Amazon Review
Seamus Heaney's 11th collection of poems, Electric Light continues his excavation of childhood, his vivifying love of nature and his quest into the meaning of poetry itself in an utterly pleasurable and satisfying way. As the poet squares up to his own mortality, many of the poems are dedicated to the memory of lost friends and poets, such as Joseph Brodsky, and yet the urgency and optimism of new birth is a lively and forceful presence in the book too. "Bann Valley Eclogue" prophesises a time when "old markings/ Will avail no more to keep east bank from west./ The valley will be washed like the new baby." In "Out of the Bag", the child narrator believes that the doctor brings the newborn from his lined bag. The doctor, "like a hypnotist unwinding us" is cloaked in luxury in his camel coat with its spaniel-coloured, fur-lined collar and like a god, he makes baby's bits appear "strung neatly from a line up near the ceiling--A toe, a foot and shin, an arm, a cock/ A bit like the rosebud in his buttonhole". Childhood is an unfading, unfailing source in Heaney's work and is caught with a breathless vitality, that is both "earthed and heady". "The Real Names" revisits the schoolboys who played Shakespeare: Owen Kelly as "Sperrins Caliban" with "turnip fists" and "some junior-final day-boy" as Miranda. "Catatonic Bobby X" plays Feste, "With his curled-in shoulders and cabbage-water eyes/speechlessly rocking... Me in attendance, watching sorrow's elf/ Bow his head and hunch and stay beyond us..." This poem has the humour, exactness, scope and tenderness of Heaney at his best. His language is as muscular and inventive as ever. He subverts the verb "waver" into a noun in "Perch" and idiom meets innovation in words such as "rut-shuddery", "flood-slubs" and "adoze". His address achieves great inclusiveness, extending the local to the universal, invoking the people who first named his world, and granting them meaning and place in the wider one. He seeks to be surefooted, to reach a clarity of understanding, asking in the wonderfully satiric "Known World", "How does the real get into the made-up?" Once more, Heaney demonstrates with humility, grace and lightness how poetry can "hold/ In the everything flows and steady go of the world."--Cherry Smyth
Review
Accepting the Latin of his education, Heaney casts off provincialism and becomes magnificantly authoritative. -- Daily Telegraph, March 2001
Electric Light is as fine as anything Heaney has done to date. -- Independent, March 2001
Heaneys most assured and focused collection to date... -- Sunday Herald, March 2001
Seamus Heaney goes on making it new, and Electric Light is as good as anything hes done. -- Financial Times, March 2001
There have been those who have seen Heaney as a merely enjoyable, rather than interesting poet; with his 11th collection he turns the tables on those critics. -- The Times, March 2001
About the Author
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He has published numerous volumes of poetry, translation and criticism and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He has twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level in 1996 and Beowulf in 1999.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Clothes Shrine It was a whole new sweetness In the early days to find
Light white muslin blouses
On a see-through nylon line
Drip-drying in the bathroom
Or a nylon slip in the shrine
Of its own electricity -
As if St Brigid once more
Had rigged up a ray of sun
Like the one she'd strung on air
To dry her own cloak on
(Hard-pressed Brigid, so
Unstoppably on the go) -
The damp and slump and unfair
Drag of the workaday
Made light
Of and got through
As usual, brilliantly.
