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Product Description
Electric Light travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry.
Electric Light ranges from short takes ('glosses') to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to 'the must and drift of talk'; other poems are arranged in sections, their separate cargoes docked alongside each other to reveal a hidden and curative connection. The presocratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegising friends and fellow poets, naming 'the real names' of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at school. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign to things their proper names. The resulting poems are full of delicately prescriptive tonalities, where Heaney can be heard extending his word-hoard and rollcall in this, his eleventh collection.
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My favourite poems after this (first) reading are 'Lupins', 'Turpin Song', 'The Clothes Shrine', 'The Gealtacht', the wonderfully evocative 'The Real Names' and many of the poems in the second section, especially the last two: 'Seeing the Sick' about his father which ends 'His smile a summer half-door opening out/ And opening in. A reprieving light./ For which the tendered morphine had our thanks.' and the title poem 'Electric Light' which simply demands reading. Out of chaos, beauty 'The smashed thumb-mail/ Of that mangled thumb was puckered pearl,' This book is steady Heaney conducting word-alchemy in the light of his mind's eye.
One or two poems however mimic his early works very well; in the title poem "Electric Light" Heaney returns to his childhood and the wonder at first coming across the miracle of electricity. Although this may seem irrelevant from today's point of view, it had sharp consequences in rural Ireland's past, and is in a similar style to many of his older poems in the manner that he looks back to his childhood and his inability to comprehend the world around him.
Despite the requirement for an in-depth knowledge to fully appreciate some of the harder poems, especially those in the section where he writes tributes to 'lost' poets such as Ted Hughes, there is something here for every reader. This book is a great introduction to Heaney's work and after reading it you are likely to want to try some of his older collections.
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