Originally posted by Rachel

Did I mention that the thing I miss most about school is structure? That I can get twice the reading done under the deadlines of a semester than I can in a full year of non-studenthood? All of this is to say, I am a bad, bad blogger. Lanea keeps reassuring me that it’s not school, it’s okay, but I keep secretly hoping she’ll play teacher and give me deadlines.

But something else I learned in school is that it’s easy to bluff when discussing poetry as long as you stick to the ones you’ve actually read. I think they call that “close reading.” Anyone want to call my bluff? Anyone? I didn’t think so. So, yeah, let’s focus particularly on the poems from The Death of a Naturalist. Um, because I’ve read those ones, dang it.

One of the things that I find surprising about Heaney’s work, at least this early work, is how influenced he seems to be by formal verse. Even where there isn’t a set rhyme scheme or particular form in use, his work has such distinctive rhythms and frequent rhyme and off-rhyme, that the poetry often seems to echo that of an earlier time. (I don’t want to tell you how much time I wasted one day trying to figure out if there was a particular form in use in “Ancestral Photograph,” and if so, what might he have been saying by using that form. I failed miserably, in case you’re wondering, though I did find some similarities to Chaucer.) I’m used to John Ashbery’s off-beat tinkerings with villanelles and sestinas and the like, but despite a title about farm implements, they have nothing to do with the poem. Whereas, um, Heaney’s poems actually do. Have to do with farm implements, that is.

So, I spotted some recurring themes in the first book. As the title might indicate, many of the poems here are, in many different ways, about humanity vs. nature. The poet’s father, as in the first poem, “Digging,” is a skilled tamer of nature: “By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man.” Heaney, on the other hand, is distracted by other pursuits: ” But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. // Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” While his father and grandfather’s work is the hard labor of digging earth, Heaney is doing a more intimate digging with his pen, digging through his identity and the identity of his family, as he does again in “Follower.”

All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow around the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

Here we see something resembling guilt or remorse on the part of the poet, the belief that he has disappointed his father for his ineptitude in farming. His father now follows, or haunts him, because he was not able to live up to what he believed his father’s expectations to be.

As a result of Heaney’s lack of skill with taming nature, nature appears again and again in these poems as something wild and unruly. My favorite example is in “Blackberry-Picking”:

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

This poem reminds me so strongly of Theodore Roethke, whom I love. The couplet at the end, and the childish hopefulness, it all makes me think of “My Papa’s Waltz,” you know? The childish innocence of always believing something will end well, even when you know from experience that it always turns out the same way. Anyhow, my point was, there’s a lot of gross-out in these poems. I mean, there are no bog bodies here, but there’s slime, mold, rats, drowning kittens, curdled milk. This is not an easy, idyllic nature, but one hard-fought and not always won.

The last selection from this collection, “Personal Helicon”, ties well into the digging theme of the first poem.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Heaney still seems to see the act of writing partly through the lens of his father, as a selfish act. But Heaney also sees it as a lens with which to view his “roots”, and that work, he argues, is just as dirty and hard as that of a farmer.

P.S. So, I never did pick the next poet. Shall we do something so obtuse that it will be nearly impossible to discuss? Yes, let’s. Let’s do Ann Lauterbach. Now, the collection I want to do is out-of-print and extremely expensive to acquire……Holy crap, I take that back. Suddenly there are, like 3 copies out there for less than $10. Go get yourself one of those! I spent $75 on a paperback copy of the damn thing. And I spent 8 years searching for a copy that cheap. I need to quell my hoarding instincts before I buy them all myself. I was going to tell you to get the Selected Poems and we’d just read the poems from her first book, and I’d supplement it with some of my favorites not included, but this, of course, is much better.

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