欧宝娱乐

This collection is beautiful at times but quite challenging to read without a guide, and I will have to return to the whole set of Heaney poems quite soon under proper supervision. Peter Barry wrote, in Reading Poetry, that 鈥淧oetry readers do not have to acquire the techniques of the Bletchley Park code-breakers of the Second World War because poets do not encode their meanings in that way.鈥� There are some poems here for which I fear Barry is not entirely right, and I did decide to use Google for a few, notably 鈥淭he King of the Ditchbacks鈥�. Only at the end did I discover Heaney himself had supplied some brief notes as a key to the principal obscurities, proving there is indeed a code. It would have helped to flag these notes at the outset, or should we read such books from the back, like murder mysteries?

Even where the intention of the poems seems clear, there is good reason to go in search of hidden layers. The Station Island sequence of poems has references back to Patrick Kavanagh鈥檚 long poem on the same Lough Derg pilgrimage, with which it certainly must be compared and contrasted, and the pilgrimage itself has an interesting status in Irish Catholic culture. Questions within the poems about the role of poetry in Irish affairs resonate with an ongoing debate going back several centuries 鈥� described for example by Declan Kiberd in 鈥淚nventing Ireland,鈥� - and it would be an interesting exercise to explore these themes.

Heaney seems to have taken the pilgrimage in all seriousness, and this whole collection is filled with Catholic religiosity. The impression is that in this intensely religious / mystical setting, he was able to confront his anxieties about the violence in Northern Ireland, with several powerful references to sectarian assassinations that clearly had a huge impact for him. It is a good thing to explore his themes across a sequence of poems, each with a different angle, because it gives him the scope to examine mutually contradictory and conflicting responses, including anger on the one hand and survivor guilt on another, imagined participation in some places and in others a wish to be liberated from any obligation to participate.

The poetry is not always so severe. In one poem Heaney refers to 鈥渢he first step taken / from a justified line / into the margin.鈥� To me, this refers to the neat alignment of text, leaving a white margin within which there is scribbling done. Later, in The Scribes, he suggests that 鈥淚n the hush of the scriptorium,鈥� the [monkish?] scribes may be writing 鈥渢exts of praise,鈥� but in the margins their poisonous doodles expose their bad temper at the vexations of their chosen profession, 鈥�...if the day is dark / or too much chalk had made the vellum bland / or too little left it oily...鈥� In my reading of this poem, Heaney laughingly 鈥� and spitefully - imagines the miserable scribes being assigned the task of setting out his poem on vellum using their best calligraphy.

It is the sixth of his poetry collections, and to be fair he may expect readers to be fully acclimatised by now in his imaginative landscape. Reading slowly, and turning back to re-read many times, this is a rewarding and attractive collection.