Heaney Opened Ground

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-26279-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author's work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 comes as close to being a 'Collected Poems' as its author cares to make it. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that have appeared since, together with examples of his work as a translator from the Greek, Latin, Italian and other languages. The book concludes with 'Crediting Poetry', the speech with which Seamus Heaney accepted the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him, in the words of the Swedish Academy of Letters, for his 'works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth'.

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013. His translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI was published posthumously in 2016 to critical acclaim, followed in 2018 by 100 Poems, a selection of poems from his entire career, chosen by his family.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Heaney, Seamus

Leseproben

Singing School

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up

William Wordsworth,

He [the stable-boy] had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles were being handed out to the Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of my future life, I thought I would like to die fighting the Fenians.

W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies

1 The Ministry of Fear

for Seamus Deane

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived

In important places. The lonely scarp

Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted

For six years, overlooked your Bogside.

I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat

Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,

The throttle of the hare. In the first week

I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat

The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.

I threw them over the fence one night

In September 1951

When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road

Were amber in the fog. It was an act

Of stealth.

Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.

Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,

Dabbling in verses till they have become

A life: from bulky envelopes arriving

In vacation time to slim volumes

Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’.

Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine

Of your exercise book, bewildered me –

Vowels and ideas bandied free

As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.

I tried to write about the sycamores

And innovated a South Derry rhyme

With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.

Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain

Were walking, by God, all over the fine

Lawns of elocution.

Have our accents

Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak

As well as students from the Protestant schools.’

Remember that stuff? Inferiority

Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.

‘What’s your name, Heaney?’

‘Heaney, Father.’

‘Fair

Enough.’

On my first day, the leather strap

Went epileptic in the Big Study,

Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,

But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life

Was not so bad, shying as usual.

On long vacations, then, I came to life

In the kissing seat of an Austin 16

Parked at a gable, the engine running,

My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,

A light left burning for her in the kitchen.

And heading back for home, the summer’s

Freedom dwindling night by night, the air

All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen

Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round

The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing

The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye:

‘What’s your name, driver?’

‘Seamus …’

Seamus?

They once read my letters at a roadblock

And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,

‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

Ulster was British, but with no rights on

The English lyric: all around us, though

We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

2 A Constable Calls

His bicycle stood at the window-sill,

The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher

Skirting the front mudguard,

Its fat black handlegrips

Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’

Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

The pedal treads hanging relieved

Of the boot of the law.

His cap was upside down

On the floor, next his chair.

The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

In his slightly sweating hair.

He had unstrapped

The heavy ledger, and my father

Was making tillage returns

In acres, roods, and perches.

Arithmetic and fear.

I sat staring at the polished holster

With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

Looped into the revolver butt.

‘Any other root crops?

Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’

‘No.’ But was there not a line

Of turnips where the seed ran out

In the potato field? I assumed

Small guilts and sat

Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

He stood up, shifted the baton-case

Further round on his belt,

Closed the domesday book,

Fitted his cap back with two hands,

And looked at me as he said goodbye.

A shadow bobbed in the window.

He was snapping the carrier spring

Over the ledger. His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

3 Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966

The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs

Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder

Grossly there between his chin and his knees.

He is raised up by what he buckles under.

Each arm extended by a seasoned rod,

He parades behind it. And though the drummers

Are granted passage through the nodding crowd,

It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.

To every cocked ear, expert in its greed,

His battered signature subscribes ‘No Pope’.

The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood.

The air is pounding like a stethoscope.

4 Summer 1969

While the Constabulary covered the mob

Firing into the Falls, I was suffering

Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

Each afternoon, in the casserole heat

Of the flat, as I sweated my way through

The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket

Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

At night on the balcony, gules of wine,

A sense of children in their dark corners,

Old women in black shawls near open windows,

The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

We talked our way home over starlit plains

Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil

Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’

Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports

On the television, celebrities

Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’

Covered a wall – the thrown-up arms

And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted

And knapsacked military, the efficient

Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,

His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall –

Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn

Jewelled in the blood of his own children,

Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips

Over the world. Also, that holmgang

Where two berserks club each other to death

For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

5 Fosterage

for Michael McLaverty

‘Description is revelation!’ Royal

Avenue, Belfast, 1962,

A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet

Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped

My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way.

Do your own work. Remember

Katherine Mansfield – I will tell

How the laundry basket squeaked … that note of exile.’

But to hell with overstating it:

‘Don’t have the veins bulging in your Biro.’

And then, ‘Poor Hopkins!’ I have the Journals

He gave me, underlined, his buckled self

Obeisant to their pain. He discerned

The lineaments of patience everywhere

And fostered me and sent me out, with words

Imposing on my tongue like obols.

6 Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:

Alders dripping, birches

Inheriting the last light,

The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was...