Artwork by Josse Mansilla (2025)
One Tuesday evening in October, within the eaves and red-gold curtains of the Old Divinity School at St John’s College, Cambridge, The Poems of Seamus Heaney was launched to a packed house with modest fanfare. As the book’s jacket sleeve reads, ‘[t]his is the long-awaited, definitive edition of Seamus Heaney’s poetry’, a 1252-page doorstopper published by Faber and Faber this October. The conversation took place between Josie O’Donoghue and two editors of the volume – Bernard O’Donoghue and Rosie Lavin, beamed in on the big screen.
Rosie recounted the excitement and difficulty involved in hunting down all of Heaney’s previously uncollected poems, as well as the key editorial decision to interleave the uncollected poems in chronological order between the twelve books of poetry published by Faber during Heaney’s lifetime. The editorial decision leads us to consider afresh the relation between Heaney’s collected and uncollected work, the latter accorded greater authority and canonicity when ‘collected’ in the spaces between the twelve books. Strikingly, the volume opens with Heaney’s uncollected poems from 1959-66, the work published in magazines as a student and teacher before the publication of Death of a Naturalist (1966). As Rosie explained, this conflicts with Heaney’s consistent inclusion of ‘Digging’ at the beginning of ‘every volume throughout his career in which it was included’, a ‘position’ which Heaney maintained was ‘decided’ by the poem ‘itself’.
These early uncollected poems track the emergence of the voice of Death of a Naturalist (1966) from Heaney’s reading. ‘October Thought’, ‘Nostalgia in the Afternoon’ and ‘Song of My Man Alive’ recall Hopkins in their rhythm and use of compound nouns (‘blue-scooped sky’ and ‘bog-sod’ are already distinctively Heaneyan). There is much to enjoy: crisp consonants, bell-clear vowel sounds, the onomatopoeic thickness of phrases touching one another. ‘Lint Water’ foreshadows the festering flax-dam from ‘Death of a Naturalist’ and the shock of the rotting ‘cache’ of berries in ‘Blackberry Picking’, while ‘Fisher’ contains early ideas of poetic vocation that would be developed in ‘Digging’ and ‘Personal Helicon’. Though the final line of ‘Fisher’ denies poetry life-force (‘I hook verse, dead as an old stump’), its language works in the opposite direction when the speaker gets hold of his catch: ‘Hoist it slapping like a silver flail / And hold it cold in his thrilled hand’.
Another important function of Poems is to show the history of individual poems between different occasions of publication. Rosie noted that ‘Punishment’ in North (1975) underwent significant changes through a number of preceding magazine publications, the changes collated in the volume’s endnotes. That being said, Heaney’s general drafting process didn’t change much between the 1950s to 1990s – moving from ‘roughs’ to a ‘full manuscript draft’ and then typewriter – before his switch to word processing from the 1990s onwards. The book’s encyclopaedic sizemeans it is nigh impossible to read cover-to-cover. Rather, it is an essential poetic point of reference, the last in the quartet of Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008), The Translations of Seamus Heaney (2023) and The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2024), where we often find the Heaney of later life apologising for his lateness, composing letters during his frequent transatlantic flights.
A significant part of the volume’s appeal is an appendix featuring twenty-five poems never before published, selected by the Heaney family ‘in consultation with the three editors’. These cut across the chronological sweep of the poet’s oeuvre and the chronological organisation of the uncollected work. The first, ‘At Yeats’s Grave’, a peculiarly ‘uncertain’ short poem written in 1964 after a visit to W. B. Yeats’s burial place in Drumcliffe near Sligo, occasioned Bernard O’Donoghue’s comment that Heaney inherited, among other things, a sense both of poetic variety and blessedness from Yeats. Another unpublished poem, ‘The Discovery of the Eel’ (1983), is carried by a rhythm of rolling wonder (‘and the eel drawn like a rib of water / out of the water’). As the editors relate in their commentary, ‘we were convinced that the delight of encountering these poems for the first time […] outweighed our natural sense of caution and trepidation’.
But it is not just the unfamiliar work where one encounters remarkable freshness. The volume encourages us to look again at Heaney’s entire oeuvre – when dipping in, one draws out lines of wonder like eels from water. When taking the book off the shelf in the English Faculty Library, I opened it to ‘The Otter’, a poem in the collection Field Work (1979), in which the speaker describes the creature with extraordinary tactile precision, the fricatives flicking at the tail of each line:
Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck.
Re-encountering the detail of familiar poems such as this one reveal their inexhaustible riches that reward re-reading. As Heaney wrote about his friend Ted Hughes’ poetry upon the latter’s death, he speaks ‘[i]n language that can still knock language sideways’. Poems gives us occasion to delve into Heaney’s tremendous body of work, full of such moments, with greater accuracy and breadth than ever before.
By George Adams
The Camera 