Review by Booklist Review
Nobel laureate Heaney is a virtual archaeologist, digging deeply into the earth in search of civilization's foundation and mining the human psyche for what is immutable, archetypal, and quintessential in our collective unconscious. Identifying resonantly with the Irish landscape, Heaney is a poet of labor, praising hammer and anvil, trowel and blade. Many poets possess a painterly sensibility; Heaney's is sculptural, his materials clay, stone, and brick. This bard of the hand-hewn and the hard-won, the bog and the country road, builds poems out of quatrains, that sturdy form, and constructs rock-solid sonnets. Looking to the past with tenderness and bemusement, steeped in myths ancient and modern, he recalls when tinkers appeared in his home district, muses over the changes war and technology deliver, contemplates a melting glacier, and traces the lineage between catastrophes of old and today's crises: Anything can happen, the tallest towers / Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune / Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, / Setting it down bleeding on the next. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from the Irish Nobel laureate may be his best in more than a decade. Celebrations of everyday objects (a fireman's helmet, a sledgehammer, an anvil), homages to and elegies for other poets (George Seferis, Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz) and gleaming recollections from the author's rural youth dominate this lyrical volume, which stands out as well for its diversity of forms: the supple pentameters Heaney perfected in such 1990s volumes as Seeing Things rub shoulders with prose poems, rough-hewn quatrains and slower-paced free verse reminiscent of the 1970s poems that made his name. Many efforts strike a ground note of nostalgia: "A Clip" remembers the "one-roomed, one-chimney house" where Heaney got his first haircut, "Senior Infants" looks back at primary school. Yet for all his Irish rootedness, Heaney's newest work remains international (poems set in the London Underground, the Danish bog where he set famous earlier poems, and in a warm and pleasant Italy) and unboundedly global: one of the strongest short lyrics, "Hofn," wonders at a newly melting glacier, anxious about global warming, yet astonished by the ice's remaining immensities, its "grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff," "its coldness that still seemed enough/ To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath." (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Nobel prize winner Heaney's (Death of a Naturalist) latest collection of robust lyrics celebrates work, memory, and the physicality of existence. Brimming with anvils, hammers, shovels, and pumps, these poems are scored into the page with Heaney's signature accentual and alliterative force. They demonstrate that words can be braced and wedged and lifted and swung from the shoulder, leaving almost physical traces of the objects they name: "Contrary, unflowery/ sky-whisk and bristle, more/ twig-fret than fruit-fort,/ crabbed/ as crabbed could be-/ that was the tree/ I remembered." For Heaney, the tongue is the muscle best suited to the hard work of animating the past, as in the sonnet sequence "District and Circle," in which he re-creates the movement of a subway ride taken decades earlier: "So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,/ My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,/ My father's glazed face in my own waning/ And craning...." His is an uncompromising Irish tongue-a rural one, at that-and the gravitas he invests in unfamiliar objects will leave some American readers cold, but there is no question that Heaney's poetry presents the "mass and majesty of this world" with unparalleled vigor. Recommended.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
