[In the following review, Mangan praises Heaney's impeccable pairing of words to things and his ability to elevate poetry to the level of myth or religion in Electric Light.]

Seamus Heaney has mapped out his own territory so clearly and thoroughly, over the past thirty-odd years, that we are liable to fall into the comforting illusion of knowing him from every angle, as if he were already a sort of walking monument. He paces the same ground habitually, with all the sharp-eyed fondness of a crofter inspecting a fertile inheritance; and he is constantly enriched by the mineral resources he finds under his feet. But he has never ceased to expand, and his very rootedness allows him to absorb the most far-fetched influences without fear of changing shape. Although bounded in a nutshell and a prey to occasional bad dreams, he behaves increasingly like a king of infinite space; and his tribute to Auden in this new collection might now be applied aptly enough to himself: “The definite growth-rings of genius rang in his voice.”

The core of those growth-rings is of course Mossbawn, the County Derry farm of his childhood, where the sap of inspiration seems to rise without fail; and Electric Light reminds us how readily he will retire into that centre of his imagination, when he is not being called out to comment on boundary disputes. Its calm and leisurely mood plainly reflects an optimism due to the ceasefire in his native province, which has since been looking sadly premature. “Bann Valley Eclogue,” one of three longish exercises in Virgilian pastoral, is a celebration of childbirth with Messianic overtones, in which the doom-laden atmosphere of the recent solar eclipse (“millennial chill, birdless and dark”) is brushed aside with a creamily eloquent vision of peace and plenty:

                                                            . … when the waters break,
Bann's streams will overflow, the old
                                                                                                                        markings
Will avail no more to keep east bank from
                                                                                                                        west.
The valley will be washed like the new baby.

More than half of the poems focus on his early life, at the farm or at college; and the themes are announced in “Out of the Bag,” a subtle collation of separate strata of memory, which opens with a crisp portrait of the family doctor who delivered the poet and his siblings: “All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag. …” From the child's surrealistic misconceptions of the event, the poem shifts forward to an adolescent pilgrimage to Lourdes, and culminates in a meditation amid the ruins of Epidaurus—“a site of incubation,” where the godlike figure of the doctor-midwife blends with the Aesculapian figure of the poet:

Poeta doctus Peter Levi says
Sanctuaries of Asclepius (called asclepions)
Were the equivalent of hospitals
In ancient Greece. Or of shrines like Lourdes,
Says poeta doctus Graves. Or of the cure
By poetry that cannot be coerced,
Say I. …

The conception of poetry as salve and salvation is not unfamiliar in Heaney, who has given other evidence of a residual belief in miracles; and the ground he shares with Keats in this respect is highlighted by the Greek background, which is glowingly updated in a sequence of six sun-ripened “Sonnets from Hellas” (“there in Olympia, down among the green willows / The lustral wash and run of river shallows …”). But it is one of several signs of a deepening mystical sense of his own vocation, perhaps most apparent at the end of an elegy for Ted Hughes:

Soul has its scruples. Things not to be said.
Things for keeping, that can keep the small-
                                                                                                                        hours gaze
Open and steady. Things for the aye of God
And for poetry.

Heaney has perhaps not quite reached the point of nominating the poet as the unacknowledged priest of mankind; but his long absorption in his craft has clearly developed habits of thought which reify language, in a sacramental sense. There is more than a hint of the hieratic, Mallarmean poetics admired by Yeats; but Heaney's more Catholic temperament seems to conceive it as a form of transubstantiation, whereby the unleavened bread of the world is consecrated as the flesh of the word. In “The Loose Box,” it emerges in a debatable proposition, where he sounds faintly intoxicated by the exuberance of his own virtuosity:

                                                                      Sandy, glarry,
Mossy, heavy, cold, the actual soil
Almost doesn't matter: the main thing is
An inner restitution, a purchase come by
By pacing it out in words that make you feel
You've found your feet in what “surefooted”
                                                                                                                        means. …

It is hard to imagine any real tiller of the soil who would not be grateful for the “almost” in that sentence. But Heaney very rarely fails to make sense, and a heightened perception of the thingness of words has certainly not impaired his capacity to match words to things—whether a bookcase “planed to silkiness, / mitred, much-eyed-along,” a fly-paper that is “honey-strip and death-trap, a barley-sugar twist / of glut and loathing,” or an old woman's thumbnail like “puckered pearl / rucked quartz … / Plectrum-hard, gilt-glittery.” His recent immersion in Anglo-Saxon has evidently concentrated his archaeological sense of English as a precious, time-resistant legacy; and the shadow of Beowulf falls most heavily over the elegy for Hughes, “On His Work in the English Tongue,” where a leaden echo reminds us of the Anglo-Saxon influence on Hopkins:

Passive suffering: who said it was disallowed
As a theme for poetry? Already in Beowulf
The dumbfounding of woe, the stunt and stress
Of hurt-in-hiding is the best of it.

The preoccupation throws an illuminating sidelight on the roots of Heaney's own native dialect, in that other old English we call Scots—a thriving pre-Norman relic, whose diffusion around the northern half of Ireland is probably due as much to common fisheries as to colonization. Words like stour, lug, fank, glarry, birl, dreep, gowl, oxter and coolth offer a special pleasure of recognition to a Scottish reader like myself; and they are prominent among the luscious, lovingly weighed fricatives that inject so much tactile particularity into the texture of his verse. They seem to be childhood friends most often, buried under layers of education and time; and their deployment is a restitution of the kind enacted in the longest poem, “The Real Names”—a semi-narrative memoir, which unearths the identities of former schoolmates from their roles in Shakespeare plays: “Enter Owen Kelly, loping and gowling. …”

Heaney's friendships with several recently deceased Scottish poets are commemorated in a sequence of elegies, fetchingly linked by a cervine motif (“Norman MacCaig, come forth from the deer of Magdalen / Those startlers standing still in fritillary land …”); and they appear amid a clutch of requiems that give the collection an increasingly bookish and valedictory tone. The most movingly fluent is “Clonmany to Ahascragh,” which traces a favourite trajectory from water into light, as a figure of hope (“If ever tears are to be wiped away / It will be in river country, / In that confluence of unmarked bridge-rumped roads / Beyond the Shannon …”). The wittiest is an affectionate is an “Audenesque” addressed to Joseph Brodsky:

Meting grief and reason out
As you said a poem ought.
Trochee, trochee, falling: thus
Grief and metre order us.

Nostalgia is a concomitant of grief, of course, and Heaney at sixty-two has plainly entered a period of life where the pangs swell into a flood. Several autobiographical pieces succumb to it without shame, with an assurance born of long practice in the art of hindsight. The most intriguing read like stray fragments of memory gently polished into a state of luminosity (“The Clothes Shrine”). Among these is the title-poem, which returns to a point of departure in a memory of a first journey to England, and a forbidding old lady whose house in Belfast boasted the first electric light he saw as a child:

                    We were both desperate
The night I was left to stay, when I wept and
                                                                                                                        wept
Under the clothes, under the waste of light
Left turned on in the bedroom. “What ails you,
                                                                                                                        child … ?”

Electric Light extends Heaney's myth-hoard notably into the classical domain; but its brightest treasures are drawn from a copious memory-hoard, which shows no signs of exhaustion. It dwells more minutely than ever on a pre-industrial past, for the benefit of a post-industrial readership, and its relative tranquility draws attention to the fact that even the sectarian conflict, which has drawn him out most frequently into the glare of modernity, is itself more ancient than the spinning jenny. The tribute to George Mackay Brown prompts me to wonder if Seamus Heaney himself, raised in a parish as remote and untroubled as Orkney, might not have been satisfied to draw on the same kind of unpolluted wells, in a world whose mythology has been

Polished till its undersurface surfaced,
Like peat-smoke mulling through Byzantium.