A Critique of Kerrigan (1999)

Jason Hall (1999), 'Hand and Foot,' London Review of Books, 15 July

‘In the years since North,’ John Kerrigan writes (LRB, 27 May), ‘the idea of “opening up” has become a leitmotif’ in Seamus Heaney. Kerrigan traces this through Seeing Things by plotting the variations on the words ‘opened ground’ in specific poems. However, his close attention to textual reworking makes only passing reference to a curious formal feature common to the poems he cites as evidence: they are all sonnets of sorts. Of the poems Kerrigan discusses, Heaney first breaks sonnet ground in ‘Act of Union’; it is ‘ploughed’ again in the first two Glanmore sonnets and the ‘Ground of being’ becomes ‘A half-door/Opening directly into starlight’ in ‘Squarings’ xl.

An accomplished sonneteer, Heaney has been highly selective in his use and placement of the sonnet form. That ‘Act of Union’ appears ‘near the heart of North’, as Kerrigan notices, seems to me especially poignant. For a volume generally associated with the free verse of the ‘bog poems’ to be able to accommodate what Kerrigan calls ‘a double, irregular sonnet’ is itself a significant act of union, as Heaney constructs a tense negotiation between freedom and form. Still, this isn’t the only structural act of union at work in the poem. What Kerrigan reads as a ‘double, irregular sonnet’ is really two fairly standard English sonnets, though some of the rhymes Heaney chooses involve a degree of phonetic liberty. Here Heaney is using the sonnet form as an ironic gesture. The English pattern (both sonnets conform to the English pattern, each rhyming ababcdcdefefgg) is a formal symbol of the colonial Other, ‘the tall kingdom over your shoulder’, which the poet embodies, both literally and metaphorically.

In the first two Glanmore sonnets from ''Field Work'', the ground which had been ‘raw’ in ‘Act of Union’ is again deliberately penetrated, though this time the encounter is more gentle (‘the turned-up acres breathe’). Like ‘Act of Union’, the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ are centrally located. In a way, they serve much the same purpose as the bog poems did in North – they are the volume’s pièce de résistance and lend it a structural and thematic focus. However, where ‘Act of Union’, and North in general, concentrate on the violence of ‘union’, the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ offer an opening which is more consensual. At least in part, they signify Heaney’s relaxed attitude towards metrical verse. Their central location in ''Field Work'' can be seen as a formal indicator of the poet’s intention to engage the iambic line of English tradition after the free-verse rebellion of North