Dennis O’Driscoll (1954–2012)

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I don't actually know Heaney's poetry all that well, but I like what I know. As an O-Level student in the early 1980s, several of his poems were on our curriculum; the one that sticks in my mind is "Digging", which is something of a mission statement:

Digging

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.

This book, published in 2009, goes through Heaney's early life in rural Northern Ireland and then through each of his poetry collections one by one, and certainly whets my appetite to become more familiar with him. It misses of course Book VI of The Æneid, published only after Heaney's death. I found some unexpected personal resonances - when I was a Fellow of the Institute of Irish Studies in 1995-96, many of the people who had worked alongside Heaney during his time at QUB in 1966-72 were still around, including Edna Longley for whom I did some editing, and whose "Cliquey Clerihew" must be quoted:

Michael Longley
Is inclined to feel strongly
About being less famous
Than Seamus

I was struck last year by Ruth Padel's observation of the importance of Northern Ireland and the Troubles to English-language poetry in Europe. It's uncontroversial that Heaney's voice was one of the clearest in this phenomenon - pulling together words and phrases to capture a way of looking at things, anchored in all the wider traditions of world literature but firmly rooted in Castledawson and Bellaghy.

There's lots of stuff here - the importance of translation (The Æneid is mentioned, Beowulf isn't); the famous encounter with Danny Morrison (disputed by the only other person who was there); the importance of place - Wicklow, America, Greece; and how he found out he had won the Nobel Prize a day and a half after the rest of the world knew. Even with only a passing knowledge of Heaney's work, I found it fascinating.

I met Seamus Heaney only once, a chance encounter in a pub (the Foggy Dew in Temple Bar in Dublin, some time around 1989); he offered to buy me a drink on the basis of having known my parents in his Belfast days, but I was too shy to accept. I wish I had. I learned a lot from this book, and I would have learned something from even ten minutes' conversation with him.… (more)

Out of the many books written on the poetry of Irish Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, I selected this as one that might provide a broader context to my reading of his work. O’Driscoll’s book consists of an extensive series of interview questions, organized by chapters that mainly correspond to Heaney’s poetry collections, beginning with Death of a Naturalist (1966) and ending with District and Circle (2006). Published in 2008, it briefly touches upon his August 2006 stroke that features prominently in his most recent volume, Human Chain. Stepping Stones took seven years to reach publication, with Heaney responding to O’Driscoll’s questions primarily in writing through the mail. In his introduction, O’Driscoll describes the book as biographical, but it is more accurately a blending of biography and autobiography, with the guiding hand of O’Driscoll as interviewer and the true content found in Heaney’s response.

This book does not pretend to be an authorized ‘reader’s guide’ to Seamus Heaney’s poems, but rather a survey of his life, often using the poems as reference points. It offers a biographical context for the poems and a poetry-based account of the life. It reviews the life by re-viewing it from the perspective of Heaney’s late sixties…

Born in 1939 on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, Heaney’s family was part of the Catholic minority. The interviews trace in detail his life and the influences of people, places and events on his poetry, including his school and college years, his marriage and family life, university lectureships and readings at home and abroad, and his receipt of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. Themes of rural life, early childhood, family life, and the Troubles are recurrent throughout. Heaney also devotes considerable attention to the many poets, both predecessors and contemporaries, whom he admires and was influenced by, crediting Ted Hughes with having inspired his earliest interest in poetry. While not intended as an analysis of his works, Heaney does frequently reference both collections and specific poems in the context of their settings, sources and inspirations. In the end, I am left with the impression of Heaney as a man, who while extraordinary in his literary accomplishments, is refreshingly quite ordinary in his origins, daily life and sources of poetic inspiration.

This is a book that is dense with detail and reflection. I read it in its lengthy entirety, although I was several times tempted to give up. While I would not hesitate to recommend it to admirers of Heaney’s poetry, I found the question-answer format wearisome for a book of nearly 500 pages (including addendums), and its full appreciation seemed to require a knowledge that I did not have. Although including a brief glossary of terms, several maps, and more extensive chronological and bibliographical glossaries, it otherwise lacks supplemental explanations and presumes an understanding of Irish culture, vernacular, traditions, politics and historical events, as well as a close familiarity with Heaney’s work and a broad background in poetry.

I am highly ambivalent about my rating of this book. Torn between the limits of its accessibility for myself as an unprepared reader and its merits as an enlightening account of Heaney’s life and literary contributions, I have chosen to emphasize the latter, despite having done no justice to these virtues here. My hope is to someday return to the relevant chapters of Stepping Stones, having spent more time with Heaney’s poems and ready for a deeper understanding of their origins in the author’s life.… (more)