The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 69

Sunday IO 1 .995 the Observer Review 17 Seamus Heaney talks to Kate Kellaway about the 'dynamo-hum' of poetry SHORTCUTS Queen of the 'B's Ida Lupino Behind the Camera Edited by Annette Kuhn (Ticks Booksl I hman doins English An Ms gm for various sorts of inadequacy. The men in question are eventually judged bv a female court. Their verdict? Well, read the poem. Heaney sells it so convincingly by the end of ihelecrure, you are ransacking the shelves for it. (It is to be found in translation in Brendan kennellv's Penguin Book of Irish Verse and John Montague's Faber Book of Irish Verse).

1 went to see Seamus Heaney in his house in Dublin, filled with books, paintings and light. He is fall. white-haired, with heavy tortoise-shell spectacles which he some-rim es takes off to reveal a warm but secretive gaze, as though he had a good joke up his sleeve which he might or might not His 1 arie. suggested that we talk in 'the smi room', which in retrospect seemed appropriate to the convex sarion. Heaney is concerned with the frontier between poetry and life.

He explained how the knowledge that you are a poet or that you have written a poem is 'a line crossed in the self in seerei-a Bttle moment of exultation'. How much of a frontier is there between Seamus 1 leaney the poet and the man who. sits in the sun room drinking coffee? 'There's a connection but not a congruity. The further away you get from your social being, the better you get in your As a Catholic born in Northern Ireland. Heaney has always had to bear the load of other peoples' expectations about what his writing should be doing, and exactly hich frontiers he should be permitted to cross.

When I ask him if this has been a pressure, he nods. It as evidently a -sort of intellectual holiday to surprise his audiences by writing mainly about English poets. But he does not duck the-subject of poetic responsibility, agreeing with George Seferis modest phrase that it can help'. His lectures speak out against what Tony Harrison calls the 'rhubarbarians' of the world, but he approaches idealistic questions gingerly and is never fey. In his lec-mres he steadfastly makes die journey back from poetry to the unpoet-ic real world, imagining the modern poet gazing into the 'deadpan cloudiness of a word processor.

Isn't theproblem that duty and Scnmu- teiw.ev remember. with relish, one otW.B.Yeats's most damning lines oi "criticism: 'He has perfected thc-disci-niine of the mirror." As lleanev recite the words, he emphasises the nvo-ihirds positive pan of the entencu that tails to prepare you for its ending. Yeais's criticism could be refashioned and presented to Seamus Heaney as a compliment. Not that his poetry is he has earned his reputation as one oi the most distinguished poets writing iodav partly because his vision is so generous" and never solipsistic. However, in The Redress of Poem; a selection of magnificent, revelatory lectures given while he was Professor of Poetry ai Oxford U980-! 994 Heaney does that most difficult thing: he reflects poets and poems exactly.

ike owning to happiness, writing about poetry is a high-risk occupation. Reading poetic criticism, it easy 10 be discomfited by the shift mm poetry to the anticlimax of nrosf. One of the several joys of Heaney 's lectures, however, is the writing itself 1 i is buoyant, precise yet unexpected. 1 le has a rapport "with die poets he writes about. To lift a few of Heaney phrases: George Herbert's imagination is described as having a 'UNA pattern'; in Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' Heaney picks up melody "of recrimination': Mar-owes Jamburhiine strikes him as 'the poetic equivalent of a dynamo-, hum.

a potent kind of He writes brilliantly about eats and Larkin. comparing their altitudes to death audaciously using as his starting point a poem by Miroiav Holub. entitled 'The -Heaney makes Yeats a celebratory figure while volunteering Larkin for the role of 'a long haired waterplant in a sour creek. as if he stuck his pale face out on a skewer from behind a graveyard The book is not entirely devoted to familiar or English writers. here is a stirring lecture about Hugh MacDiarmid and one on Brian Meniman's 'The Midnight Court', an extraordinary, neglected poem wriiien in the Irish language in 1780, about a bunch of siormingly Gver-sexcd women beraiingmen sort of extra-ness.

The older you get the simpler it Photograph by Decla'n Shanahan never wrote just, straight women 's roles. 1 liked the strong.Gharacters. 1 don't mean women who have masculine qualities about them, but something. that has some intestinal -fortitude, some guts to it-. Everything about the- writerdirector and producer Ida Lupino, who died last month, proved to be gutsy.

Tired of being typed the 'poorman's Bette Davis' while she was at Wamer.Brothers in the.Forties,.she pushed her career 'in a new direction, establishing herself as one of the key independent film-makers of the period. Her movies are typically punchy and uncompromising their approach. Despite. this, her-work has been sadly the more welcome then is this intelligent collection of essays whien provides the first -comprehensive examination ot her film and television work, A fitting testimony to one of the original movie mavericks. PAPERBACKS Travesties by Emma Tennant Faber 9.99 Role reversal is the name of the macabre game played out here in first published in 1978, 1989.

and 1992 respectively. It's interesting to see Tennant's talent develop its line of black, quirky comedy as chance events, erupting manias and a panoply of human foibles corrupt the very ordinariness of the lives portrayed. This is especially so in 'Faustine'. a tomboyish' reworking of the Faust legend for the Nineties. Selected Poems Baudelaire, translated by Carol Clark Penguin 6.99 this selection focuses on the Baudelaire of mid-nineteenthhcentury Paris, rather than the self-obsessive work so beloved by th.e symbolists and poetic adolescents.

Much of the poetry combines the two, as in the haunting and eloquent 'petit poemes en prose' a form invented by Baudelaire which end this lively anthology. From the Beast to the Blond Marina Warner Vintage 10.99 Are they what Pindar called', 'iridescent lies' or are crucial truths -embedded in fairy structures? Warner's fascinating account of the genre's genesis (from Perrault to Andersen, cinema and operatic variants) enthrals like the tales themselves. Nimbly illustrated, the ambiguities of the tales are teased put ahd probed from their roots in classical literature to contemporary fantasy. Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies Geoff Small Little, Brown 7.99 Guile, guns and crack cocaine are a Yardie best friends. The book foliows the Yardies' progress from their gangster roots in the bloody politics of the Jamaican ghettos; through tribal' violence and infighting to their present-day status as world-class drug-traffickers with supply networks stretching from Kingston.

Jamaica to Kingston-upon-Thames. Though the.facts are fascinating, and though Small infiltrated the drug-infested ghetto to tajk to such characters as Bigga'Knee; his over-adjectived prose and twisted syntax detract from-the tale: is packed with essential advice Seamus Heaney: 'Poetry is a poetry are mutually exclusive? 'My favourite illustration of this is that, some time ago, 1 received a letter from in Sandymount asking me to write a poem for them. The material they sent me was so much stronger than anything 1 could Then after I'd said no I began to fiddle with the game of making up a place called Con- He was teaching at the time and he got his students to write as if they lived in countries called Shame, Embarrassment and soon. lie believes that it is possible to jump-start imaginationin this wav: '1 think you can trampoline yourself into it through words. The relish of words, the hedonism of the act of writing.

And think that is what this book is about. Poetry is a sort of etra-ness. The older you get. the simpler it In these lectures there is a sense of poetry as" coming from'outside the poet, of being, slightly alien and having the pow er to surprise. Seamus Heaney says.he thinks poetry is a sort of 'answer' owed.

But owed to whom? 'Oil it's nota'who. it's an The Relress of Poet r- is full of other peoples' definitions of poetry. Wallace Stevens: 'The nobilitv of. poetry is a violence from within that protects us from a violence Ezra Pound: 'the thing that matters in art is. a sort of something more or less like electricity or radio activity, a force 'The slow writer in the book is certainly Elizabeth 1 leaney said.

He hiet her when he taught at Harvard finding 'a stillness and pleasure in tier company'. He says that she was 'cliicd in, demure and cheerful'. But from the-way he pronounces 'cheerful' yon know; that the cheerfulness was willed, like her poetry. He likes to remember her, he says, as a-woman 'carrying a handbag ironically. Since retiring from his' Oxford professorship Heaney.

as well as completing a new collection of poems to.be published next year, lias translated, with Stanislavv Baraiiczak, a Polish classic by Jan Kochanowski, 'A Renaissance treasure-written by 'a cultivated Functionary about the death of his hyp-and-ti-htilf-ytNttr-okiilaughier. There are 19- poems written in strictly formal Renaissance verse but with personal grief. At die time they caused a literary scandal because if was deemed that their subject-was much too Now, '100 years after Kochanows-ki's death, the is stale, the grief fresh. like Heaney's lectures, reminds us that great poems not only survive time but can actually change with it: He femjrids us ill way no slogan, this poetry The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures by Seamus Heaney will be published by Faber on 1 8 September, at 1 5.99. transfusing, welding and unifying But Heaney- himself never succumbs to a single stance.

At the precise moment when the drawstring s6ems to into a definition, he reveals it to be a slip-knot that gives way to the unfastness of poetry I leanpy says he 'entered literature through good teachers' and that. since 1962 he has taught -at I larvard, at Oxford and elsewhere. He tells me he was tempted to call his lectures 'Doing English'. As a schoolboyandsinee; learnt many poems off by heart. He believes they are then 'possessed and become-part of your memory.

1 think your relationship with-a poem you have learnt becomes I low many poems had been landmarks in his life? That is so difficult. Is it 100. 50. or 10? Each answer would be true in someway. There are different stages of recognition and of Gerard Manley 1 lopkins introduced him to poetry: He got a tremendous 'fris-soh' from learning Hopkins by heart and was, in his early writ-, ing, inspired by him: 'My aspiration was to make my poetry, rough and Ted Hughes, has.

been partly because in Hughes Heaney sees 'the line back to 1 lopkins'. As.an undergraduate he says he 'was Eliotised': The verb tells you about Eliot's arm's length effect. BESTSELLERS One of the poets, who is most important to him now and about whom he longed to write a lecture is Emily Dickinson. But he could not do it. This was partly, he fcelsr because he came to her work late.

It is clear from the way he talks about her work that someone should twist his arm. 'It's so Em in awe of her, the leaps, the sparks, there is something silicate. It scares me, it' is so- exclamatory, so. Emily Dickinson may be enigmatic than, most poets hunt's tantalising how little we know about hovv most poeins were written: which lines were gifts, which battles. Of the poets Heaney writes about who does he think have got most joy or ease out of writing? 'Marlowe, certainly.

Hero Leatuler seems to have' come straight off the press, it's just there, like a Heaney. writes: 'the figure Marlowe cut in the minds of. his. contemporaries in" the late 1580s and early 1590s was utterly Who might the modern' equivalent of Marlowe be? Tom Paulin? Heaney gave a spreading feline smile. We agreed -that given what happened to Marlowe, it might be unwise to nominate a.

modern, candidate. think it would have to be a South American poet', he compromised. Nameless, for safet y's sake. in top 10 THE RAIN STICK by Seamus Heaney for Beth and Rand Upend the rain srick and what happens next Is a music That you never would have known To listen for. In a cactus siaik Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash Come flowing tlirough.

You stand there like a pipe Being-played by water, you shake it again lightly diminuendo nins tlirough all its scales like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves." Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies; Then gliner-drizzle, almost-breaths of air. Upend the stick again. What happens next Is undiminished for haxing happened once. Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Who cares if all die music that transpires Is the fall of grit or dry seeds tiirough a' cactus? You are like a rich -man entering heaven Tiirough the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again. TURKEY SHOOT Brackets indicate number of weeks Paperbacks Goodbye to All That Bryan Gould (Macmillan16.99) Guardian Guide Hardbacks Oil NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND Bill Bryson (Doubledav 1,1.99) lowan's journey around down-your wayBritain. Hi SUMMER COLLECTION Delia Smith (BBC 14.99) Seasonal recipes from the bobbed gourmet. is: THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY Chris Ryan '(Century Another boy's own story from another former SAS man.

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