Opened Ground
Authors: Seamus Heaney
‘These poems find – in the dowser’s gift and the child’s perception of the world – images of the marvellous that are also wonderfully grounded … Heaney is a poet who deserves to be read in entirety.’ Jamie McKendrick,
Independent on Sunday
‘Virtuosity and truth, the one useless without the other, are the hallmarks of these poems … In the Nobel lecture he commends the achievement of Yeats, whose work does what the necessary poetry does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. It is a fair account of what he himself has done.’ Frank Kermode,
Sunday Times
‘There are many sorts of poems here: love poems, family poems, farm poems, metaphysical poems, his ancient-grave poems, the medieval-modern outcasting king poems his Sweeniad … It’s good to find fully represented the ones which tell you there is a civil war going on, which tell you about a divided community.’ Karl Miller,
Observer
SEAMUS HEANEY
POEMS 1966–1996
for Marie
This book contains a greater number of poems than would usually appear in a
Selected
Poems,
fewer than would make up a
Collected
:
it belongs somewhere between the two categories.
I have taken the opportunity to include a very few poems not printed in previous volumes and made a short sequence of extracts from
The
Cure
at
Troy
(1990), my version of Sophocles'
Philoctetes.
In similar fashion, âSweeney In Flight' is made up of sections from
Sweeney
Astray
(1983), a translation of the medieval Irish work
Buile
Suibhne,
which tells of the penitential life led by Sweeney after he was cursed and turned into a wild flying creature by St Ronan at the Battle of Moira.
Stations
was published as a pamphlet by Ulsterman Publications in 1975. The first pieces were written in Berkeley in 1970.
âStation Island' is a sequence of dream encounters set on an island in Co. Donegal where, since medieval times, pilgrims have gone to perform the prescribed penitential exercises (or âstations').
âVillanelle for an Anniversary' was written to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College in 1636. âAlphabets' was the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1984.
I have included âCrediting Poetry' as an Afterword. This seemed to make sense, since the ground covered in the lecture is ground originally opened by the poems which here precede it.
S.H.
from
Death of a Naturalist
(1966)
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
from
Whatever You Say Say Nothing
A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
A Kite for Michael and Christopher
Villanelle for an Anniversary (1986)
From the Republic of Conscience
From the Canton of Expectation
A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
