We have lost a writer who masterfully synthesised traditions – and was also a great ambassador for poetry as a craft of listening
I'm of that generation that first encountered contemporary poetry at school through poems such as Digging: that squelchy soundscape of compacted memory and turf that opened Seamus Heaney's 1966 debut, Death of a Naturalist. It was, I suppose, perfect GCSE exam fodder; metaphor, anecdote, rhyme, alliteration: it had it all. I was hooked.
Digging is a classic young man's poem, a search for validation from the past, for continuity with a world that has already moved on. And Heaney, who has died aged 74, was the poet of recollection par excellence, his lines effortlessly transporting the reader to the rural Northern Ireland of his youth. But if he might occasionally have been accused of nostalgia, it was always balanced by the vitality of his language, which probes and pulls you into a world of immanent things: a turnip-snedder, a schoolbag, sticky blackberries or a waterfall as a "helter-skelter of muslin and glass".
Heaney's verse really came alive to me in his 1975 collection North, which I treasure in my sky blue paperback from Faber & Faber. Arguably Heaney at his most linguistically adventurous, the poems in North constitute a deep lyrical inquiry into the politics and violent history of northern Europe. Many of the poems are inspired by his reading of PV Glob's The Bog People, an archaeological study of bodies deposited in bogs and fens during the iron age. He describes these preserved corpses in all their "leathery beauty" not merely as historical artefacts, but as a means of collapsing time: perhaps the most powerful of these poems, Punishment, connects the bog bodies with sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, exposing his own complicity in what he calls "the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge".
Heaney has been the pre-eminent figure in English language poetry for at least two decades; his books account for an astounding proportion of the total sales of modern poetry. But "Famous Seamus", as he is sometimes dubbed, was not a unique or unaccountable figure, nor someone to whom the tag of genius can easily be fixed. Instead his work succeeds in its masterful synthesis of traditions. Picking through my slim volumes of Heaney's poetry on the announcement of his death, I realise how close in tone and texture he was to another great poet from the north of Ireland: Louis MacNeice. And how, like Bernard O'Donoghue, he was always looking back, to his own past or to the ghosts of the poetic canon. Like Tony Harrison, he struggled with what Blake Morrison called the tension between his roots and his reading. And he shared with Ted Hughes a desire to capture the brutality of nature and of rural life: in The Early Purges, drowned kittens are "wet gloves" bobbing in a bucket.
It's fair to say that Heaney stood apart from many of the innovations of modern poetry, but he was a master of breath, and of the poised line-ending. His poems are always clean and efficient, but with sounds that leap off the page: his was a poetry of speaking, of a gently turned vernacular. They are, to me, deeply religious too; fascinated by things that fade, by the possibility of a world beyond the visible.
I think Seamus Heaney will be remembered as one of the finest poets of our time, not to mention as a translator whose rendition of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf helped to revitalise that poem for a new generation. But he was also a great ambassador for poetry as a craft of listening. Heaney leaves an substantial and important body of work; his poems always had the human touch. They are things that will not fade.
The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it in extremis.
All I believe that happened there was vision.
(from 'The Disappearing Island ')
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