Seamus Heaney, Collected Poems, 15-CD box set
by Barra Ó Seaghdha

from Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 98

With its restrained earthen reds, browns and yellows, with its simple photograph and clean typeface, there is something modest and unflashy about the box in which the recorded version of Seamus Heaney's Collected Poems comes to us. At the same time, there is something almost grandiose about the project that has resulted in the emergence of this little box. No Irish poet has ever been publicly celebrated as comprehensively as Heaney has this year, with the near-simultaneous arrival of Stepping Stones (a substantial review of his life and writing career in interview with Dennis O'Driscoll), a near-takeover of RTÉ Radio One on the big day (Heaney's seventieth), a television portrait by Charlie McCarthy, an RTÉ-sponsored celebration at IMMA, the related commissioning of works by Irish composers, numerous interviews, features and reviews in both print and broadcast media, and of course our little box.

With the importance of TV, radio and recordings of all kinds in our daily lives, it is hardly surprising that the voices of most of the major English-language poets of the last fifty years have been captured. Here in Ireland, starting in the 1960s, Claddagh Records issued single and double LPs of Irish and Scottish writers such as Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean. More recently, we have had Heaney's joint venture with the piper Liam O'Flynn and the double CD of Thomas Kinsella reading his own work. Poets who never or rarely read in public are now the exception. Reading is part of the job of creating an audience and of selling books, and there are more and more readers who will want a recording of their favoured poets for home consumption. But in Heaney's case we are now offered, not a taste or a few alluring tapas, not a lunch or a three-course dinner, but the full menu, dish after dish, from top to bottom, and demanding numerous sittings even from the gluttonous.

That there will be gluttons out there goes without saying. Almost any Heaney-connected product is guaranteed success at the moment: the poetry books sell at a rate that would leave many novelists envious; Stepping Stones will deservedly earn itself long-term readership; and it's standing room only, even in large venues, for any public reading by Heaney. Our 15-CD box might seem scaled more to the Transcontinental Highway or the Oriental Express, but why shouldn't a literary train-traveller listen to Heaney between Portarlington and Ballinasloe? And a motorist might do worse than stick Wintering Out in the sound system on one of those rare days when the soul seems to demand more than another snip of classical ear-fodder from Snooze FM or Joe Duffy's relentless eking-out of Mrs Durcan's troubles with her neighbour's terrier and Mr Boland's indignant bark back. If a lyric is worth reading, it is worth lingering over. It may indeed demand lingering over. This is where listening and our own silent reading of a poem diverge.

You are reading the third section of 'Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces'. It could go like this: 'Like a long sword / sheathed in its moisting / burial clays .. .' Moisting, not moist? Hmm ... 'Like a long sword / sheathed in its moisting / burial clays, / the keel stuck fast/ / in the slip of the bank, / its clinker-built hull .. .' Just a second, are we still talking bones here? What was that earlier? Yes: 'the nostril / is a migrant prow / sniffing the Liffey...' Back to 'clinker-built': 'its clinker-built hull'—that has the crunch of the real about it—'its clinker-built hull' / spined and plosive / as Dublin.' Things keep shifting here. What is being compared to what? Must come back to this and work out exactly how that happens. 'And now we reach in / for shards of the vertebrae...' You go on, pausing here and there, rereading a phrase, moving on till you reach the end. Then, perhaps, after savouring or working out some of the detail, you read again for the pleasure of feeling the whole thing unfold. This kind of to-ing and fro-ing, the flicking to a word or a line in another poem, the breaking and re-knotting of threads, is excluded as the poet's voice moves relentlessly on. (Could the gap between tracks have been longer, allowing the listener a little more time to reflect and absorb, to stare at the ceiling, without hitting the pause button?)

As a reader, you can set your own pace. You are working towards your own reading of the poem and there is nobody to interfere. When you listen to Heaney on CD, either you are getting a preliminary reading that gives you some sense of the poem (but which leaves you still needing to make the poem your own) or you are checking Heaney's version against yours.

If there is something excessive about the whole enterprise, the same cannot be said about Heaney's reading style in individual poems. We can only guess how long the recordings took and how much preparation went into them, but the likelihood is that Heaney did not have to agonise too much over stresses and speeds. For someone who can draw superstar crowds, his delivery is almost invariably steady, unfussed and intimate. Heaney is blessed with a voice that is easy on the ear but, as readers of Stepping Stones will know, he is as professional and as respectful of his audience in this aspect of his work as in any other. Seeing that reading was to be an important part of his life as a full-time writer, he worked on his enunciation and projection, attaining clarity, continuity and flexibility of line without sacrificing either his accent or the gift of intimacy that seems to be part of his nature. The stress is not on the voice in itself, or on the poet's personality, but on transmitting as much as possible of the meaning and energy of the poem in this single act of communication.

Again, we can only speculate as to what Heaney felt while reading, as he was obliged to do after agreeing to the project, poems which he had not revisited in years, poems that would have no chance of appearing in the definitive Selected Poems. While Heaney's voice sometimes takes on a particular animation, there is no throwaway reading, even of such early poems as 'Gravities' or 'Valediction', where the voice of the poem is not Heaney's. Each poem is given a decent start in life and sent out to fare for itself in the world of the listener, or the ear of the behearer, as a Dewey Redman album title puts it. This necessarily egalitarian approach means that we are reminded of poems that, after a number of readings, we tend to skip or almost erase from memory. In the case of Death of a Naturalist, I had forgotten entirely the poem 'The Folk Singers', which targets that awful goody-goody, prettily arranged style of folk-singing that probably drove Bob Dylan howling into his jangling, electric phase. Listening to the poem 'Saint Francis and the Birds', I was suddenly carried back to the young Seán Dunne's reading of his own Saint Francis poem, in a semi-chanting style full of vibrato.

There are indeed many different ways of reading a poem, but some are only effective in performance or in limited doses. Would listening for hours to the Yeats chant be bearable? Heavily stressed reading styles can quickly become painful or monotonous and, for those not swayed by a particular poet's charm, can have the effect of drawing attention to banality of language (I ASKed my MOTHer WHY she USED a SOUP SPOON / to STIR the TEA). Several exponents of this style are active on the Irish scene. In contrast with this and other reading styles that demand either full adhesion or termination with extreme prejudice, Heaney's voice can fade to a pleasant background noise if the listener loses concentration. Print addicts who listen book in hand will very quickly stop listening, as the eye speeds ahead of the ear even when a poem is being read perfectly.

To the question, 'Do he do the police in different voices?', the answer in Heaney's case is a qualified no. There is basically one mode of delivery (within which there can be accelerations and changes of pressure), but there is a second voice (with its own minor variations) that can appear when, for example, children or other people, oracles even, speak in a poem, or when a child's view of the world is being evoked. This merely confirms that Heaney is an excellent performer of his own poetry but not a natural actor, not a flitter from persona to persona.

Even when the reader is the author, today's performance of a poem is just one of many valid possibilities. Speed, stress and other interpretative factors may all vary. Thus, the 'Sunlight' section of 'Mossbawn' (the body of the poem, excluding title and sub-title) takes about five seconds longer in the Poetry Archive version than in the box-set. Does this have the effect of further slowing time and lengthening the 'long afternoon'? Such points of interpretation add to the interest of these recordings. In the 1970s, when reading 'Exposure', did Heaney hammer a little harder on 'the ANvil BRAINS of SOME who HATE me' than he now chooses to do? In fact the line is pronounced quite lightly, with heavy stressing and slowing of 'weighing and weighing' in the same sentence. There is a wistful quality to the way in which the poet allows the last words of the poem—'the comet's pulsing rose'—almost to drift away.

The emphatic delivery of 'scald, scald, scald' in 'Summer Home' (Wintering Out, 1972) is echoed in a later volume (Field Work, 1979) when oysters are 'ripped and shucked and scattered', each word receiving full value. Heaney doesn't go much further than this in heightening a line. (The rendering of 'Mid-Term Break' shows that he also knows when understatement is both more effective and more humanly appropriate).

Even if poems are open to multiple interpretations, it is interesting to discover Heaney's own (current) interpretation. The concluding line of 'Digging' is a case in point: Heaney says, 'I'll dig [half-pause] with IT', emphasising the implement over the activity. The first line of another famous early poem, 'The Forge', goes, 'All I know is a door into the dark.' Stressing the 'All' suggests the meaning, 'Everything I know ... '; stressing 'know' might suggest, 'The only thing I know...'; Heaney stresses the 'All'. Ultimately, however, once a poem is released into the world, it belongs to each one of us as much as to the poet. It is by listening attentively to the poem rather than to the poet's reading of it for us that we decide on our own ideal interpretation. (Is there a parallel here with the idea of the informed conscience?)

In the poem 'Damson', there is relish in Heaney's voice as he evokes the bricks 'tocked and tapped in line'. Perhaps the whole poem is read with such animation but, as a listener who feels that the mythical references in the poem are rather forced, it is difficult to decide whether I am hearing a similarly forced quality in the voice at times or whether I am importing into it my own discomfort with some of the material. A similar difficulty arises with 'The Flight Path'. It is the poems we love that we really want to hear read, but there is always, in theory at least, the possibility of conversion by listening. However, as The Spirit Level and Electric Light contain little poetry that I love, I am more likely to pluck what I want from those volumes myself than to listen to the poet run through them from beginning to end. Poems like 'Wordsworth's Skates' or 'Planting the Alder' in District and Circle, on the other hand, are delivered whole by the poet and may well call out to be heard again.

The box-set—a collaboration between RTÉ and the Lannan Foundation—comes with a hefty booklet that contains, in addition to photographs and a guide to the CDs, a long essay by Peter Sirr. This recapitulates Heaney's career and situates his work in the context of his times; not just a work of analysis, it is also a younger poet's very precisely judged engagement with the marrow of Heaney's work. It will be as useful to readers of the books as to listeners to the CDs.

The books have been launched one by one down the years and have made their way out to sea. Now, a large new vessel is hitting the water. It is too soon to know how it will fare but, as it is already giving pleasure to many, let's wish it well.

About the Author
Barra Ó Seaghdha writes about poetry, history, cultural politics and music (or combinations thereof) in such publications as the Dublin Review of Books (drb.ie) and the Journal of Music in Ireland.

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