Review
In lieu of an autobiography from Ireland’s greatest living poet, this excellent series of interviews does a sterling job of filling the gap, says Sean McMahon.
- Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
- (Faber)
A Local Habitation
Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream described the poet as giving to ‘airy nothing a local habitation and a name’.
It is a statement generally true but with remarkable aptness in its application to Seamus Heaney. If he had lived in the 18th century he would have outfaced Burns (though he hasn’t yet written songs as fine) trumping Mossgier with Mossbawn. Since his early work was rooted in the life he knew in south Derry he was conveniently, if imprecisely, classed as a provincial poet. He may have soared out of Anahorish and Bellaghy Bawn but he has remained true to the ‘kindred points of heaven and home’. The ultimate accolade of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, though justly revered as international recognition, is in a way irrelevant. Heaney had already established himself not only as a poet of world recognition but also as the renderer for the non-specialist of the works of as such titanic and generally inaccessible figures as Sophocles, Ovid, the anonymous compiler of Beowulf, Robert Henryson’s 15th-century The Testament of Cresseid and our own Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court (1780).
His self-consciousness about his art has made him a sympathetic but exacting critic, a fine teacher and respected academic. He has published more than a dozen books of poetry, four poetry anthologies (two with Ted Hughes), six works of critical prose, two plays (versions of Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Antigone) and he is burdened with an inordinate number of well-deserved awards, carefully listed with full provenance by Denis O’Driscoll. He was a director of Field Day, the vital institution that caused a cultural and political surge at the height of the northern Troubles and Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1989. Now in his 70th year he can look back with pride on a life crammed with achievement, and it is time, perhaps, that he wrote his autobiography!
Or perhaps it may not be necessary! This sumptuous book with many personal family photographs by the entirely empathetic O’Driscoll, himself a poet, critic and editor, has if not actually removed the need of further self-revelation then given colossal aid to any future biographer. It is in the form of a series of interviews, begun in 2001, in which the poet speaks with transparent honesty and incredible detail about his childhood, his education, his friendship with other poets, the generation of his books and, in a coda, the nature of his religious belief. O’Driscoll emerges as a man of great tact and sensitivity, unthreateningly persistent. He is also a fine and generous editor offering a fascinating chronology and a ‘biographical glossary’ glossing neatly the lives of nearly a hundred significant figures in Heaney’s life. Best of all is Heaney’s own almost shy actor’s voice talking about the nature of the poet’s life still rich with Ulster vowels. This is a sumptuous tribute, a beautifully produced book, a treasure trove, rich with generosity from all concerned.
