Book Review – Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems

A Retrospective of an Important Figure in Irish Literature

May 11, 2009

For a very select audience, this documentation of 21 years of Seamus Heaney's poetry career will be an enjoyable and cathartic journey through Ireland and its culture.

As a retrospective of what is now the first half of Seamus Heaney’s poetry career, New Selected Poems: 1966-1987 (Faber and Faber, ISBN: 0-571-14372-5, 1990) does well in showing a man who rallied for not just justice and understanding for the working class, but the imagination and beauty within it.

Stretching from 1966-1987, this volume collects work from Heaney’s first seven collections of verse: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), and The Haw Lantern (1987). Also included are prose poems from Stations (1975) as well as excerpts from Sweeney Astray (1983), Heaney’s English translation of the legend of Irish king Buile Shuibhne.

A Strong Sense of Place

Heaney’s work has a strong sense of place. Any reader familiar with “salt-of-the-earth” types may expect Heaney’s dense stories of blue-collar Irish life to be easier to swallow. However, be warned that the weight of the work almost seems too condensed, as if there was a narrative thread running through each poem at one point, only to be removed later in favor of a more stated, “poetic” tone.

Muddled Clarity

The early poems “Mid-Term Break” and “The Other Side” stand out because of their personal importance and focus on a sort of clever sadness. Heaney tries to imbed the woes and concerns of all of Ireland within every poem, and while a later poem such as “Hailstones” achieves a connection for the character and the country, there are more instances of the clarity being muddled from an attempt to pack a poem too full.

The prose poems do not fare much better, as any sense of narrative is absent. The longer work – poems from Station Island, specifically – show more of a tie from poem to poem, but even then poems like “Chekhov on Sakhalin” and “Making Strange” suffer from their own overuse of the poetic statement.

A Vocalized Strength

These poems benefit greatly from being read out loud. A reader may find more power in the poems if she reads them audibly to herself (perhaps even with an Irish accent, like Heaney). To hear the poems brings out their best qualities: the smart line-breaks, the way Heaney unlocks the natural cadence in a piece of poetry, the emotion and timing of the language and the characters/narrators who use it.

More often than not, these traits ended up working near the actual meat of the poem as opposed to with it. When Heaney can grasp both his craft and his point in his hands simultaneously, as he does in “Strange Fruit,” the results are quite good. While there are no offensively bad works in this collection, the results rarely transcend an audience of those who are interested in working-class Irish culture and history.

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