[In the following review, Taylor appreciates Heaney's examination of the past in Electric Light, but laments the poet's apparent emotional distance from his subjects.]

Although Seamus Heaney includes fine lines celebrating landscape in Electric Light, this is not his most impressive collection. Several bookish poems enfeeble the overall impact of a volume comprising, even more than descriptive nature poetry, some engaging, thought-provoking reminiscence. This irregularity is a pity. The Irish poet's particular way of looking back merits attention. One wishes that he had produced a more unified collection devoted to recovering vanished events from his past.

He notably attempts, as an aging man, to re-experience childhood and early-adulthood perceptions in all their sensate fullness. When (in the opening poem) he looks down at water “pouring over the weir out of Lough Neagh,” he recalls a few telling incidents associated with the site. He then significantly yearns for the “slime and silver of the fattened eel” to reappear—a manifold symbol moreover involving his desire to enjoy “as once before” this synaesthetic perception. When a poet willingly seeks out this state of consciousness, wherein the past becomes present, and when he furthermore makes recovering lost time an integral part of the poem's theme and narrative structure, then certain emotions—melancholy, say, or regret—necessarily emerge. They need not even be made explicit. For Heaney, otherwise not an emotional poet, these implied feelings are crucial not only to the warmth, but also to the enduring psychological interest of the poem.

Several reminiscing verses are moving in this subtle, withheld way. Elsewhere, however, Electric Light veers into virtuosity. Alongside travel poems and clever adaptations from Dante and Virgil, for instance, are learned elegies to Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert, and Ted Hughes. Composed with Heaney's sure craftsmanship, these elegies for his friends seem, in places, more exercises than deeply-felt memorials. The Brodsky remembrance employ, the same trochee meter as Auden used in the third part of his famous eulogy for Yeats—just one of several eye-winks to literary history. And in passages vividly sketching camaraderie (“In a train in Finland we / Talked last summer happily, / Swapping manuscripts and quips, / Both of us like cracking whips”), Heaney's bravura technique nonetheless vies for attention. Similarly, when he commemorates Herbert, he grandiloquently imitates Greco-Roman epitaphs. The homage to Ted Hughes is more complex. Still, distancing effects—a versified disquisition on Beowulf, a quotation from Czeslaw Milosz at the very end—compromise the poignancy.

In this regard, Heaney remains remote. Wit, erudition, and technical mastery distract him from the too-intimate; or rather, give him license to avoid it. For some readers, this stance may well represent a superior poetic strategy. Ever since Eliot's essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” it has of course been a prevailing modernist dogma that poetry is “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” In some poems of Electric Light, Heaney puts this idea to work quite brilliantly, yet at the expense of penetrating no further into mysterious castles, as it were, than their decorous, well-lit entryways.