Books: Singing of Skunks and Saints

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SWEENEY ASTRAY by Seamus Heaney; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 96 pages; $13.95

A Dublin paper once decided that he was the "bard of the bogs." Robert Lowell took the high road, designating him the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Seamus Heaney (pronounced Hay-knee) finds very little comfort in either encomium. "The first annoys me," he grumbles. "The second makes me uncomfortable."

That is as may be; both labels apply. Heaney is very much a product of Ireland's soil, an element he describes as "black butter/ Melting and opening underfoot." And in a land that has produced enough rhymers to people County Mayo, his is the voice that resonates loudest past the Irish Sea to Britain, America and beyond. Heaney's reputation seems to increase geometrically with every poem, starting back in 1966 with the appearance of his first true verse, "Digging." It announced, as William Butler Yeats announced in one of his own early works, that a vocation was being sought: "Living roots awaken in my head./ But I've no spade to follow.../ Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I'll dig with it."

The digging has thus far unearthed five volumes of poetry, including the bestseller Field Work (1979). Sweeney Astray, to be published next May by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, provides a festival of Heaneyan contradictions. The hero is a modernist ideal: wounded, cunning, lyrical and deranged. His name inescapably recalls T.S. Eliot's Irish vulgarian "Apeneck Sweeney ... among the nightingales." Yet Heaney's man is not a commoner but a king, and he does not merely listen to birds, he becomes one. Sweeney Astray is in fact not an original poem but a brilliant rendition of the 7th century Irish legend Buile Suibne. In it, Mad Sweeney slays an innocent psalmist and is cursed for his great offense by St. Ronan: "It is God's decree/ bare to the world he'll always be." Thereafter, the king loses a battle, a mind and an identity when he is reduced to a pitiable creature, "wind-scourged, stripped/ like a winter tree/ clad in black frost/ and frozen snow." Flailed by the seasons, run to earth by his enemies, Sweeney, in the epic tradition, finally earns redemption through suffering. In this role, says Heaney, he stands both for every man and for the artist, "displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his utterance."

Those words are uttered in a melodic Irish intonation by a man who could have modeled for Eliot's caricature. Currently a poet in residence at Harvard, Heaney is hardly noticed on campus or strolling the Boston waterfront. At 44, he checks in at 5 ft. 10 in. and 200 lbs.; with his shock of thinning gray hair and the thick-fingered hands of a farmer, like his father's and grandfather's before him, he might pass for an immigrant long shoreman or an off-duty officer. But the appearance is what he calls "the great fur coat of attitude." Beneath it is a wary, hypersensitive poet, alive to the nuances of speech and feeling.