Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1993 by John McGurk

If poetry rather than history is said to be the more adequate symbol to express the quintessence of the human spirit then Michael Parker's study of Heaney's volumes provides some justification for the pre-eminence of the poetic muses. This book is neither a simple biography nor an extended essay in literary criticism; while both skills are self-evidently here, it goes deep into the forces, influences and relationships, past and present, on the making of the poet. At each stage of Heaney's development Parker relates the life and work to the concurrent socio-political and religious upheavals.

To enjoy this book the reader needs some familiarity with Heaney's poetry, the rock whence he was hewn, his particular 'cud of memory' and possibly some empathy with the life experiences that lie at the roots of so many of his poems. Heaney's ideal in Parker's words was 'to endeavour to create an art which is both particular and universal, immediate and oblique'. At the same time the author sees the poet aiming at a series of reconciliations and expiations of public and private concerns and of seeking a poetic resolution of inner tensions met with in familial, local and national histories. Indeed, Heaney often describes poetry in terms which could equally apply to the Mass. How well he has succeeded still concerns some critics.

However, to others Heaney has an uncanny capacity to transform basic intuitions into universal insights. Parker is particularly good at delving into those universal themes informing the poetry. At times he too easily claims that all of this stems from Heaney's classical education as much as from his poetic intuitive genius. Too much can be made of his classicism which in any case was Latin-based whereas among the roots of the Gaelic revival, which certainly influenced Heaney, it is Greek that bears the closer relationship to the language and culture of the Celt. Nonetheless, like all great poetry there are as many levels of meaning as floors of turf in the beloved peat banks of his and my own part of Ulster.

The author's evocation of that part of Ireland in which we both grew up is authentic as he draws out the images, sounds and smells so powerfully present in the poetry - the retting flax dam, the scalding of the milk churn, the aroma of the open peat fire, the mossy hillocks of the soft bog, the spluttering carbide in the bicycle lamp, the haunting murmurs of corncrake, snipe and geese at nightfall, the jars of frog spawn on window sill, the fowl on the half-doors, and in the window bays the rosaries on a nail, the faded snapshots and the Maynooth catechism. And, in the snatches of neighbourly converse, the Hiberno-English and residual Gaelic speech patterns, the ancient Gaelic in townland names and topography are all mixed with the rich biblical phraseology of the God-fearing Protestant neighbours.

Like William Wordsworth and other nature poets, Heaney's later poems outgrow the simple sensual delight in Nature until it becomes for him, 'the nurse, the guide, the guardian ... of heart and soul'. 'Water' is associated with the feminine, the Gaelic, the Catholic - in a word one of his creative elements. In Personal Helicon, and the Diviner, the powerfully ambiguous symbol of the well, at once pagan and christian, past and present are reconciled. No Irish poet can avoid the spring well - in any case there are over three thousand of them associated with Irish saints alone! It is in his Station Island and elsewhere, that Heaney engages with the power of the Church in its pitched battle against 'the older, recalcitrant Celtic temperament', yet another constantly recurring tension for Irish poets. 'The poet like the priest', Chesterton once wrote, 'should bear the ancient title of the builder of the bridge'. Heaney's reconciliations and resolving of tensions between extremes, political, social and religious, Parker interprets the poems as attempting to bring together the divided communities of the North. This is done as the author charts the poet's progress from Mossbawn, Derry, Belfast, Glanmore, the United States, back to Ireland and so to Oxford, and these physical journeys are put within the context of the poet's own spiritual Aeneid which is of course the deepest well of Heaney's poetic inspiration.

The writer sees the period 1961-68 as the seven years of plenty in his subject's personal and literary life and from 1968 to 1975 as the seven years of pain in the larger drama of the politics of polarization'. Wintering Out is a celebration of the identity, history, territory and tongue of his people, the Northern Irish Catholic. Parker sees the period 1975-1984, the time of his fifth collection, Field Work, as one of homely lyricism associated with the poet's cottage at Glanmore. But the guilt of the 'inner emigre' and of the survivor from the North still pursues the poet in his idyllic phase. For his final chapter, 'Space, 1984-1991' (so-called because in three major collections: The Haw Lantern (1987), New Selected Poems (1990) and Seeing Things (1991) Heaney struggled to fill the space left by the death of his parents). Parker not only analyses the poetry itself, but interprets this period as one of freedom from parental constraints, of more overt observations of Catholicism and of the Nationalist tradition. Heaney's attitudes towards his strict catholic childhood and inheritance are not seen as uncritical and narrowing as Edna Longley, one of Heaney's major critics would have us believe. This last chapter maintains a fine balance of literary criticism with general argument, invaluable to students of poetry. The analysis of Seeing Things brings the reader round to the poet's efforts to keep faith with his origins and yet his readiness to strike beyond them like light from a god's shield'. No doubt there will be other interpreters of the poetry of Seamus Heaney, already hailed as some of the finest being written today, but they will all be in debt to this painstaking and pioneering study from the adroit pen of Michael Parker.