Death of a Naturalist
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Amazon.co.uk Review
First published in 1966, this debut collection by Seamus Heaney signals the talent that was to win him the Nobel Prize in 1995. Largely addressing his rural childhood in County Derry, the volume begins with "Digging", a poem which encapsulates Heaney's early concerns about roots, belonging and the supple joy of language. As he watches his father digging the flowerbed, he recalls him working the potato drills and lines of turf 20 years before. "By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man." Heaney is renowned for getting inside language and revelling in its sensual glut. He talks of "the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots." He too severs roots, being the first generation not to depend on the land. "But I've no spade to follow men like them. / Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I'll dig with it." Heaney has the bewildering genius of being loose and tight at the same time, conversational and colloquial as well as formally rigorous. He's equally at home and as wildly inventive in blank and rhyming verse. In Death of a Naturalist, he takes the reader to the festering flax-dam where "bluebottles / Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell" and he gathered "the warm thick slobber / Of frogspawn." He delights in excess, in textures--"a glossy purple clot" of ripe blackberry, its flesh like "thickened wine". "For the Commander of the Eliza" is savage in its depiction of the famine: "Six grown men with gaping mouths and eyes / Bursting the sockets like spring onions in drills." The captain of the ship refuses to give out food on Whitehall's orders. In "At a Potato Digging", Heaney compares contemporary potato-gatherers at their "seasonal altar of the sod" and the piles of spuds, "live skulls, blind-eyed" to those who "wolfed the blighted root and died". He renders the famine unavoidably stark and present. Almost every poem demonstrates his resourceful, elastic use of language and Heaney ably achieves what he aims to do: "I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing." --Cherry Smyth
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
For the fortieth anniversary of its publication, in May 2006, Faber are reissuing Seamus Heaney's classic first collection, Death of a Naturalist, which on its appearance in 1966 won the Cholmondeley Award, the E.C. Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
'His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry. The full-blooded energy of these poems makes Death of a Naturalist the best first book of poems I've read for some time.' - C.B. Cox in the Spectator
'The power and precision of his best poems are a delight, and as a first collection Death of a Naturalist is outstanding [...] His subject is those things which are inherent or inherited. What he praises is to be praised in his own work.' - Christopher Ricks, New Statesman
'Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Returning to this book some ten years after I first encountered Seamus Heaney (under the inescapably unfortunate constellation of GCSE English coursework) I was a little unsure what I would encounter. Those first readings of "Mid-term Break" left me slightly puzzled: these were clearly moving, often quite funny stories, but I didn't "get" the poetry. I couldn't tell what it was that Heaney was doing with language. In short, it all seemed a little, well, pointless.
But now, rather older, and maybe a little wiser (though that's hardly a great improvement: I was a particularly useless example of a 15 year old boy), I find in Heaney a stunning ability to weave language into something that is far more than the sum of its parts. There is a denseness to his poetry, not in the sense of obscurantism or difficulty, but in the sound it makes when you read it, in the weight of the syllables in your mouth, that sets him apart from any other poet I know. And this is not to claim some sort of affective fallacy, whereby the weight of his verse evokes the weight of the Irish soil, but to mark his writing out as something more firm, more resilient, than texts that could be so easily dismissed by a rather glib, arrogant young man.
And now I turn again and again to Heaney, seeing in his writing great thought, close observation and honesty, and I am grateful for the time that has passed.
But now, rather older, and maybe a little wiser (though that's hardly a great improvement: I was a particularly useless example of a 15 year old boy), I find in Heaney a stunning ability to weave language into something that is far more than the sum of its parts. There is a denseness to his poetry, not in the sense of obscurantism or difficulty, but in the sound it makes when you read it, in the weight of the syllables in your mouth, that sets him apart from any other poet I know. And this is not to claim some sort of affective fallacy, whereby the weight of his verse evokes the weight of the Irish soil, but to mark his writing out as something more firm, more resilient, than texts that could be so easily dismissed by a rather glib, arrogant young man.
And now I turn again and again to Heaney, seeing in his writing great thought, close observation and honesty, and I am grateful for the time that has passed.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I first encountered Seamus Heaney as a 22 year old completing an ACCESS to university course. I was immediately impacted by the simplicity and hidden depths within; Heaney's genius lies in his familiarity with the everyday and his ability to confront our preconceptions with poetry that appears rough and ready but which is in fact beauty wrapped up in dirt and the mundanity of everyday life.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
For those who like Heaney, this excellent early work gives an insight into the themes and ideas that he has continued to explore and develop since. A super read.
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