David Schurman Wallace at Poetry Magazine:
The collected poems displays the evolution of Heaney’s poetic impulses. The apprentice work from the 1960s is already accomplished, if less clarified in its thought and more given over to the tug of spontaneous music. Influences are, inevitably, worn on the sleeve, as in the Hopkins-derived “October Thought,” which bursts into chiming assonance and alliteration: “Starling thatch watches, and sudden swallow / Straight shoots to its mud-nest, home-rest rafter, / Up through dry, dust-drunk cobwebs, like laughter”—a clue to the origin of the compound nouns that are constant in his work. Commentators note the Dylan Thomas influence in “Song of My Man-Alive” (“it was all tune-tumbling / Hill-happy and wine-wonderful”). Heaney was hyper-aware of his influences, even as he refined his relationship to them. Helen Vendler thinks of him as a poet of “second thoughts,” testing the same material again and again. In an essay about Thomas collected in The Redress of Poetry (1995), Heaney turns his eye to the fate of that’s poet reputation: “I want to ask which parts of his Collected Poems retain their force almost 40 years after his death. In the present climate of taste, his rhetorical surge and mythopoetic posture are unfashionable . . . which only makes it all the more urgent to ask if there is not still something we can isolate and celebrate in Dylan the Durable.”
more here.
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