Word: poem
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DIED. Muriel Rukeyser, 66, American poet of social protest; of a heart attack; in New York City. After dropping out of Vassar in 1932, she published a poem on the Scottsboro trial (in which nine black Alabama youths were accused of raping two white girls) that foreshadowed a concern with injustice that remained the theme of her poetry and her life. Though critics complained that her "message became more important to her than [its] expression," when her Collected Poems appeared in 1978 they also praised her devotion to the dissident muse named in her first book, Theory of Flight...
Heaney fuses this dichotomy so convincingly it's difficult to detect it. His indissoluable phrases and sounds don't reflect the labor he has given his verse-making. Each poem artfully avoids the simplistic on the one hand and the obstentatiously convoluted on the other--two qualities that dominate contemporary poetry...
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...
...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...