Down to earth

Seamus Heaney is a poet of the four elements, par- ticularly air and earth. Early in his career it was earth that dominated, as both a gift and a burden. In his 1975 collection North, he famously reflected on corpses from the Iron Age that the acids in Danish peatbogs had preserved. The mysteries the earth has stored may sometimes be enriching; they may also haunt the present with unspeakable horrors. This was notably so in the Ulster of the Troubles, a province locked in the cycles of retribution. Essential as contact with the soil under your feet has been to Heaney, it has also weighed him down with guilt and anxiety, and the motive of his poetry has often been the desire to escape. In more recent years, he has taken flight in poems of the air. Outstanding among these was his 1991 collection Seeing Things, in which he freed himself to encounter the miraculous.

Though Heaney's poetry is always worth reading, it is less consistent than is commonly supposed. He has striking moments of arrival, the most impressive being the two books I have named. Many of the intervening books - and this was especially true of his last, Electric Light - are in danger of marking time. He can seem cornered by his own genius: writing too many poems that emulate past successes, and shutting off the routes to discovery. He has written of words "as physical sensations . . . as weights on the tongue" and the music of his verse might be called tactile. Too often, however, this knack becomes mere reflex. In his new collection, District and Circle, he writes of ". . . the scut and scat of cones in winter,/So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle". And yes, it's a beautiful effect, but with too much the feeling of "this is what I can do". When he really makes a discovery, it is often by avoiding the lyrical. I suspect this explains the presence in District and Circle of "stanzas" of heightened prose (some of it "found prose") and passages of versified conversation.

District and Circle is not as good a book as Seeing Things, but it does show Heaney struggling to break free and features a number of memorable poems. Surprisingly, after three or four "air" books, this one shows him coming down to earth, in some cases underneath it. The title poem is about the London Tube, and reminds us of the bombs of last July. It recalls an earlier poem called "The Underground", in which the Tube becomes a metaphor for the classical underworld. The Christian afterlife is aerial and celestial. The pagan realm of the dead, by contrast, belongs to the earth. District and Circle is a book about death very much in that pagan sense: the deaths of friends and loved ones that have, not surprisingly, become more frequent as Heaney has entered his sixties, and the fear - despite the outbreak of peace in his Irish backyard - of a world newly threatened by terrible violence, from terrorist outrage to great-power invasion. In one beautiful lyric he gets

. . . a bird's eye view of myself,

A shadow on raked gravel

In front of my house of life.

Something similar happens in the title poem when, in the Tube as if in Dante's Hell, he glimpses the reflection of his own face in the train window. Crucial to all this, for me, is a poem called "Out of this World", a lament for the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz and Heaney grew up in the Roman Catholic Church; the work of both is haunted by its language and symbolism, and neither could avoid some feeling of loyalty towards an institution that sustained their two peoples against imperial power. Yet neither could ever give the Church his full assent. Milosz drifted closer to Catholic belief as he aged; his posthumous "Treatise on Theology", clearly in Heaney's mind here, is one of the greatest of modern religious poems. In Heaney, though, the ambivalence cuts deeper. His poem cites an exchange from the Catechism:

Q. Do you renounce the world?

A. I do renounce it.

The message of the poem is that neither poet could renounce the world - precisely because the physical world of bogs and bodies, of iron tools and automated locks, is for both of them the true source of the sacred. In consequence, neither can embrace his birthright religion and neither can fully reject it:

"There was never a scene

tremor and draw, like well water far down."

Is the speaker Milosz or Heaney? The passage is set between inverted commas. From the context, one would think it was Milosz, but the language is unmistakably Heaney's own, particularly in that lovely final sentence.

This ambivalence haunts District and Circle and is, in my opinion, a strength. As if in defiance of old age, terrorism and abstract spirituality, Heaney asserts the force of heavy, earthy things and, in doing so, visits the subjects and scenes of his earlier poems. For example, his published work begins with the anthology-piece "Digging", in which he compares his father's skill with the spade to his own with the pen; yet as the poem proceeds, the contrast weighs more than the similarity, until the reader remembers that, in the first stanza, the pen (unlike the spade) had sat in his hand "snug as a gun". This collection starts with "The Turnip Snedder", a machine for mashing turnips for animal feed. It belongs to "an age of bare hands/and cast iron". On the one hand, this is the era of Heaney's boyhood, an age that valued good tools, physical skills and hard labour - all matters praised in his earliest books and contrasted with our era of high tech, smart bombs and virtual reality. On the other hand, it calls to mind North: the snedder "standing guard" at the book's entrance "on four braced greaves", an Iron Age warrior or, equally, an American infantryman in "body armour". Similarly, in the poem "District and Circle", the London of the jihadis is superimposed on the London of Heaney's youth. Most striking of all is "The Tollund Man in Springtime", in which the body resurrected from the peatbog all those years ago revivifies the imagination that recalled him to life then.

But the context for such recall is the certainty of death. There is something valedictory about the tone and subject matter of some of these poems, yet it isn't a case of resignation or melancholy. On the contrary, the great strength of District and Circle is in its alertness to the troubles that surround us. That alertness does not always extend to the poet's means. I cannot be the only reader, for instance, who is weary of Heaney's dependence on the sonnet, especially as his use of it is so perfunctory and seemingly unconsidered. Paradoxically, his ease with form and his fluency are among Heaney's burdens. This could never be called a smug or facile collection - it is full of painful knowledge - yet there is much in it from which he must be longing to take flight.

Clive Wilmer's new collection, The Mystery of Things, is published by Carcanet Press on 27 April