One hundred poems that perfectly capture the essence of the great Seamus Heaney

One of the best-known poems of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is the one titled Digging (Digging), the first canonical piece in his songbook. The son of generations of Irish peasants, young Seamus must have been the first to break with the family's farming tradition. "Between my index finger and thumb / rests the stubby quill," this poem begins. And it ends in the same way, but with the addition of a final line: "I'll use it for digging." It's not an original theme for Heaney: without straying from his own tradition, we could recall the illustrious poet and mud-dugman Verdaguer (who, in fact, was a poet by vocation and only, if anything, a mud-dugman by family origin). Or, even more so, that prodigy by Guerau de Liost entitled Obaga de pechoswhose last verses I hesitate to reproduce, because they convey an emotion very close to that of the Irish Nobel laureate of 1995: "The shade grows little by little, overcoming / the dangers of dryness and fleas. / My father used to say, his lips now confiding, / 'Grandfather planted the shade / and you will cut it down.' / And I say: 'Oh, the! / What will be my endeavor?'

With DiggingHeaney strengthened his roots and embraced his ancestors, his dead. That is why he digs: he unearths the past, exhumes the light of bygone years. The poet did not have time to establish the corpus of this type of selected poetry Now presented in Catalan, in a fine translation by the poet Marcel Riera: one hundred poems that perfectly capture the essence of a great author. The family undertook the project, and the result is now in our hands: "Perhaps inevitably, the resulting selection is filled with personal evocations of the lives we shared," writes his daughter Catherine in the preliminary "Heaney Family Note." I would say that those well-versed in the Irishman's work will not miss any of his major titles.

The Memorable Dimension of Things

Reading the author's poetry, we immediately notice the presence of objects, the memorable, even sacred, dimension that things always possess. The sofa that served as a play space during childhood. A blacksmith's anvil that is "an altar / where he consecrates himself in form and music." The bucket full of water into which a couple drops peeled potatoes, revealing that these two had never been so close. The rainstick that, with its liquid sound, returns us to paradise. The objects, yes, with such sharp outlines ("things that are grounded in their forms"): a water pump, a bicycle dynamo that is like a potato... Always this sustenance (for the young poets who, in the sixties, followed the lessons of, among others, Patrick Kavan). potato poets)!

Heaney is a confessional poet in a very different way from Robert Lowell's. The Irishman dedicated a beautiful elegy to him: "You found the son in me / when you said goodbye / under the laurel tree / at the gate to Glanmore." His poetry is not easy, although the anecdotes often seem familiar, and they feature the names of fellow countrymen whom he immortalized (if he had been Catalan, he would have filled his verses with endearing names like Ester, Esteve, or Montserrat). The poem The subway It is an Orphic recreation enlivened by a pair of lovers, and it also evokes the tale of Hansel and Gretel: "the wet tracks / bare and taut like me, my attention fixed / on your steps that follow me and cursed if I look back." It reveals, like so many other compositions by the author, the ability to connect various pretexts to create a single, compact current of meaning. Moreover, the poet does not shy away from the political question: his very name, SeamusIt is a hallmark of Irish Catholicism. The famous Brands It recalls that effort to define an inside and an outside: the "four jackets in place of the four goalposts" that some young footballers place on the field, "you have the string well enough to mark the perimeter of a house's foundation"... Or, if not, a walking stick - the shadow of the father's presence (the title of the poem). My father's walking stick / this year I'm going to face the ice." I rejoice in verses forged in experience and memory!