November morning sunshine on my back
This bell-clear Sunday, elbows lodged strut-firm
On the unseasonably warm
Top bar of a gate, inspecting livestock,
Catching gleams of the distant Viking vik
Of Wicklow Bay; thinking scriptorium
Norse raids, night-dreads and that 'fierce warriors' poem
About storm on the Irish Sea - so no attack
In the small hours or next morning; thinking shock
Out of the blue or blackout, the staggered walk
Of a donkey on the TV news last night -
Loosed from a cart that had loosed five mortar shells
In the bazaar district, wandering out of shot
Lost to its owner, lost for its sunlit hills
Höfn
The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats
And the miles-deep shag ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff,
And feared its coldness that still seemed enough
To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,
Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth
And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.
From A Shiver by Seamus Heaney
How Seamus Heaney has always held his ground, through thick and thin, is something of a miracle, like the preservation in a Danish peat-bog of the Tollund Man, now revisited in this collection (‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’) and given a clean bill of health. Here in A Shiver Heaney’s ground is reaffirmed, found and kept and a stance maintained, in lifelong love, though glaciers melt and Jupiter (after Horace, Odes I, 34) finds ground zero: ‘Anything can happen, the tallest things / Be overturned, those high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded.’ These subtle and quietly allusive poems speak the violence of the new world order in a world itself in peril of oblivion as the polar ice-caps melt. There is sufficient blood and gore here to send a shiver down your spine, from a scene in a slaughter house, to Ajax rampaging (do not seek to identify him). In the title poem a shiver is sent up the shaft of a sledge-hammer, in a paradoxical celebration of creative power, ‘witholdable at will’, capable of making ‘air of a wall’. Martial code words infiltrate these poems, like shields in a ‘testudo’, or cleaved to the helmet of an Irish-American fireman-poet called BREEN. The Americans are on the march too, though at a discreet distance, in 1944, bound for Normandy. The nine powerful (and power-full) poems that constitute A Shiver signal the onset of a new campaign, as Heaney in age, enters the fray again.
source - http://www.clutagpress.com/
