‘His argument true, his tone light’

I think I did pretty well in the first quarter of last year in my poetic pursuit, a couple of major well-known figures in the contemporary poetry, I read. Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet who won Nobel Prize in 1995. When it comes to Ireland, you know W. B. Yeats’ poems; I liked very much, his folklores especially. Yeats’ folk tales had some cultural similarities with the Indian subcontinent. When I picked up this Irish poet, I was expecting some relatedness, though in some other enclave of poetic land. And I was not disappointed!

He is too natural a poet I guess, at least from the themes that I extracted from this poetry collection. Look at the list: Digging, potato digging, the barn, cow in calf, waterfall, gravities, blackberry picking, churning day… these are some of the poems! In the first poem, he compares the potato digging of his father, his grandfather cutting more turf than anyone, and says at last that he has no spade like these men to dig, so he will dig in his own way….

“Between my fingers and my thumb
the squat pen rests, snug as a gun…..

Between my fingers and my thumb
the squat pen rests and I’ll dig with it.”

This is a good collection and I liked many poems. There is a poem called ‘at a potato digging’ and I loved it. It covered the historical potato famine and the hard work of potato diggers!

This book can be a challenging read for readers who don’t have a taste for naturalistic poems. The poet has taken the readers to his childhood memories, his personal experiences, his happy moments, and time of loss, through extremely vivid imagery in and around his local natural landscape. A truly def portrayal. He has described the harsh activities of farm life and depicted the brutal culling of animals with an amazing poetic sense.

Leaving you with the poem “Follower” from this collection, describing relation with his father,

“My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away”

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