Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
Poet Beyond Borders
By Fintan O'Toole
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 444 pp., $25.00
Seamus Heaney
by Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 188 pp., $22.95
In the first five poems in Opened Ground, Seamus Heaney's comprehensive new selection from the first thirty years of his career, the reader is arrested by the words 'gun,' 'grenades,' 'armoury,' 'blood,' and 'bombs.' Since Heaney comes from Northern Ireland, a place that is only now emerging from decades of violent conflict, this hardly seems remarkable. These poems, however, were first published in 1966, three years before guns and bombs began to dominate the politics of Northern Ireland. They are, moreover, poems whose ostensible subject is a rustic childhood and whose universe is the enclosed domain of the Heaney family's house and farm in County Derry in Northern Ireland, where he was born in 1939 into a Catholic household. The gun, in fact, is a simile for the poet's pen. The grenades are frogs. The armory contains only some familiar farmyard implements. The blood is the juice of a blackberry. Crocks full of cream about to be churned into homemade butter, a nostalgic image, one might think, of old-fashioned abundance, are 'large pottery bombs.'
Review, 6820 words
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