Books: Inspirations Station Island

A year ago, Seamus Heaney, 45, offered his incandescent version of Mad Sweeney, the legendary Irish king who was turned into a bird-man and condemned to live in the trees for slaying a psalmist. In this new collection of verse, Heaney moves to an even higher and madder style. In the process, Station Island reinforces his reputation as the best poet that Ireland has produced since Yeats.

The roughly two dozen works in the book’s first section range from the erotic awakening of a honeymooning couple to the pensiveness of an old man surveying his fields and finding solace in memory. The book’s third section contains more poems inspired by the tale of Sweeney. They describe the bird- man’s first flight: “more sleepwalk than spasm” . . . drawing “close to pebbles and berries . . . relearning the acoustic of frost.” He recalls his roosting place in a chestnut tree, characterized as “a queen in her fifties, dropping/ purses and earrings,” and the highlights of an avian existence as he goes “scaling heaven/ by superstition/ drunk and happy/ on a chapel gable.”

But it is the book’s centerpiece, “Station Island,” that is most likely to find its way into anthologies. Set on Ireland’s noted isle of pilgrimage in Lough Derg, Donegal, the long poem describes two journeys, one a pilgrimage of prayer, the other a search for self. That quest, and the thoughts it inspires, brings as much pain as enlightenment. In a typical passage, Heaney, who grew up in Northern Ireland, bitterly remembers the Catholic ghetto, and “how quick I was to know my place.” In another, he faces the ghost of his cousin Colum, killed in the sectarian violence. “You confused evasion and artistic tact,” the murdered man tells him. “The Protestant who shot me through the head/ I accuse directly, but indirectly, you . . . for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew/ the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio/ and saccharined my death with morning dew.”

In the poem’s final stanzas the accusations cease, and Heaney, like many another Irish artist, confronts the shade of James Joyce and his own destiny. The great Irish exile warns Heaney to forget his preoccupation with the past: “That subject people stuff is a cod’s game/ in- fantile, like your peasant pilgrimage . . . it’s time to swim/ out on your own and fill the element/ with signatures on your own frequency.”

Heaney, who alternates stints of teaching at Harvard with intense, productive periods of writing at his home outside Dublin, has heeded Joyce. The master of “exile and cunning” would understand the image of inspiration authenticated by Heaney’s ringing lines: “That eternal fountain, hidden away,/ I know its haven and its secrecy/ although it is the night.”