Stephanie Burt on Seamus Heaney's Legacy and 100 Poems

A new books of poems selected by Seamus Heaney's immediate family, 100 Poems "highlights his work as a poet of friendship and family, of careful and long-felt affiliation, not only to land and language but to the people who stayed with him throughout the decades," Stephanie Burt writes in her latest New Yorker review. "Some of the poems are what classical musicians call warhorses, work many readers will know; others—especially the late work, and the work on domestic themes—surface parts of his talent that Americans, in particular, may not have yet seen." Picking up from there: 

Born, in 1939, into a Catholic farming family in County Derry, Northern Ireland, Heaney grew up attached to his surroundings, to local terrain and to the folk life around it, where “my father worked with a horse-plough.” He also took to Latin and to English literature, especially poetry, before and during his time at Queen’s University, in Belfast, where he would start to teach and to write his first books. The poems in “Death of a Naturalist” (1966) and “Door Into the Dark” (1969) delved into the sensory experience of language, vowel by consonant, likening their sounds to parts of the land. His “Personal Helicon”—the well of the Muses—was “A shallow one under a dry stone ditch / Fructified like any aquarium.” Irish language, as well as Irish land, informed such early poems as “Anahorish” and “Broagh,” whose weedy riverbank “ended almost / suddenly, like that last / gh the strangers found / difficult to manage.” (The poem concludes on its own soft “G,” too.)

This early Heaney found in fields and bogs unanswerable questions about the flaws in humankind: “The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet center is bottomless.” He also wrote about romantic love, at once awkward and lovely, as in “Wedding Day,” a poem that ought to be far better known: “When I went to the Gents / There was a skewered heart / And a legend of love. Let me / Sleep on your breast to the airport.” The poem bears in its four unsturdy quatrains the kind of uncertainty that might face a man who knows whom he wants to marry, but not what marriage may entail: “I am afraid,” he writes.

By the turn of the nineteen-seventies, many critics in Britain and in Ireland saw Heaney as the leading poetic talent of his generation. As such, he was expected—he may have expected himself—to react to the spread of violence in Northern Ireland in the early part of that decade. In poems and in never-reprinted newspaper prose, Heaney chronicled his region’s self-divisions as they turned openly bloody, the state more repressive, the I.R.A. and U.D.F. daily threats. He could not stay there, once he had a choice. In 1972, he, his wife, Marie, and their children moved south across the border, to County Wicklow, where he wrote the taut, politically charged poems of “North” (1975). It is a book that smolders with frustration, a book whose author sees no way out for Belfast and Derry, nor for the warring forces—solidarity, independence, piety, skepticism, family loyalty—within him. Its best-known poems find metaphors for the Northern Irish conflict in acid-preserved Iron Age corpses unearthed from a Danish bog. “The Grauballe Man” “lies / on a pillow of turf / and seems to weep // the black river of himself.”

Read more at the New Yorker.