[In the following review, Deane assesses works by Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, and Richard Murphy.]

Reading these five books, [Wintering Out, North, Notes from the Land of the Dead and Other Poems, The Snow Party, and High Island,] I am reminded of what R. P. Blackmur wrote in 1948: “Almost the whole job of culture has been dumped on the artist's hands.” In Ireland, where this is particularly true, most writers have become wearied by the attritional quality of their relationship to their society and its history. Given the example of W. B. Yeats, the political and economic depression, the society's fixed loyalties and fissile emotions, it was difficult for an Irish poet of the thirties and forties to see his function as anything less than redemptive. It was as though every poet was compelled by circumstances to see himself as a major poet if he was to become a poet at all. This stress on creativity had to be damaging. Much Irish poetry after Yeats would have been more memorable if it could have settled for being less ambitious. This, I think, is at least part of the truth about Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey, and Austin Clarke.

Thomas Kinsella inherited the disappointments of that era and subsumed them in his early work into a long contemplative exercise on the problem of evil. The climax to this phase of his work came with the publication in 1968 of Nightwalker and Other Poems. Since then, up to the publication of the present volume and the more recent One (Dublin, 1974), the mood of Mr. Kinsella's poetry has sharpened into a surgical exploration by the imagination of the resources of the will—above all, of the basic will to go on, to survive, to remain aware. Mr. Kinsella has consistently grown away from his early highly-cadenced verse toward a poetry which is at times rhythmically cumbersome, lacking the finish and completeness which Clarke, for instance, managed so well. Mr. Kinsella, it might be said, prefers to write poetry rather than to make poems. He seeks precision but not at the cost of becoming a miniaturist. So he has increasingly turned from the formalities of lyric verse toward larger, more sculptural effects. This does not exclude subtlety or delicacy of feeling. The delicacy, rather than having the appearance (as it did in his earlier work) of being elegantly attenuated, lives in a more somber and more miscellaneous world, as a vein exists in a block of marble. The gravity of mood which characterized the earlier work has now itself become the object of the poet's scrutiny. We are faced with a genetic account of a consciousness coming to maturity, taking possession of recalcitrant experiences, learning to resist the resistance of the outer world.

The levels at which a Kinsella poem moves can switch and fracture dramatically. His continuous fascination with growth as a biological as well as an emotional process can create unexpected friction in the language of his verse. We meet this quickly in the first section of Notes from the Land of the Dead in phrases like “Dark nutrient waves” or “red protein eyes” or in a description of a beetle “clasping with small tarsi / a ball of dung bigger than its body.” “Nutrient,” “protein,” and “tarsi” are the crucial imports from the language of natural history into the otherwise conventional phrasings. “Dark waves” is harmless, but the intervening epithet lends to it a sharper, more diagnostic quality. We see through the surface of the thing to the biological process of its activity. Here, as elsewhere, the roof of appearance is lifted off to enable us to see the movement of vast, purposive, and yet almost inchoate forces. The same exposure is practiced on human feeling and appearance. As a result we witness ongoing endless processes rather than specific events. The reader is always looking down into “the hells of circumstance” below the fact. The poetry brings him on a vertically downward journey from appearance to process, on a quest for the ever-elusive first principle from which everything else has drawn its life and force.

The poems in this volume invoke a drear landscape—so drear and terminal in fact that the imagination seems homeless within it. The recurrence of certain words—shell, ash, torsion, echo—indicates the survival of certain thematic bonds—birth, death, heredity, love, subjectivity quailing or refusing to quail at the prospect of its own extinction. The world of things is inert and given; but the world of feeling is inherited and, though heredity is a mysterious process, can be understood. Out of that understanding the imagination can gain renewed access to the world of objects. The poet seems to envisage a human world in which community, or at least the sense of it, is enhanced by a contemplation of what binds humans to one another—love, birth, death, the inheritance of physiological as well as psychological features, the capacity to endure suffering and even to treat it as the way to understanding. As against that there is the discrete world of object and moiling process. Sometimes, caught in the light of a myth or of a memory, an illusion or an image, that world casts an anthropomorphic shadow. But more often it does not. The charities of the human community are foreign to the indifferent nature of the universe in general. Nevertheless the imagination has a role to play and Mr. Kinsella assigns it one by acknowledging that although we may not be able to discover the meaning things have in themselves, we nevertheless can and must see to it that they have a meaning. Consciousness, after all, governs the world since consciousness (in Merleau-Ponty's words) is that “through which from the outset a world forms itself round me, and begins to exist for me.”

Thomas Kinsella thus gets back to the primary data of existence—its slime, eggs, dung, sweat, accident—and makes the apparent lack of kinship between these phenomena and the consciousness the necessary precondition of a more profound communion. He accepts the possibility that the universe may be deaf to the cry of human longing and that this can render the consciousness dumb. But it need not. For in asserting its role in the world the imagination creates art or poetry, and poetry becomes then the discovery of a loudly-struck harmony existing between the mind and the world. In the end there is no difference between the will and the imagination. The will is the imagination in extremis. The determination to take responsibility de nouveau for the drear world in which it had seemed such a lost pilgrim makes the imagination triumphant, a creative force feeding on the world's given data and then seeking to reproduce itself in a new form. The biological idiom remains salient, as in the beautiful poem “Hen Woman”:

I feed upon it still, as you see;
There is no end to that which,
not understood, may yet be noted
and hoarded in the imagination,
in the yolk of one's own being, so to speak,
there to undergo its (quite animal) growth,
dividing blindly,
twitching, packed with will,
searching in its own tissue
for the structure
in which it may wake.

Mr. Kinsella is fond of predatory animals in his poetry, but by far the most predatory is his own imagination and its favorite victim is himself:

A dry teacup stained the oilcloth
where I wrote, bent like a feeding thing
over my own source.

(“Minstrel” from One)

The presence of this self-fueled strength has become more apparent in each volume since 1968. Notes from the Land of the Dead restores to the imagination the strength to take on the weight of the “whole job of culture.”

Seamus Heaney comes from the north of Ireland, and his career has almost exactly coincided with the present span of the “troubles.” A crisis like the present Irish one inevitably makes demands, sometimes very crudely, on a poet; and Heaney has recently begun to answer these more forthrightly. His first two books—Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969)—charted the boundaries of a luxuriantly experienced private world. These two more recent books concede the presence of a large, violent, and public landscape which is inhabited sometimes by Norsemen, sometimes by policemen, as well as by Mr. Heaney himself—now ready, it seems, to enter into a subtly nuanced dialogue with them on the subjects of politics, culture, and poetry. The ancient past and the contemporary present, myth and politics, are in fact analogues for one another in these books. Mr. Heaney is very much in the Irish tradition in that he has learned, more successfully than most, to conceive of his personal experience in terms of his country's history. Even the names of the townlands of County Derry—Anahorish, Toome—lead him directly back to his childhood and into the depths of the area's past history. Accent, etymologies, old ritual murders and invasions, contemporary assassinations and security systems—these and other related elements swarm now more and more thickly, the lethal infusoria in this pellucid verse.

Some of Mr. Heaney's poems are about words, some about bogs and their well-preserved victims, some about love and marriage, some about the social and political tensions of the Irish situation. But these categories, initially useful, finally give way under sustained rereading. The poems express no politics and indeed they flee conceptual formulations with an almost indecent success. Instead they interrogate the quality of the relationship between the poet and his mixed political and literary traditions. The answer is always the same. Relationship is unavoidable, but commitment, relationship gone vulgar, is a limiting risk. Nevertheless commitment is demanded during a crisis, and in a poem like “Exposure,” the final poem in North, Mr. Heaney faces the further, less welcoming possibility that poetry is itself a commitment and therefore a limitation too. It is what makes the poet miss the comet, “the once-in-a-lifetime portent.” On the other hand the demand to write has come from the public realm. He is called upon to assume responsibility. In doing so, he does not satisfy his critics, for whom his commitment is not of the sort they want; nor does he satisfy himself, for, in attempting to do “the whole job of culture,” he may forget to live.

When we look again at the faces rising out of the Norse past or the violent present, we see that they are the most vivid renderings in Mr. Heaney's poetry of a deep sense of estrangement. In Wintering Out he associates himself with outcasts or lost remnants of a tradition, with victims in fact. We can see this in smaller details too. How often people are poignantly remembered by the mark they leave behind—heelmarks, wound scars, the traces of rings embedded in the flesh or bone. The poet carries these “semaphores of hurt” himself. In “Stump” we read: “I'm cauterized, a black stump of bone.” The estrangement of these figures is itself a medium or metaphor of the poet's estrangement. He wonders, again in “Stump”: “What do I say if they wheel out their dead?” Later, in North, he has found a way to hear what they say. Remnants are the core of Heaney's treasure. What is scattered in the culture is collected in the poetry. His fondness for the word hoard itself and for images or relics of the past bursting out of the skin of the all-preserving peat-bogs would sufficiently indicate this. And what they tell him is clear enough too, as when the “longship's swimming tongue” speaks in the title poem “North”:

It said, “Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.”

This is almost a credo. Seamus Heaney could be claiming the right to keep to what he knows; but I think he also means that the retention of such intimacy leads to a more profound deepening of knowledge, a deeper searching in the word-hoard. In the end his varied relationships with his culture are for him a means toward poetry. At the end of every rainbow of association lies the word-hoard.

So he assumes responsibility for language in language. It is a delicate matter since language is bearing the freight of history and tradition and Mr. Heaney is expert in the balancing of this cargo in the sensitive scales of his increasingly flexible verse forms and rhythms. Sometimes, in North and in poems like “Ocean's Love to Ireland” and “Act of Union,” he starches his language into allegory. Such poems reveal how strongly a plain political or social direction would reduce the complexities of Mr. Heaney's best poems. For all his local fidelities and exactitude of physical detail in his world, he is not a local poet. He has subdued, in these two volumes, the longing of personal growth to the pace and patience of the deep culture which fuels it. So he can say

I grew out of all this
like a weeping willow
inclined to
the appetites of gravity.

(“Kinship” IV)

That growing out of and bending back toward, the sobriety of tone, and the lightly submerged wit are all characteristic features. The sense of estrangement is something to be grieved at; but the grief reawakens contacts which the estrangement had lost. In North particularly it is notable that many of the poems find voices in which the poet is addressed—for Mr. Heaney wants to hear the sand sift in the hourglass, time's whisper in his Ireland, coming to him in the articulate speech of a poetry implicit in the very artifacts of his world, violently different though it may be from others. In Wintering Out the poem “The Wool Trade” makes the contrast between the speech of the continental culture associated with wool and that of Ireland where the poet finds: “And I must talk of tweed, / A stiff cloth with flecks like blood.”

Derek Mahon, also from the north, has so far published three books—Night-Crossing (1968), Lives (1972), and now The Snow Party. His imagination seems to be at once haunted and attracted by the thought of a total apocalyptic disaster which would wipe out the mess of the modern world and leave instead only the ticking of “a slow clock of condensation.” Yet his other favorite scenario, “the ideal society which will replace our own,” is as elusive and as ironically observed as the apocalypse. For between these two falls the shadow of Belfast, the dark industrial waste in which Mr. Mahon goes time and again to seek what he calls “the original poetry of our lives.” The violence of recent years and the weight of the north's urban and spiritual dreariness have increasingly left their imprint on Mahon's work. From one point of view which he assumes, Belfast is the wasteland, the terminal point, the very antithesis of what a culture might be. But it is also the poet's own territory, his community, lost, but still passionately wishing to be found again:

In a tiny stone church
On the desolate headland
A lost tribe is singing abide with me.

(“The Chair Squeaks”)

The struggle between community and wasteland which consumes so much of Mr. Mahon's writing is not resolved in favor of either. More subtle than a resolution, there is an interweave, so that often we find the longing for community, “the ideal society,” spoken by those who are most utterly victimized by the wastage of modern existence. In fact, as in “After Nerval” and “The Apotheosis of Tins,” it is the very wastage which speaks or is spoken for. The rubble contains within itself the heavenly city we failed to realize.

No modern Irish poet has taken the weight of responsibility with so much elegance and panache. The very nature of Mr. Mahon's language, “An eddy of semantic scruple / In an unstructurable sea” (“Rage for Order” in Lives), works, in its eloquence against the bleak content. His style is at war with his meaning, for the tight linguistic control and the clipped, educated vocabulary evoke a sense of rationality in contrast to the irrationality or apocalyptic nature of the experiences they render. One means by which Mr. Mahon sharpens this paradoxical effect is by the cancellation of time. His poems have a locale, but their voice is that of “The Last of the Fire Kings,” the voice of one who is “through with history.” It is remarkable how often phrases such as this last occur, such denials of the here and now. We have, for instance, in “A Refusal to Mourn” and in “Thammuz” (itself a rewriting of “What Will Remain” in Lives), in “Leaves” and above all in “Matthew V. 29-30,” a brilliantly executed series of such reductions to nothingness, to “that silence without bound.” The “I” of these poems, a very Beckettian persona, looks to the lost and inanimate things of the world for speech and hope. History, especially in its Irish form, but not only in that, is a kind of dream, a communal symbol of what we are, reduced by the author to an arid nonidentity in the actual world of the present. But we remain aware that Mr. Mahon remains haunted by the fragile possibilities of what the dream might, in another world than this, have become.

Two poems in particular in this volume retain that fragility—the title poem and the final one, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” This latter is dedicated to the English novelist J. G. Farrell and owes something to his novel Troubles (1970). In a disused shed, locked in darkness since the days of the (last?) Irish civil war, a forest of mushrooms has been growing, straining toward the minimal light of the keyhole. The “We” of the poem, inquisitive tourists with their flash cameras, open the door, and in a burst of light the weak lost souls of the past are exposed, pleading, to the vacuous present:

Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
Save us, save us, they seem to say,
Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

Here again Mr. Mahon reaches out to rescue the lost history of the victimized, the lost possibilities of the silent, of the inanimate, of the history in which a future other than the one which we now have once resided. In the other poem, “The Snow Party,” we meet again with an image of stillness and pale fragility, a Japanese snow party, as fixed in its odd silence as a Japanese print, while beyond, in the contemporaneous European world, “they are burning / Witches and heretics / In the boiling square.” One image is out of history. It is a dream of civility and perfection. The other is in history, savage and barbarous. They are interwoven with one another as the imagination, enduring, is interlocked with time. In this fashion Derek Mahon takes the burden of his culture. Along with the element of repudiation there lives the element of involvement.

The striking of a balance between these things is a complex matter. Sometimes, as in “Afterlives,” the repudiation is reconsidered. This can lead to feelings of guilt, for Mahon, who lives in London, is aware that he can retain a kind of closeness to home which would be different, if not indeed destroyed, were he to live, say, in Belfast. The question is an old one, especially in Ireland; the question of exile and distance, being free and being trapped, or of being trapped by the idea of freedom itself:

Perhaps if I'd stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.

Perhaps. But what we recognize finally is that the inflection of these poems is toward silence, a home “safe from the historical nightmare.” In that respect Mr. Mahon's poetry often reads, with its bitter courage, like the last will and testament of a dying culture.

Richard Murphy is a different kind of exile. He has included in this new volume a selection of poems from Sailing to an Island (1963) and The Battle of Aughrim (1968) plus twenty-five new poems. Commenting on “The Battle of Aughrim” he once said: “I was trying to get clear a division in my mind between England and Ireland—between an almost entirely English education, an English mind and Irish feeling.” The problem is indeed Anglo-Irish, but that only brings it more closely into accord with the mix of allegiances which we find in Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney. Mr. Murphy seems to have a dual loyalty. One part of it is to the past of his colonial forbears in Ireland, in Ceylon, and in Rhodesia. Another part is to the past of the Irish people, of which the island he lives on, off County Galway, with its holy well and Celtic cross, is a living emblem. Out of these loyalties he tries to fashion an attitude toward the present. The present is a product of those two pasts and simultaneously, in its spirit, it is their denial. For Mr. Murphy's Ireland is a difficult place for a poet who wishes to see it in terms foreign to its own, even though these may be anything but a foreigner's terms. In “The Philosopher and the Birds,” a poem in memory of Ludwig Wittgenstein's stay at Rosroe in County Galway in 1948, the poet remembers the philosopher's local reputation for taming wild birds. He associates this with Wittgenstein's breakthrough in linguistic philosophy: “He broke prisons, beginning with words / And at last tamed, by talking, wild birds.” But that great creative achievement is savagely revoked in Ireland:

His wisdom widens: he becomes worlds
Where thoughts are wings. But at Rosroe hordes
Of village cats have massacred his birds.

Mr. Murphy dwells a good deal on sudden calamity, disaster, breakdown as if in such instances he can test where his ultimate loyalty lies. The opening poem, “Sailing to an Island,” is a sort of emblematic journey through near-disaster to the island where men are accustomed if not resigned to such things. Battles, boat disasters, drownings, colonial decline supply the occasions for many of these poems. Yet the tone of the poems is never melodramatic. In fact there are times when it becomes staid.

Civilization, imaged as an island surrounded by a discordant sea, is a frail thing. The island, of course, can be a colonial one, and the sea can be a horde of rebellious natives. But Richard Murphy's loyalty is precisely to that kind of situation, one in which crisis is always a ripe possibility. Life in such a brooding environment produces sacred things in which a whole culture's values are invested: a Celtic cross, a holy well, an old woman's charity, a particular type of boat. These are the spoor of a tradition, and they are marks both of continuity and of extinction. It is in this world that Mr. Murphy's sensibility comes most alive. What he offers in the end are poems in which the culture survives crisis to emerge as something achieved, an artifact of the spirit amidst the debasement of souvenir shops and tourism.

It would be impossible right now to say how well or how badly the “whole job of culture” is being done by poets in Ireland or elsewhere. This essay has no grounds for such a judgment because there are so many other poets involved, and because all of them are still writing, still listening to “the dying of time in the white light of tomorrow.” But these four poets along with John Montague, Michael Longley, James Simmons, Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, and some others bring again to mind the Yeatsian possibility of an Ireland which could again become known as “a country of the imagination.”