Seamus Heaney

Once again, I prove myself incapable of keeping up any kind of regular blog ... I finished Paul Muldoon's book "Moy Sand and Gravel" in the meantime, and I really loved it. Now I've moved on to Seamus Heaney's selected poems, "Opened Ground" - I have studied him in the past (particularly his book "North"), so I'm familiar with a lot of his work. It's always a nice feeling to return to a poet you know and re-discover his or her works.

I just re-read "Blackberry Picking," and I feel like that's a poem a lot of people are force-fed in AP high school courses (I know I was). I wonder if poets ever get annoyed with the work they did when they were relatively young ... I'm sure when people glorify "Digging" or "Blackberry Picking," Seamus Heaney is a little pissed. I know I would be. But, in any case, both of those poems deserve glorifying. I like how simple and straightforward his writing is, as opposed to some poets (Muldoon not excluded) who delight in completely confounding their readers. Heaney knows that it is possible to write good, solid poems without packing them full of arcane references. The last stanza of "Blackberry Picking" is so simple, like its narrator, yet so rich:


We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.


The blank verse is unobtrusive, yet carefully structured, and the couplet at the end really brings home the harmonic obviousness of a natural progression that somehow, we humans can never accept. When Heaney says "I always felt like crying," you know exactly what he means.

I think there is a value in difficult poetry, but I also think there is a value in clear, lucid verse. Some poets go a little too far in that direction (Robert Frost, in my opinion), but a poem like "Blackberry Picking" echoes in the mind long after the words' meanings have been digested.