Heaney Offshore

Abstract

This chapter reads Seamus Heaney’s engagement with water, liquidity, and shore and coastlines throughout his poetry. Seamus Heaney is so familiar as the laureate of Mossbawn and its extended enclosures that his poetry seems impossible to uproot from its locality. The northern countryside that nourished, and often troubled, his imagination is a dominant metaphor for the poet’s ideas of family, community and, by extension, nationality. Under-observed in all this is another element in Heaney’s writing, which is the use of water as a medium to imagine other kinds of human association. Water is a key image throughout Heaney’s work in the form of rivers, streams, bogs, lakes, and oceans; it is there at the beginning as a drip from the farmyard pump, and there again at the end in the eel fishery at Lough Neagh, as this chapter discusses in close readings of his poems.