Bedding the Locale

Extract

Social Darwinian optimism assesses a poet in terms of his ‘advance’ or ‘development’—thus the conventional blurb’s claim that Seamus Heaney’s ‘power is, if anything, stronger than before’. The immodesty of Faber’s claim might obscure one’s sense that something more subtle, and less inevitably even, is taking place in Heaney’s third book. The book shows, for instance, the elements in his work as he assimilates himself into a variety of forms and tones of voice, some of which are modish, others achieved deftly but with creditable hesitation. In Death of a Naturalist, the title poem indicated Heaney’s capacity to formulate that revulsion which seems to be a fairly basic constituent of man’s relation to nature; (of the ‘gross- bellied frogs’).