IN the first version I got of this book, an uncorrected proof, the title poem had a revision stapled on to it, doubling its length. In the original four lines Heaney simply remembered being sent by his father to find "a bubble for the spirit level,/a new knot for this tie". The revision says: "But still he was glad, I know, when I stood my ground,/ Putting it up to him/ With a smile that trumped his smile, and his fool's errand,/ Waiting for the next move in the game". Psychologically, the addition is fascinating, as if this always emotionally careful poet had suddenly understood the pathos of outwitting his own father of losing a game by winning it.
There is a feeling in this book that for Heaney, happiness is harder now, "balanced between density and dread"; that though blessed, he has reached a limit, "Love brought me that far . . . Then just kept standing there, not letting go"; that love-making itself leaves "us none the wiser"; that language is polluted, "Flowing with the dirt/Of blurbs and the front pages". Even revisiting Tollund Moss, scene of a famous poem, there is "a satellite/Dish in the paddock" and "tourist signs in furthark runic script".
There is, too, in the many reimaginings of childhood here a persistent sense of unease, even desperation, a "wondering, is this all? As it was/In the beginning, is now and shall be?" In this instance the questioning is caused by seeing his "dear brother" Hugh "at the end of your tether sometimes,/In the milking parlour, holding yourself up/Between two cows until your turn goes past". There is also a hindsight awareness of the insecurity of memory: was the lorry that brought coal to his home also used to carry "a payload/That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes"?, In a vision he sees "Death ... like a dust laced coalman/Refolding body bags".
In knowing "the slop of the actual job", Heaney is, like the Caedmon he addresses here, "the perfect yardman,/Unabsorbed in what he had to do/But doing it perfectly, and watching you" - But in this book there is evidence of an increasing impatience with selfsubjugation. An extraordinary poem called "Weighing In" proclaims: "I held back when I should have drawn blood . . . At this stage only foul play cleans the slate". The anger is palpable but too private to be known by us.
Equally tantalising is Heaney's description of a dream in which Ciaran Nugent, the first man on the blanket" in Long Kesh, asks him to plant a bomb in Pettigo. He then reports an actual meeting with Nugent on the Dublin Belfast train during which Nugent said: "When, for trick's sake, are you going to write/Something for us?" Heaney replies: "If I do write something./Whatever it is. I'll be writing for myself" - (From a writer that it" is curious.)
Fierceness of language and emotion is also apparent in a re imagining of Cassandra as "campfucked/and simple little rent/ cunt of . . . guilt". This is part of a Greek sequence which marvellously combines physicality and historical imagination - a Heaney Homer would be a great thing.
Concomitant with anger, perhaps freed by it, there is, since his father's death, a deepening sense of mortality: "My last things will be first things slipping from me". This is expressed with touching vulnerability in "A Call", where the poet waits on the phone for his lathe to come in from the garden: Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unat tended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums...
And found myself then think ing: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would sum mon Everyman.
Next thing he spoke and I
nearly said I loved him.
That "nearly", the Irishman's waiting game, is very painful.
This poem is typical of the movement of Heaney's talent: from the small to the general, from minor to major, from a sight via a sound to a reconstituted memory. Could it even be that occasionally the memory is actually created by its description? Certainly, although it is an over simplification to say so, Heaney moves more from language to experience than vice versa. When that energy is particulated the result is a fusion; when it's generalised, as for instance in the Hugh MacDiarmaid elegy, the result tends towards puff and blabber: "Who is my neighbour? My neighbour is all mankind". Well.
This book is prosodically brilliant, particularly in the use of half rhymes and near rhymes. But there are, too, technical quirks. Gone are the "un-" words that littered Heaney's last book, but now there is a fondness for adverb sandwiches, c.g. - "from the neck on down out through" - Yet the technique is still unrivalled, the image gift still magical, the sweetness a given. What sharpens this book, though, is its anger, the spirit level, but bubbling under.