Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Living roots awaken in my head’: Place and Displacement
- 2 ‘Where the fault is opening’: Politics and Mythology
- 3 ‘I hear again the sure confusing drum’: Reversions and Revisions
- 4 ‘It was marvellous and actual’: Familiarity and Fantasy
- 5 ‘Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad’: The Unpartitioned Intellect
- Appendix
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2 - ‘Where the fault is opening’: Politics and Mythology
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Living roots awaken in my head’: Place and Displacement
- 2 ‘Where the fault is opening’: Politics and Mythology
- 3 ‘I hear again the sure confusing drum’: Reversions and Revisions
- 4 ‘It was marvellous and actual’: Familiarity and Fantasy
- 5 ‘Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad’: The Unpartitioned Intellect
- Appendix
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Wintering Out opens with a poem of dedication to David Hammond and the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley:
This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
a bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
in the roadside, and over in the trees
machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
and it was déjà-vu, some film made
of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there life before death? That's chalked up
on a wall downtown. Competence with pain,
coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
we hug our little destiny again.
(WO, p. v)
As a point of entry into Heaney's third collection of poems, this piece (later incorporated into ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing' in North) offers us a glimpse of a very different world from the one we are introduced to on the opening page of Death of a Naturalist. Where ‘Digging’ presents us with a natural, rural world of ‘flowerbeds’, ‘potato drills’, ‘new potatoes’, ‘good turf’, and ‘living roots’ (DN 1, 2), Heaney's poem for Hammond and Longley brings us face to face with a harsh new set of realities. Northern Ireland had changed quite dramatically between 1966, when Death of a Naturalist was published, and 1972, when Wintering Out appeared, and many of these changes are registered here in this poem of dedication.
As the 1960s ended, the Northern Irish state lurched toward crisis. With the failure of the Civil Rights movement, militant republicanism (and militant unionism) revived and the province grew accustomed both to the sounds and to the consequences of bombings and shootings. As Heaney drives along the motorway (in itself something of an incongruous intrusion of the modern world into his typical poetic mise-en-scène - at least up to this point in his career), he sees the crater which a bomb has scarred into the landscape. As a result of the deepening crisis, the British Army were now deployed in the North and they, too, intrude into the scene, with their ‘machine-gun posts defin[ing] a real stockade’.
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- Seamus Heaney , pp. 29 - 49Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010