Guest Review: Nolan on Heaney

PJ Nolan reviews
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
by Dennis O'Driscoll

From farm boy to Nobel Laureate, the life of Seamus Heaney has acquired a mythic proportion, in scale with the influences and preoccupations that continue to shape his remarkable output of poetry and related writings. Unapologetically a poet of the local, he has achieved a global readership, well beyond the halls of academe. Widely recognised as an affable interviewee, Heaney is also well-practiced in discretion – any tendency towards the oracular countered with determined respect for those private spaces which allow inspiration to flourish, within attendant and necessary mystery.

Denis O’Driscoll, poet, editor, commentator and stalwart of the Irish poetry scene, is also widely respected. George Szirtes has referred to him as ‘a poet of European temperament, and stature’. He shares familiarity, firm friendship and mutual respect with Heaney and is therefore well placed to coax intimacy and candour from his subject. In mining these familiarities, he has produced a remarkable insight into what Heaney himself has described as ‘a journey into the wideness of language’. It may be true that the revelations and insights in Stepping Stones are to be found in Heaney’s own words, but the success of this book lies in skilled and sensitive prompting by O’Driscoll.

Structured in a loosely chronological format, the first of three sections – Bearings – deals with formative years and experiences. Childhood, family relationships, sketches of community and custom, schooling and vital first exposures to literature and specific poetry, are spelled out in languid reflection. Some of this ground is already documented in Heaney’s own essays – but here, the interview format teases further depth from recollections. Physical description is leisurely and context is set for some future Heaney themes: family, tradition, place, history and perception.

The second section – On The Books – is the meat of this volume. Throughout these linked interviews, O’Driscoll shapes space so that the poet may roam the terrain around each of his poetry collections. Heaney stipulated early in the process that he would not engage in detailed analysis of individual poems; yet this is no handicap to either interviewer or subject in freely exploring those landscapes – physical and otherwise – from which they emerged. Beginning with Death of A Naturalist, we become passengers in that roaming, and are introduced to sources of specific imagery – some benevolent, others more troubling – and concerns that saw an Ulster Catholic poet ‘hurt into poetry’, as Auden remarked of Yeats’ relationship with Ireland.

Part of Heaney’s achievement is an ability to bridge the world of poetics. His relationships with Eastern European poets, as well as the UK and US communities, mean there’s no shortage of anecdotes here. Encounters with contemporaries are recounted – admiration expressed, or tactfully withheld – destinations, achievements and disappointments are visited, without apparent rancour or regret. A certain steeliness becomes apparent along the way as the young poet grows in confidence and stature, embracing risks that prove to be judicious moves beyond the comfort zone, at the necessary times. A move to Wicklow, to Berkeley, a refusal to become a mouthpiece – or bite the tongue, for that matter – all point to a finely timed sense of the appropriate, carried beyond the formulation of words on a page. Key influences are affirmed: Frost and Hopkins emerging as consistent touchstones, a weathered respect for Yeats; the ghost of Patrick Kavanagh looms. Love of the classics, and the depth of scholarship there is striking, with their value as source re-affirmed.

The book concludes with the shortest section – Coda – dealing with current perspectives, following the poet’s recent recovery from a minor stroke, as he faces into the next phase of a richly detailed and productive life.

One couldn’t claim that this book sees Heaney at his most unguarded. The structure of the book – most questions and answers were communicated in writing between interviewer and subject – perhaps precludes some of the spontaneous cut-and-thrust of a live interview. Some of the ground has been covered in previously published interviews and Heaney’s own prose writings, for example in Finders Keepers. In truth, The Redress of Poetry, drawn from Heaney’s lectures while Professor of Poetry at Oxford, may give a sharper insight into the purely poetic concerns informing Heaney’s work. Some of the material is echoed elsewhere, drawn from interviews with O’Driscoll under the patronage of the Lannan Foundation in 2003 (one of which is freely available as a podcast from their online archive).

However, this volume is a valuable and considered addition to the Heaney bibliography. It will, appropriately enough, serve a wider readership than those engaged in purely academic study – especially in the absence of a formal biography at this time.

Stepping Stones reveals the poet from within his formative experiences. The leisurely pace of the questions and answers, the eddying currents of memory and intuitive digression, create a fleshed-out sense of the concerns which drive some of the most striking and popular works in English language poetry today.

Nolan is a Dublin-based poet, reviewer, and blogger.

Budgets To The Left Of Us

You have to hand it to him. President Obama really is the new American Chavez - and it is thrilling, and a bit scary (because I keep hearing Jim Carrey's line "somebody stop me!" as an ominous taunt that may be taken up and replied to). I don't want him stopped - this is nearly too good to be true, and such epiphanic moments in politics are rare. What has occasioned this post? His new budget, which, in terms of redistributive justice, and dismantling of military-industrial prerogatives, is audacious.

Gun Crazy Redux

This is Eyewear's 1,250th post. The film Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is The Female) is currently resurfacing in Britain, to excellent reviews, 60 years after its initial appearance. This 1949 (some say 1950) classic of film noir is one of the key films, for me, and greatly inspired my sense of style for my early 90s work. Budavox, in which "Gun Crazy" first appeared, 50 years after the movie's creation (in 1999) is, in some ways, an exploration of the sort of world set in motion by the movie. So, anyway, I am glad to see it back on release. Seaway, from Salmon, was where I published this new version, see below.

Gun Crazy

Against the world, just us.
Behind, a trail of gas stations,
small banks, the meat packing plant,
knocked over. FBI Telexes
clatter like town gossips across America:
Barton Tare and Laurie Starr, dangerous
and armed. How did it begin?
Neon wakes me, I peel back blinds
to jackhammer rain, shake a Lucky
from the pack, and light.
Behind, on the tangled bed, you are mine,
every inch of your easy hunger, your fear
cold and material in the night.

Where are we two going? When we get
there, how will we know we’ve finally
arrived? Mexico, possibly, but the bills
are marked and the Feds hot on our tails.
The first time we met, I shot six matches
off the crown on your head, at a carnival,
won five hundred bucks. The moment
the matches flared, I knew my bullets
would always be true, direct. You kill
out of a necessity verging on need, I
cannot squint the eye down to that degree,
my hand trembles at the sight of flesh targets.
Still, I’ll end up putting a bullet in your heart
up in the Lorenzo mountains, in the mist.

That first night I aimed and squeezed
I should not have missed.
You wake and call me over to the bed.
Then I’m down in your arms and kissed.
Your mouth sets off all four alarms.
How can a man be so made
from moments of early loss?
I was always gun crazy,
so good at one clear thing:
hitting what I could barely see.
I see nothing in the darkness now, only
one part moving on the bed, my body
pressed like a pistol
into the small of your cries.

poem by Todd Swift

Poem By Nigel McLoughlin

Good to have Nigel McLoughlin (pictured) as the featured poet this Friday. He's one of the impressive new voices of his generation.

He is also Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire and his work has been twice short-listed for a Hennessy Award, and placed in The Kavanagh Prize and The New Writer Poetry Prize.

McLoughlin lectured in Traditions at Poets’ House from 2000 to 2004 and has worked as a tutor with the London School of Journalism and as a Senior Tutor and Curriculum Design Consultant with the Open College of the Arts. He holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing and a PhD from Lancaster University.

He has written four collections of poetry: At The Waters’ Clearing (Flambard/Black Mountain Press, 2001), Songs For No Voices (Lagan Press, 2004), Blood (Bluechrome, 2005) and Dissonances (Bluechrome, 2007). He also co-edited Breaking The Skin (Black Mountain Press, 2002) an anthology of new Irish poets. His New and Selected will be out soon, from Templar, I hear.

Most recently, McLoughlin became editor of the revamped Iota magazine.


After The Battle

Night cursed its way along the valley,
lay like a malartán in the cradle of two hills.
The moon like a burst of ore had shot through
the streams’ seep between the stones
and sifted ferric flakes downhill
from the battlefield where the weapons
rust their way to their oblivion
of soil and shattered bone.

Even the grass is vaguely ferrous,
the sharp blade hides that underhand
green, flicks it from the frosty
underside like a switchblade of colour.
Dew shod, I make my crossing
across a treachery of stones
my feet defy by gripping
before the crack splits the blue air

wide open and through it something
vast and dark at the corner of my eye
approaches, flutters, passes. Again
and I look down into the whiskey-
coloured water a long while before
I realize the ore that colours it. I drop
my gun – a splash – a crack off stone,
I feel the iron heat half-cauterise my side.

Who’d have thought that blood
could have been that colour.


poem by Nigel McLoughlin

Ash Wednesday

Review: U2's No Line On The Horizon

The Guardian is offering readers a chance to listen to the new U2 album, courtesy of Spotify. Diving right in, as an existing member of Spotify, I am pleased to say that it sounds like No Line On The Horizon is not the over-hyped self-important and bloated dud How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb mostly was.

It is impossible to write about U2 anymore - U2 writes white. U2 is overmediated, over-saturating. The only question we are fed is the one that makes sense to answer: is this the next Joshua Tree? The next Achtung Baby?

Both those records are bolts from the blue, true masterworks that, within a few years, spanned decades and shifted styles decisively. Could this be the third time U2 astonishes and rips up the sonic pop rules? I think not quite, but this is their best album since Pop, more than ten years back.

I want to write myself a critical blank cheque below, where I can add more thoughts, as the album sinks in, later, so for now, this is the last line:

Seaway Gets Seen

Self-advertisement warning

My Seaway: New and Selected seems to have had its first review, at Various Artists, Tony Lewis-Jones' online review vehicle, which reaches interested readers and writers across the world. The review is by poet Tom Phillips. I quote some of it here, below:

"Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift’s Seaway is both a ‘greatest hits’ collection for those who’ve already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue.

[....]

Words matter throughout. That might sound like a very obvious thing to say about a poetry collection but then, when it comes down to it, few contemporary English language collections exhibit the combination of verbal precision and improvisation which Swift deploys in poems like the tour-de-force ‘One Hundred Lines’.

[....]

What counts in Swift’s case, then, is his fashioning of a particular, disjointed sense of ‘the world’ and its difficult relationship with wherever we might call home – home, at various times, being where we were born, where we happen to be living or where we might possibly die. How we exist in several different places at once and survive abstract relationships which nuance our day-to-day relationships with those different places is very much a part of Swift’s subject matter here, the ‘Seaway’ of the title coming to seem like a metaphor for the great architectural changes most of us have no say in determining. Curiously, for all their vertiginous imaginative leaps, reading these immaculately crafted poems and knowing that Swift is out there somewhere fashioning stray experiences into verse makes more of the world seem like home."