This ended up being one of the more serendipitous pickups of the entire challenge. Having read a bunch of Star Wars novels to pad out a list I was sure I’d easily finish, I decided in 2019 to look for something with a bit more, let’s call it ‘highbrow artistic merit’ than pulp novels derived from a schlock sci-fi movie series (how’s that for pretentious?)
I did do a few books of poetry in 2018 (Cantos of Ezra Pound and a collection of Mallarmé; the Cantos were a special case as the sections were individually published and so I could read each of them as a separate book, if it turned out I needed to (and it did,) but it wasn’t until near the end of the year that I realized that a couple of the large volumes of poetry I own are ‘collected poems,’ that is, collections made up of entire standalone works, so some of those have already made an appearance in late 2018-early 2019.
Anyway, I was at the library with the older kids for babies and books, which meant I had an hour or so to sit and read and had forgotten to bring any book. Though there are a couple of titles I’m like halfway through and have since returned, I was in the mood for something new, and browsing the 800s I came across Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney, which is a selection of his poems. Well, that’s no good, I’d have to read the whole thing to count it, but I was already back in the children’s area by the time I figured that out.
So I flipped through, and noticed he had done a version of the Buile Suibhne, and also that he had, like most poets, published a few collections over the years. Apart from Sweeney Astray, which a library in the next town has, I tried to find the earliest of his collections first, and this one, from 1976, happened to be the earliest one that was available for interlibrary loan.
So, all that long introductory is basically to say, unbeknownst to me this fit in perfectly with other Irish material I’ve been reading.
The first half of Field Work is mostly concerned about the Troubles, which makes sense given Heaney made his home in Belfast before moving to Glanmore (in Co. Wicklow) a few years before this book was published. The rest has a pastoral quality, but never escapes the spectre of the carnage revisited in the first few poems, and ends with a translation of the Ugolino episode of Dante’s Inferno, tying themes of fraternal and internecine strife in with death from starvation and the recompense for such in the afterlife.
Two examples:
The Toome Road
One morning early I met armoured cars
In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
All camoflagued with broken alder branches,
And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
Among all of those with their back doors on the latch
For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones…
O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
The invisible, untoppled omphalos.
And another:
Song
A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
ianuaditis 