Poetry/Review Daniel Picker

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: DANIEL PICKER

Fiction by Daniel Picker has appeared in The Abington Review, The Kelsey Review, The 67th Street Scribe, The Adelaide Literary Magazine,(NYC), and Scribe of Macaulay Honors College CUNY. Nonfiction by Daniel Picker has appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Sewanee Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Copperfield Review, The Oxonian Review, The Irish Journal of American Studies,(IRL), The Stanford Daily, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Middlebury Magazine, and many others. Daniel Picker is the author of a book of poems, Steep Stony Road, and won The Dudley Review Poetry Prize at Harvard University. Daniel’s memoir “Eat Your Good Lamb” on studying with Seamus Heaney at Harvard appears in The Oxonian Review of the University of Oxford where Daniel studied English after studying English at Harvard. Daniel’s poetry has appeared in Sequoia: The Stanford Literary Magazine, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Soundings East, Vermont Literary Review, Folio, RUNE: MIT, Ireland of the Welcomes Magazine, and The Dudley Review at Harvard, among many others.

OLD IRELAND: “Isle of Wondrous Beauty”

My mother used to say, “The Irish fought the English with sticks,” she never mentioned “Vinegar Hill” or 1798, that year known simply as “98.” We all knew something of famine, potato blight, black mould. My mother’s father “was killed by a hit and run driver” in West Philadelphia where during The Depression neighbors gave her bread for her little brother, our Uncle John; and Uncle Frank, Grandmom’s brother helped out some. Later, Pal, mom’s English teacher recommended her to Ursinus College where she “worked her way through, the first to do so,” she loved to say later. She met Dad in Atlantic City while working there one summer, and soon my oldest sister arrived, after they married back in Philadelphia, then another daughter, then Grandmom lost her eyesight, went blind “from running out in the cold with wet hair,” dad and mom said. My older brother, the last born in the city, before they moved here to this old, small town where I arrived, then my little brother too. Later, Uncle Frank joined us after Dad had left, and Uncle recalled, “Babe Ruth and Connie Mack,” “Dempsey – Tunney and The Sesquicentennial,” and when I mentioned tennis, “Little Bill and Big Bill.” Years later Mom recalled “How green Ireland looked from above and landing at Shannon once”; “I felt at home there, connected,” she said, and only then did Ireland become as Whitman wrote: “An isle of wondrous beauty.”

(Daniel Haney Picker)

On Seamus Heaney by R.F. Foster Princeton University Press 2020, 228 pages, $19.95 Hardcover

On Seamus Heaney and “Death of a Naturalist” and The Troubles

Review by Daniel Picker, MA

Roy F. Foster, historian, has produced one of the finest books to date on Irish poet and Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney. Foster’s book, On Seamus Heaney covers both Heaney’s work and his life, in a compact format and accessible style which both scholars and students will welcome. Any avid or even casual fan of Heaney’s work should also welcome this book and find it a congenial addition to his or her personal library. R.F. Foster, Emeritus Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford is the ideal scholar of Heaney’s work as it remains chocked full with allusions to the history of Ireland.

The book weighs in at a mere 228 pages with its “Index” and penultimate “Brief Reference Notes.” Foster’s five-page “Preface and Acknowledgements” precedes the text of this compact hardcover tome which stands just 7 ½” x 5.” This handy format would slip well into the pocket of a tweed jacket if one were to visit The Republic of Ireland or the North of Ulster. On Seamus Heaney appears as the latest addition to the “Writers on Writers” series of Princeton University Press, which already includes Michael Dirda On Conan Doyle, John Burnside On Henry Miller, and Philip Lopate Notes on Sontag, along with four other instalments in the series. Heaney, who died in 2013, and his work deserve serious attention.

Foster organizes his book in eight distinct chapters, beginning with “Certus” on Heaney’s early days at university when he first began to publish poems under the pseudonym “Incertus.” Foster makes certain, that despite Heaney’s hesitant penname, his early work and steps into the literary world occurred with a certain sure-footedness. From a farmhouse in Derry, Ireland, to Queen’s University, Belfast, Heaney knowingly stepped forward with a sense of irony, in not only his pseudonym, but also in his poetry. Foster handles well Heaney’s early poems, which hold a connection to nature; these poems, like “Digging” and “Death of a Naturalist” and Heaney’s later works in response to the works of W.B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “The Wild Swans at Coole” will reinvigorate past readers of Heaney and Yeats.

Heaney’s strategy of striding beside and across borders and boundaries set Heaney’s balanced tone, which addressed forces exerting pressure from both without and within. Perhaps some readers may find it surprising when on the first page, Foster alludes to the work of T.S. Eliot, an American-born poet who became a British subject: “Like T.S. Eliot, a constant if oblique presence in his writing life, he prized gaining access to ‘the auditory imagination’ and what it opened up, ‘a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the levels of conscious thought and feeling, invigorating every word’.” Foster astutely concludes, “His readers felt they shared in this.”

Surprisingly, and perhaps more so to American readers, also early in the first chapter, Foster notes that “Heaney’s inner certainty of direction” along with “his charisma, style, and accessibility” inspired some resentment among both critics and fellow poets, especially those from Northern Ireland, whom Heaney moved on from as his work and career took him into circles beyond Belfast.

Foster acknowledges the “indispensable” interviews of Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones of 2008, and Foster alludes briefly to Helen Vendler’s scholarly commentaries, as “long one of his closest readers.” As was the case with Vendler, Foster benefitted from actually knowing Heaney; Vendler and Heaney were colleagues at Harvard, and Foster, a historian at Oxford, enjoyed Heaney’s Oxford lectures during Heaney’s appointment as Professor of Poetry there. Both Vendler’s book, Seamus Heaney and Foster’s book, On Seamus Heaney benefit from some insider’s information. But Foster’s book steps beyond Vendler’s due to the retrospective nature of his work; as a historian he looks back on Heaney’s entire career, now encapsulated in this book produced after Heaney’s death, while Vendler’s book appeared nearly 25 years ago, in 1998, while Heaney’s late career lay ahead of him.

Foster’s ability as a historian to contextualize Heaney’s work remains the most profound strength of On Seamus Heaney. First, Foster notes that Heaney began writing serious verse among a Protestant community of poets in Northern Ireland, which included Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, and hovering in the background, the Protestant Northern Irish master Louis MacNeice. Foster writes eloquently of MacNeice’s place in the early context which Heaney grew in response to, and eventually flew beyond: “For Longley and especially Mahon, Louis MacNeice was a vitally important precursor.” But Heaney’s Catholicism lent him an outsider status in the North, and Longley and Mahon, both products of the formerly Protestant Trinity College Dublin held an urban ironic sophistication quite different from Heaney’s rural upbringing on a farm in Derry, Northern Ireland.

Foster’s book, remarkably, surprises, when he notes that early editors, including the founding editor of The Honest Ulsterman later felt “envy” toward Heaney, who enjoyed early publication in that Northern Irish journal, but far eclipsed its editor, James Simmons, in success. Foster does well recapturing Heaney’s Catholic upbringing which existed in sharp contrast to the work of MacNeice: “Heaney admitted that MacNeice did not – at this stage ‘speak’ to him; he would later stress that his immersion in Catholic theology and practice at St. Columb’s, ‘living the liturgical year in a very intense way’, instilled an atmosphere which attuned him to Hopkins – a Catholic priest – as his ‘main man’.” Foster goes on to note Heaney’s take on Hopkins’ work at this time: “‘What you encounter in Hopkin’s journals – the claustrophobia and scrupulosity and ordering of the mind, the cold-water shaves and the single iron beds, the soutanes and the self-denial – that was the world I was living in when I first read his poems.’” These remarks seem akin to James Joyce’s early masterwork, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Foster does allude to Joyce’s work on a handful of occasions as it has influenced Heaney’s work, particularly in the long poem of pilgrimage, “Station Island” with its Dante-esque shades and Catholic overtones. Some readers may find it surprising that as a young man Heaney participated in several serious Catholic pilgrimages, to both Lourdes in France and to Station Island in Ireland.

For readers of Heaney’s early poems in Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark Hopkins’ influence appears in the percussive sounds and pulsing rhythms of Heaney’s well-known poem, “Digging” and “Death of a Naturalist” with its bellowing amphibians: bullfrogs. Heaney’s background: Catholic, rural, and agrarian seems to galvanize his affinity for the work of Patrick Kavanagh, another Irish master whose work though written in the 20th century brings to light the connection to the soil in rural Ireland. Also, present is the spirit of the earth present in the early work of William Butler Yeats.

As Heaney’s work progresses, it does not appear Catholic in the same sense that some of Hopkins’ verse remains; Heaney’s work seems catholic only in that it is universal; Foster notes that late in his career Heaney

became only nominally Catholic. Of course, the towering figure of Irish poetry, and Heaney’s fellow Nobel laureate, William Butler Yeats exerted some presence which Heaney in his work had to address and reckon with, and Yeats, unlike Joyce, Kavanagh, and Heaney was not a Catholic. But Yeats did have a familial connection to the Irish soil in Sligo, in what became the Irish Republic; Yeats too, like Louis MacNeice had a familial connection to the Protestant clergy in Ireland. Foster does well in fully addressing Heaney’s grappling with the legacy of Yeats.

Foster organizes his work chronologically. In his second chapter, “Kinship” Foster begins to investigate Heaney’s early response to The Troubles which began in Northern Ireland in 1969, and resulted in sectarian violence not only in Ulster, but elsewhere in the UK. The Troubles recur through to 1985 when an Anglo –Irish Agreement is broken, then on to 1993 when an IRA ceasefire is broken just two years after its initiation. Heaney continues to respond to the violence throughout his writing career, sometimes retrospectively, linking an event from decades back to his present situation.

As a historian of Ireland, and of Irish birth himself, Foster, like Heaney, appears in the advantageous position to place Ireland’s late 20th century Troubles in a centuries-old historical context. Heaney’s sonnet and early masterpiece, “Requiem for the Croppies” brings to the fore an extended episode in Irish history, which culminated in 1798, yet still resonates today. This poem, even in its 14-line brevity demonstrates the power Heaney’s poetry holds. Foster sagely notes, “The tentative politics of ‘Door into the Dark’ took a more decided form in a celebrated poem about the 1798 Rising ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, with its powerful closing image of the pocketfuls of barley seeds buried with the slaughtered rebels and sprouting from the ground a year later.” Foster follows the sentence with a connection to the Troubles in Ireland in “1969” and connects those Troubles to an allusion: “this could look like an invocation of blood sacrifice in the style of Patrick Pearse” who was a martyr of The Easter Rising in Ireland of 1916 which eventually gave birth to The Republic of Ireland. Foster goes on to note that “the British Army [was] on the streets of Belfast and the birth of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.” Foster also notes that Heaney ceased reading this poem in public at that juncture.

One could simplify somewhat and note that Heaney response to The Troubles, which he contextualized in Irish history gave birth to one of the more remarkable qualities to Seamus Heaney’s literary endeavor: Heaney’s ability to see issues of “sectarian violence” and “religious” or “tribal loyalties” stretching back many centuries and to witness those issues in The Troubles in this deeply-ingrained background, which Heaney called “the tribal dirt” gave the work a special resonance. Foster’s chapter “Kinship” on Heaney’s response to The Troubles remains the most powerful in On Seamus Heaney. For readers interested in an outsider’s take on The Troubles from a period about a decade later, Paul Theroux’s chapters on Ulster at the heart of his book from 1983, The Kingdom by the Sea also offer a first-hand account on The Troubles from someone trying to comprehend yet at the same time not taking sides.

But “Kinship” is not the only chapter in Foster’s exemplary book which deals with the Troubles. Heaney circles back to the Troubles repeatedly in his work, and addresses it in his lectures, essays, and poetry. Despite a brokered peace agreement in the mid-1980’s, The Troubles continued into the 1990’s. This cycle of violence informs Heaney’s poetry for decades as he kept circling back to it; especially in his book North he dealt directly with the political and violent turmoil which for Heaney were synonymous with human history. By the mid-1970’s the Heaney family had relocated to the Republic of Ireland, living in a cottage in Wicklow, and teaching part of the year at the University of California, Berkeley, where Heaney became good

friends with Irish-American scholar and historical novelist Thomas Flanagan, who was an academic there. It was in Wicklow, in the Republic that Heaney completed and awaited the publication of North; living in the south gave Heaney the perspective to complete that work, and after 1979, to embark on more personal verse in Field Work. At this time Heaney began teaching half the year at Harvard University in the United States, and during this time Heaney would purchase a home just south of the heart of Dublin near Sandymount Strand, and within walking distance of the Martello Tower, now a Joyce Museum, where James Joyce briefly lived and where Joyce set the early chapters of his novel Ulysses.

If there exists a small omission in Foster’s remarkable book, it appears in his section on Heaney’s mid-career masterpiece, Field Work which includes Heaney’s most lyrical and most masterful sonnet sequence, “The Glanmore Sonnets” which includes the eloquent couplet: “Vowels ploughed into other opened ground/ Each verse returning like the plough turned round.” It seems Foster for the sake of brevity and due to his personal tastes spends some time analyzing just a few of the sonnets; while he does spend enough time providing background on Heaney’s move to Wicklow, within the mountains west of Dublin, where the Heaneys first rented, then later purchased a rural cottage or retreat, he fails to truly investigate all these sonnets and the power they still exert.

Foster is at his best noting the connections between Irish history, and the history of The Troubles particularly, as addressed in Heaney’s poems and lectures, including the Nobel lecture, “Crediting Poetry” of the mid-1990’s. In Foster’s 3rd chapter, “The Same Root” and his 4th chapter, “In the Middle of his Journey,” and again in the 6

th chapter, “The Moment of Mortality” Foster finds Heaney’s response to The

Troubles deepens yet again.

Foster notes: “Simply being called ‘Seamus’, he caustically pointed out, made his position on Northern Ireland implicitly clear, as the name’s Gaelic provenance implied a nationalist background – ‘sure-fire Pape’, he would later put it in a famous polemical poem.” That poem, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” from North remains both a sophisticated and direct response to The Troubles and the tribal loyalties, secret communications, nuances of language, and fear engendered by cycles of violence that pervaded Irish history. Stylistically, the poem also reveals not only Heaney’s mastery of language, but also his prowess with the Northern Irish vernacular, and colloquial language in general, as in “the wink and nod.” “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” brilliantly moves in the penultimate stanza toward the conclusion of Part III of the poem: “That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod/ And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape/ O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod, / Of open minds as open as a trap,”; the final quatrain of Part III, rife with historical and literary allusion concludes:

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

Where half of us, as in a wooden horse

Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,

Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

There is so much to admire within Foster’s excellent book: his astute analysis of Heaney’s poems, his synthesis of disparate sources, including Heaney’s notebooks and letters, his identification of historical and literary allusions, and his thorough understanding of the rural culture, and the literary, religious, and political

milieu from which Heaney emerged. With his historian’s understanding of Ireland’s fraught history, and his cultural and personal affinity for Heaney’s poetry, life, generosity, and work, R.F. Foster has created a wonderful explication, which is more than an overview of Heaney’s life work. Foster, as was the case with Heaney, even exhibits some appropriate humor; upon Heaney’s departure south from Belfast for a rural cottage an hour west of Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, the folks Heaney left behind felt betrayed: “The overcompensation is palpable, but the resentment was real. To some Northern minds, Heaney, already suspect from his Californian sojourn and Faber connections, had decamped to somewhere that suggested Grub Street and Sodom rather than a damp cottage on an obscure country road in County Wicklow.”

After studying with Seamus Heaney at Harvard I began a teaching career, and Seamus wrote a letter of recommendation for me. Later, I recalled a prose assignment for his The Practice of Poetry class; one of the options was to compare Robert Lowell’s poem “Water” with Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “North Haven.” That was the option I selected. Seamus noted on my essay, that my response was “judicious.”

I heard him read three times after my time at Harvard: once outside of Philadelphia at Bryn Mawr College where I attended with my mother and stepfather, and after the reading we made small talk and I introduced my mother and stepfather to him. He signed a copy of Sweeney Astray and my stepfather complimented him by saying, “You are as great as they say you are.” Later, at the reception he introduced me to Eudora Welty, and we also made small talk.

The last time I heard him read was at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. He read well and held up a Fireman’s helmet that had been given to him, he related it to September 11th, which had occurred five years earlier, and read his poem “Helmet” and a number of other poems.

Over the years I wrote Seamus brief letters and he wrote back, and often he sent postcards, from Massachusetts, from Harvard, and from Dublin. I sent him a postcard from the GPO in Dublin, the famous General Post Office where The Easter Rising in 1916 began, and he later wrote back that he “was glad I made it to Ireland.” When I was out in Kinvara, near Galway, Ireland, and visiting sites associated with Yeats: Coole Park and Thor Ballylee, I learned that the gentleman who ran the rural hotel where I was staying was friends with Seamus, and he called him up on the phone; I had said earlier I did not wish to bother him. But the gentleman, whose name escapes me now, said that Seamus was on his way to Scotland and did not have time to visit with me if I were back in Dublin, where I would return in a few days.

Through the power of the Internet, one may find many photographs and even sound and video recordings of Seamus Heaney reading his poetry and answering questions in interviews. I see how he aged over the years. When I was his student, I was just 23 and he was about 45. That was many years before his death, and many years before where I am today. A long time ago. But I still enjoy hearing his voice on those recordings, even without the video, but with the video he is less disembodied. I miss hearing him.

I am glad I visited Ireland and I would like to return. In one of his last readings in New York City, Heaney read a passage from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” from The Four Quartets. Heaney mentioned the idea of “the soul as transfigured.” R.F. Foster addresses connections to those issues within Heaney’s work, and Heaney’s fondness for that long poem from Eliot in On Seamus Heaney eloquently. Heaney returned to Eliot’s poem at several junctures in his writing life, and now readers may re-engage with Heaney’s thoughtful responses.

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