The Redress of Poetry by Seamus Heaney

Well, more than I month since I wrote, but have done some reading, not enough but all I have the energy to do after challenging days with the new bureau.

So here is the best book I've read all year, maybe longer.  Finishing up my delving into Heaney's works, I tackled his Literature Nobel Prize, a series of ten lectures at Oxford, The Redress of Poetry.  Wow.  Maybe the rest of my year should be devoted to prize winning books.

Flat out, Heaney composes as beautifully in prose as poetry.  He makes me think about how much I miss reading for structure, voice, and intent instead of plot.  He makes me break out old high school literary magazines when we were challenged to tackle a particular meter, style, voice or some little used challenging device and like eager Catholic teenagers in the mid '60s, we did.  I can only quote verbatim and at length because these sections are not only thought provoking but exquisite.

"... Plato's world of ideal forms also provides the court of appeal through which poetic imagination seeks to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions .. whereas poets are typically more concerned to conjure with their own and their readers' sense of what is possilbe or desirable, or indeed imaginable ... It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality ... This redresssing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential ... denied or threatened by circumstances."

"...where the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our own experience..."

"... reminded of a remark once by an Irish diplomat with regard to the wording of a certain document, "This ... is a minor point of major importance."  In a similar way, the successful outcome of any work of art depends upon the seemingly effortlessness and surefingeredness with which such minor points are both established and despatched."

Some of Heaney's lectures focus on one or more poets, Marlowe, Wilde, Hopkins, but he always elevates his interpretation of them into something like this when he writes about his early love to Dylan Thomas: "...Thomas had gradually come to represent a longed-for prelapsarian wholeness, a state of the art where the song of the autistic and the acostic were extenive and coterminous, where the song of the self was effortlessly choral and its scale was a perfect measure and match for the world it sang it."

Heaney does quote entire poems or whole sections to make his points on how readily a poet creates redress.  His lecture that I read at the same time I was reading The Dawning Moon of the Mind, a translation of pyramid hieroglyphics,a chapter entitled Joy or Night about man's understanding of life and death, included all of Yeats' The Man and the Echo, that drew a marginal note of WOW.  I never heard of much less read Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, written in 1780 and still echoed loudly in the demeanor of the Irish women I encountered beyond the pale 200 years later.

I am passing this book on to my most literate book club members and then leaving on the shelves within easy reach to reread almost like seasonal psalms.