Tuesday Tome - Seamus Heaney Poems 1965-1975

I recently completed my first reading of Seamus Heaney: Poems 1965-1975. This book is a compilation of all the poems from Heaney's first four collections or poetry. The first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), was the the most accessible for me. I found the poems of Door into the Dark (1969) and Wintering Out (1972) harder to understand, and those of North (1975) to be the most difficult of all. The cultural, geographic, linguistic, and political references were often beyond my reach. It was a little frustrating that the book seemed to be less comprehensible the further I went, but I read every page with the expectation that at any moment a phrase, or stanza, if not an entire poem, would jump out and grab me. I was not disappointed. Sometimes there are wonders to experience and treasures to be found even when one is lost in the forest.

I purchased Poems 1965-1975 just a few months ago, actually on the very day Heaney died (October 30, 2013). The many tributes, accolades, and excerpts of his poems published that day prompted me to get to know more about the man and his work.

He was a native of Northern Ireland, grew up in County Derry, and lived in Dublin for many years. Author of over 20 books of poetry and literary criticism, Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Liturature in 1995. He taught at Harvard University from 1985-2006, and was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1989-1994.

Heaney is widely respected as a major poet of the 20th century. At Ireland’s national celebration of Heaney’s 70th birthday in 2009, it was announced that two-thirds of the poetry collections sold in the UK the previous year had been books by Heaney.

Personal Helicon
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

"Personal Helicon" by Seamus Heaney, from Death of a Naturalist, © Copyright 1966 by Seamus Heaney.