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Read Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (1999)

Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (1999)

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ISBN
0374526788 (ISBN13: 9780374526788)
Language
English
Publisher
farrar, straus and giroux

Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (1999) - Plot & Excerpts

People in Northern Ireland rather think that Seamus Heaney – “Famous Seamus”, they say with irony – belongs to them. They feel he is close to them, expressing their everyday concerns. Even when he ventures into abstruse territory, for example, translating Beowulf or Antigone, Ulster people sense that even these texts express concerns they share with him. Gaelic football is a big preoccupation in the area he was brought up. So when I found myself there discussing football, it was no surprise that different teams claimed ownership over him, each explaining how he played football for their team and not for the others A recurring theme in his poetry is his childhood in the flat farmlands of south Derry. It was a life of butter-churning, pig-killing, turf-digging, jamb-walls, funerals; of policemen and beggar-women; of taciturn farmers sending foolish youths on fools’ errands; a world where recreation revolved around Gaelic sport; one where the postman had to know the invisible boundaries of invisible townlands. Heaney writes much of his father who spent much of his life in silence, believing that “even to speak at all was an affectation”, and of his siblings, for example, playing at trains on the living room couch. It is the kind of world – fading now – that I got to know myself in other parts of rural Ulster, though in my case as an outsider. All the same, having been among such people, I find his poems startle me by being accurate. It would be wrong to think Heaney sentimental. Nor is he a parochial poet. It’s just that he evokes more general truths by writing straightforwardly, with realism and apparent simplicity, about the people and the places he knows.Ulster, however, is a complicated place. At the moment Heaney emerged as a writer, so did Ulster’s Troubles. Heaney therefore gave significant voice to a strand of decency found in Ulster political opinion. Few people in Ulster are blindly sectarian; but nor can they shake off old loyalties and this ambiguity is present in his writing. He gives voice to what everybody feels in war, the anger, the futility, the exasperation, the sense that what one does is what one also regrets. He sometimes gives vent to the hypocrisy and untruth that conflict brings. “Whatever you say, say nothing” is the title of a poem, but it became a catchphrase in Ulster, for it rang an important bell. Heaney is a poet to his boots, passionate about language. Despite his subject matter and the seeming simplicity of his writing, his scholarship peeps through. He seems pleased to have had his ability recognized, but he does not appear to have sought recognition. I met him briefly once, and I thought him a kindly, decent man who just liked to write poetry. The book contains his speech of acceptance in Stockholm. It is a model of clear prose and humanity, and well worth reading.The epithet “Famous Seamus” has a convoluted Ulster irony. It firmly chides him for winning a Nobel Prize, for in rural Ulster, one is supposed to be “modest”. But there is also affection in the accusation, for everybody knows that Heaney as a quiet, modest man who wears his celebrity very lightly. Indeed, one doubts if he wears it at all.

As if we needed any proof that Seamus Heaney's Nobel Prize in Literature was well-deserved--the (somewhat abridged) collection of his volumes of poetry from 1966-1996, contained in Opened Ground prove this. Heaney's collected poems illustrate a discovery of (Irish) heritage, an awakening from childhood into adulthood, and an astounding awareness of the "little" things in life. From the opening poem--the well-known "Digging"--we are immediately immersed in Heaney's world of ancestry, the burden of age, the struggle to maintain a balance between history and heritage, the future and modernism, and other "grand motifs" that Heaney somehow manages to condense into metonymic and representative figures and symbols, respectively.This is also, in many ways, a collection about nature and the cycle of life. One of the most fascinating types of poems found here are Heaney's "bog people" poems, which describe the physical bodies found and excavated from the marshy land of Ireland. "The Tollund Man" exemplifies these such poems early on and Heaney returns to the local in his penultimate poem of the collection, "Tollund." Heaney's intense love of earthiness, of Ireland's "soft" terrain, of wells, water-pumps, slime, mud, and bogspawn also give us material that, quite possibly, could be enjoyed by ardent environmentalists and nature-lovers.But this is not to say that Heaney's poems are meant for only one kind of person or another. On the contrary--they are meant for everybody.Additionally, Heaney's organization is felt both within each volume and among them. There is no such thing as haphazard with Heaney--every piece feels interlocked with the others, each poem truly belongs, and every one is readable on various levels. Of course, much of the poet's work is also highly political, but this never seems to become some sort of eye-rolling "hidden agenda" of the collection. We are never distracted, negatively, by any one thing. Instead, we are asked, as readers, to compile, return to, and remember the various images, thoughts, and motifs offered here and often returned to.Of interest to writers, too, is Heaney's address of the poet's burden: is he to respond to life as it is and report it in all its rawness and ugliness? Or is he to take events and sugarcoat them a bit? In Opened Ground it quickly becomes evident that Heaney struggles with and attempts to do both at times. In the end, however, it at least becomes apparent that Heaney's greatest loyalty lies with Artistic Vision, whether it means describing the deaths of mythic heroes of yesterday or the passing of family members before his very eyes.

What do You think about Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (1999)?

When Seamus Heaney writes, "Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests, snug as a gun," that "snug as a gun," is for me the sound of Seamus Heaney. Of course it is not the only sound of Seamus Heaney. These poems clash, hiss, whisper, whoosh, hum, splash, and ring, but the guttural, earthy grunting is always there: hum, gulp, pluck, pump, slung, glut, plunge, muddied, puddled, scuffled, clutch, grunts, muck, slugged, thumped, mush, rump, and more.The Ireland of Heaney's memories is a place of earth and water. It is muddy. I was reminded of something I read once about some tropical place: it was a land of abundant life, and ever-present death. Heaney's poems teem with nature, with bats, hares, crows, badgers, seals, otters, gulls, eels, and bluebottles thriving among the flax, blackberries, moss, ferns, sycamores, mistletoe, rushes, and foxgloves. And yet, everywhere, death looms. The poems I found most memorable were usually those full of death. "Requiem for the Croppies," where the rebels had pockets full of barley to eat, and next spring barley plants grew from their mass grave. Poems such as "Bog Queen" and others, describing ancients who had died by violence. "Station Island," where the author, on a religious pilgrimage, meets the ghosts of people he once knew, and they tell the stories of their violent deaths. The candles, and coffins, and corteges of village funerals. And Heaney's retelling of the Sweeney legends, how the mad king scrabbles to survive in the wild landscape, and ends being speared to death as he drinks milk from a hole made by a boot heel in the dung. And Heaney's retelling of Ugolino, from Dante, how a man unfairly imprisoned with his children, watches the children die before him.For Ireland is here, both ancient and modern, but so is the world. Heaney may have been raised in a barn, boiling potatoes and picking blackberries, but he is also a scholar. He has read Dante, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Bible. He has traveled Europe and the Americas. He speaks the curt words of field and bog, but also the polysyllabic language of books: crepuscular, zoomorphic, somnambulant, irrevocable, prismatic, lineaments, diminuendo. What can he not do? He can create poems both local in focus and universal in scope, poems of visual clarity and emotional depth, and that make you think.I saw Seamus Heaney when he spoke at Syracuse University. When he finished speaking, and walked forward through the aisle to exit the auditorium, I reached out and laid my hand on his shoulder, because I wanted to be able to say that I had touched Ireland's greatest living (at that time) poet. And so I did.
—Cheryl Gatling

Have owned this volume for years and sampled from it on occasion. For some reason the poems had never really connected with me. I don't know if it was Heaney's recent death or my rapid advance through middle age but my latest foray into this volume has made me a believer.The first poem that got me was "Mid-Term Break", a heart-breaking but entirely unsentimental look at the death of a much younger sibling. Things just get better from there. "Clearances," an homage to Heaney's mother, is stunning. "Blackberry-Picking" is a tour de force, connecting nature, family and mortality deftly and seamlessly. One of my very favorite poems in the volume is its very last, "Postscript," the last line of which is "...And catch the heart off guard and blow it open." No more accurate statement could be made about Heaney's work. Opened Ground is a wonderful place to appreciate it.
—Scott Reeves

This should really be on my "always reading shelf." I love his poetry. It's grounded, almost smelling of the earth (of his native Irish soil), and gritty without being graphic or turning too hard an edge. In an interview following the publication of his new translation of Beowulf, Heaney talks of the old Anglo-Saxon poet and the warrior culture evoked in the poem. He speaks about the heart of the poet grieved by the cruelty of the world, the loss of home, of safety, of companions: a grief not unknown in modern Ireland. I hear the same voice in much of his own verse; there is, as he puts it, a knowledge that "the world is not quite trustworthy, but we must be grateful for it when it is."Note: How sad that Heaney is gone! (added September, 2013)
—Sarah Ryburn

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