Feature: Poetry - Human Chain. By Sea­mus Heaney and New and Collected Poems. By UA Fanthorpe

Published: 7 October, 2010
JOHN HORDER

THROUGHOUT 12 books of poetry, Seamus Heaney has appeared in the best impossible light, like a knight in shining armour. Born in County Derry in 1939, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In 1999 his translation of Beowulf established him as one of the most powerful poets writing today. He is a Very Famous Poet (VFP), like Milton – who dictated Paradise Lost when blind – and, more recently, Stevie Smith and UA Fanthorpe.

“Churning Day”, “Blackberry-Picking”, and “Digging” in his first book, Death of a Natur­alist (1966) remain three of his most memorable and anthologised poems. Here he is speaking of his father and his gang of farm labourers at the end of “Digging”:

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.

This leads us across the bridge of 11 books to “The Conway Stewart” in Human Chain: “The nib uncapped/ Treating it to its first deep snorkel/ In a newly opened ink-bottle.” He can write with exquisite exactitude with his eyes closed.

After his recent stroke he has to let down some of his defences in “Chanson d’Aventure”, in which he is taken by ambulance to hospital with his wife at his side: “Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked/ In position for the drive,/ Bone-shaken, bumped at speed.” 

In “Route 110” he plots the descent into the underworld from the time when he was a bristlingly bright schoolboy – reading a used copy of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI – to the birth of his first grandchild. 

“The Door was Open and the House was Dark”, in memory of David Hammond, is one of a cluster about old friends. He says more about his relationship with David, with whom he played jazz, in his and Dennis O’Driscoll’s book of interviews, Stepping Stones (Faber), in which the latter leaves few stones unturned.

This does not prevent Seamus being Seamus, leaving nothing to the chance of future importunate biographers. His pristine image as “knight in shining armour” remains intact in this latest book. In the last poem, “A Kite for Aibhin”, he connects his deepest longings in life, death and beyond, to the taking off of the kite in the last line. 

I take my stand again,
halt opposite
Anahorish Hill to scan the blue
Back in that field to
launch our long-tailed
comet.

And now it hovers, tugs,
veers, dives askew,
Lifts itself, goes with the
wind until
It rises to loud cheers
from us below.

Rises, and my hand is
like a spindle 
Unspooling, the kite a
thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying,
carrying farther

The longing in the breast
and planted feet
And gazing face and
heart of the kite flier
Until string breaks and –
separate, elate –

The kite takes off, itself
alone, a windfall.

The re-issue of UA Fanthorpe’s New and Col­­lected Poems is for me the outstanding poetry book of the decade. Its 508 delicious pages brim over with subversion, warmth and risk-taking. Her trans­formation from prestig­ious head of English at Cheltenham Ladies College, to a secretary of the out-patients department of the local hospital, is already the stuff of legend. It gave her the raw material for her first book, Side Effects (I978) for starters.

The second poem “The Watcher”, gives a heart-felt taste of much that is to come:

I am a watcher; and the things I watch
Are birds and love...
The love I watch is rare,
its habitat
Concealed and strange.

The very old, the mad,
the failures. These
Have secret shares
Of loving and of being loved.
I can’t 
Lure them with food,

Stare at them through
binoculars, or join
Societies

That will preserve them. Birds are easier
To do things for.
But love is so persistent,
it survives,
With no one’s help.

Carol Ann Duffy writes in her preface about UA’s poems being “founded lastingly on love, not shakily on superiority. All her poems, in fact, were sourced in love... She had not a smidgeon of pomp­osity or self-regard”. Last, “this subtly subver­sive poet... would have been the perfect Poet Laur­eate or Professor of Poetry at Oxford. I’m pos­itive that, with Rosie [her partner] at her side, she could have been both.” 

Beg, borrow or steal this treasure-house of treats, and mull over their riches slowly, slowly, very slowly. UA is truly a Very Infamous Poet in the very best sense.

• Human Chain. By Sea­mus Heaney. Faber £12.99

• New and Collected Poems. By UA Fanthorpe. Preface by Carol Ann Duffy. Enitharmon 
Press £25