Midwinter at Walden Pond
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Seamus Heaney 1939-2013 I dig deep for words worthy of what you gave delving into the peat and loam of your own upbringing, a country boy as I was who in the end became a countryman, versed in our particular trade honing language to cut a swathe through unbearable experience, scything a space where we all could breathe, a wedge of silage in the side of a hill held down by tires on a black tarpaulin, the ritual of tying the harvest bow. I cannot bear the thought of you reduced to bone smashed in a mortar shelved or scattered. though know the earth or sea will gravely welcome you, an ally at a time we spend our time naming and numbering our enemies, walling ourselves in, wanting no contact, and the only poetry garish words slashed on brick in the small hours by one too young to carry a gun. I am ill at the idea that you are gone, who looked so kindly on us, who wrote about your wife with unparalleled love, who sat at a table so solidly, so filled with confidence that inspiration would always come, a gift in the gorse-scented wind or brine-soaked oyster-colored sea, an unexpected parcel, a good turn, a phrase for something we did not quite believe. The stacked lumber of your seventy-four years and our repining is now pared down to a single knot-holed plank of grief. In a cobbled yard we build your bier, as plain and unpretentious as celebrity allows, acknowledging the simple fact that your words were also ours whether walking through a hail of stones and hate-filled rhetoric on a Belfast street or penning in our collective mind obituaries for the blinding passions that had brought us to our knees. We will sing your praises as if you were our lost Lycidas, not drowned by history but survived to tell the tale, to bind us close with the fraying twine of your careful phrases. You showed us what we had forgotten about our common clay, how we might bridge the gap between history and hope, a skunk in the garden and your beloved wife bending to take a plunge-line black negligé from the bottom drawer. If I go against the grain of your tilled, harrowed fields, furthering the line of the glinting plough to absorb clamoring gulls and other scavengers, if I migrate or deviate, slam the tractor into reverse at the thought of a cowering animal, it is because of what I read between your lines in wintering out or on bog sacrifice in North or on those antinomies that strike a spark from the hooves of our hurrying harnessed pairs and hint like fireflies of a path through elephant grass or a stream, still muddy after rain, that will run clear.
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About the Book
An ice-bound New England pond – utterly still, though racked with sub-glacial groans – serves as an image of a mind overwhelmed one moment by troubling memories, the next by the peace that passes all understanding. In his new collection, Michael Jackson explores the impact on a poet’s consciousness of past and present events – both personal and historical - and the possibility of transcendence in love and creative work. “Without ever submitting to bland fashion or to clique, Michael Jackson for almost fifty years has written poetry which is that of a man confronting ‘the things happening’ of his time, poems probing at that recurrent query, where does one take one’s place in ‘the terrible parades of history’. There is no final reply. But by love, by compassion, by constant attention to what is said and how it is written, the questioning itself, with luck, sustains. What one hears in his readings is the modest, confident, international voice that drives his poems, the conversing of a man who, as ever, is on one road to find another.” – Vincent O’Sullivan.
About the Author
The author of thirty books, including seven volumes of poetry, Michael Jackson has won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, and his work is represented in the UK Poetry Archive. His poetry often reflects his ethnographic experiences in Sierra Leone, Aboriginal Australia, and his native New Zealand. Michael Jackson is married with three children and lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. Since 2005 he has been Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.