September 9, 2024 Issue

Seamus Heaney is one of my heroes. I first encountered his work on a 1985 trip to Halifax with several friends. One of them, Alan Buchanan, brought a slim book of poetry with him and read some of it to us as we drove. The book was Seamus Heaney’s Field Work (1979). Alan read it with great gusto. I relished every line. “You drank America / like the heart’s / iron vodka,” “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me into verb, pure verb,” and this beauty – “A rowan like a lipsticked girl.” Soon after, I discovered Heaney’s critical writings. His essay collection The Government of the Tongue (1988) is one of my touchstones. I mention all this because, in this week’s New Yorker, Maggie Doherty reviews The Letters of Seamus Heaney. I read it avidly. What was Heaney’s letter-writing like? Doherty doesn’t exactly say. She provides an excellent outline of his life. She quotes some of his poems, e.g., “Digging,” “Churning Day,” and “Funeral Rites.” She praises their sound:

Like a good anthropologist, young Heaney had a knack for thick description, but, as with Hopkins, the great pleasure of his early poems is their sound. Combining the hard consonants of Old English, which he’d studied in college, with the Latinate style favored by many lyric poets, he developed a voice that was by turns ruthless and refined. Consider the first lines of “Churning Day”: “A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast, / hardened gradually on top of the four crocks.” Each consonant cracks like a peppercorn between the teeth. These are poems you taste.

She occasionally provides a brief excerpt from a letter, e.g., “In a letter, he described California as a ‘lotus land for the moment’; walking to campus, he passed ‘hippies, drop-outs, freak-outs, addicts, Black Panthers, Hare Krishna American kids with shaved heads.’ ” But there are no extended quotes, nothing to indicate whether the letters themselves are worth reading. She says of the collection that it “shows the man to be both responsive and responsible, generous with praise for his fellow-writers, grateful for feedback from trusted readers, and open to the dissenting opinions of his colleagues and countrymen, even as he maintains his own beliefs.” Okay, all very interesting. But what of the writing purely as writing? Are there any flashes of the Heaney magic? Doherty doesn’t say. It’s a very disappointing review.