Clearly, I sometimes go Last-In-First-Out when it comes to selecting books. In this case, for the poetry collection that I keep beside the readin’ chair, I picked out a book I just bought last month (well, actually, I brought out a couple when I was stacking them up) and of the couple, I started this one first. At some point, I thought “Isn’t this the guy who translated Beowulf?” Yes, it is, and I’m not sure how I knew that. It’s been a while since I read Beowulf–probably college–and Heaney’s version did not come out until 1999 to some fanfare. Perhaps I have a copy of it that I’ve been avoiding. But I delved into this book, and….
Well, it was all right. Some of the poems were interesting. The style tends to feature longer lines and completing thoughts, not just a couple of words dropped ponderously which the reader can imagine the poet saying and then pausing and looking around as though the two or three word lines were profound enough to warrant a pause much less a poem. But, gentle reader, I slag on modern poetry like that all the time.
Themeatically, he talks about love and whatnot, but half of the book is given over to The Troubles as he is Irish after all. So they didn’t speak to me as much as they would an Irishman or as much as they would to a literati who wanted to claim they speak to he/she/it.
But, some interesting rhythm wordplay and rhyme. Not a bad collection, and it makes me wonder how his earlier works were. By the time he published this book, he was teaching at Harvard and had a number of other books under his belt. One wonders if his earlier work was better, more real, than what might have come after he was a cause célèbre in poetical circles such as they were in the 1980s which is a far, far cry from what they might be in he 21st century.
