Bucketful By Glistering Bucketful

STEVEN MATTHEWS

Seamus Heaney, District and Circle, Faber, 12.99, ISBN 9870571230969 eaneys previous two collections, The Spirit Level (1996) and, especially, Electric Light (2001), were risky and uneven affairs. Lacking the dominating and shaping ritual of his best books, North, Station Island, and Seeing Things (still his masterwork), they often went for a luxuriance of language, and a reach or up-lift which was awkwardly achieved, even when warranted. The wryness had come to feel mannered, the sense of election to the learned fellowship of poets too often untrammelled and untroubled to avoid our sense of embarrassment. Re-read now, these most recent books fracture into a small set of achieved lyric one-offs amid an over-riding lack of direction and coherence. District and Circle represents work consistently higher in achievement, and different in kind, largely because it makes riskiness and venturesomeness into its own procedures. This book sees such uncertainty as part of the general and traumatically conflictual condition of the world across Heaneys lifetime, from the Second World War through to last summer. It also wears its riskiness openly in other ways, right from the page dedicating the book to Heaneys early patron Ann Saddlemyer, which bears an epigraph beginning Call her Augusta / Because we arrived in August. Saddlemyer, early provider of the Heaneys Glanmore cottage, is here set up as the mistress of a latter-day Coole Park. Heaney, exulted (condemned?) by Robert Lowell to be the best Irish poet since Yeats, again broaches and dares a subject which might prove cringe-worthy for his supporters. At Heaneys current age, Yeats was producing the work that would be gathered in The Winding Stair and Other Poems: a book which includes the Coole Park poems, alongside poems on love from old age, and sequences containing the troubling adoption of the voices of women young and old. What is also signalled in the epigraph to District and Circle, however, is that Heaneys selfmythologising and vocalisations will be of a different nature; the happenstance of Augusta / Because we arrived in August, and the fact that the bounty which August brings is that of baled hay and blackberries and combines, rather than the model of civic, literary or philosophic order Cooles bounty came to be for Yeats. The book is a very self-conscious re-visioning of the favoured Heaney themes, however, in a retrospective vein familiar from Yeatss late style.

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Poems on farm instruments a turnip-snedder and harrow-pin appear here ; undergrounds of various kinds, as the Tube and also as Hades; the Tollund man revives in this late springtime; brick-laying; funerals; the early death of Heaneys brother; his young married life: all are reviewed. But unlike the lustfulness and prurience of Yeatss sense of renewed fertility in this phase, Heaneys is a calm, post-wintering-out exuberance at the return of possibility and fruition, even in age and against continuingly-intransigent circumstance. The reason for this is formal. Against what seems already to have become a tag-line for the collection, the declaration that Anything Can Happen in its version from Horace there, this is a return by Heaney to a concerted deployment of form and formal variation. Despite his early reputation as a poet able to mirror nature or to evoke the sensuous and physical qualities of objects, it has always been noticeable that Heaneys collections have gathered their force through the adoption of a specific formal model. Think of the drill-bit thin quatrains which sustained him through Wintering Out and North to Field Work; the sonnets from this last which reappear in The Haw Lantern; the twelve-line Squarings from Seeing Things which recur in various combinations (Squarings squared) in The Spirit Level; the Derek-Mahon-like rhymed quatrains from Seeing Things which crop up in Electric Light, and again here. But the formal gravity of District and Circle is firmly centred upon the sonnet, variously rhymed or unrhymed; a surprising way of abbreviating, managing, and establishing a vast range of personal and impersonal content. Anything Can Happen is freighted by awful historical and global premonition. The sense that at any moment things can randomly shift their ground. And yet what is noticeable also about the book is that it is absolutely assured in its own voice and stance a key word or the (etymologicallyunrelated) way in which the people in the poems take their stand against troubling experience. In The Aerodrome, for instance, remembering having become unsettled by watching the wartime planes in 1944 with a young girlfriend, the speaker reflects that love is dug heels and distance[] a stance. Describing the way you had to stand to swing a sledge-hammer in The Shiver, the question raised of the experience is, did it do you good? And the answer implied, of course. The title sonnet sequence, recounting journeys on the London Underground under various kinds of surveillance, its tunnels flicker-lit, has the speaker recall how:
On to the carriage metal, I reached to grab The stubby black roof-wort and take my stand From planted ball of heel to heel of hand

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As sweet traction and heavy down-slump swayed me.

To the extent that this speaker, like late Yeats, feels himself to be the only relict / Of all that I belonged to, he remains like the earlier refugee in Exposure from North, someone escaped from the massacre, whatever grimly recurrent local or global catastrophe that might be. To this extent, the risk of District and Circle is also its command. More assuredly than in Electric Light, with its gauche versions of eclogues, this is a book by a pastoral poet once again convinced in his knowledge that the pastoral tradition from Virgil onwards, whilst not immune from echoes of historical carnage, ultimately offers a stance against them. A tactful celebration of the fruits of age, The Birch Grove, has a half-mocked, halfrecognisable, al fresco breakfaster dandle a sandal, and declare that If art teaches us anything[] its that the human condition is private. Unstomachable to some, as a response inadequate to its situations and to the vast historical moment or moments raised, this ideal is the challenge which the book offers. The metaphors of blood, and blood itself, flow here, as they did for Yeats at Coole. But the upshot is always a contained and benignant acceptance and possibility, the startling burst of poetry from the raw sliced mess, as at the end of The Turnip-Snedder, emerging bucketful by glistering bucketful.
Steven Matthewss latest book is Modernism, in the Arnold Context Series of which he is General Editor.