Connecting with Seamus Heaney

Foreword  (District and Circle). District and Circle is Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection since Death of a Naturalist (1966), published in April 2006 by Faber and Faber. There are 44 titles including 5 sequences of more than one poem; 68 poems in all. Many had already appeared in some form or other in a variety of publications on both sides of the Atlantic.The volume includes some ‘found prose’ and a number of translations.   Heaney’s work since 1966 has lost none of its accessibility, erudition and vitality. The textual commentaries that follow seek to tease out what his poems are intimating [...]

The Turnip Snedder   In ‘Stepping Stones’ (p 407) Heaney acknowledges to Dennis O’Driscoll that District and Circle was a time for ‘pouncing’ on poems; the inspiration for this opener was a photograph the poet saw visiting  in an exhibition by modernist artist Hughie O’Donoghue to whom he dedicates the piece. Associated with Heaney’s rural Irish ‘territory’, this manually driven turnip-crushing machine, a piece of archaic agricultural machinery, comes to bear the hallmarks of a medieval war-machine and introduces more modern forms of violence implicit within the first dozen or so poems in the collection Heaney takes us back a [...]

A Shiver   The sonnet sets out at some length the physics and dynamics of wielding a hammer. The energy generated brings with it, however, an understanding of its destructiveness. What begins as a sense of physical reverberation affecting the person using a heavy tool ultimately evokes a shiver of fear when, as contemporary history demonstrates, extreme power falls into the wrong hands. The tool in question is the weighty sledge-hammer, commonly used by builders and labourers for demolition. Aware of the possible damage to the untrained operator it is clear that the poet/ farmer’s son has handled such an [...]

Home Help   Poems recalling the memory of two of Heaney’s father’s sisters. Helping Sarah   A woman working in the garden in springtime: ageing, perhaps, but annually rejuvenated at this moment in time, young/  Again as the year; neat and demure with tuck and tightening of blouse; active and untroubled by stiffness of the joints: with vigorous advance of knee; busy weeding rigs; frugal In the same old skirt and brogues; both well-organised and physically strong, on top of things; in all, a credit to her kind Her clothing: tweed skirt With pinpoints of red haw and yellow whin; [...]

Helmet   The poem focuses on an Boston fire-fighter’s headgear, symbolic of a breed seen as god-like ‘supermen’ risking their lives for society. It was presented ‘formally’ to Heaney in an informal ceremony in Boston. The poem celebrates human solidarity. A helmet; its owner; its provenance: a Boston fireman’s gift; the name printed boldly on its spread / Fantailing brim / … shoulder-awning. The eye is drawn upwards. The helmet shows evidence of its energetic use and design: Tinctures of sweat and hair oil /… withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs; the dome of the helmet: not crown (civilian) but crest, [...]

Polish Sleepers   The first of eight poems alluding to boyhood during World War II. In this first poem the sight of recycled use of railway sleepers transports the speaker back in time to the lost domain of wartime childhood. Within this context, reference to Poland and the positioning of other key-words in the narrative open the way to the period’s more chilling phenomena: wartime concentration camps. Once: a time when Heaney’s local railway-line, now closed, was active. Railway-sleepers in situ were a common sight, block-built criss-cross and four-squared with a characteristic smell: We … breathed pure creosote, a common [...]

Anahorish 1944   In a newspaper interview Heaney revealed how, as a boy, he watched American troops marching by from ‘up a beech tree’. The momentous preparations for D-Day  brought an international force to Britain which was to launch an assault on the Normandy beaches and free Europe from nazi oppression. Unusually Heaney, who would have been a small boy at the time, uses a speaker working in the local abattoir. Subsequent  loss of life on Normandy beaches endorses the ironic juxtaposition of butchered pigs and soldiers at the very moment when American troops arrived: We were killing pigs/ sunlight [...]

To Mick Joyce in Heaven. A sequence of 5 sonnets, set at a time when Heaney was five or six years of age, is addressed to the memory of Mick Joyce. Heaney resurrects a figure from the past, recalling him with great warmth, affection and good-humour. The man was ‘demobbed’ at the end of WW2 and, it is suggested, became part of the post-war reconstruction programme. Personal pronouns are those of a shared relationship: you, your, we, I, me. In a sequence that will regularly allude to life-and-death issues, the final couplet of all clarifies Heaney’s subtle choice of title: [...]

The Aerodrome   Before moving away from his WW2 theme, the poet retells the story of a particular wartime visit to his local airfield. The visit becomes a parable about insecurity, temptation and resistance. The airfield is long since out of commission, first disused then re-developed : First … back to grass, then after that/ To warehouses and brickfields/ … Its wartime grey control-tower rebuilt and glazed/ Into a hard-edged CEO-style villa. Post-war changes in attitude and style were accompanied by a new vocabulary; here the ‘hard edge’ is associated with uncompromising money-making opportunities. Toome aerodrome is a part of [...]

Anything Can Happen. Of the outrages that occurred increasingly regularly in the 5 years following Heaney’s previous published volume, it was the ‘strike’ of 9/11 that persuaded him to write Anything Can Happen. He adapts Horace’s Ode I, 34 to focus on the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. This act had brought Heaney to a ‘terrified awareness that ‘the tallest things can be brought low’ and demonstrated that absolutely nothing was beyond the bounds of possibility. Both poems introduce Jupiter from classical mythology; sovereign God of the Romans, omnipotent, identified with the [...]

Rilke: After the Fire. Heaney show-cases a version of a Rilke poem from 1908. The theme is of a man whose past has been destroyed overnight and is suddenly alienated from his environment. Early lyricism introduces personification: startled Early autumn morning hesitated,/ Shying at newness. Nature is conscious of a profound overnight change, an emptiness behind scorched linden trees (the phrase introduces both the fire element and a Germanic context using ‘linden’ for ‘lime’). Whether out of curiosity or concern or for concealment the trees are still crowding in around a home reduced to a shell, now just one more [...]

Out of Shot   The poetic process is illustrated: a poem ‘comes on’ during a leisure activity. The title of the sonnet is suggestive of things ‘seen’ by the poet that by-pass ordinary mortals. Cameras following news-pieces is also record the less obvious. This is what the poet spots that sets his creative spirit in motion. The poem provides a stepping-stone between two sets of events: the first to be remembered from Irish history; the second brought on by current reports from the war-stricken Middle-East. The speaker recalls the context in which an incident took on poetic charge: outdoors; a [...]