I found my copy of Wintering Out in a box I hadn't opened since moving
flats in 2019. The spine was cracked in three places, the pages yellowed in
that particular way paperbacks get when they've lived in damp rooms. I'd
forgotten I owned it.
Seamus Heaney published this collection in 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday,
though you wouldn't necessarily know that from reading it. The violence is
there — it's always there in his work from this period — but it comes at you
sideways, through bog bodies and place names and the particular way rain
sounds on different surfaces. He doesn't write about soldiers. He writes about
the word "Anahorish" and how it feels in the mouth.
That indirection annoyed me when I first read him. I was twenty-two,
impatient, wanted poets to say what they meant. Why all this business about
etymology and townlands when people were dying? It felt like evasion. I put
the book aside and didn't pick it up again for over a decade.
I was wrong.
The poems in Wintering Out
aren't avoiding the Troubles — they're excavating the ground beneath them.
When Heaney writes about the word "Broagh" and how the "gh" sound at the end
is unpronounceable for English speakers, he's writing about borders. About who
belongs and who doesn't. About how language itself draws lines that bodies
later bleed across. This isn't evasion. It's archaeology.
"The Tollund Man" is the poem everyone talks about, and for good reason. A
body preserved in a Danish bog for two thousand years, sacrificed to some
fertility goddess, becomes a lens for looking at sectarian murder in Belfast.
The logic shouldn't work. Denmark isn't Ireland, and ritual killing isn't the
same as a car bomb. But Heaney makes the connection feel inevitable rather
than forced. Both are forms of tribal violence. Both leave bodies in the
earth.
I keep thinking about my grandmother's accent. She grew up in Tyrone, moved to
England in the fifties, and by the time I knew her, her voice had become
something strange — not quite Irish, not quite English, caught between. She
pronounced certain words in ways I've never heard anyone else pronounce them.
When she died, those pronunciations died with her. That's what Heaney is
getting at in poems like "Traditions" — language as inheritance, but also
language as loss. Every generation forgets something.
He wrote much of this collection while on sabbatical at Berkeley in 1971.
California, of all places. He said the distance loosened something in his
form, made the quatrains more relaxed. I find that odd — that you'd need to
go to the other side of the world to write about the six inches of soil
beneath your childhood home. But maybe that's exactly right. Too close and
you can't see it. The Irish memory bank, he called it. Something you can
only access from far away.
The shorter poems frustrate me. "Servant Boy" and "Limbo" feel slight next to
the longer pieces, sketches rather than finished work. Critics at the time
complained that Heaney wasn't addressing the violence directly enough, and I
understand the impulse even if I think they were wrong. When your country is
tearing itself apart, poems about place names can feel like fiddling while
Rome burns.
But that misses what Heaney understood: the violence didn't come from nowhere.
It grew from centuries of contested ground, contested language, contested
memory. You can't address the present without digging into what made it. The
bog preserves everything — bodies, butter, wooden trackways. It's a kind of
memory that doesn't forget. Heaney keeps returning to that image because it's
doing real work for him. The past isn't past. It's right there, just under
the surface, waiting to be cut into.
My copy still smells faintly of the flat I lived in during my twenties. Damp
plaster, radiator dust, the particular staleness of single-glazed windows. I
don't know why I kept it through three moves. Most of my books from that
period went to charity shops or got left on trains. This one survived.
Harold Bloom called Heaney's voice "keyed and pitched unlike any other
significant poet at work in the language anywhere." That's the kind of
sentence critics write when they can't quite explain what they mean. But he's
not wrong. There's something in the sound of these poems — the vowels, the
consonant clusters, the way lines break mid-phrase — that doesn't sound like
anyone else. You can recognise a Heaney poem by its music before you've parsed
a single image.
The collection ends with "Westering," a poem about California, about being far
from home, about the direction of travel that the word itself implies. West
into the unknown. West into the sunset. West into America, where so many
Irish ended up. It's not a conclusion exactly — more of a trailing off, a
question left hanging. Where do you go when the ground you came from is
contested? What happens to memory when it crosses an ocean?
I've started rereading the bog poems aloud. There's no other way to get them
right. The sounds matter in a way that silent reading can't capture. "The
Tollund Man" in particular needs to be spoken — the way "Tollund" itself
echoes and dulls, the flat vowels of "the mild pods of his eyelids." Heaney
was obsessed with how words feel in the body. The tongue, the teeth, the
soft palate. Poetry as a physical act.
I still don't love all of it. Some of the mythological pieces feel like
exercises. But the best poems here — "Anahorish," "Broagh," "The Tollund
Man," "Gifts of Rain" — do something I can't quite name. They make the
familiar strange and the strange familiar. They make language itself feel
like archaeology, like digging.
Sources: