjoyable
The Bailout Babies by Adam Maguire: Occasionally entertaining but an opportunity missed
The last of these poems, Those Winter Evenings, written in the summer of 2013, shows Heaney at his plainest.
Twenty years earlier, in Fosterling, he wrote of himself “waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels.” In many of these late poems, he allowed the unmarvellous and the unmiraculous to be credited and given their due – ordinary days, quotidian moments, registered in lightly metered lines, a relaxed sound.
This book contains these unpublished poems plus all the poems that appeared in the single books of poetry Heaney published in his lifetime, as well as more than a hundred others that were printed in stray publications but never collected in a volume.
The editors have assembled all this work with little fuss and much intelligence. Even when Heaney did not date his manuscripts, they can be dated because of the typewriter he used, or even the paper. Thus, poems not collected in volumes can be gathered and placed, according to their time of composition, in small groups between each book.
[ Faber to publish definitive edition of Seamus Heaney’s poetryOpens in new window ]
This means that the integrity of each of Heaney’s books – he cared deeply about the order of poems in each volume – has been respected. Also, the page number of the commentary is given at the bottom of each right-hand page where the poems appear, thus making it easy to move between the poems and the notes.
This is all so sensible that it might seem normal. But it isn’t. After Philip Larkin died, his first Collected Poems included unfinished poems and did not respect the integrity of each volume he published.
The estate of Elizabeth Bishop allowed a volume to appear after her death with many unfinished poems and drafts of poems that she would never have published in her own lifetime.
In James Merrill’s Collected Poems, all the “Previously Uncollected Poems” appear bunched together at the end, thus depriving them of context.
This book uses the same template as Paul Keegan’s edition of Ted Hughes’s Collected Poems, although Heaney’s collected poems has many more pages of notes than the Hughes edition.
One of the stanzas in Those Winter Evenings invokes the image of a kite. As the editors’ note explains: “The kite-flier recalls earlier kite-poems, especially A Kite for Michael and Christopher, weighed down with its ‘long-tailed pull of grief’, and A Kite for Aibhín at the end of Human Chain.” It gives the relevant page numbers.
Reading this collected poems thus becomes a process of finding echoes and associations, seeing images repeated and reconfigured, noticing, say, the first island poems culminating in The Given Note or the first bogland poems culminating in The Tollund Man or the poem Scullions, about his mother’s family (“big-voiced ancestors”), the same Scullions who will raise their voice in Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, 30 years later.
There is also the laugh-out-loud pleasure of finding that, in an uncollected poem, the poet has rhymed Heaney with martini, and yoga course with Star Wars force.
There is a wonderful, spirited early poem called Victorian Guitar, published in Door into the Dark, where a guitar that belonged to a woman in the 19th century now belongs to Heaney’s friend David Hammond. The poem ends: “Did you even keep track of it as a wife?/ Do you know the man who has it now/ Is giving it the time of its life?”
The time of life changes its form in a poem written 40 years later (and, in this book, 600 pages later) – Heaney’s hushed, lapidary, unadorned elegy for the same David Hammond that begins: “The door was open and the house was dark/ Wherefore I called his name, although I knew/ The answer this time would be silence.”
Among the poems that have not been previously included in any volume are a few that are among Heaney’s best, but the main message we get from these and other early poems is how many different styles and poetic personae he tried out.
Taking Stock, for example, written in 1964, shows him briefly as a wry, self-deprecating Movement poet: “I noted meals and meetings that now look/ As useless as the stubs of old chequebooks/ – ‘Dined with Joan’ or ‘Wild night with Donal. Booze.’/ Rise like ghost hangovers to accuse.”
Soon, the core of the book will matter more - the 12 individual volumes Heaney published in his lifetime placed in sequence
— Colm Tóibín
Twice Shy, written in 1965, shows him as an elegant and diffident young follower of Thomas Kinsella: “She came with me one evening/ For air and friendly talk./ We crossed the quiet river./ Took the embankment walk.”
Soon, he would realise that there was as little future in dining with Joan as there was in crossing quiet rivers.
Heaney’s ballad Craig’s Dragoons (“We’ve gerrymandered Derry but Croppy won’t lie down,/ He calls himself a citizen and wants votes in the town.”), published as part of an essay by Karl Miller in The Review in London in 1971, is also among the uncollected poems published here. The rousing ballad was not a form for which Heaney became known, unless An Open Letter, written in verse to object to his being included in an anthology of British poetry, is a rousing ballad.
So, too, For a Young Nun (“A wave of Christ’s love blood has washed/ The selfishness all out of you.”) stands alone as a devotional poem, even though the figure of Christ will appear in other, later poems, most notably Westering, the last poem in Wintering Out, whose original title, the editors tell us, was Easy Rider.
For those familiar with Heaney’s work, the new poems in this book will keep them going well beyond Christmas. But soon, the core of the book will matter more – the 12 individual volumes Heaney published in his lifetime placed in sequence. What emerges strongly in the third volume, Wintering Out, is the sense of struggle, of a fierce, energetic heaping on of phrases that push toward difficult and enigmatic meaning.
It is as though the poet is fighting for his life, using the hyphen and the comma as his weapons and arriving at times at images of astonishing and unobliging beauty, such as these lines from Kinship: “This is the vowel of earth/ dreaming its root/ in flowers and snow,// mutations of weathers/ and seasons,/ a windfall composing/ the floor it rots into.”
Even in Field Work, his fifth book, the hyphen and the comma create the tension (“eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road”), thus making some of the less taut, more conversational poems read almost like prose.
Reading the poem again after more than 40 years, I can remember the hush in that theatre. What the poem conjured up seemed present, palpable. As it still does.
— Colm Tóibín
And this feeling that the essence of Heaney is in these short-lined, densely-textured poems and not in, say, the Singing School sequence at the end of North can last for a few poems. But then poems such as Exposure, at the end of North, and the elegies (The Strand at Lough Beg, A Postcard from North Antrim and Casualty) enact their own struggle, but in longer lines and longer stanzas and more sentence-led rhythms.
I remember the shock of Heaney reading Exposure at the launch of North 50 years ago in one of those old high-ceilinged rooms in Trinity College Dublin. And then four years later in the Edmund Burke Theatre observing him “change the note and lengthen the line”, in his own phrase, in Field Work, his striving towards a stately kind of perfection, as in the last two lines of the second of the Glanmore Sonnets: “Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,/ Each verse returning like the plough turned round.”
The most memorable reading was at the Project Arts Centre just before the publication of Station Island, when Heaney read the haunting Section Vll of the poem, the section when one of the murdered dead of the Troubles appears as a ghost: “And though I was reluctant/ I turned to meet his face and the shock// is still in me at what I saw.” Reading the poem again after more than 40 years, I can remember the hush in that theatre. What the poem conjured up seemed present, palpable. As it still does.
The line that stood out most in that poem was the poet’s own voice: “Forgive my timid circumspect involvement.”
This idea of the circumspect became a kind of gift for Heaney, as he worked on sequences of poems, letting one poem echo another, or take its bearing from a previous poem, or shift tone and perspective, with no poem as the final word, with the whole notion of a final word left tentatively, tactfully aside.
This happens in the bog poems and in the Glanmore Sonnets; also, in Clearances, the poems on the death of his mother, and in the brilliant, darting, casual poems in the sequence Squarings in the volume Seeing Things, poems that give him the freedom to let memory and wonder and sheer random thought rub against each other: “What came first, the seabird’s cry or the soul// Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?”
The first poems, the ones collected in Death of a Naturalist, note and observe, they register a gaze that is distilled, reticent, often fearful.
In later poems, the gaze becomes more even; it measures up. By the end of this book, the voice, Heaney’s voice, is almost wise, but rueful too, ready to credit “the pain of loss before I know the term” as well as the marvels that have come before.
Colm Tóibín’s latest works are A Long Winter (Picador) and Ship in Full Sail: The Laureate Lectures and Other Writings (Gallery Press). He will deliver the 10th annual TS Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre on December 14th.
