Nick Laird's " 'The Music of What Happens' "

I’ve just finished reading Nick Laird’s “ ‘The Music of What Happens’ ” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2026), a review of The Poems of Seamus Heaney. What a great piece! Laird praises Heaney for, among other things, his “uncanny descriptive abilities.” He says that Wallace Stevens’ observation “Description is revelation” was “never truer than for Heaney.” I agree. Recall his description of butter in his brilliant “Churning Day”: “Their short stroke quickened, suddenly / a yellow curd was weighting the churned up white, / heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight / that they fished, dripping, in a wide tin strainer, / heaped up like gilded gravel in the bowl.” And this beauty from “Oysters,” one of my favorite poems: “Alive and violated / they lay on their beds of ice: / Bivalves: the split bulb / And philandering sigh of ocean. / Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.” And this memorable image from “The Grauballe Man”: “As if he had been poured / in tar, he lies / on a pillow of turf / and seems to weep // the black river of himself. / The grain of his wrists / is like bog oak, / the ball of his heel // like a basalt egg.” And this from “Strange Fruit”: “Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd. / Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.” And this from “Song”: “A rowan like a lipsticked girl.” I could go on and on quoting these marvelous poems. Heaney is one of literature’s great describers. I cherish his work. 

Credit: The above portrait of Seamus Heaney is by Yann Kebbi.