Word: heaneys
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SWEENEY ASTRAY by Seamus Heaney; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 96 pages...
...Heaney always digs roots in his ongoing field work, and the pinnacle of his efforts comes in his Glanmore sonnet sequence. (Glanmore was the author's home for four years after he left Belfast.) These poems must be considered the centerpiece of Field Work, and are wonderfully successful in their fusion of reach and reticence. In them, Heaney also demonstrates that versification is not extinct. He chisels rhymes out of unlikely word combinations, and simultaneously knows when to interrupt his alliteration with parenthetical asides...
...take lines out of context in this series of poems would ruin them, because each work relies on the momentum of one line following another. Heaney strings words together like notes in a finely-tuned melody, and to untangle them would not do his work justice. Even in the little poem, we witness a poet who connects ambiguities through a poetic magnetism, when he utters "You are stained, stained/To perfection...
...HEANEY HAS MATURED considerably in Field Work. His voice is confident, his versification operative, and his substance highly provocative. Though Heaney tends toward the pastoral, he bestows his work with so much energy that every poem seems to perpetuate itself, with each line flowing into the next. His book contains only a few flaws. For one, Heaney's line breaks seem a bit contrived. Sometimes, too, the poet couples abstractions, such as "sibilant penumbra" or "mellowed clarities" which ask too much of the reader, even the active one. Finally, his detached version of the Ugolino episode in Cantos...
...most part, however, these uncluttered poems collectively represent a meaningful achievement. Heaney never hesitates to face up to the dilema of being an artist. His is not an easy life; some of the violent incidents from life in Belfast still linger in his head, coiling around that field where he cultivates his poetry. But in Field Work, Seamus Heaney advances beyond the political bog. His acres breathe, and his road steam...