Sifting Through Thirty Years of Seamus Heaney

OPENED GROUND (POEMS 1966-1996)

By Seamus Heaney

Faber and Faber

$25, 443 pp.

"Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests. /I'll dig with it." With these final words, the poem "Digging" began 1995 Nobel Prize winner and Ralph Waldo Emerson Visiting Poet Seamus Heaney's first collection of poems (Death of a Naturalist) in 1966, inaugurating an entire corpus of work that resonates majestically with themes of searching, wandering and exploring ever downward and inward. Each of his collections of poetry, while encompassing individually different personal, historical, social and political modes, echoes with similar thematic and imagistic ideas. Until now, there really was no comprehensive retrospective of Heaney's work that could show, by placing his texts side-by-side with each other, the underlying veins of narrative digging and searching that permeate his work. With the recently published Opened Ground (Poems 1966-1996), his most recent and comprehensive prosodic collection, a forum for appreciating and explicating Heaney's most powerful prosodic digging has appeared.

A must-have for all Heaney fans, Heaney neophytes and poetry enthusiasts in general, the anthology offers word-for-word the richest visual splendor this side of Yeats. Herein are contained works of virility, gentility, raw passion, reserved harmony and the sheer ecstasy of reveling in language, rolling around in verbiage as only Seamus Heaney can do. The anthology contains works Heaney himself chose from among his rather extensive prosaic and prosodic output. The majority of the collection is made up of poems from all nine of Heaney's collections (spanning a thirty-year literary eternity from 1966's Death of a Naturalist to 1996's The Spirit Level), including the rarely published pamphlet of prose poems, Stations.

The chronological organization of the book shows the trajectory of Heaney's extensive digging motif over the course of his work. Digging first appeared in his earlier books such as Death of a Naturalist, Door Into the Dark, and to some extent the prose-poem collection Stations in their use of language to delve into the fertile cultural expanses of his childhood in Ireland. This "digging" into his private and cultural past (first addressed in his famous poem by that same name) soon unearthed the central myth of the bog people, men and women (apparently sacrificed to Mother Earth to guarantee a good harvest in prehistoric times) that were recently found in the swamplands of Jutland and Ireland, perfectly preserved and fully intact. After composing a series of "bog poems" in which Heaney identified the subverted society of his native Ireland with these perfectly preserved bodies, Heaney became more overtly political once the age-old tensions between England and Ireland began to escalate in the '60s and '70s.

Heaney was too gentle a lover of language to ever write anything overtly jingoistic or propagandistic in defense or incitement of Ireland, choosing instead to write subtle but equally powerful works urging by implication (meaning that has to be "dug up" from the earth of the poems) the recovery of Irish culture through the overthrow of those foreign "invaders." This light but equally effective touch, driven almost exclusively by the power of image rather than the power of overt explication, was criticized by many political figures in Ireland for being too ineffective and too oblique, but Heaney gave the impression in his several appearances at Harvard that he in no way regrets his decisions to avoid public politicking. The later collections become more and more violent and even overtly political in prose style and theme (particularly the works in The Spirit Level), but never lose their acute Keatsian awareness of detail and natural beauty.

The title for this collection Opened Ground, seems to imply a new mode for or at least perspective on his work. The phrase "opened ground" appears several times in the anthology, but one of the most important appearances of the phrase comes at the end of "Act of Union," a poem from his most widely-read collection, North,

...No treaty

I forsee will salve completely your tracked

And stretchmarked body, the big pain

That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again."

With this allusion to his own work, perhaps Heaney is implying that after these thirty years of "digging," some ground has finally been opened, some introspective conclusion reached; yet the fact that this land may be "stretchmarked" and "raw," sexually mauled and completely violated, seems to imply that there is something inherently wrong, even obscene in this final revelation. Does this mean that the newly and rarely anthologized works contained in Opened Ground are detrimental to the essential oeuvre of Heaney's work, previously established within a mythical, symbolic, and imagistic framework? Hardly. Rather, Heaney is saying with his title and the anthology it names that his life as a poet is in no way complete, his digging but only begun. The fans of this miraculous wordsmith have a lot more in store to enjoy:

Under the humus and roots

This smooth weight. I labour

Towards it still. It holds and gluts.