{"id":31970,"date":"2011-01-08T06:58:24","date_gmt":"2011-01-08T11:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=31970"},"modified":"2020-11-16T09:19:46","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T14:19:46","slug":"the-books-north-by-seamus-heaney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=31970","title":{"rendered":"The Books: North<\/i>, by Seamus Heaney"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry<\/p>\n

The next book on my poetry shelf is Seamus Heaney’s 4th volume of poetry, published in 1975 North<\/a>\"\"<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the bog poems, Heaney scrupulously inspects his own poetic art for an aestheticizing of death and murder, and the poems that result are cramped, anguished, and self-aware, among the most powerful poems about political violence written in the twentieth century.<\/i> – The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nIn 1975, the year of the publication of North<\/i>, Heaney and his family moved to Dublin. He still lives in Dublin, and is now a citizen of the Republic. This adds to the tension in his work, his in-between status, straddling two worlds simultaneously. North<\/i> is a harrowing collection, and very difficult to take at times. It is relentless. Full of death. Political death, sure, but he goes back, way way back, to Viking times, and further, and the series of “bog poems” that make up the majority of this book (a sort of grisly Spoon River Anthology<\/i>), are some of the best poems he has ever written. Things were bad in the 70s in the North of Ireland. We all know that. Heaney, with his particular genius, struggled to find forms<\/i> that would help him talk about it. You can tell that there is a violent context behind North<\/i>, and even the title gives the subtext away, but the poems are like dark dreams, one after the other after the other, showing how the landscape is seeped with death. All landscapes are. There are more dead people than there are alive people. Heaney clicks into that. These poems feel raw, but only a master of language can really get that effect across. The poems here are longer than in his other volumes. Many of them are multi-parted. He’s working on a theme, circling around it in multiple ways. The topic is too big for one man to take on, but he does his level best.<\/p>\n

The bog poems (which he had been working on for a while, some of them show up in his earlier volumes) detail the different people found fully preserved in peat bogs, from the BC era and beyond. Heaney referred to the peat bog as a “memory bank”. The past may seem to be obliterated, but it is not. It is perfectly preserved. But how can a people access<\/i> it? What can the bog people tell us? Not only about themselves but about us? Although “the North” is not overtly mentioned in the bog poems, because these people long pre-date even nationhood, that is all that they are about. <\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets<\/i> writes:<\/p>\n

[Heaney] moves from that landscape [the “authentically rural” landscape of his childhood] to a wider sense of Ireland, the shape that it is in a map, the roads that intersect it, the histories that divide it. The development of his early writing is vivid, culminating in the historical and then the autobiographical poems in North<\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

North<\/i> is an important book, not just in terms of Heaney’s development, but in terms of literary history, Irish and otherwise. <\/p>\n

One of the most famous poems in the book is called “Bog Queen” and that is the poems I will excerpt today.<\/p>\n

Again, a couple of words from the Norton Anthology<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The dead undergo no spiritual transcendence, but remain tenaciously material, bodies bound to the earth. At the end of “Bog Queen”, he insists on bleak images of the woman’s deadness – bone, skull, stitches, even as he allows her rebirth into the light and into his dramatic monologue: “and I rose from the dark, \/ hacked bone, skull-ware, \/ frayed stitches, tufts, \/ small gleams on the bank.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Speaking of his connection to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, there are echoes of “Lady Lazarus” in “Bog Queen”, especially in the last lines (the last lines of “Lady Lazarus” are “Out of the ash \/ I rise with my red hair \/ And I eat men like air.”). It even looks like “Lady Lazarus”, the length of the lines, the small jagged-edged boxes the poem makes on the page. <\/p>\n

Bog Queen<\/big><\/p>\n

I lay waiting
\nbetween turf-face and demesne wall,
\nbetween heathery levels
\nand glass-toothed stone.<\/p>\n

My body was braille
\nfor the creeping influences:
\ndawn suns groped over my head
\nand cooled at my feet,<\/p>\n

through my fabrics and skins
\nthe seeps of winter
\ndigested me,
\nthe illiterate roots<\/p>\n

pondered and died
\nin the cavings
\nof stomach and socket.
\nI lay waiting<\/p>\n

on the gravel bottom,
\nmy brain darkening.
\na jar of spawn
\nfermenting underground<\/p>\n

dreams of Baltic amber.
\nBruised berries under my nails,
\nthe vital hoard reducing
\nin the crock of the pelvis.<\/p>\n

My diadem grew carious,
\ngemstones dropped
\nin the peat floe
\nlike the bearings of history.<\/p>\n

My sash was a black glacier
\nwrinkling, dyed weaves
\nand Phoenician stitchwork
\nretted on my breasts’<\/p>\n

soft moraines.
\nI knew winter cold
\nlike the nuzzle of fjords
\nat my thighs\u2013\u2013<\/p>\n

the soaked fledge, the heavy
\nswaddle of hides.
\nMy skull hibernated
\nin the wet nest of my hair.<\/p>\n

Which they robbed.
\nI was barbered
\nand stripped
\nby a turfcutter’s spade<\/p>\n

who veiled me again
\nand packed coomb softly
\nbetween the stone jambs
\nat my head and my feet.<\/p>\n

Till a peer’s wife bribed him.
\nThe plait of my hair
\na slimy birth-cord
\nof bog, had been cut<\/p>\n

and I rose from the dark,
\nhacked bone, skull-ware,
\nfrayed stitches, tufts,
\nsmall gleams on the bank.<\/p>\n

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