POEMS: 1965-1975

by Seamus Heaney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1980

In apparent response to his current popularity, Heaney's first four, out-of-print collections are yoked together here--and the first-skin attractiveness of these ten years of work is undeniable. With few ungainly metaphors and little rhetoric, the poems from Death of a Naturalist, Door Into the Dark, and Wintering Out have a farmer's virility, opening out to the reader ribbed and crusty rinds consistent with the unromanticized animals and landscapes of gorse they enclose. The vocabulary is intensely tongued: a rain-swollen river is ""slabbering past the gable,/ the Moyola harping on/ its gravel bed."" Not unusually there are poems in which the forceable removal of something indurate or elusive from its element--potato-digging, snipe-shooting--is celebrated; when left alone, nature tends to be honored for its texture mostly, with ""eye clear/ as the bleb of the icicle,/ trust the feel of what nubbed treasure/ your hands have known."" Yet, for all that, the four books together seem extremely limited. Literarily self-conscious, the endemic pellet-like and bitten-off Anglo-Saxonisms--""the scop's/ twang, the iron/ flash of consonants/ cleaning the line""--seem clichÉd, pale reflections of Pound's minutely deliberate ""The SeaFarer."" And not until North's last poems, or ""Limbo"" in Wintering Out, does Heaney venture from his stone-and-water world into another one of pity, anxiety (poems about exhumations, relics, and shards, associated consonants to the agony in Northern Ireland), and a projective imagination. For the most part, then, Heaney at his most sensually gratifying and safely syllabic: merely good, not his best.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1980

ISBN: 0374516529

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION