March 16: Terrific Friend, Seamus Heaney, "The Spirit Level," New Cartoon

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

I know I've used this Holden quote before when I've talked about books and writers I love.  I can honestly say that I love the writer I'm going to talk about today, but I don't think I'd want to call him up on the phone whenever I felt like it.

Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet, is one of my favorite writers.  His poems are like precious stones, cut and polished and glinting with light.  However, I've talked to people who have met Heaney, and, from their reports, he's kind of an asshole in person.  He can afford to be.  He's brilliant and accomplished and doesn't suffer fools very gladly.  I wouldn't mind having dinner and drinks with him, but I don't know if I'd be able to hold up my end of the conversation for very long.  I have a feeling I'd end up being one of those fools.

The Spirit Level is Heaney's collection of poems published in 1996 by Farrar Straus Giroux.  His poems, as always, are stunning, filled with the music and myth and mud of the world.  He's able to take ordinary stuff of everyday life and transform into something beautiful.  In the poem "St. Kevin and the Blackbird," he takes as his subject the sacred nature of Nature:

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird.

The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside

His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff

As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands

And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked

Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked

Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity:  now he must hold his hand

Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks

Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,

Imagine being Kevin.  Which is he?

Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

Are his fingers sleeping?  Does he still feel his knees?

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him?  Is there distance in his head?

Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,

'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely

For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

Heaney is a master of making these kinds of moves, from hagiography into legend into feather and finger.  His poems have that kind of muscle, assured in each leap of thought and image.  I'm not always sure where his leaps land.  Sometimes, I find myself in places strange and frightening.  But Heaney is always there, in command, leading me where he wants me to go: 

Postscript 

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you'll park and capture it

More thoroughly.  You are neither here not there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

That's what Seamus Heaney does.  He blows our hearts open with his every word.  He may puzzle me, make me feel inadequate, a little foolish.

But Seamus Heaney also makes Saint Marty want to be a better writer, to strive to understand the mysteries of everyday life just a little more.
 

Confessions of Saint Marty