The worlds behind the poems

Seamus Heaney and the Troubles

Heaney (1939–2013) grew up on a farm at Mossbawn in County Derry and made his name in the Belfast literary scene of the 1960s. When sectarian violence broke out at the end of that decade, a Catholic poet of his standing was under pressure to speak for his community. The volume before Field Work, North (1975), answered that pressure with dense, mythic bog-poems. Field Work (1979) is the book of his retreat from it: in 1972 he left Belfast for a farmhouse at Glanmore in County Wicklow, in the Republic, and the collection registers both the relief and the guilt of that move. Its elegies mourn real people killed in those years: his second cousin Colum McCartney, the youth worker Sean Armstrong, the fisherman Louis O’Neill, blown up the week after Bloody Sunday. R. F. Foster notes that in this period ‘if one preoccupation of his work… is love, the other is death’.

Two literary presences shape the book. W. B. Yeats stands behind its elegies and its high public tone, ‘Casualty’ openly echoing ‘Easter, 1916’. Dante is, Foster writes, ‘a constant reference point’: Heaney takes an epigraph from the Purgatorio for the Lough Beg elegy and ends the whole collection with a version of the Ugolino episode from the Inferno. Behind both is Heaney’s lifelong sense of the poet as a maker rooted in place and in ordinary labour, the pen that will ‘dig’ like a spade.

Owen Sheers, Wales and the border

Sheers (born 1974) grew up near Abergavenny, in the Welsh border country under Skirrid Fawr. Skirrid Hill (2005) is steeped in that landscape and in the divisions it carries: between England and Wales, between the living and the remembered, and between Sheers and the Welsh language he cannot fully speak, ‘the unspoken words / of an unlearned tongue’. Its history is Welsh too: the loss of heavy industry (the closing steelworks behind ‘The Steelworks’), and, in ‘Mametz Wood’, the 1916 Battle of the Somme, where a Welsh division took catastrophic losses and the ground still gives up bones. A group of the poems steps abroad, to Arizona and Los Angeles, carrying the same preoccupations with ageing, distance and myth into new country.

Sheers’s chief literary inheritances are the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, acknowledged directly in the subtitle of ‘Inheritance’, and Heaney himself: ‘Hedge School’ answers Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’ almost line for line. That makes the exam pairing unusually apt, because the younger poet has clearly read the elder.

Why the pairing works

Both are poets of a specific, named, worked landscape that refuses to stay scenery; both write elegy and family; both distrust easy consolation. Neil Corcoran’s remark about Heaney, that Field Work holds ‘in the same balance the song of possible reconciliation and the memorial lament’, could stand over both collections. Their differences are as useful as their likenesses: Irish conflict against Welsh memory, a poet inside the violence against a poet looking back at it.