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PARTISAN REVIEW
preoccupation with the land , he is less necromantically obsessed
with the archaeological past. In the ten "Glanmore Sonnets" that
form the centerpiece of this book, Heaney expresses a deeply
wrought physical love for the living (though in the final sonnet he
cannot resist the image of lovers, "Darkly asperged and
censed ... laid out / Like breathing effigies on a raised ground")
and a natural, almost Wordworthian landscape that the poet can in–
habit with ease. And beyond this, the collection resurrects the
mystery of "words entering almost the sense of touch" - a mystery
explored at length in
Station Island
(1985).
The Haw Lantern
is at first
glance an altogether more modest book - a slim volume indeed, of
only thirty-one poems occupying fifty-one pages. And yet it quickly ,
quietly, opens new territory.
The coll ection's opening poem, "Alphabets," returns us to
Heaney's overriding concern with the tangible sense of language,
evoking the child's growing fascination with the ability to make signs
for what is spoken, heard, imagined. It recounts the poet's progress ,
is a recapitulation of all the steps and phases that lead ultimately to
grace and mastery, a celebration of the poet's delight in the feel of
words and rhythms:
Here in her snooded garment and bare feet ,
All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes ,
The poet's dream stole over him like sunlight
And passed into the tenebrous thickets.
As the poem proceeds, the writer is no longer a mere pupil and farm–
boy but has himself become "the scribe / Who drove a team of quills
on his white field." Which takes us back, by another path, to "Dig–
ging."
"Alphabets" covers ground familiar to those who have followed
Heaney's work even casually. The most ambitious pieces - and the
most astonishing departures - in
The Haw Lantern
are a handful of
political poems that embody the cryptic assurance of Milosz. To put
it another way, they are the sort of poems Milan Kundera might
write were he a poet: difficult, edgy, uneasy , abstract, allegorical ,
and yet infused with a knowing and sympathetic humor; located
everywhere and nowhere, in a country that is both central and
marginal. With such titles as "From the Frontier of Writing,"
"Parable Island," "From the Republic of Conscience," "From the
Land of the Unspoken," and "From the Can ton of Expectation" serv-
