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| Meg Tyler |
The
Hastings Room Series’ Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading with feature reader Meg
Tyler and Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Death of a Naturalist
Wednesday
September 14th at First Church Congregationalist
11
Garden Street near Harvard Square, at 7pm
by
Michael Steffen
The
book Death of a Naturalist, with its well-known title poem, was
published in 1966, fifty years ago this year. Seamus Heaney’s first major
published collection, it won the Cholmondeley Award, the Gregory Award, the
Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award—an auspicious
welcome in publishing for the Irish poet who would go on to receive the Nobel
Prize twenty-nine years and many collections later in 1995.
Death
of a Naturalist consists of 34 poems based on childhood
experiences and the coming to age of adult recognitions, family relations and
life on the farm and in rural Ireland.
Helen
Vendler has written about the identity groups Heaney confronted in forming his
early poetic character, his family name “Heaney,” his national conversation
with Ireland and the Irish, as a Catholic, as an English speaker, a European, a
member of rural rather than urban background. Vendler writes, “If Heaney is to
write about any of these several groups, he vows not to be intimidated by what
those groups think of him and of his work… This vow is one all poets must take,
and one which is always very difficult to keep; but it becomes particularly
hard when the claims of affection and solidarity attempt to establish confines
around what can be said or written.”
Vendler
also speaks of the anonymity the child’s persona takes on in the poems of Death
of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, of the “outsideness” of the
perception. In one of his books of essays on poetry, Preoccupations,
Heaney writes with admiration for the childhood poems of Theodore Roethke. Like
Roethke’s greenhouse poems, Heaney’s early pieces, especially the poem “Death
of a Naturalist,” make a broad, nearly immediate appeal to readers. In these
lines which begin—“All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland;
green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there…” —the poet is acknowledging and
confronting perhaps his most encompassing identity mirror, nature/sexuality, in
the image of the frogspawn which fascinates the young Heaney, then of the frogs
themselves, who with their coarse croaking voices take on a transcendent,
demonic aspect which frightens and turns the child away.
On
Wednesday evening, the poem “Death of a Naturalist” will be read, to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of Heaney’s marvelous international debut, in
the introduction to our readers,
George
Kalogeris, David Blair and Meg Tyler. We’re putting Meg on the spot this year
as the “feature” guest. All three readers are equally wonderful.
Tyler
is
the 2016 Fulbright Professor of Anglophone Irish Writing at the Seamus Heaney
Centre for Poetry at Queen's University in Belfast. She's the author of a
monograph on Seamus Heaney, A Singing Contest (Routledge 2005), and is
now working on a book of essays about the Irish poet Michael Longley. Her
first book of poems, Poor Earth, was published by Finishing Line
Press in 2014.
It’s a
pleasure and so interesting how Tyler talks and writes about poetry. She takes
less-traveled paths to look at Heaney’s poetry. Edna Longley and Ciaran Carson
have caged the power of Heaney’s pieces on history as “dangerously
mythologizing” and mystifying. But Tyler’s opening, almost thesis-like view of
the poet’s “impulse” as one “towards unity and regeneration” both is unexpected
and makes great sense in the overall estimation of Heaney’s poetic character,
which time and again attests to wariness for the superficial arguments and
identifications that give rise to enmity and conflict.
Meg
speaks of Heaney’s “working model of inclusive consciousness” for poetry,
including
“an
engagement with the past.” This opens an inexhaustible door to the influences
and conversations with other poets that have sparked Heaney’s interest and
imagination. Tyler reiterates that Heaney did not make giants of his
predecessors, but equals of them. And like
a
faring poet, Heaney conversed with so many poets, from the speaking yesterday
of Virgil, Dante or Kavanaugh, Lowell and Larkin to his contemporaries at home,
Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and abroad, Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.
While
Tyler’s scope is broad and far-reaching, she can be wonderfully forensic in her
prosodic analyses. In one, of many instances throughout A Singing Contest,
Meg compares Heaney’s translation of passages from Virgil’s Eclogues
with those of David Ferry. “Ferry’s puzzles are subtle,” Tyler writes—
as he relies less on dialect,
which heightens the line’s rhythmic movement in Heaney. Ferry adheres to a
pentameter line. However, the line that reads, “Heartbroken and beaten, since
fortune will have it so,” displays metrical ingenuity with a spondee in the
first foot followed by other anapestic substitutions. The variations…express
the strain and stress of circumstance, a weight too great to carry… (A
Singing Contest, Routledge, 2005, p. 63)
Drawing
our attention to the line and its meter, she appreciates the subtly signifying
and illustrative dance of the language’s rhythm composed in its metrical
difference. It is as fine an observation as that rare diner’s who tastes a sauce
and then proceeds to analyze the wine, vegetables, herbs and saltiness of the
butter used to prepare it.
So,
looking forward to Wednesday evening: Because “Death of a Naturalist” will be
among the poems read for the audience, I’ve chosen a poem of a very different
inspiration to leave our readers with this week, in a far different situation
and meditation from the child’s instinctual attractions and dreads.
St Kevin and the Blackbird
And then there was St Kevin and the
blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast,
the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
*
And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting
forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in
his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.
