It is little over 12 years since Ireland lost its greatest ever poet, and at last Seamus Heaney's impressive body of creative work has been assembled for a new (and rather definitive) collected volume of poems to add to his letters and translations. Not only do readers now have the opportunity to track his progression as a writer and maturation into perhaps the go-to public figure within Irish cultural life, but to enjoy individual pieces which have never before been published.
Even when compared with other Irish Nobel laureates like Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and WB Yeats, Heaney’s legacy on the nation’s reckoning with its own past, present and future has been immeasurable. At times when it looked as though the fractious relationship between Loyalist and Republican factions in the north of Ireland might spill over into civil war, Heaney’s work came to symbolise the idea that a more peaceful transition to power-sharing was possible.
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Listen: RTÉ Arena celebrates the publication of The Poems Of Seamus Heaney
Indeed, during his inaugural visit to Ireland in 1995, American President Bill Clinton quoted from Heaney’s translation of The Cure at Troy, telling the assembled crowd at Derry’s Guildhall: "Once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme." It was an appropriate choice of words, representing the idea that every society since the days of Ancient Greece has had face into moments of cyclical violence and rebirth.
And yet, arguably Heaney’s true brilliance comes not just from his vivid choice of subject matter or even from his imperative to choose the right, simple word to encapsulate experience. In his best work, there is also an unpretentious gesture toward the personal, something that – tipped too far the other way by a poet of lesser gifts – might run the risk of veering into sentimentality.
Even when compared with other Irish Nobel laureates like Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and WB Yeats, Heaney's legacy on the nation’s reckoning with its own past, present and future has been immeasurable.
Heaney’s mastery over the dramatic moment presents us with both an immersive environment and a believable way of apprehending it. We see the house, the farm, the country road he describes, and are in no doubt whatever about the calendar on the wall whether it reads 1944 or 2004. But we are also never allowed to lose sight of the man himself. The poet at work in the act of remembering, at once universal and deeply private to every reader.
The achievement of this is no mean feat. To conceal his brushstrokes from the discernible viewer, the artist must first stage his props with microscopic precision lest his choice of environmental cues overwhelm with detail. Next he must decide who is animating the story, what are their individual quirks, how might the viewer imagine them if they were speaking to us in a bar or across the table during a tea break or dinner.
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Watch, via RTÉ Archives: Seamus Heaney wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995
Last, he must decide how large to make the frame; whether it would be appropriate to the story to speak at us from an invisible lectern or to plunge his hands into the muck and allow for a looser adherence to formal quality, diction, line length, stanza type. All of these elements are perfectly balanced in Heaney, shouldering equal and appropriate weight in the rhythm of his syntax.
In this new collected volume, we finally get a sense of how the poet arrived at this equilibrium. We get to see him move, page by page, from the chronicler of Irish rural tradition in collections like Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark to the 'artful voyeur’ of North, the soothsaying mystic of Station Island and Seeing Things, and the elder statesman of District and Circle and Human Chain.
As Heaney himself once said to Dennis O’Driscoll in the invaluable Stepping Stones, a collection of interviews which is perhaps the closest thing we have to a functioning biography of the man: "It is possible for the poet to be better than himself in the poem he writes. That is one of the functions of doing any art and one of the benefits of putting yourself into the contemplative, receptive and transporting presence of art. It makes you a bit better than yourself for the moment; it doesn’t mean you won’t relapse or fail yourself."
The Poems Of Seamus Heaney is published by Faber
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
