I am so sad about this -- and far less articulate than
Edward. Seamus Heaney holds an important place in this house. Millie
was introduced to Heaney's work (and I am pretty certain heard him
read) at Columbia University. The result (for me) were some wonderful
gifts from Millie along with the admonition to read those books. And I
did. Heaney read at Canisius College here in Buffalo last October to
an overflowing hall. I arrived less than ten minutes after the doors
opened -- arrived that late because of miserable parking situation --
and took one of the last available seats. He seemed physically frail
that night, but his voice and mind were vigorous, and there was a
wonderful Q and A afterwards full of anecdotes and humor along with
wisdom about some dark times. Buffalo had a very large Irish Catholic
population. They were out in force, and it was a remarkable evening.
Martha Deed
Edward Picot wrote:
A friend of mine met me up the High Street at lunchtime, and as he
knows I'm interested in poetry, he called out to me that Seamus Heaney
had just died. It was the last thing I was expecting to hear, and it
took me a moment or two to make sense of what he was saying. "What?
Seamus Heaney? Bloody hell." Then I found myself going through an
extremely rapid process of mental readjustment. Right, so he's gone.
He's not a contemporary poet any more. The contemporary poetry I grew
up with is now a closed chapter, a thing of the past. So where are we
now? What have we got left?
When I was at school in the 1970s, it seemed to me and my
contemporaries, those of us who took an interest in that kind of thing,
that there were three big voices in British poetry: Philip Larkin, Ted
Hughes and Seamus Heaney. At the time they were all still alive and
publishing. Larkin and Hughes tended to be regarded as opposites to
each other: Larkin was "genteel", nostalgic and inhibited, and wrote
rueful poems about his own inability to live life to the full; whereas
Hughes was "violent" and "extreme" and wrote about the natural world in
an extremely un-picturesque manner, emphasising its sexuality and
brutality. Heaney, the youngest of the three, was a bit like a
synthesis of the other two in some respects: some of the forcefulness
of Hughes, but also some of the restraint and rueful self-awareness of
Larkin. Then, as the years went by, Heaney became the most celebrated
and was often regarded as the most "important", largely because he
ticked a lot of politically-correct boxes: he was a Catholic from
Northern Ireland, which meant that he came from a disadvantaged
minority background, and he wrote poems about the Troubles, of which he
had first-hand experience, which meant that he appealed to middle-class
literate readers on the mainland (like me), who felt uneasy and guilty
about the conflict in Northern Ireland but usually had only a vague
sense of what was going on there, how it had started or what could be
done about it.
It became a bit difficult to separate Heaney's real achievements as a
poet from the reasons for which his poetry attracted attention. His
"breakthrough" collection was North, in which he came out with
a sequence of poems that linked the situation in Ireland to the
subsurface of the Irish landscape - in particular to the bodies of
sacrificial victims which had been exhumed from peat bogs. The
present-day Troubles, he suggested, could be linked to ancient tribal
habits of mind and behaviour, and perhaps to an innate human tendency
for groups of people to define and reassure themselves by committing
violent acts on scapegoats and outsiders. In other poems he compared
English soldiers to Roman legionaries, suggesting that they had a more
cerebral and less instinctive view of life than the Irish natives - the
English were sky-worshippers, whereas the Irish were earth-worshippers.
In retrospect this oblique, symbolic and mythologising approach to the
subject-matter of the Troubles looks both necessary and unhelpful. You
can see how it would have been essential to Heaney to find his own way
of writing about them, rather than approaching them head-on; how he was
trying to avoid getting stuck inside any particular sectarian viewpoint
or political agenda. On the other hand, some of the poems deal with the
Troubles by a process of "stacking up" symbolic meanings and
associations, as one critic put it, rather than talking about the
nitty-gritty of what's actually happening. The results can sometimes
have more than a tinge of swotty earnestness about them.
On the other hand, when he writes more directly, some of his finest
moments are about the Troubles. There's a grimly marvellous poem in Station
Island when he imagines himself meeting the ghost of a man who was
shot in the head by sectarians on the steps of his own shop: "Through
life and death he had hardly aged./There always was an athlete's
cleanliness/shining off him and except for the ravaged/forehead and the
blood, he was still that same/rangy midfielder in a blue jersey, the
one stylist on the team,/the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim."
Anyway, now that he's gone it really does feel like the end of an era.
Larkin, Hughes and Heaney are all dead, and although it certainly isn't
true to say that their kind of poetry has died with them, the work they
produced had a kind of cultural centrality which perhaps isn't going to
come round again. In their different ways they really did help to
define certain aspects of the British experience in the sixties,
seventies and eighties - Larkin with his highly-polished "ordinary
bloke" poems, almost a kind of anti-poetry, certainly anti-pretentious;
Hughes with his "violent", "ugly" and uninhibited poems, which were
also a sort of anti-poetry in their way, but of a very different kind;
and Heaney with his political relevance, his sectarian subject matter
and his subtle refusal to take sides.
- Edward Picot
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The Last Collaboration
http://www.amazon.com
Read online
http://www.furtherfield.org/friendsofspork/
Intro by Edward Picot
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/last-collaboration
City Bird: Selected Poems (1991-2009) by Millie Niss, edited by Martha Deed
http://blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/
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