A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов

A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов


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and skins

      the seeps of winter

      digested me,

      the illiterate roots

      pondered and died

      in the cavings

      of stomach and socket.

      I lay waiting

      on the gravel bottom,

      my brain darkening,

      a jaw of spawn

      fermenting underground

      dreams of Baltic amber.

      (Heaney 1998, 108, ll. 9‐21)

      Here, the body in death constitutes another type of life, the queen's “fabrics and skins (l. 9)” becoming a permeable membrane to “the seeps of winter (l. 10)” absorbing her body into its own greater organism. But even while the brain is “darkening” (l. 18) there is still a bubbling of consciousness, a dream of light: the glint of the Baltic amber that may be adorning her—or perhaps, rather, she herself is the beginning point for the formation of future jewels. And, in the same way, the imagery of this poem—so similar to the “deep imagery” of a James Wright or Galway Kinnell—exists both as finely focused description as well as part of a metaphorically constructed field of meaning; the language remains both concrete and metaphysical at the same time.

      Besides Heaney's panoramic yet seamless vision—able to connect past and present, local and universal, sentient and inanimate—is his remarkable voice itself, as sophisticated as it is accessible. American poet Brad Leithauser, reviewing Heaney's 2006 volume District and Circle for The New York Times, describes how Heaney's voice still “carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken—even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say” (Leithauser 2006). In fact, in the opening to the title poem of Seamus Heaney's 1979 collection Field Work, we can see the poet's mouth as well as eye at work, the scene's clarity perhaps whetted rather than merely adorned by the steady play of alliterative [w] sounds:

      Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze,

      where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,

      where one fern was always green

      I was standing watching you

      take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing

      and reach to lift a white wash off the whins.

      (Heaney 1998, 170, I. ll. 1‐6)

      Anchored in place (another element that makes him almost automatically tap into an American audience, despite the fact that he might write about Northern Ireland rather than a James Wright Ohio or a Richard Hugo Montana), as well as attuned to local speech (in the same way that William Carlos Williams aimed to emulate the “brown bricks of American speech”), Heaney's work can indeed be appreciated in America on an anthropological level, a description of the “works and days” of the people populating his world from childhood onward. But there is much more here at work: a scaffolding built so squarely in the ground can hope to climb the higher. The title Field Work itself bespeaks the upper reaches of Heaney's poetic sweep. Not only does the phrase refer to the quotidian notion of agricultural work conducted in the field—planting and spading and herding and so on—but also the idea of field work in the sense of scientific investigation, in the sense of Heaney being a full‐fledged practitioner of his art immersed in the past and influential in the future of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps it is worth noting that in a short essay published by the online news magazine The Daily Beast, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey even claims that Heaney's collection North inspired her own poetic investigation into her “South” in her 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning collection Native Guard:

      I'd been reading North while working on a book of my own, turning again and again to that title poem. In it I found one of the things to which I am most drawn in Heaney's great body of work: that Heraclitus's axiom is as true now as ever—“Geography is fate”—and that answering the call of our particular geographies and their attendant histories is a noble undertaking: a necessary one. […] In grappling with the difficult history and hardships of his homeland, Heaney's work […] showed me, too, a way into my own work, the calling to make sense of my South with its terrible beauty, its violent and troubled past.

      (Trethewey 2013)

      Besides Heaney from Northern Ireland, two poets from England who have garnered widespread attention are Philip Larkin (1922–1985), born in the city of Coventry, and Ted Hughes (1930–1998), born in the town of Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire. In fact, these two British poets have perhaps made the leap into American poetry to the point that their work would be equally well known as just about any American‐born practitioner of poetry in the latter half of the twentieth century. Kevin Clark, too, notes (wryly) these two British poets' exceptionality for American readers in a remark about their absence: “Now that Larkin and Hughes are dead, most of us may have assumed that British poets have returned to laboring in neat little fields circumscribed by fourteen rhyming lines and 140 syllables. Of course, we're wrong.” (Clark, Georgia 2005, 403)

      When I see a couple of kids

      And guess he's fucking her and she's

      Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

      I know this is paradise

      Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—

      Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

      Like an outdated combine harvester,

      And everyone young going down the long slide

      ………………………………………………………

      Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

      The sun‐comprehending glass,

      And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

      Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

      (Larkin 1974, 17, ll. 1‐8, 17‐20)

      Though he may be thought cynical and anti‐emotional, through his precise craft he is still able to trace the twisting pathways of the human mind, its sudden


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