Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography 1959-2003 By Rand Brandes and Michael A Durkan Faber, 527pp. £50THIS BOOK makes no secret of the fact that it is aimed at specialists, containing as it does only four pages that are not structured as a list.
These are Rand Brandes's introduction, in which he explains the genesis of this book as a checklist in the Irish Literary Review in 1986 and briefly notes Seamus Heaney's work's "distinctive permutations and variations" and his commitment to poetry as a public art. Brandes is in a better position than most to discuss how Heaney's poems and prose have been transmitted, but he quickly abandons the reader among the lists, which slowly exert a dusty fascination.
The book proper begins with a list of the little magazines and newspapers in which Seamus Heaney has published. This reads like a cultural index of Ireland in the last 50 years, with its mixing of Irish, English and American titles, and it shows the poet finding his feet (between Belfast and Blackrock, between Boston and the South Bank) in each of the 10 areas it surveys: Books and Pamphlets; Broadsides and Cards; Contributions to Books; Contributions to Periodicals; Contributions to Exhibition Catalogues and Programmes; Translations; Interviews; Audio Recordings and Ephemera. The book is at its best in the largest, 861-item-long Contributions to Periodicals.
Many of the periodicals' and little magazines' names will be familiar only to poets. Their combination of familiarity and strangeness, some hardy perennials among the mayflies, form a kind of litany: Kilkenny Magazine, Listener, Stone Ferry Review, Verso, Verse, The Shop, St Stephen's, Brangle, Printer's Devil, Oar, Thames Poetry, River City, Force 10, Orbis, Owl, Honest Ulsterman. Reputations in poetry are grounded in these magazines' grassroots legion of editors and reviewers, often poets themselves, who choose to publish or write about a small percentage of the work they see. This part of the book clarifies, early on, the range of Heaney's publication and his acceptance among his peers: by 1971 he was publishing the poems of his third book, Wintering Out, in Irish, English and North American poetry quarterlies as well as in the Guardian, the New Statesman, the New Yorker, The Irish Times and the Irish Press. His sometimes simultaneous publication of poems in Ireland, the UK and the US would continue to be a feature of the transmission of his work over the next four decades.
This part is interesting in many ways. A reader will register the first print appearance of favourite poems which quickly entered the anthologies and canon (End of a Naturalist in Poetry Ireland, Oysters in Thames Poetry, The Skunk in Cyphers, The Mud Vision and the first translation of Beowulf in a Cambridge magazine called Numbers in 1986). We see also the famous uncertainty of the poet's beginnings, publishing occasionally under other names: Incertus, Seamus J Heaney and even once in this paper as James Heaney. This section also announces items which are no longer available: there are numerous early reviews, a radio play called Munro, a scatter of uncollected poems and early versions of poems which would be revised for book publication. The phrase "collected with revisions" appears, at a guess, hundreds of times. Like Derek Mahon and Thomas Kinsella, he has been and continues to be a regular, public reviser of his own work. It is impossible not to be curious about these items and the kind of book that might include them, a book to which Brandes and Durkan's bibliography will act as a guide and index.
The book's other sections outline less submerged aspects of Heaney's writing life: like his friend Ted Hughes, he has regularly collaborated with visual artists and fine presses for pamphlet publication, although this book is unillustrated, which seems like a missed opportunity; as essayist he has consistently involved himself in arguments about, and contexts for, poetry; as introducer, he has been a generous supporter of other writers; internationally, he has been translated most frequently into Italian, German and Spanish. He has been interviewed more sparingly than many of his contemporaries (something about to be rectified by Dennis O'Driscoll's forthcoming Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney). Much of this information, though, and more, is available to anyone who quickly browses online bookshops, in whose catalogues the commodification of the text, the valuing of the rare book, rather than the good poem, is startlingly evident. The bibliography ends too soon for the (multiple) appearances of most of the poems of District and Circle and the most recent pamphlet, The Riverbank Field. This bibliography will surely require supplements and corrections and will probably be published online. This work, unfinished as it is, can be easily consulted by scholars who will continue to be inspired by and drawn to Heaney's commitment to print, to the book, the pamphlet and the little magazine.
• John McAuliffe's second book of poems, Next Door, was published last year by The Gallery Press. He co-directs the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester and is an editor of the Manchester Review