Word: heaneys
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...Heaney attends to the sensual in these lines; but more significantly he yearns for the easier life. He pleads for the days gone by, hoping to stand again at the crossroads of his decision to be an artist...
These crafted poems are a roadmap of Seamus Heaney's soul. In them he has left Belfast and the political images of past volumes and retreated to the fields. He's headed to the coast, "through flowers and limestone" to eat the day "deliberately, that its tang/Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb." And an active, transitive verb at that. Heaney always places himself in each animated poem: in a record of his four sequestered years in the country, he wanders from the water's edge to open shed, from a stone pier to a deeply tilled...
...other wonders, in "The Badgers": "how perilous is it to choose/Not to love the life we're shown?" The artistic poet never resolves this artistic dilemna, but that doesn't matter. Heaney carefully considers the issues at stake, and finds contentment in language, though he's not wholly satisfied with the life of an artist. But in essence, the very existence of his poems is a resolution of his inner crisis. The poet deserves a great deal of credit for posing his difficult questions with such dexterity. All too often, contemporary poets feel compelled to interrupt fluent verse with awkward...
SOMETIMES SPARSE, always evocative, Heaney's imagery and use of metaphor facilitates his transferral of personal circumstance into poetic experience. In "The Guttural Muse," for example, the poet describes the noise and the young people leaving a discotheque...
...Heaney doesn't wallow in self-doubt, however. Many of the poems in this collection are elegies (some memory of Irish soldiers and artists), along with one particularly striking lament for Robert Lowell, whom he calls "our night ferry Thudding in the sea." He admires Lowell as one who "drank America/Like the heart's/Iron vodka...," and these lines of veneration acquaint us with Heaney's intrinsic poetic spirit. Like Lowell, he wants to glean all that he can from his environment...