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New Selected Poems (1988-2013)

Page 12

by Seamus Heaney

Between languages, half in thrall to desire,

  Half shy of it, when a flit of the foreknown

  Blinked off a sunlit lake near the horizon

  And passed into us, climbing and clunking up

  Those fretted metal steps, as we reboarded

  And were reincarnated seat by seat.

  III White Nights

  Furrow-plodders in spats and bright clasped brogues

  Are cradling bags and hoisting beribboned drones

  As their skilled neck-pullers’ fingers force the chanters

  And the whole band starts rehearsing

  Its stupendous, swaggering march

  Inside the hall. Meanwhile

  One twilit field and summer hedge away

  We wait for the learner who will stay behind

  Piping by stops and starts,

  Making an injured music for us alone,

  Early-to-beds, white-night absentees

  Open-eared to this day.

  ‘The door was open and the house was dark’

  in memory of David Hammond

  The door was open and the house was dark

  Wherefore I called his name, although I knew

  The answer this time would be silence

  That kept me standing listening while it grew

  Backwards and down and out into the street

  Where as I’d entered (I remember now)

  The streetlamps too were out.

  I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,

  Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

  Yet well aware that here there was no danger,

  Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming

  Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

  On an overgrown airfield in late summer.

  In the Attic

  I

  Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the cross-trees

  Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him

  But still green water and clean bottom sand,

  The ship aground, the canted mast far out

  Above a sea-floor where striped fish pass in shoals –

  And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

  That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead

  Appears to rise again … ‘But he was dead enough,’

  The story says, ‘being both shot and drowned.’

  II

  A birch tree planted twenty years ago

  Comes between the Irish Sea and me

  At the attic skylight, a man marooned

  In his own loft, a boy

  Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,

  Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

  By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,

  Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most

  Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

  III

  Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma

  Of hallway linoleum, grandfather now appears,

  His voice a-waver like the draught-prone screen

  They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier

  For the matinee I’ve just come back from.

  ‘And Isaac Hands,’ he asks, ‘Was Isaac in it?’

  His memory of the name a-waver too,

  His mistake perpetual, once and for all,

  Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

  IV

  As I age and blank on names,

  As my uncertainty on stairs

  Is more and more the lightheadedness

  Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,

  As the memorable bottoms out

  Into the irretrievable,

  It’s not that I can’t imagine still

  That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt

  As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

  A Kite for Aibhín

  after ‘L’Aquilone’ by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)

  Air from another life and time and place,

  Pale blue heavenly air is supporting

  A white wing beating high against the breeze,

  And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon

  All of us there trooped out

  Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn,

  I take my stand again, halt opposite

  Anahorish Hill to scan the blue,

  Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.

  And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,

  Lifts itself, goes with the wind until

  It rises to loud cheers from us below.

  Rises, and my hand is like a spindle

  Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower

  Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher

  The longing in the breast and planted feet

  And gazing face and heart of the kite flier

  Until string breaks and – separate, elate –

  The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

  In Time

  for Síofra

  Energy, balance, outbreak:

  Listening to Bach

  I saw you years from now

  (More years than I’ll be allowed)

  Your toddler wobbles gone,

  A sure and grown woman.

  Your bare foot on the floor

  Keeps me in step; the power

  I first felt come up through

  Our cement floor long ago

  Palps your sole and heel

  And earths you here for real.

  An oratorio

  Would be just the thing for you:

  Energy, balance, outbreak

  At play for their own sake

  But for now we foot it lightly

  In time, and silently.

  18 August 2013

  Index

  Album, 176

  Anahorish 1944, 147

  Anything Can Happen, 148

  At Banagher, 108

  At the Wellhead, 106

  Audenesque, 139

  Augean Stables, The, 135

  August Night, An, 10

  Baler, The, 191

  Ballynahinch Lake, 127

  Beowulf (from), 112, 118

  Bereaved, The, 143

  Blackbird of Glanmore, The, 173

  Boarders, 156

  Bodies and Souls, 143

  Butts, The, 184

  Call, A, 99

  Cassandra, 81

  Castalian Spring, 136

  Chanson d’Aventure, 186

  Clothes Shrine, The, 128

  Conkers, 133

  Conway Stewart, The, 181

  Cot, The, 16

  Crossings, 42

  Damson, 71

  Desfina, 137

  District and Circle, 149

  Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also, A, 101

  Eelworks, 193

  Electric Light (from), 145

  Errand, The, 100

  Fiddleheads, 171

  Field of Vision, 11

  Flight Path, The (from), 78

  Fosterling, 25

  Found Prose, 153

  Glanmore Eclogue, 129

  Glanmore Revisited (from), 15

  Golden Bough, The, 1

  Gravel Walks, The, 90

  ‘Had I not been awake’, 175

  His Dawn Vision, 84

  His Reverie of Water, 87

  Höfn, 165

  Human Chain, 190

  In Iowa, 164

  In the Afterlife, 143

  In the Attic, 215

  In Time, 218

  Into Arcadia, 132

  Keeping Going, 66

  Kite for Aibhín, A, 217

  Lagans Road, The, 153

  Lift, The, 158

  Lightenings, 26

  ‘Like everybody else …’, 163

  Little Canticles of Asturias, The, 125

  Lupins, 121

  Lustral Sonnet, 17

  Man and Boy, 5

  Markings, 3

  Mint, 62

  Miracle, 189

>   Mycenae Lookout, 80

  Nights, The, 85

  Nights of ’57, 143

  Nonce Words, 160

  Out of the Bag (from), 122

  Out of This World (from), 163

  Parking Lot, 212

  Perch, 120

  Pillowed Head, A, 19

  Pitchfork, The, 12

  Planting the Alder, 169

  ‘Poet’s Chair’, 93

  Postscript, 111

  Pylos, 134

  Quitting Time, 172

  Rain Stick, The, 61

  Riverbank Field, The, 197

  Route 110, 199

  Royal Prospect, A, 21

  St Kevin and the Blackbird, 76

  Scrabble, 15

  Seeing Things, 7

  Settings, 36

  Settle Bed, The, 13

  Shiver, A, 146

  Sidhe, 211

  Skylight, The, 18

  Sofa in the Forties, A, 63

  Sonnets from Hellas, 132

  Squarings, 49

  Squarings (from), 26

  Stern, 162

  Strand, The, 103

  Swing, The, 95

  Tall Dames, 155

  Tate’s Avenue, 170

  ‘The door was open and the house was dark’, 214

  To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert, 142

  Tollund, 110

  Tollund Man in Springtime, The, 166

  Two Lorries, 69

  Two Stick Drawings, 97

  Uncoupled, 182

  Vitruviana, 138

  Walk, The, 104

  Watchman’s War, The, 80

  Weighing In, 73

  Wheels within Wheels, 23

  Whitby-sur-Moyola, 92

  White Nights, 213

  Wordsworth’s Skates, 152

  Wraiths, 211

  About the Author

  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.

  By the Same Author

  poetry

  DEATH OF A NATURALIST

  DOOR INTO THE DARK

  WINTERING OUT

  NORTH

  FIELD WORK

  STATION ISLAND

  SWEENEY ASTRAY

  SWEENEY’S FLIGHT

  (with photographs by Rachel Giese)

  THE HAW LANTERN

  NEW SELECTED POEMS 1966–1987

  SEEING THINGS

  LAMENTS BY JAN KOCHANOWSKI

  (translated with Stanisław Barańczak)

  THE SPIRIT LEVEL

  OPENED GROUND: POEMS 1966–1996

  BEOWULF

  ELECTRIC LIGHT

  DISTRICT AND CIRCLE

  THE TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID & SEVEN FABLES

  HUMAN CHAIN

  NEW SELECTED POEMS 1988–2013

  THE RATTLE BAG

  (edited with Ted Hughes)

  THE SCHOOL BAG

  (edited with Ted Hughes)

  prose

  PREOCCUPATIONS: SELECTED PROSE 1968–78

  THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE

  THE REDRESS OF POETRY: OXFORD LECTURES

  FINDERS KEEPERS: SELECTED PROSE 1971–2001

  STEPPING STONES

  (with Dennis O’Driscoll)

  plays

  THE CURE AT TROY

  THE BURIAL AT THEBES

  Copyright

  First published in 2014

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  All rights reserved

  © The Estate of Seamus Heaney, 2014

  Cover design by Faber

  Cover photograph © Antonio Zazueta Olmos

  The right of Seamus Heaney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–32173–5

 

 

 


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