Victoria's secret.(Verse chronicle)(Seamus Heaney's poetry)

Last year a Dublin literary magazine sponsored an open competition for the best Seamus Heaney imitation. The winning poem began,

 
   Niall Fitzduff brought a jar 
   of crab apple jelly 
   made from crabs off the tree 
   that grew at Duff's Corner-- 
   still grows at Duff's Corner-- 
   a tree I never once saw 
   with crab apples on it. 

This would be hilarious, if Heaney hadn't written it himself (I was kidding about the competition, though surely he would win). At sixty-seven, his Nobel dusty on the shelf, Heaney is old enough and honored enough not to have to impress anyone. He's so full of genial sanity and sly little tricks with syntax (no one since Shakespeare has been shiftier at manipulating the sequence of tenses), it's easy to be gulled by his calloused facility.

The poems in District and Circle (the name of a London Underground line) sometimes take up the subjects of poems from twenty or thirty years ago. (1) You go through the book thanking, Oh, there's the Tollund Man again, and there's Glanmore, and there's the Underground--you'd be forgiven for thinking this a Seamus Heaney greatest hits collection. He's still a poet of wood smoke and heather, imbued with the Irish past, a sucker for every hand tool and stove lid that comes his way--he goes into a swoon over farm machinery the way Auden did over collieries. Heaney will make a poem, as Frost and Hardy could, from something seen out of the corner of his eye; he gives you an Ireland where the ancient flows beneath the leaf litter of the modern. When critics say he's the best Irish poet since Yeats, they mean there hasn't been an Irish poet as full of blarney and yet so honestly brilliant at being himself.

And yet. And yet! The verse in this new book is sloppy and casual, the poet running through his routines with great skill--but they are routines, without the routine magic he once brought (whatever's at stake in these poems, it's much less than two decades ago). It's a good day when he drags out the poetry engine and cranks it up, but I'm not sure the old Heaney would have settled for lines as fumbling as "Like a scorch of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent" or "But if kale meant admonition, a harrow-pin/ Was correction's veriest unit." (Veriest unit!) Heaney continues to smuggle Irish dialect into the emollient diplomacies of British English, but the new poems sometimes sound as if he were still translating Beowulf.

 
   And for me a chance to test the edge 
   of seggans, dialect blade 
   hoar and harder and more hand-to-hand 
   than what is common usage nowadays: 
   sedge--marshmallow, rubber-dagger stuff. 

These lines have wrestled Grendel, and lost.