Death of a Naturalist

by Seamus Heaney

"Death of a Naturalist" marked the auspicious debut of poet, Seamus Heaney, with its lyrical and descriptive powers.

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Irish Literature, Classics, Nobel Prize, 20th Century, Literature

57 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Works of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections Wintering Out (1972) and Field Work (1979) as well as a translation of Beowulf (1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.

This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Heaney on Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Carolyn Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lovely collection of poems honoring the Irish landscape, nature, animals, farming, and potatoes :)

My favorite poem was “Scaffolding” which is one of his more romantic and sweet poems found in this collection…

Masons, when they start upon a building
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done,
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me,

Never fear. We may let the scaffolding fall,
Confident that we have built our wall.

[Helga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney’s first collection of poetry which was published in 1966, revolves around the themes of childhood memories, loss of innocence, war, nature and death.
Heaney was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Here are two of my favorite poems:

The Early Purges

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.

‘Sure isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.

Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown,
I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:

‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural,
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Scaffolding

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done,
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me,

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall,
Confident that we have built our wall.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

For years I had a treasure on my bookshelves and did not know about it. I bought this booklet shortly after his Nobel Prize, but had the notion of Seamus Heaney as a poet of the Irish countryside and country life. And he is! But what sounds dull in fact is the playground for the full span of human experience:

His role as a writer in a peasant family in “Digging”

...
Between my fingers and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

The overcoming of childhood fear in “The Advancement of Learning”. Old age in “Follower”

...
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stambling
Behind me, and will not go away.

Childhood mortality in “Mid-term Break” and – most impressive – the Great Famine in “At a Potatoe Digging” and “For the Commander of the Eliza”, working class chagrin and religious conflict in “Docker”

...
God is a foremen with certain definitive views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.
...

Minacious nature in “Storm on the Island” and finally wonderful poems dedicated to parentship and love “Poem. For Marie”, “Twice Shy”, “Scaffolding” and my favourite

Valediction

Lady with the frilled blouse
And simple tartan skirt,
Since you left the house
Its emptiness has hurt
All thought. In your presence
Time rode easy, anchored
On a smile; but absence
Rocked love’s balance, unmoored
The days. They buck and bound
Across the calendar,
Pitched from the quiet sound
Of your flower-tender
Voice. Need breaks on my strand;
You’ve gone. I am at sea.
Until you resume command.
Self is in mutiny.

[TAP · Rating 5 out of 5]

Personal Helicon

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top,
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch,
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's the opposite of a perfect storm? How about an imperfect beautiful day? Certainly not the weather in Massachusetts, which was cloudy start to finish today.

No, instead, I wrote a poem tangentially about Henry David Thoreau to start the day off. Then I picked up from the library this first edition paperback of Seamus Heaney's first collection of poems, which included in its title (Kismet!) "Naturalist." HDT would have been proud.

Then, when I walked the dog this evening, peepers! Like a light switch had been thrown, I mean, as if nearing 60 degrees near the end of March does the trick. The sound-of-summer trick.

So you see, an auspicious day. One in which I finished this British paperback (Faber and Faber, sold for 1.25 pounds in 1966) of 57 pages in one sitting. That's 34 poems. With an old-school card in the back showing it was signed out for the first time on June 15, 1977, and only three more times after that, the last being Dec. 22, 1995.

So if you're wondering why your own poetry book isn't selling better, you need look no further than this Irish giant's first foray, which apparently got no play in the Petersham Library. Small comfort, that!

Now some people are intimidated by the likes of men named Seamus Heaney. He did, after all, develop a style to be reckoned with over time. Have no fear here, however. Seamus's first outing is mostly the stuff of one-page poems (a particular favorite of mine) and of memories of farm life and boyhood back in the days of yore in Ireland. Sod. Cows. Cuds. Potatoes. Barns. Drowning kittens. Irish wakes. Young love. The usual and the un-, in other words.

Leading off, a familiar poem. The only one I knew from this collection, turns out. See if you know it, too:


Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.


And dig he did. Here. First. On one of the better days I've had in a while. The only thing that could top it off is seeing a new review of my own book of poems tonight. Out of the blue. Like the peepers on cue.

Now that would put the im- in this most imperfect of beautiful days....

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Death of a Naturalist" explores Seamus Heaney's memories of his changing relationship with nature. Unlike Keats, whose appreciation for nature intensifies as his life draws to an end, Heaney's passion for nature perishes with time.

[Praveen · Rating 4 out of 5]

'His argument true, his tone light'

I think I did pretty well in the first quarter of last year in my poetic pursuit, a couple of major well-known figures in the contemporary poetry, I read. Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet who won Nobel Prize in 1995. When it comes to Ireland, you know W. B. Yeats’ poems; I liked very much, his folklores especially. Yeats’ folk tales had some cultural similarities with the Indian subcontinent. When I picked up this Irish poet, I was expecting some relatedness, though in some other enclave of poetic land. And I was not disappointed!

He is too natural a poet I guess, at least from the themes that I extracted from this poetry collection. Look at the list: Digging, potato digging, the barn, cow in calf, waterfall, gravities, blackberry picking, churning day… these are some of the poems! In the first poem, he compares the potato digging of his father, his grandfather cutting more turf than anyone, and says at last that he has no spade like these men to dig, so he will dig in his own way….

“Between my fingers and my thumb
the squat pen rests, snug as a gun…..

Between my fingers and my thumb
the squat pen rests and I’ll dig with it.”

This is a good collection and I liked many poems. There is a poem called ‘at a potato digging’ and I loved it. It covered the historical potato famine and the hard work of potato diggers!

This book can be a challenging read for readers who don't have a taste for naturalistic poems. The poet has taken the readers to his childhood memories, his personal experiences, his happy moments, and time of loss, through extremely vivid imagery in and around his local natural landscape. A truly def portrayal. He has described the harsh activities of farm life and depicted the brutal culling of animals with an amazing poetic sense.

Leaving you with the poem "Follower" from this collection, describing relation with his father,

"My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away"

[David Lentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began reading this first book of poetry by the Nobel Laureate from Ireland a few weeks ago. My wife and daughter were traveling on the Dingle Peninsula and stayed a few nights visiting Trinity College and drank pints of Guinness and Bushmills at the Temple Bar and witnessed the statues of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde in the greens of the great Gaelic capital. Ireland is an island which adores its poets, literary novelists and playwrights with a national ardor that I devoutly wish for my own country so immersed in commercial fare and cultural pap. Have you ever seen photos of the Library at Trinity College Dublin? It's where God goes to read on Sunday. I stayed at home to work and as the iPhone photos came in from Dublin, Galway, Coole, Adare and Dingle, I connected with my beloved family by reading the great Irish naturalist, Seamus Heaney. I finished this book without knowing that he had been so ill and he died the very next day. The timing of the death of this Nobel naturalist and my reading of him struck me as providentially uncanny. But what a magnificent literary legacy he leaves behind and one could see his prolific poetic gifts in this work, his first published collection which paints such a humble and humbling portrait of life among the farms and villages of rural Ireland. This is a hard life with grim realities. It's a life of tilling the boulder laden sod behind horses pulling a plough. Heaney writes about digging potatoes flashing white in soil from the spade and how blackberries ferment and turn green so soon after the picking. He writes about the ability of the Irish to endure great tempests blasting off the ocean. And about the grim business of shooting snipe at dawn. The writing is, at times, brutally frank in the way in which Robert Frost was later in life as a poet of the countryside of New England. Frost and Heaney had much in common in their respect and honest portraits of the simple life in the country. Both can bring vibrant images flying off the pages in 3D after only a few short, well chosen words. The writing is vivid, realistic, unsentimental and has the power to leave one stunned by the poet's discernment and rough sensibility at the conclusion of a poem. Some of this work is hard to read in a wince causing way because Heaney wants to show the reality of his existence as a naturalist with such gripping candor. At times, he almost seems intent upon sensationalism as in his poem about the drowning of kittens. I loved his poem about "The Trout" and his vision of the playwright Synge and lovers on the bare island of Aran. Heaney gives us a compelling portrait of a hard life in Ireland in his day. That he was destined to become a Nobel Laureate is evident from the beginning in this first collection. Pay homage to the great poet and read this work.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Storm on the Island
We are prepared: we build our houses squat,
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
This wizened earth has never troubled us
With hay, so, as you see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees
Which might prove company when it blows full
Blast: you know what I mean - leaves and branches
Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you listen to the thing you fear
Forgetting that it pummels your house too.
But there are no trees, no natural shelter.
You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Turned savage. We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo,
We are bombarded with the empty air.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thirty four poems. Beauty, brutality of farm life, poignant, earthy and memorable. Digging reminded me of my father and his garden where we would harvest the potatoes and the smell of freshly dug up earth. Mid-Term Break and the death of his brother in a car accident was powerful and very poignant.

I look forward to reading more of Seamus Heaney and rereading the poems in this book again and again.

Read this 44 page book of poems again and wonderful poetry.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simply incredible first collection from a master poet.

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay,
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying -
He had always taken funerals in his stride -
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in a four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

[Alice-Elizabeth (Prolific Reader Alice) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heaney is one of my favourite poets for landscapes poetry. This short collection was one of my favourites from the Faber and Faber boxset I borrowed from my Mum. My favourite from here is the one about blackberry picking, very reminiscent from my own past too. The flow is strong and the writing is written well!

[Zuberino · Rating 4 out of 5]

২৭ বছর বয়সে তরুণ কবি শেমাস হীনি তার প্রথম সংকলনের প্রথম কবিতায় জানিয়ে দেন - বাপ্ দাদার কৃষিকাজ তার জন্যে নয়। লাঙ্গল-কোদাল ফেলে তিনি তুলে নিয়েছেন কলম - প্রত্যয়ী কণ্ঠে বিংশ শতাব্দীর কবিতায় অন্যতম বিখ্যাত স্বগতোক্তি :

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

১৯৬৬ সালে প্রকাশিত এই ক্ষীণকায় গ্রন্থের প্রতিটি পাতায়, প্রতিটি লাইনে গ্রাম্য ছেলেটির অজেয় কাব্য প্রতিভার প্রমান। ক্ষেতিকাজ থেকে মুখ ফিরিয়ে নিলেও খামারে বেড়ে ওঠার অভিজ্ঞতা হীনির হৃদয়ে গভীর দাগ কেটেছিল - সংকলনের প্রথম ডজনখানেক কবিতায় শুধুই গ্রাম, গ্রামের জীবন। ঘোড়া দিয়ে হালচাষ করা, ব্ল্যাকবেরি ফল কুড়ানো, মাখন বানানো, ক্ষেতের আলু তোলা, দুধেল গাই আর মেঠো ইঁদুর, এমনকি বাড়তি কুকুর-বেড়াল ছানা পানিতে ডুবিয়ে মারার অনিবার্য প্রয়োজনীয়তা - নিত্যদিনের এইসব নানা অভিজ্ঞতার নিবিড় পর্যবেক্ষণ করে তার নির্যাস তুলে এনে অত্যন্ত আঁটোসাটো কবিতায় বেঁধে ফেলতে ওস্তাদ আমাদের শেমাস।

মাটির সোঁদা গন্ধ লেপ্টে আছে এই প্রথমদিকের কবিতার গায়ে। কবির শব্দচয়নও যথাযথ - শক্তপোক্ত করে দুই হাতে ধরা যায় এমন সব স্যাক্সন শব্দ তার দরকার। বর্জন করেন বিমূর্ত অশরীরী ল্যাটিন থেকে প্রাপ্ত শব্দভান্ডার। তার বোল সাদাসিধে, কাদামাটির মতো, হ্রস্ব ব্যঞ্জনবর্ণগুলো মুখের ভেতর পানের মতো পুরে চিবিয়ে নিলে স্বাদ যেন খোলে... এক পূর্বপুরুষের ফ্রেমে বাঁধা ফটো দেখে তার মতামত যেমন -

Jaws puff round and solid as a turnip,
Dead eyes are statue's and the upper lip
Bullies the heavy mouth down to a droop.
A bowler suggests the stage Irishman
Whose look has two parts scorn, two parts dead pan.

*

অতঃপর আরেকটু তফাতে চলে যান কবি, যদিও চোখের তীক্ষ্ণতা, হৃদয়ের আর্দ্রতা কমে না। কিছু প্রকৃতি বন্দনা, কিছু চেনা-অচেনা মানুষের প্রতিকৃতি, কিছু কচি প্রেমের কবিতাও আছে। আয়ারল্যান্ডের নিষ্ঠুর নিসর্গকে নিখুঁতভাবে ধরে ফেলেন তিন-তিনটি দুর্ধর্ষ কবিতায় - Lovers on Aran, Storm on the Island, Synge on Aran. আরো দুয়েকটির কথা না বললেই না - আইরিশ দুর্ভিক্ষ নিয়ে মর্মস্পর্শী At a Potato Digging আর For the Commander of the Eliza, তার চিত্রকর বন্ধুকে উৎসর্গ করে লেখা অসাধারণ In Small Townlands যেখানে কোন এক বিস্ময়কর আলকেমি বলে ক্যানভাসে ল্যান্ডস্কেপ আঁকার মতো করে কবিতা এঁকে ফেলেন কবি - যেমনি দুরূহ তেমনি দক্ষ কৌশলে।

একটি কবিতার বই খুলে যখন একের পর এক স্বার্থক কবিতা পাতার ওপর সদম্ভে হেঁটে যায়, একবার দুবার বা তিনবার অস্ফুট বিড়বিড় বা সজোর আবৃত্তি দাবী করে, ষোল আনার মধ্যে বারো আনাই যখন হিট কবিতা বলে ঠাহর হয়, তখন পুরো সংকলনকে প্রবলভাবে সফল স্বীকার না করে আর উপায় থাকে না। ১৯৬৬ সালে এই ছিল শেমাস হীনির প্রথম পদক্ষেপ। পথের শেষ মাথা পর্যন্ত হেঁটে যান কবি, যেখানে ত্রিশ বছর পর তার জন্যে অপেক্ষা করছিল সাহিত্যে নোবেল পুরস্কার।


*

পুনশ্চ - এতগুলা জোসিলা কবিতার মধ্যে আমার চূড়ান্ত ফেভারিট Mid-Term Break. দম-আটকানো পারিবারিক বিয়োগের স্মৃতি, কবির নিজের জীবন থেকে।

[Matthew Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

128th book of 2020.

A deceptively short collection, for every one of these poems are like lumps in the throat – stones caught by beauty or sadness.


- Seamus Heaney

This was Heaney’s first collection but it reads like the melancholic, beautiful poetry of a man at the end of his career, wise from years of both living and writing. Heaney got hold of a collection of Ted Hughes’ poetry and after reading that, realised he wanted to be a poet, possibly that he could be poet. I could only stomach a poem a day, at best two. Each one lingered for a long time, the feel of them, and the images in every single one, the sort of images that stick forever. The following paragraph is a collected mass: the lines in italics are quotes from random poems – there is no order or reason to it, simply what I have devised. Everything not in italics is my own writing, attempting to thread the random images from the various poems into some semblance of sense.

Heaney’s world is built from fragments. They dig. The potatoes are flint-white, purple./ They lie scattered like inflated pebbles, or else they are live skulls, blind-eyed. Blackberries - at first, just one, a glossy purple clot/ Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. His world is full of nature, both alive and dead. Trout: A volley of cold blood/ramrodding the current, Cow: From forelegs to haunches,/ her belly is slung like a hammock, and from the title poem: gross-bellied frogs were cocked/ on sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails.

And the final stanza of “Turkeys Observed” I must write in full for the power and imaginary it captures:

Now, as I pass the bleak Christmas dazzle,
I find him ranged with his cold squadrons:
The fuselage is bare, the proud wings snapped,
The tail-fan stripped down to a shameful rudder.

Nature throbs in the pages, both its beauty and its horror. The title of the collection speaks for itself – the death of a naturalist. Included in nature, however, is not just the natural world, but Heaney himself, his family. One of the most poignant poems is “Mid-Term Break” which is about his brother who was killed in an accident. The poem drifts through crying faces and condolences, it ticks towards the separated final line that lies across the page like a nail

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

[Ashley Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly evocative.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.


Picking this up last week confirmed my love of books as aesthetic objects, a stirring combination of color and tactile appeal and consequent offset of all sorts of mitigating factors*. I knew a promising journalist studying at Cambridge who spoke solemnly of the virtues of heading to the moors with a slim volume of Faber. This was certainly the week for such; between a lovely if demanding visit from my best friend and some troubling demands on the work front, this was ideal.

Heaney packs the volume with nature but the death is random, almost symbolic. A small child hit by a car; kittens drowned in a bucket. A poet recognizing the worth of labor and puzzling about his own. There is no magic here and the human history appears limited to Erin's famine. There are no troubles here, no ideology and very little love.

* the opposite is true, a lovely literary creation can be muffled in my mind if the book itself is unseemly. My strange snobbery also loathes cheap paper.

[John Hatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to believe that this was Seamus Heaney’s debut book of poetry, but after reading it, it’s easy to understand why he was later awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. I’ve written here several times that I’ve never had an easy time with poetry. If I had started with this poet, that might have been very different. Whether about his father ploughing the fields, the death of a 4-year-old brother, the waves of the sea crashing against the cliffs, or churning butter, each one is a portrait of life. Beautiful.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fave poems -

An Advancement of Learning
Follower
The Diviner
Waterfall
Gravities
Twice Shy
In Small Townlands

[Billy O'Callaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney

A stunning first collection, which set the tone for the stellar career that followed.
I was nine years old when I first became aware of Seamus Heaney, and maybe even the potential of what poetry could be. There was a teacher called Mr. Deegan, and I remember with incredible clarity the day he sat on the edge of a table at the front of the classroom, folded open a ragged-looking paperback and began to read, slowly and aloud, the poem, 'Mid-Term Break.' Everything about it has stayed with me, the greyness of the late morning, the rain beating at the windows, and his voice painting scenes, giving us a sense of something, a life lived that was not our own.
Five or six years passed before I came across the collection, as a book in the library probably just as ragged as the one I'd seen the teacher with. At that stage, my tastes swayed between horror and western, probably Stephen King and Louis L'Amour, and poetry wasn't something that interested me much at all. But I took that book and lived with it, devoured it, and over the years I have owned and given away several copies. But it's a book I keep coming back to. It's not even necessarily my favourite Heaney collection, but it's where we begin, and that can't change.
Not all the poems here move me, but there are some, like the title poem, or 'Scaffholding,' or 'Advancement of Learning' (“Something slobbered curtly, close, / Smudging the silence: a rat / Slimed out of the water...”), or 'Lovers on Aran' (“Did sea define the land or land the sea?”) that have attained such permanence in my life that I know their landscapes by heart. Heaney for me is a picture-poet. The images he creates have burned themselves into me. What keeps me coming back to this book, and to his work in general, is the visceral nature of the descriptions, the appetite for wildness, solitude and stillness, and the realisation – even if only sensed – of what might lie beneath, or beyond, turning the ordinary into something not only remarkable but almost mystical (all qualities, actually, that I also find, and adore, in the work of Ted Hughes).
Ultimately, though, when I think about or revisit Death of a Naturalist, what matters most to me is the poem that Mr. Deegan read aloud to us on that rainy morning when I was nine years old. I've since heard Heaney himself reading it, but – with this one at least – his is not the voice I hear in my head.

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Heaney is like drinking clear spring water from the source

[Dublin James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Living in Dublin, i have actually seen Seamus Heaney in person. About 5 years ago i was on a train that was about to pull out of Connolly Station. Just before it did i noticed Heaney and his wife standing on the platform facing me. in my drunken state i jumped up excitedly. "My God!" i thought, "its Seamus Heaney the noble prize winning poet! Someone who had been spoon fed to me for years in school!"........

I frantically tried to open the window so as to call out to him but alas the train pulled away just as i succeeded in getting the lever to open and he never got to hear what i had to say. which is probably just as well really. As if the train had been just 10 seconds later in pulling away he would have heard me shout out the only line i could remember at that exact instant from all his poems:

"A FOUR FOOT BOX, A FOOT FOR EVERY YEAR!!!!!!!!"

So lets just say i'm eternally grateful that my inability to open train windows when drunk prevented me from shouting at one of the world's most famous poets a line about the passing of his four year old brother! I blame the Irish educational system for forcing us to memorise quotes before we learn to understand them!!!

Anywho, this is a lovely little book. personally i find some of Heaney's poems quite dull and uninspiring but his first two books are very enjoyable reads and this is still my favourite book of poems that he's written.

highlights:

from digging
"Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun"

^ wow. just wow.

from twice shy
"A vacuum of need / Collapsed each hunting heart / But tremously we held as hawk and prey apart, Preserved classic decorum, Deployed our talk with art"

^ I've been on dates like this. just didn't manage to articulate it quite like this when asked 'how it went' afterwards. My bad.

from the docker
"The only Roman collar he tolerates / Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter"

^ now thats how you describe a drunken religious bigot people. take note.

To sum up, even non-poetry fans can enjoy this book. people can either agree or shake their head in artistic disgust depending on their ilk.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Released in 1966, Death of a Naturalist was the first collection by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. While his later work would be more far-ranging, this debut is deeply concerned with the Irish countryside.

Many the poems deal with traditional labour. “Digging”, perhaps his most famous poem, begins with a descriptive of the poet’s father digging up potatoes with a spade and ends with Heaney’s proclamation that the pen will be his tool of choice. In “Follower” he describes how he would walk behind his father as Heaney senior ploughed the field with a team of horses. Even when the poems move on to later periods of Heaney’s life when he was living in towns, such as his relationships with women, they continue to use this farm imagery: “Love, I shall perfect for you the child / Who diligently potters in my brain / Digging with heavy spade till sods were piled / Or puddling through muck in a deep drain.”

It is not only Heaney’s rural upbringing that we find here, but the Irish experience back through time. Some of the poems look back the potato famine that decimated the Irish population in the 19th century. “For the Commander of the Eliza” is narrated by a British captain who meets a rowboat of starving people trying to escape the starving country, but he can’t do anything to save them due to British policy of the time: “We’d known about the shortage, but on board / They always kept us right with flour and beef / So understand my feeling’s, and the men’s / Who had no mandate to relieve distress / Since relief was then available in Westport – / Though clearly these poor brutes would never make it.” Of the four scenes in “At a Potato Digging”, three are observations of contemporary Irishmen at work and one the poet’s imagination of how the 19th-century blight destroyed whole crops.

Unlike many of his peers in 20th century English poetry, Heaney continued to work with traditional metres and rhyme schemes like ABAB. The form of many works, where an observation of everyday life moves into a meditation on larger things, reminds me somewhat of Elizabeth Bishop. Clearly this poetry with its accessible language and concerns has a wide readership. For me personally, the somewhat single-minded focus of the collection keeps me from being completely overwhelmed, though I very much appreciate the art inherent here.

[Brian Robbins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming back to this volume of poems after many years, it was an absolute joy & I found myself upping my rating of it to 5 stars. The delightful quality of the poems in themselves, which breathe & encapsulate the world that Heaney inhabits & present it to the reader in the most vivid of images deserve regular re-readings in order to soak in them.

Their attraction was probably heightened by reading them during a 5 hour coach journey (I loath the enclosure, discomfort & stuffiness of coach travel!). They provided the perfect antidote to that atmosphere, opening out a world of air, water, colour, space & life.

Thank God for such poetry.

[Pooya Kiani · Rating 3 out of 5]

ترجمه‌ی مجتبی ویسی نسبت به اثر دیگری که از شیموس هینی در کتابفروشی‌ها هست ترجمه‌ی بهتری دارد و برای بازسازی زبان هینی در آن زحمت کشیده شده... اما فقط از پس یک شعر و نیمی از دو سه شعر دیگر برآمده.

این کتاب عنوان «مرگ یک ناتورالیست» را بر پیشانی دارد، اما در واقع گزیده‌ای از چند شعر انگشت‌شمار شیموس هینی است، نه ترجمه‌ی «مرگ یک ناتورالیست».

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's fascinating to read this collection of nearly three dozen short poems, individually each a gem, collectively a story of childhood and young adulthood leading to marriage. It very much reminds me of an album of photographs, or even those selections of instrumental miniatures called Albumblätter or Feuilles d'Album.

What do we observe? Scenes of countryside activities from the author's childhood in County Derry, glimpses of individual lives in Belfast, reminiscences of a honeymoon taken, a sojourn on the islands of Aran. Vignettes they may be but they're vivid and intense, self-contained and demanding to be savoured.

I've met one or two of these before, for example Blackberry-picking, which inspired me to write 'I Hunted Dragons Once', but to encounter them in their entirety is a very different experience. Too many to comment here on each individually, it's also hard to make a selection of favourites because each one has its own merits; but try I must.

I'll start with the title poem, though it's not the first in this collection. Like many of the other pieces it's rich in metaphor and anthropomorphism: describing a putrid flax-dam sweltering in the sun he tells us how "Bubbles gurgled delicately, bluebottles | Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell." Here is the "warm thick slobber | Of frogspawn" that draws the schoolchild back to the dam; here now he finds the "great slime kings" whose pulsing and farting nip the nascent naturalist's ambitions in the bud. On the other hand, An Advancement of Learning describes an encounter with a "hitherto snubbed rodent"

"Forgetting how I used to panic
When his grey brothers scraped and fed
Behind the hen-coop in our yard,
On ceiling boards above my bed."

Dare one hope the young naturalist was revivified meeting this rat with" tale red tail" and "raindrop eye"?

Farm life looms large: memories of his father behind a horse-plough, a photograph of his father's uncle evoking long-gone haggling at cattle prices, lines of potato pickers bring awaken ancestral thoughts:

[...] Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod.

But it's not all back-breaking toil and family deaths. We see a docker after work sitting at home "strong and blunt as a Celtic cross" while his family maintain a respectful silence; "old dough-faced women with black shawls" are descried praying in church; Heaney as a schoolteacher reflects on Beethoven "working its private spell"; and folk singers turn over "time-turned words":

Their pre-packed tale will sell
Ten thousand times: pale love
Rouged for the streets. Humming
Solders all broken hearts. Death's edge
Blunts on the narcotic strumming.

A good half dozen poems reflect on his wife Marie, to whom the whole collection is dedicated. The tone of these is personal, obviously, but also revealing of deep love and reliance (Valediction), recognition that the course of love didn't always run smooth (Scaffolding), and quiet meditation on togetherness (Lovers on Aran).

All this varied material is itself scaffolded by masterly technique. Alliteration and onomatopoeia weave their spoken charm; near rhymes alternate with true rhymes; end-stopped lines are balanced with phrases flowing into those that follow; stanzaic structures in their brilliance don't disguise the nature of these pieces as true prose poems.

I shall end with the last stanza of the first poem, Digging. Heaney is reminded of his familial roots listening as his father's spade "sinks into gravelly ground", conscious that his skills lie elsewhere:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Lucky we are that we may enjoy the fruits of his labour.

[Rosemary Standeven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reminded of one of my favourite poems recently by a Goodreads friend who was reading through the works of Seamus Heaney. I had not remembered who had written the poem – but remembered the poem itself so vividly from my school days – over 40 years ago. ‘Mid-Term Break’ is a poem once read, will always be remembered. Its universal enduring partiality is shown by Googling half its last line: “A four foot box, …” – and the whole poem appears. The poem beautifully depicts the numbness and detachment that you go through when a young person close to you suddenly and unexpectedly dies. The tears come later. The shock forces you to focus on minutiae, on the ordinary that has become extraordinary – because thinking about what has happened is too horrific, too much to cope with.

Another poem that appealed to me was "Scaffolding", a poem about building long-lasting relationships

Scaffolding
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.”

And then there was the beautiful imagery and consonance in "Digging", where he compares his poetic craft to his father's and grandfather's digging of peat:

"The cold smell of potato mould , the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it"

Highly recommended

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been re-reading this alongside Derek Walcott's 'Midsummer' and it underscores the differences between the two poets. Walcott packs his poems with rich metaphors and similes, creating startlingly vivid images through unexpected combinations of adjectives and verbs. Heaney is more craggy, austere, full of precise specific terms for kinds of soil and vegetation. Both gaze at the world around them, but Walcott's regard is forever being reflected back upon himself while Heaney is more often focussed on capturing a sense of place and the seasons of life for itself although autobiographical elements are frequently the hook for his poems here. Of course, Heaney's own style would soon become more daring and far-ranging, but these poems, shot through with sun, hail, soil, field and fallow, rock, sea and tide are brilliant and evocative.

[Descending Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first collection of poems of the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It's a strong debut. It has some of his most well known and loved works. Highlights ~ "Digging" "Death of a Naturalist" "Blackberry-Picking" "Follower" "Mid-Term Break" "Docker" "Twice Shy" and "Personal Helicon".

[ciel]

frogs and death and mud. rhythm and sound kept distracting me from the matter which is a huge compliment as I'm quite deaf to my own phonological loop