There was a particular warmth about the many tributes that were paid to Seamus Heaney last April when he was seventy. We are justly proud of him as Nobel Laureate but the warmth goes deeper. His poetry - particularly when he reads it - creates a sense of community with those listening. It was my earliest impression of him back in 1967 when he read some of the poems from his first book.
His readings are always popular. The community of people in Mossbawn, Co Derry where he grew up, are reassuringly ordinary, but they are graced by love. As he says in one poem, "Here is space and Here is Love." It may be a description of his father ploughing, or his mother peeling potatoes, or his aunt baking. These were relationships that touched his soul, and Heaney in his poetry set himself to achieve the skill of his father ploughing and the durability of the Blacksmith's hammered out work. He said he made poems out of "the unregarded data of the life I had lived". In poem after peom he rearranged that familiar world until we too see it in strangeness, which is as transforming of the ordinary as sunlight is of a landscape.
He knew many exiles from his home place and as the troubles engulfed that part of the island he became 'an inner emigre, grown long-haired and thoughtful' in Co Wicklow. How did he as a poet respond to this violence? His poetry had always registered how he felt his community was excluded. A man who lived nearby is not a neighbour; he is a 'special militiaman', in uniform, 'harassing Mulhollandstown'. The images are cold and mechanical. Patrols intimidate, question his very name, handle his poems with disrespect. Worse, it seemed unchangeable. Like 'Wood Road' it could be resurfaced, but it could never be widened.
How did he as a poet respond to this violence? The received wisdom of the past was, 'whatever you say, say nothing'. Heaney struggles today to make space in his poetry for the marvellous as well as for the murderous. He struggles that we too may glimpse what I would call the spiritual in the unregarded data of the life we live. Heaney's poem, Lightenings VIII, describes a ship appearing in the air above the monks of Clonmacnoise while they ate, its anchor became entangled in the altar rails and a crew man, who grappled down a rope, could not free it. The Abbot realised that their visitors could not live the monastic life. So he set them free, just like the poet does. maybe we can only take so much of the marvellous in this world!
John Looby S.J.,
Editor