Book Review

Death of a Naturalist is an anthology of poems written by Seamus Heaney and published in 1966. In it, Heaney touches on subjects such as the natural traditions of his ancestors, their decline, his own childhood and maturation as well as love. Through his direct, colloquial writing style, Heaney gives us a deep glimpse into the traditions of his ancestry while portraying nostalgia and regret for its passing. He parallels the end of the simple Irish life with that of his own loss of innocence and by crossbreeding the two themes creates a deeply layered work. The anthology’s only notable weak-point is its meditations on love which seem an unfitting addition to the work’s otherwise unified product.
Much of the joy in reading this anthology comes from Heaney elevating the sensory aspect of successful poetry to a new level. In doing so, Heaney transports us directly to the fresh, natural environment of his family and by extension his Irish ancestry. Heaney thus purposefully makes the reader long for the extinct past which he himself shows deep nostalgia for in Death of a Naturalist. A prime example of the reader’s sensory involvement within Heaney’s poems occurs in “Blackberry Picking”. The reader is transported directly to the action of Heaney and his comrades picking blackberries through the use of onomatopoeia and alliteration to heighten our senses. “Big dark blobs burned,” for example, makes one feel like they are inches away from the subject of the poem. In “Digging” – the anthology’s first and arguably best poem – one feels at the helm of Heaney’s father’s action of digging for potato roots with such sensory diction as “cool hardness” of “scattered new potatoes.” Paralleling and signifying this fresh and natural imagery in Death of a Naturalist is the colloquial language which pervades the anthology – the simplicity of which does not detract from the deep thematic unity of the poems. In “Personal Helicon”, for example, Heaney explores both the loss of his innocence and the obsoleteness of naturalistic observation with short and unpretentious diction.
Heaney not only describes well the pure essence of his ancestry and family’s traditions but also laments their loss in unique ways. In “Blackberry Picking”, for example, Heaney creates a brilliant allegory for the loss of this natural lifestyle by describing the rotting of previously “glossy and sweet” blackberries and Heaney’s role in the process. Religious imagery such as “thorn pricks” – connoting the crucifixion of Jesus – is included in the poem to heighten Heaney’s lamentation of Ireland’s modernization. In “Follower”, Heaney – through the use of ironic role reversal – is extremely self-critical of his inability to fill his father’s manual labor footsteps. He elaborates on the effect this takes on him with the non-literal meaning of the poem’s last line. It is now “his father who keeps stumbling behind him and will not go away”, which suggests the loss of his past is always at the back of his mind. However in a number of poems he reconciles his own role in this loss of tradition by suggesting that his poetry allows him to relive and commemorate the past. “Digging” is a prime example of this, in which Heaney parallels his own work with that of his grandfather by comparing digging to the art of writing poetry. By delving into his ancestors’ past, he is in effect digging for roots just as his father and grandfather dig for the literal roots of potatoes. The grandfather “nicks and slices neatly” just as Heaney does his words; despite its technical nature and difficulty, digging is clearly described as a sensory and liberating process just as poetry is meant to be – exemplified by this poem being written in free verse. Thus, Heaney rationalizes his breaking with tradition by suggesting that he is continuing his ancestry’s actions by bringing light to them.
Coming hand in hand with Heaney’s criticism of the loss of a simpler time is his own maturation and loss of innocence – a common theme in Death of a Naturalist which is brilliantly explored as its own entity as well as effectively paralleled to Ireland’s maturation. In “Mid-term Break”, for example, Heaney accounts with cold and melancholy diction the accidental death of his four year old brother, describing an event in his life which brought him to a difficult reality and thus helped end his childhood innocence. While this poem deals solely with Heaney’s own maturation, other poems such as “Personal Helicon” brilliantly combine a child’s growing up with the loss of Ireland’s natural identity. “To stare big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring is beneath all adult dignity” is perhaps the most fundamental display of this fusion within the anthology as the sentence evokes intense nostalgia for both the freedom and simplicity of childhood and traditional Irish customs. Not just restricted to “Personal Helicon”, these two respective changes and Heaney’s lament for them are effectively paralleled and combined in Death of a Naturalist.
The only notable Achilles’ Heel of this anthology seems to be the author’s poems about love, which though by no means examples of dull poetry are unfitting in the context of the bulk of the anthology. Death of a Naturalist has a purposeful unity without these additions and makes one question the motives behind Heaney’s choice to include them. For example, “Poem”, which compares manual labor to perfecting love is a neat poem which fits within the boundaries of describing a simple past however is an outlier to the anthology thematically. Such a poem would fit well in another collection where its theme and message can be better developed with similar poems. Poems such as “Poem”, though seemingly unfitting, give only a small dent to the rich and highly-developed work that is Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist.