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PARTISAN REVIEW
Since there really is no history, only historians, each with a point
of view, a polemicist might argue that all history is psychohistory, in
that it involves the unconscious and conscious mind of the historian.
Loewenberg addresses political conflict, ideological formation, and
the apparently illogical contradictions with such an historical con–
sciousness. In this sense, his psychohistory is profoundly modern,
profoundly in touch with the temper of our post-Freudian era.
DAVID JAMES FISHER
DAMNED FOR LOOKING BACK
STATION ISLAND. By Seamus Heaney.
Farrar, Straus,
&
Giroux.
$11.95.
Seamus Heaney's newest collection of poems opens with an
Orphean love poem. Retracing his steps back to a honeymoon scene
in the London underground, the poet finds himself alone, trains gone:
the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
In a book in which so many poems, including the title sequence, are
intentionally Orphic acts of looking back, it's as if Heaney has damned
himself in advance. Though the book is explicitly Dantesque, espe–
cially the purgatorial pilgrimage of "Station Island," Orpheus seems
an equally informing spirit. For
Station Island
is largely a troubled
meditation on the poet's role and sources, a descent to an inferno of
personal and literary dead, and an ascent, afterward, in the lyric fig–
ure of the legendary mad Irish King Sweeney, cursed for his irrever–
ence by being turned into a bird. Heaney emerges in Part Three of
the book a freer poet, but a scarred one; his persona Sweeney has
lost kingdom, family, and sanity in exchange for his vision.
The poems in Part One are the book's only miscellaneous ones;
they include the frankly erotic, interesting ruminations over totem
objects, tender poems to Heaney's children, and documentations of
his usual political concerns. They are graced with the qualities one
