Abstract
This chapter delves into Seamus Heaney’s archives, unearthing manuscripts, limited edition publications, and environmental documents that reveal Heaney’s support for conservation causes. Although Heaney is often interpreted as an ecopoet, and there has been promising, recent work on his climate change poetry, no previous scholars have mentioned his support for environmental projects. This research thus aims to expand readings of Heaney as a poet of place, nature and environment, towards an understanding of his work as a public intellectual engaged with issues including bog conservation, resistance to a new road, and the protection of birds. The ‘deep time’ of the distant past and far future haunts Anthropocene culture, and this may give rise to an ethic of care that aims to protect fragile, ancient environments for the future. I analyse Heaney’s celebrated bog-poems through the lens of the Anthropocene’s preoccupation with ‘deep time’. The bogland is a highly significant focus for Heaney, and his poems examine vast systems of climate, the water cycle, glaciation and geology. Archival drafts reveal new insights into Heaney’s awareness of water pollution, peat as a fossil fuel, extinction, and that his conservation activities focused primarily on boglands. I build on the work of David Farrier, Brendan Corcoran and others, who read Heaney’s published work in the context of Anthropocene studies. The chapter also develops a line of enquiry that scholars such as Maureen O’Connor and Benjamin Gearey have raised; this complicates Heaney’s early celebration of peat cutting, by showing that Heaney came to understand that peat extraction could damage the bogland. I propose that this might be why he used his celebrated bog-poems to raise funds for later bog conservation projects. With reference to theories of environmental cosmopolitanism, earth systems and planetary ways of seeing in the Anthropocene, I then analyse his images of the planet, in conservation documents and later environmental poems.
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Notes
- 1.
Seamus Heaney. Letter to Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, 2005. Ctd in Connla Young. ‘Revealed: Seamus Heaney opposed route of new A6 carriageway.’ Irish News, 17 Nov 2016. Web. 10.01.2022. https://www.irishnews.com/news/2016/11/17/news/revealed-seamus-heaney-opposed-route-of-new-a6-787716/
- 2.
See, for example, the drafts in Tony Curtis, ed. The Art of Seamus Heaney. 4th edn. Bridgend: Seren, 2001 [1982]. 53–62.
- 3.
Heaney judged the Arvon Foundation’s poetry competition with Ted Hughes in 1980. See Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, eds. Arvon Foundation Poetry Competition 1980 Anthology. Ulster Museum. A Personal Selection: Seamus Heaney. 20 August–24 October 1982. Ulster Museum Publication Number 248. Seamus Heaney, author, and Tim O’Neill, designer. ‘Columcille the Scribe’ limited-edition poem. Royal Irish Academy library, 2004. Seamus Heaney, poet, and John O’Connor, engraver. ‘The Earth House.’ National Library of Ireland Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition, 2021. Limited edition marked LO P 592. Heaney opened the ‘Face to Face with Your Past’ exhibition at Silkeborg Museum, Denmark, where he’d seen the Tollund Man bog-body, 2 Aug 1996. ‘The Man and the Bog,’ corrected proof, Silkeborg Museum. Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers, collection 960, box 86, folder 19. Seamus Heaney. ‘From the Republic of Conscience.’ Dublin: Amnesty International Irish Section, 1985. Seamus Heaney. ‘The Wishing Chair’ (later collected as ‘Squarings xxxix’ in Seeing Things). John F. Deane, ed. Thistledown: Poems for UNICEF. Dedalus, 1990. Brandes and Durkan 218.
- 4.
Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers Collection 960, box 89, folder 19. Proofs of Heaney’s talk ‘The man and the bog,’ Silkeborg Museum, Denmark, August 1996, 2.
- 5.
Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney Papers collection 960, box 89, folder 19, two word-processed or faxed letters from Mogens Schou Jørgensen headed ‘Wetlands Archaeology Research Project’, regarding Heaney’s essay. See also https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prehistoric/past/past25.html#Bog, accessed on 3 March 2023, which details the discussion of wetland environments and archaeology at the 1998 conference.
- 6.
Heaney writes on a draft of his poem ‘Belderg’ that he donated a page of the manuscript to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council to raise funds via sale at an auction in 1989. National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney manuscripts. MS 49,493/39 Fol 1 Manuscript draft of ‘Belderg’ beginning ‘26 July 1974 (1) Contributed to Auction, May 1989’ Manuscript on cream A4 paper, p. 135 (digital catalogue numbering). See also my analysis below. The 1989 anthology The Orange Dove of Fiji: Poems for The World Wide Fund for Nature contained Heaney’s poem ‘The Road at Frosses.’ This was later collected as ‘Squarings xxxi’ in Seeing Things (Brandes and Durkan, 215). The year 1991 saw Heaney contributing to a series of posters for the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation, which paired artwork by T. P. Flanagan with sections of his poems. For example, T. P. Flanagan’s ‘Where Sheep Have Passed’ is paired with two stanzas of Heaney’s ‘Bogland’ for the ‘Peatlands’ poster. National Library of Ireland EPH F1089. Sections of Heaney’s poem ‘The Peninsula,’ from Door into the Dark (1969), features on the ‘Wetlands’ poster, an excerpt from ‘Exposure’ (1975) on ‘Woodlands,’ and an extract from ‘Fieldwork’ on ‘Meadowlands.’ I am thankful to Siobhan Coyle from Ulster Wildlife for images of the posters. In 1999, Heaney’s poem ‘The Child That’s Due’ from ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ was printed in a limited-edition broadside by the Bank of Ireland Group Treasury, with some signed copies for Irish Peatlands Conservation. The Bank of Ireland Group made a donation to the Irish Peatland Conservation Council’s ‘Save the Bog’ campaign in recognition of Heaney’s contribution (Brandes and Durkan, 158). The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Northern Ireland branch notes that ‘Lough Beg near Toome is part of a landscape that Seamus Heaney called “the country of the mind”. The much-loved poet wrote about his experiences growing up in the area in poems like “The Strand at Lough Beg” and lent his support to a management plan from the RSPB to improve the site.’ Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. ‘Budget cuts impact Lough Beg.’ 1 Apr 2010. Web. Accessed 16.02.2022. ‘Lough Beg near Toome is part of a landscape that Seamus Heaney called “the country of the mind”. The much-loved poet wrote about his experiences growing up in the area in poems like “The Strand at Lough Beg” and lent his support to a management plan from the RSPB to improve the site.’ I am thankful to Catherine Heaney and the Estate of Seamus Heaney for bringing this to my attention.
- 7.
Catherine Morrison. ‘Heaney backs campaign to save beloved wetlands.’ Irish News, 3 Apr 2007 p. 3. For political reasons, Heaney would not have seen Lady Moyola as an ally before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998: she was the widow of the Ulster Unionist James Chichester-Clark.
- 8.
In a BBC broadcast from 2008, Heaney spoke out against a motorway that would pass near the historical sites at Tara in the Republic of Ireland. Irish Times. ‘Heaney claims motorway near Tara desecrates sacred landscape.’ 1 Mar 2008. Web. Accessed 17.02.22. https://advance.lexis.com/document/?pdmfid=1519360&crid=6cf81f4f-2247-4a6f-b433-f805ce9e3fde&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fnews%2Furn%3AcontentItem%3A4RYD-36Y0-TX39-J18C-00000-
- 9.
Seamus Heaney. ‘The whisper of love.’ Granta 102 (summer 2008). https://granta.com/subjectobject-whisper/
- 10.
Jim Holt. ‘When the world turns ugly.’ Granta 102 (summer 2008): 16–21.
- 11.
C. B. Cox, ‘The Painter’s Eye’, Spectator, 20 May 1966, p. 638.
- 12.
Specifically ‘Belderg’ for the Irish Peatland Conservation Council in 1989 and ‘Exposure’ for the Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation in 1991. The use of these poems is further discussed later in this chapter. The term ‘Ulster’ was used by unionists. Seamus Heaney, interviewee, and Mark Carruthers, interviewer. ‘Seamus Heaney: ‘If I described myself as an Ulsterman I’d have thought I was selling a bit of my birthright.’ Irish Times, 23 Jan 2011. Accessed 24.01.22. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/seamus-heaney-if-i-described-myself-as-an-ulsterman-i-d-have-thought-i-was-selling-a-bit-of-my-birthright-1.2077002
- 13.
‘The Road at Frosses’ was published in a World Wide Fund for Nature anthology whose contributors included British royalty (1989); ‘The Child that’s Due’ from ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ supported the aforementioned ‘Save the Bog’ campaign in 1990, as the Bank of Ireland Group treasury made a donation to the campaign in recognition of Heaney’s permission to print the poem. Brandes and Durkan 158, 215.
- 14.
Benjamin Lytal. ‘The Plough Turned Round: District and Circle.’ Los Angeles Times, 18 Jun 2006, ‘R’sec. P.8. Rosemary Goring. ‘The magic circle’. The Herald [Glasgow], 01 Apr 2006: 4.
- 15.
Chao Xie. ‘Reading Corporeality in the Climate Change Era: A Comparative Study of Seamus Heaney’s and Hua Hai’s Ecological Poetry.’ Kritika Kultura 38 (2022): 274–89.
- 16.
Email from Michael Parker to the present author, 29 March 2022.
- 17.
Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers, collection 960, Box 89, folder 4, T. A. Barry. ‘Origins and Distribution of Peat-Types in the Bogs of Ireland.’ Undated article funded by Bord na Móna energy company.
- 18.
Environmental Protection Agency, John Lucey and Yvonne Doris. Biodiversity in Ireland: A Review of Habitats and Species. Johnstown: Co. Wexford, 2001. https://www.epa.ie/pubs/reports/biodiversity/EPA_Biodiversity.pdf6
- 19.
Irish Peatland Conservation Council. ‘Habitat loss of peatlands.’ N.D. Web. http://www.ipcc.ie/a-to-z-peatlands/peatland-action-plan/habitat-loss-of-peatlands/
- 20.
For example, early manuscript drafts of ‘Bog Queen’ from North are juxtaposed with poems that would be published in Wintering Out and which are dated to 1969. NLI 49, 493/11. ‘Orange drums, Tyrone 1966’ was published in the year of its composition in The Listener (Brandes and Durkan), but this poem would not be collected until North.
- 21.
Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers Collection 960, box 89, folder 4. See, for example, ‘The Moving Bog,’ Bord na Móna, undated booklet, T. A. Barry’s ‘Origins and Distribution of Peat-Types in the Bogs of Ireland,’ undated article funded by Bord na Móna energy company, and Leslie Gardner, ‘Bogland Harvest,’ Blackwoods, 1974.
- 22.
Emory Rose Library, Seamus Heaney papers Collection 960, box 89, folder 4. ‘The Moving Bog,’ Bord na Móna, undated booklet.
- 23.
The ‘Irish Elk’ is not actually an elk at all but an extinct species of giant deer. These creatures were widespread throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa, but some of the best specimens are from Irish loughs. See A.J. Stuart, P.A. Kosintsev, T.F.G. Higham, and A.M. Lister. ‘Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth.’ Nature 431 (2004): 684–89.
- 24.
A.J. Stuart, P.A. Kosintsev, T.F.G. Higham and A.M. Lister. ‘Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth.’ Nature 431 (2004): 684–89.
- 25.
For deforestation as a contributory factor to bog formation, see Birks, H.J.B. & Birks, H.H. Quaternary Palaeoecology. London: Edward Arnold, 1980.
- 26.
National Geographic. ‘Bog.’ National Geographic, 1996–2020. Web. Accessed 26.05.20. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/bog/
- 27.
Heaney’s presentation of wood unearthed from the bog and uncovered in Lough Neagh is linked to Heaney’s later examination of a causeway of recently planted firs in a bog in Seeing Things—a ‘meaning made of trees’ (ST, 89).
- 28.
Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation poster, featuring T. P. Flanagan’s ‘Where Sheep Have Passed’ and two stanzas of Heaney’s ‘Bogland.’ National Library of Ireland EPH F1089. It is important to note that Flanagan is the dedicatee of ‘Bogland’ and was instrumental in the poem’s creation, although Flanagan’s painting ‘Bogland’ does not feature on the poster.
- 29.
National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney archive, MS 49 493–12 fol 1, labelled pp. 1–54 by archivist, manuscript, and annotated typescript drafts of poems, many of which were collected in Wintering Out. TS with MS amendments, cream A4 paper, p. 46 (digital catalogue numbering), ‘A Pollution.’
- 30.
See ‘As I was walking all alane’ or ‘As I was walking mine alane’ in Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. The Oxford Book of Ballads. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1910. 868.
- 31.
C. Kinealy, A death-dealing famine: the great hunger in Ireland. Chicago: Pluto, 1997.
- 32.
Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation poster, ‘Woodlands,’ 1991. Featuring T. P. Flanagan’s painting ‘Lagan Twilight, Barnett’s Park, Belfast’ and two stanzas of Heaney’s poem ‘Exposure.’
- 33.
Marie-Christine Flechard, Matthew S. Carroll, Patricia J. Cohn, and Aine Ni Dhubhain. ‘The changing relationships between forestry and the local community in rural northwestern Ireland.’ Canadian Journal of Forestry Research 37 (2007): 1999–2009 (2001).
- 34.
Heaney alludes to this in ‘Alphabets’ (HL, 2).
- 35.
Greg Garrad also commented on the extinction-poems in Wintering Out, in an unpublished PhD thesis (1999, 195).
- 36.
The predicament of being an Irish writer who writes in English is one that is explored at length, notably by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Heaney quotes in his epigraph to ‘The Wool Trade’ (WO, 27). Heaney tells O’Driscoll that he has reached ‘an un-anxious state’ about this predicament. He says that ‘I still believe that my English is inflected, perhaps better say by Ireland than by Irish, but at this stage that’s neither a cause for swank nor shyness’ (O’Driscoll, 315).
- 37.
Heaney is careful to date his drafts: NLI 49, 493/11, manuscript draft labelled ‘For the Tollund Man’ by Heaney, on lined paper. Heaney dates the draft ‘9–10 March 1970 1–3 a.m’ and notes that he continued work on the poem in Ballydavid, a Gaelic-speaking village in the west of Ireland.
- 38.
See, for example, Patricia Coughlan, “Bog Queens’: The Representation of Women in the poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney. M. Allen, ed. Seamus Heaney: New Casebooks. London: Palgrave, 1997. Pp. 185–205.
- 39.
F. Tanneberger, C. Tegetmeyer, S. Busse, A. Barthelmes, S. Shumka, A. Moles Mariné, K. Jenderedjian, G.M. Steiner, F. Essl, J. Etzold, C. Mendes, A. Kozulin, P. Frankard, Đ. Milanović, A. Ganeva, I. Apostolova, A. Alegro, P. Delipetrou, J. Navrátilová, M. Risager, A. Leivits, A.M. Fosaa, S. Tuominen, F. Muller, T. Bakuradze, M. Sommer, K. Christanis, E. Szurdoki, H. Oskarsson, S.H. Brink, J. Connolly, L. Bragazza, G. Martinelli, O. Aleksāns, A. Priede, D. Sungaila, L. Melovski, T. Belous, D. Saveljić, F. de Vries, A. Moen, W. Dembek, J. Mateus, J. Hanganu, A. Sirin, A. Markina, M. Napreenko, P. Lazarević, V. Šefferová Stanová, P. Skoberne, P. Heras Pérez, X. Pontevedra-Pombal, J. Lonnstad, M. Küchler, C. Wüst-Galley, S. Kirca, O. Mykytiuk, R. Lindsay and H. Joosten. ‘The Peatland Map of Europe.’ Mires and Peat 19 (2017): 1–17.
- 40.
European Union. ‘The history of the European Union.’ 13.11.19. Web. 20 Feb 2020. https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history_en#1970-1979
- 41.
National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney papers, annotated typescript drafts of poems for inclusion in WINTER SEEDS, MS 49,493 fol 19.
- 42.
Glob gives detailed information about the radioactivity, carbon, and how human tissues are permeable to radiation from beyond the Earth: ‘All living things contain a constant quantity of this radio-active carbon as a result of cosmic radiation from outer space, which produces the radio-active carbon dioxide absorbed by all green plants and by sea-water. From these sources it passes into men and animals’ (45). When the Grauballe Man’s antiquity was disputed, Glob detailed the process of carbon dating: ‘The public were looking in particular to a dating from the Carbon-14 laboratory at the National Museum, but this had to wait for various adjustments, as nuclear explosions in 1956 had raised the general level of radioactivity in the atmosphere all over the world’ (61). Heaney’s work is not so preoccupied with technicalities, but this does mean that Glob’s book is prescient of the narrative of the ‘nuclear Anthropocene.’
- 43.
NLI 49,493–33, red grid-squared A4 spiral-bound ENRI notebook labelled ‘Bits of—NORTH Stations Beowulf Revidus’ by Heaney, draft of review of The Mound People by P. V. Glob, page beginning ‘I was so haunted by P.V. Glob’s earlier book,’ p. 32 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 44.
NLI 49,493–33, red grid-squared A4 spiral-bound ENRI notebook labelled ‘Bits of—NORTH Stations Beowulf Revidus’ by Heaney, MS, draft review of The Mound People by P. V. Glob, page beginning ‘The mound people were an aristocratic caste’, p. 31 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 45.
NLI MS 49,493/46. MS text of a 1975 broadcast about and poetry reading from North, titled ‘Broadcast of North Poems: 6th June 1975,’ A4 unlined cream paper, page numbered (1) by Heaney.
- 46.
See also Edna Longley’s view that ‘moles … focus differences between the Irish and English terrains’ (82).
- 47.
NLI Ms 49,493–35 fol 2 TS on A4 paper, titled ‘A FLOURISH FOR THE PRINCE OF DENMARK,’ p. 52 (digital catalogue numbering). Heaney notes that he did not attend the planned reading due to the birth of his daughter.
- 48.
NLI 49 493–36, TS draft of ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces,’ A4 typescript on cream paper beginning ‘magnified on display,’ p. 33 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 49.
National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney archive. MS 49 493–37, folder 1, first TS draft of ‘Bone Dream’ (published as ‘Bone Dreams’) with handwritten amendments, cream A4 paper, p. 9 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 50.
Richard Brown, ‘Bog Poems and Book Poems: Doubleness, Self-Translation and Pun in Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.’ In Neil Corcoran, ed. The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1992. 153–67 (p. 153).
- 51.
NLI MS 49,493/39/Fol 3 manuscript draft of what would become ‘Belderg,’ labelled 6 by Heaney, cream A4 paper, p. 140 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 52.
NLI 49 493–36 fol 1. MS draft of ‘Belderg’ beginning ‘There were the burnt plug-marks,’ pen on cream unlined A4 paper, p. 28 (digital catalogue numbering). My transcription.
- 53.
National Library of Ireland, Seamus Heaney manuscripts. MS 49,493/39 Fol 1 Manuscript draft of ‘Bogland’ beginning ‘26 July 1974 (1) Contributed to Auction, May 1989’ Manuscript on cream A4 paper, p. 135 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 54.
NLI 49,493–34 fol 1, typescript of ‘Bog Queen’ labelled ‘THE VIKING QUEEN OF ULSTER’, TS on A4 cream paper, p. 31 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 55.
NLI MS 49,493/46. MS text of a 1975 broadcast about and poetry reading from North, titled ‘Broadcast of North Poems: 6th June 1975,’ A4 unlined cream paper, page numbered (2) by Heaney.
- 56.
National Geographic. ‘Bog.’ 1996–2020. Web. Accessed 26.05.20. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/bog/
- 57.
NLI MS49,439/39 Fol 4 manuscript of ‘Kinship’ on cream unlined A4 paper, headed ‘I love the shaky floors of memory’, p. 165 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 58.
Heaney MS 49,493/39/Fol 3. Draft of ‘Kinship.’ TS labelled ‘11’ by Heaney, beginning ‘Quagmire, swampland, morass’: on A4 cream paper, p. 94 (digital catalogue numbering). Heaney’s original spelling is retained. An early section of ‘Turf Burning’ appears as in a typescript draft as a section of ‘Kinship’: NLI 49,493 fol 1 TS draft beginning ‘I love the quaking floors of memory’, p. 49 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 59.
NLI 49,493–34 fol 2. Typescript drafts of ‘TURF BURNING’ on cream A4 paper, one with manuscript amendments, pp. 58, 59 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 60.
NLI MS 49,493/46. MS text of a 1975 broadcast, titled ‘Broadcast of North Poems: 6th June 1975,’ A4 unlined cream paper, page numbered (1) by Heaney.
- 61.
NLI MS49,493/12, Folder 3, manuscript poem titled ‘To Kit,’ cream unlined A4 paper, archived with the drafts of Wintering Out, p. 116 (digital catalogue numbering).
- 62.
Department for Communications, Climate Action & Environment. ‘Oil & Gas: Exploration and Production.’ 2020. Web. Accessed 20 Feb 2020. https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/natural-resources/topics/Oil-Gas-Exploration-Production/Pages/home.aspx
- 63.
Graeme Macdonald. ‘Research Note: The Resources of Fiction.’ Reviews in Cultural Theory 4. 2 (2013): 1–24.
- 64.
For oil-poetry from North America, see ‘Brent Crude’ and ‘Dynamic Positioning’ in Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came. Oakland: Commune, 2015. See also Jonathan Skinner’s ‘Auger’ from Poets for Living Waters’ 20 Apr 2011. Web. 26 May 2020. https://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/from-auger-by-jonathan-skinner/. For an ecocritical analysis of Nigerian oil-poetry by Ogaga Ifowodo and Tanure Ojaide, see Yvonne Reddick, ‘Palm oil and crude oil: environmental damage, resource conflict and literary strategies in the Niger Delta.’ Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26.3 (Summer 2019): 688–721.
- 65.
For the La Mon restaurant petrol bomb, see BBC On This Day archive. ‘Belfast bomb suspects rounded up.’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/18/newsid_2550000/2550869.stm
- 66.
Marco Pagliaro. Glycerol: The Renewable Platform Chemical. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2017. 1–21.
- 67.
Heaney discusses this 1972 Civil Rights march at Newry with O’Driscoll (119–20).
- 68.
Ulster Trust for Nature Conservation poster. ‘Meadowlands,’ 1991. Featuring two stanzas from Heaney’s ‘Field Work’ and T. P. Flanagan’s ‘A Summer Meadow.’
- 69.
Walter C. Patterson. ‘Inadvertent Climate Modification: Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate’. Review. Your Environment 3.1 (Spring 1972): 42–3.
- 70.
Stephen Knight. ‘District and Circle by Seamus Heaney: The bog man cometh (again).’ Independent, 9 Apr 2006. Web. 2nd Apr 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/district-and-circle-by-seamus-heaney-6104219.html
- 71.
Andrew Motion. ‘Digging Deep.’ The Guardian, 1 Apr 2006. Web. 2 Apr 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/01/poetry.seamusheaney1
- 72.
The mowing machine is conspicuous because the poem is set ‘among the Mennonites,’ whose most conservative members eschew mechanised farm equipment.
- 73.
Heaney comments on his shift in focus from introspective lyric ‘I’ to collective ‘we’ in other poems, in his discussion with O’Driscoll (89).
- 74.
For Edmund Burke’s treatise on how the ‘terrible’ inspires a sense of sublimity, see A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
- 75.
Email from Catherine Heaney at the Seamus Heaney Estate to Yvonne Reddick. 16.02.2022.
- 76.
NLI MS 49,493/126 fol 1. Seamus Heaney. ‘Höfn’—TS with MS amendments p. 29.
- 77.
NLI MS 49,493/126 fol 1. Seamus Heaney. ‘Höfn’—TS with MS amendments, MS draft p. 31.
- 78.
These are ‘periphrastic expressions used instead of the simple name of a thing, characteristic of Old Teutonic, and esp. Old Norse, poetry’ (OED). See, for example, Heaney’s use of kennings to evoke the bog: ‘Earth-pantry, bone-vault,/sun-bank’ (North, 34).
- 79.
Earlier in Heaney’s work, the image of the tongue has been a multifaceted and recurrent symbol of language, Irishness, and utterance. In Wintering Out (1972), words ‘Fading, in the gallery of the tongue,’ with a quotation from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as its epigraph, elaborate on Joyce’s thought that English wielded by an Englishman is different from English used by the Irish subject (WO, 27). In ‘The Government of the Tongue’ (1986), Heaney writes that poetry has the power to suggest alternative forms of thought but is not subservient to political agendas. ‘[N]o lyric has ever stopped a tank,’ but the power of poetry is ‘to hold in a single thought reality and justice’ (FK, 189–90). For Heaney’s ‘On His Work in the English Tongue,’ an elegy for Hughes, and a section from Beowulf that speaks volumes about how Heaney employs and interprets work in the ‘English tongue,’ see Electric Light 2001 61–63.
- 80.
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. 13 Apr 2018. Web. 3 Apr 2020. https://gulbenkian.pt/uk-branch/publication/wild-reckoning/
- 81.
For this insight about prepositions, I am indebted to John McAuliffe’s discussion of this poem at the ‘Planting Poems: Seamus Heaney’s Ecopoetry’ workshop for the British Academy at the Rylands Library on 13 November 2021.
- 82.
Other ecopoets embrace just such disorienting perspectives. Juliana Spahr’s sequence ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’ intercuts a prose-like text about the melting of ice caps with a litany of extinct or endangered animal names (Well Then There Now, Jaffrey: Black Sparrow 2011, 75–93). Heaney’s work did not develop in such an experimental vein, and his poetry employs relatively traditional forms, such as the pentameter and the sonnet.
- 83.
NLI 49,493/126 fol 3 ‘THE TOLLUND MAN IN SPRINGTIME,’ TS with MS amendments, cream A4 paper, p. 111 (digital catalogue numbering). My transcription.
- 84.
Eugène Guillevic. ‘La Bretagne’ is mentioned four times, once in the title and three times in the poems (locs 1671, 1747).
- 85.
The present author’s translation. Capital letters have been kept for the beginning of each line, and asterisks are left-justified, in keeping with Guillevic’s original: Guillevic locs 1850–1877.
- 86.
Email from Seamus Burns to Yvonne Reddick, 16.02.22.
- 87.
Seamus Heaney. ‘Foreword.’ In RSPB. Lough Beg Management Plan. 2010.
- 88.
Heaney’s legacy formed an important part of environmental campaigns against the new A6 road, years after his death. These include a petition to ‘Stope [sic] Ecocide in Heaney Country’ and a Friends of the Earth campaign. Change.org. ‘Stope [sic] Ecocide in Heaney Country.’ N.d. Web. Accessed on 17.02.22 https://www.change.org/p/save-heaney-country-ecocideinheaneycountry. Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland. ‘Disrespecting “everyday miracles and the distant past”: the Lough Beg wetlands and the A6 road.’ March 2017. 3. The document’s title cites the ‘everyday miracles and the distant past’ that the Nobel Committee found in Heaney’s work when they awarded him the Prize in 1995.
- 89.
Change.org. ‘Stope [sic] Ecocide in Heaney Country.’ N.d. Accessed on February 17 2022. https://www.change.org/p/save-heaney-country-ecocideinheaneycountry
- 90.
Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland. ‘Disrespecting “everyday miracles and the distant past”: the Lough Beg wetlands and the A6 road.’ 3 March 2017. Accessed on 22 April 2023. The document’s title cites the ‘everyday miracles and the distant past,’ which the Nobel Committee found in Heaney’s work when they awarded him the Prize in 1995.
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Reddick, Y. (2024). Seamus Heaney’s Environmental Poetry: Conservation Causes, Deep Time, Shifting Scales, and Climate Change. In: Anthropocene Poetry. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39389-1_4
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