Seamus Heaney (1939 - )

Last weekend a friend who is not much into poetry asked me if I knew Heaney’s poem Thatcher. She’d read it while a student back in the 80’s but no longer knew where to find it. I located it quickly enough, in Door into the Dark (Faber 1969) and left her to read it while I finished cooking lunch. Door into the Dark, whose title is taken from the opening line of The Forge is for me one of the best of Heaney’s books, full of strong visual imagery that somehow makes you think:


And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean in their own shapes’
Water and ground in their own extremity.


(from The Peninsula)

Rereading Door into the Dark after my friend had gone home reminded me that I still haven’t finished  Stepping Stones (Faber 2010), Dennis O’Driscoll’s long series of interviews with Heaney. I’ve been struggling with it since March this year, I think because it lacks what most attracts me to Heaney’s work – his richly visual lexicon:


All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag.
He'd arrive with it, disappear to the room
And by the time he'd reappear to wash
Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his
In the scullery basin, its lined insides
(The colour of a spaniel's inside lug)

(from Out of The Bag)

I will finish it some day, but the poetry wins hands down!