Neil Jordan: works for the page

Hickey notes “the element of pollution” in the “exhaust fumes, silage, traffic, and transatlantic flights” (93) in the poem. In would be easy, in some respects, to read the poem as a rebuke to a dematerialised, disembodied modernity that has lost all contact with the natural world, and that Tollund Man himself represents that lost connection. In this reading the poem is another iteration of the Derry versus Derrida contest through which Heaney characterised The Haw Lantern. But as with that earlier collection, such contests draw on false dichotomies. Tollund Man too is dematerialised and disembodied, and at the end of the poem he is “spirited [. . .] into the street.” The tensions in Heaney’s work, then, are not so much between ethereal spectres and solid, elemental reality, but rather between different types of haunting. Haunted Heaney consistently and persuasively makes this case, and centres haunting as a key preoccupation of Heaney’s work, but it is less successful at differentiating between different kinds of ghosts, and their multiple, shifting contexts and implications.