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Here I differ from Side, who sees Heaney’s prose as a clear index of his poetic intentions. Instead, I would argue that
Heaney’s prose is essentially cheerleading on poetry’s behalf, trying to convince not only audience but also poet of
its ongoing intrinsic value and relevance. His poetry is where he actually entertains and engages with his real doubts.
If a commune between poet and readership is what is aimed at throughout Heaney’s work, then an identificationwith-doubt
seems more healthy to me than with the chthonic certainties of a (to name another recent ‘canonical’
figure often linked to Heaney) Ted Hughes any day of the week.
J. H. Prynne’s poetry-and this is where I can sympathise with Side’s implicit exasperation-seems to me endlessly
more ambitious than Heaney’s, and has attempted, increasingly, what seems a “total” expression, dragging in
individual perception, stray cultural detritus, political commentary, esoteric specialised terminologies, everyday
slang, scientific jargon, emotional feedback, unpredictable connotation-everything, in short, that Prynne is, knows
and feels (a not inconsiderable amount). Such complexity does not make for easy consumption. Take this example:
All the fun of the pit gets well and then better,
sand spun off as yet to bind promise to tap up
one clock via another, either to both, sky-divers
like swallows gorging their young. In staple pairs
all so sudden with a tumult, written for nothing
to skip a beat, break open the shells; dexter risen
forward, new zonal application as leaf by shaded
leaf glows with wanting itself so. None other for
both or neither, before this after that, hall-way of
desire in fairest placement rising. As brood so on
donation true to tint momentous, all is too hardly
much to clear unaided: hot justice pleading for penalty
in a rigged-up camp of love, courtship plays requited
and branded so faintly at implicit final appeal.
This starts off with playful twists on common idioms-all of the fun of the ‘fair’ gets redirected to the decidedly less
fun ‘pit’ (with its connotations of mining or Hell) while ‘gets well and then better’ plays off the fact that we happily
tell people to ‘get well soon’ and hope that they ‘feel better’ too, when the two aren’t really compatible, at least in a
sequential way: can someone be any better than well? This bifurcation introduces a preoccupation with twinning
and doubling that comes to dominate the poem: the ‘staple pairs’ of sky-divers, ‘leaf by shaded / leaf’, the two clocks,
one of which will be ‘tapped up’ (?) via another (how does this work?), moving from alternatives to unity (‘either to
both’, then later ‘None other for / both or neither’).
Figuration works in this poem via suggestion and implication rather than overt comparison (with ‘sky-divers / like
swallows gorging their young’ a particularly vivid exception): ‘sand spun off’ to ‘bind promise’ suggests an
hourglass (another two-part mechanism) in the context of ‘clock’, with the falling sand comparable to the falling skydivers,
whose suddenly opening parachutes might well resemble a ‘tumult’ or ‘shells’ breaking open, the associated
thrill like a heart ‘skip[ping] a beat’ (another everyday idiom re-routed), before the parachutes in turn suggest
falling leaves seeking a new ‘zon[e]’ on the ground. The upbeat tone of this image-complex, with its undertones of
release and excitement, is implicit (if ambiguous) in the positive connotations of ‘fun’, ‘well’, ‘better’, ‘promise’,
‘staple pairs’ (hard not to read/hear ‘stable’, but positive in either case) and the phrase ‘skip a beat’, suggesting that
more than the leaf ‘glows with wanting itself so’. One is put in mind of the surprise ending of Rilke’s tenth Duino
Elegy, where happiness unexpectedly ‘falls’. These positive possibilities are summed up in the single, odd-butprecise
word-choice ‘dexter’, the opposite of ‘sinister’-i.e. on the right rather than on the left-and with all the
fortuitous connotations that suggests in comparison. It is both literal and specific-the right side of these falling
divers / leaves is ‘risen / forward’-and figuratively propitious, implying a potentially ‘good landing’, a ‘hall-way of
/ desire in fairest placement rising’.
The mood gets gloomier as the poem goes on, the language of law and restriction crowding out the intimations of
uplifting downfall. First we have the need for a ‘zonal application’ - bureaucratic red tape and/or nefarious
parceling, buying, selling and developing of land. Possession, or desire for possession, is implicit. Then, towards the
end of the second stanza, we get ‘hot justice pleading for penalty / in a rigged-up camp of love’, where words like
‘hot’ and ‘camp’ shift disturbingly from positive, light-hearted, sexy connotations to more painful hints of
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