Chapter and verse

Hugo Williams

OPENED GROUND POEMS 1966-96 by Seamus Heaney Faber and Faber, £20, £12.99, pp. 352 It must be galling, chilling even, to find yourself placed above such an everyday thing as a bad review. Ever since the bestowal of the Nobel Prize for Literature with its agenda for peace in Northern Ire- land, public and critics alike have let Sea- mus Heaney escape like a balloon into the wide blue yonder of 'International Poetry', waving respectfully to him from time to time as he ascended. It seemed churlish somehow to snipe at this giant who was clearly doing such a good job on behalf of an endangered art form. If you couldn't stand his stuff, perhaps it was best to keep quiet about it. After all, supposing his sort Overweight stick-insect of poetry was the real thing and the kind of stuff you liked wasn't? Now that Heaney has the double cross of Irish Troubles and Swedish Approval to bear he is destined to be taken after meals like a kind of cultural vitamin pill. You feel sorry for him in a way, but the truth of the matter is that that is what he has always tasted like.

Nobody can say that Seamus hasn't been a good boy. His career has been exemplary and his poems have the confidence of righ- teousness. Impossible to imagine him being wrong, or young, or drunk, or embarrass- ing. His poems unfold with a portly deliber- ation of diction which embraces antique literary felicity while turning its back on awkwardness, spontaneity and risk.

His high moral groundism, from which this tone naturally springs, was first revealed to me as an active ingredient when I read his Oxford lecture 'Joy and Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Philip Larkin', in which he used a poem by Miroslav Holub in praise of Yeats and casts the English writer in an unattractive light. In the poem, one man (ostensibly Yeats) dies nobly, saying he'll be fine, while a second (the deplorable Larkin)

plodded on for eight milk and water years like a long-haired waterplant in a sour creek, as if he stuck his pale face out on a skewer from behind the graveyard wall

Heaney finds the image apt:

The persona he [Larkin] created for iiimself in the last two decades of his life bore a definite resemblance to that pale face on a skewer....

He goes on to compare Larkin's great death-confronting poem `Aubade', unfav- ourably, with a piece of well crafted waffle by Yeats called 'The Cold Heaven', 'a poem which suggests there is an overall purpose to life'. `Yeats's cold heaven is neither frigid nor negative,' he intones.

It is an image of superabundant life, whereas Larkin's sunstruck distancbs (in 'High Win- dows') give access to an infinity as void and neuter as those 'blinding windscreens' which flash randomly and pointlessly in 'The Whit- sun Weddings'.

But are they so pointless? Doesn't 'crossed a street/ of blinding windscreens' accurately conjure a level-crossing on a summer's day?

`We would like him to answer back with the enormous Yes which love and art might generate,' Heaney goes on piously, 'but he is unable to do it.' Well, of course he is; he's hardly going to lie about it, is he? Or is that what's expected of poets?

I was even more surprised to see Heaney dismissing the 'pallor' of Larkin's 'Sad Steps', a poem, like Yeats's 'The Cold Heav- en', about looking up at the sky at night, whose last lines, about the moon, still raise the hair on my neck after many years' usage:

The hardness and the brightness and the plain Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare Is a reminder of the strength and pain Of being young; that it can't come again, But is for others undiminished somewhere.

This sort of thing is simply beyond Heaney's reach, but he goes on insisting there is something wrong with Larkin's atti- tude. 'Where Larkin's `Aubade' ended in entrapment,' he thinks, "The Man and the Echo' (Yeats again) has preserved a free- dom and manages to pronounce a final Yes.' The same 'yes', no doubt, pronounced by the priest when asked, 'Is there life after death, Father?' — a matter Larkin doesn't lie about, even to himself. I suspect it has been this sort of moral one-upmanship which has endeared Heaney to the great academic institutions which now caretake poetry and are currently dropping the fiercely unacademic, incorrect Larkin from their teaching programmes. It is ironical that Heaney should point to Larkin's negativity, because that is exactly the quality I sense in his own poetry. Not of literary effort — one is only too aware of the work that has gone into a Heaney poem: no throwaway lines for this crafts- man — but of personal engagement. Just as a poem seems to be coming to the boil, it backs away from life into literature, from living speech into literariness: 'frond-lipped, brine-stung' — you know, that poetical stuff that only poets know how to do. (The last lines of his poem about eating oysters: I ate the day

Deliberately, that its tang Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

absolutely takes the biscuit as far as I am concerned, although I know it is famous.) I tried the experiment of opening this beautifully produced Collected at random, then doing the same for Larkin. Over and over again Larkin's dazzling lyrical attack left Heaney's airy negotiations puffing at the start, pleading for attention from Eng. Lit. This is not to say that there aren't good poems in his 450-pp oeuvre, only that there are fewer than is usually supposed — and none are heartstoppers. He is at his best when at his least guarded, in poems like 'The Guttural Muse' (my favourite) about listening to young peoples' voices floating up from a lakeside disco and feeling like

some old pike all badged with sores wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouth life,

Or that marvellous sonnet about folding sheets with his mother,

So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand,

or in the first part of 'Field Work', where he's watching the girl and smelling

the coal smell of the train that comes between us, a slow goods, waggon after waggon full of big-eyed cattle.

There's something about that 'a slow goods' that is worth waiting for. Rare moments of vulnerability and revelation in a lifetime of adroit circumspection.