[In the following review, Moldaw contrasts the subject matter of Heaney's earlier works with that of Seeing Things and Selected Poems, noting a shift from materiality to abstraction.]

Seamus Heaney has long been praised for the textured “thingness” of his poetry. If poets have a ruling element, earth has been his. In 1976, after Heaney's fourth book, North, came out, Robert Fitzgerald noted that Heaney fulfills, as Yeats himself did not, Yeats's dictum in “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” that “All we did, all that we said or sung / must come from contact with the soil.” In “North,” Heaney's poetic conscience, in the form of the “longship's swimming tongue,” counseled him to “trust the feel of what nubbed treasure / your hands have known.” This image of “nubbed treasure” could stand for much of Heaney's poetry. His early work, from the farm and country poems of Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, to the bog poems of North, was tactile in its preoccupations and its language. “Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable” (“The Harvest Bow,” Field Work), has been one of the trademarks of Heaney's work. More than most, he has been capable of embodying linguistic sensuality, and the grounding of emotion in a vibrant object. Characteristically, in “Mossbawn,” from North, love is expressed, and contained, in “a tinsmith's scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin.” Heaney's word sounds can chafe the tongue; the rawness heightens our pleasure. One feels one's mouth working to produce the closed, close, dense sounds, the encompassing soft vowels, the muscled, brawny, or sometimes sharp consonants. One needs to be limber to manage some of it.

With Seeing Things, Heaney's most recent book, a geological shift has occurred, as if the ground beneath his feet, and ours, had opened, and there is no ground, not even the bog, with its “bottomless wet centre.” The poems no longer have the sense of being secreted and pulled up from the dark deep; neither, like the first poems, are they rough and abrading, stubbled, sandpapery. Instead, they flow. The language is freer, with an inner clarity, bright glints, sun glancing off water, the spirit forming and reforming in the current. The palpable has given way to the impalpable.

Whereas in “Song” (Field Work), Heaney wrote joyfully of “the moment when the bird sings very close / To the music of what happens,” in Seeing Things that moment has soured, and its music become a matter for regret: “And poetry / Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens” (“Fosterling”). Instead, he looks for “what the reach / Of sense despairs of as it fails to reach it, / Especially the thwarted sense of touch” (“A Basket of Chestnuts”). Touch, once a characteristic response and imaginative gesture of Heaney's, is now at cross-purposes with his endeavor; it is “thwarted” by being out of its element. Now he savors “A farewell to surefootedness, a pitch / Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves” (“Squarings, xxxviii”). This is a poetry that is “against … all emulation of stone-cut verses” (“Squarings, xxxviii”) and self-consciously finds even that formulation too self-conscious, too pumped-up. This is a purposefully playful poetry that “lifts its eyes and clears its throat” (“The Biretta”) at its own imaginings, here an overturned clergyman's hat becoming a boat.

In Seeing Things these moments of transformation are mostly written on water. Images of fishing, boating, streams, rivers, boats, and the sea abound. Stonework (as opposed to “stone-cut verses”) carved to represent flowing water—the element most mutable figured in the material most obdurate—is praised for the transformation of its nature: “Lines / Hard and thin and sinuous represent / The flowing river. … / … / And yet in that utter visibility / The stone's alive with what's invisible” (“Seeing Things”). Water, what's invisible, not earth, where things are encoded and tactile, is the governing element and image of Seeing Things; the imagination, its ability to re-invent reality, is its ruler.

The struggle between the imagination and the claims made upon it by politics and religion has been one of Heaney's driving themes since Wintering Out, when, in “Midnight,” he wrote regarding Northern Ireland, “The tongue's / Leashed in my throat.” But in the more recent books, Station Island especially, the quarrel has grown dramatically, as Heaney has ventured toward an at first uneasy acceptance of his “free state of image and allusion” (“Sandstone Keepsake”).

Heaney's process of defining his role as a humane person, as a Catholic, and as a poet, in the politically violent, religiously charged atmosphere of Northern Ireland has been arduous and wrenching. He has written about it in the most personal of terms (“The Toome Road,” “The Strand at Lough Beg,” among other poems) and castigated himself for his personal and poetic handling of the situation—especially for evading it (“Punishment,” “Singing School: 4. Summer 1969, 6. Exposure,” “Station Island vii”) or handling it falsely (“Station Island viii”). In section viii of “Station Island” Heaney has his cousin, for whom “The Strand at Lough Beg” was written, lash into him for that elegy:

‘You confused evasion and artistic tact.
The Protestant who shot me through the head
I accuse directly, but indirectly, you
who now atone perhaps upon this bed
for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew
the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio
and saccharined my death with morning dew.’

Heaney has written as if being a writer, let alone a successful Irish writer writing in English, is tantamount to being a deserter, not least because one's allegiance is necessarily to the “country of the mind” and a larger non-partisan community.

But Heaney has movingly explored the problem of the poet's need to be faithful to and protective of his inner freedom in the essays collected in The Government of the Tongue. There he decisively defends the “imagination as a shaping spirit which it is wrong to disobey.” “Station Island” itself is a pilgrimage to this conclusion, with Heaney continually facing the wrong way or blocking the other, traditional, pilgrims, as he is stopped by his own private station masters. It is, famously, Joyce, whom he has tell him that “You may lose more of yourself than you redeem / doing the decent thing”; since Station Island Heaney has steered away from the shoals of political engagement. He also seems finished, for the time being, with his long mining of the tribal properties of language.

But if Joyce gave him his push, the examples of the Eastern Europeans, Milosz, Herbert, Holub, and Popa especially, all of whom he wrote about in The Government of the Tongue, gave him the navigational chart he used in much of his next book of poems, The Haw Lantern, written at roughly the same time as The Government of the Tongue. Some of the uncharacteristic strategies he borrows are allegory and parable, the indicative mood, the use of abstract words, a temperate, even tone. Although “Parable Island,” “From the Republic of Conscience,” “From the Land of the Unspoken,” “A Shooting Script,” and “From the Canton of Expectation” may be successful by their own lights, with their dispassionate lack of affect they hardly bear comparison to the full-bodied, full-throated, full-hearted poems of Heaney's which preceded them.

Instead, I find the route to Seeing Things in “Clearances,” the sonnet sequence for Heaney's mother, which seems to me the heart of The Haw Lantern, and in “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanaugh,” the first essay in The Government of the Tongue. Both “Clearances” and “The Placeless Heaven” contain an anecdote which becomes a metaphor for Heaney's (and Kavanaugh's) poetic. Heaney's aunt had planted a chestnut the year of his birth; the tree became associated, in his mind as in others, with himself: “the chestnut was the one significant thing that grew as I grew.” Sometime after his family moved from that house, new owners cut down the tree. In “Clearances,” written after his mother's death, the chestnut, or the place where the chestnut had been, becomes a metaphor for the powerful presence of what is absent—“A space / Utterly empty, utterly a source”—by implication, his mother's still powerful presence in his interior life, despite her death.

In “A Placeless Heaven,” Heaney tells the story of the chestnut, and concludes:

In my mind's eye I saw it as a kind of luminous
emptiness, a warp and waver of light, and once
again … I began to identify with that space
just as years before I had identified with the young tree.
… The new place was all idea, if you like;
it was generated out of my experience of the old
place but it was not a topographical location. It
was and remains an imagined realm, even if it can
be located at an earthly spot, a placeless heaven
rather than a heavenly place.

About Kavanaugh and his earlier ‘misreading’ of him, he notes:

I still assumed Kavanaugh to be writing about the tree which was actually in the ground when he had in fact passed to write about the tree which he held in mind.

With Seeing Things, Heaney has passed almost wholly from writing about the “tree in the ground,” to writing about the tree which he holds in mind. Before, Heaney used objects to contain and ballast his flights of fancy, his linguistic escapades. The objects were the inspiration; now inspiration—imagination, memory—is the object he examines. The title of the book is apt. The process of seeing—both visually and with understanding—and not the things themselves, is the focus of the poems. The colloquial meaning—seeing what is not there—is carried off with aplomb.

For the most part, the poems in Seeing Things are not attempts to recreate experiences, situations, feelings, or objects from the inside, thereby plunging the reader into the linguistic equivalent of sensory virtual reality. Instead, Heaney ruminates, reflects, recollects from a distance in time, so that the poems, on their surfaces also, have a gap of consciousness between the moment of writing and the original experience.

The difference can be seen in “Glanmore Revisited.” In the original “Glanmore Sonnets” (Field Work), the stance of most of the poems is that they were written at or just after the moment the sonnet describes. The present tense of the poem and its subject overlap. “Come to me quick. I am upstairs shaking” we read, feeling that concurrent with writing it Heaney did indeed call downstairs. In “Glanmore Revisited,” the poet revisits both the place and the time written about earlier; the tone is predominantly one of remembrance: “It felt remembered even then.” His image of memory as the almost tamed bedroom ivy could stand for the poem (perhaps the book) as a whole:

And little shoots of ivy creeping in
Unless you've trained them out—like memories
You've trained so long now they can show their face
And keep their distance.

Throughout Seeing Things, especially in the second part, “Squarings,” Heaney squares up against his past poetics, “re-envisaging” his material in a more relaxed way, going for something elusive he feels he missed, or neglected, before:

Re-enter this as the adult of solitude,
The silence forder and the definite
Presence you sensed withdrawing the first time around.

In the phrase “silence forder” it is tempting to find an allusion to and contrast with the one who burrowed so long in “the word hoard.”

The sense of refinding and re-invigorating a lost self is strong in Seeing Things. It is the self who, as he writes in “Fosterling,” can “credit marvels.” It is the self who, after long instruction, has learned:

… whatever is given
Can always be re-imagined, however four-square
Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time
It happens to be. You are as free as the lookout,
That far-seeing joker posted high over the fog,
Who declared by the time that he had got himself down
The actual ship had been stolen away beneath him.

(from “The Settle Bed”)

As in Blake's couplet, “If the sun and moon should doubt / They'd immediately go out,” belief is all. Fortunately, while he's posted high “over the fog,” like his “far-seeking joker” lookout, the actual ship of Heaney's poetic gift is very much supporting him, carrying him over the waters.