brendan corcoran
twentieth century. As a consequence, the dead man, as an emanation of trauma
itself,refuses to stay buried (a pattern Heaney is familiar with), coming back to
harangue the poet in ‘Station Island’. The symbolically achieved mourning fails, and
the hubristic claim of truly consolatory orobtusely transformative powers demands
revision. Ultimately, Heaney hears the voice of a poem and a grief left unfinished,
which must stay unfinished, unburied precisely, as Blanchot says, to ‘keep watch’.^67
In ‘Station Island’, Heaney keeps this death alive in the same way in which he keeps
the wound to the Grauballe man ‘cured’,^68 and with this paradox Heaney finds his
ultimate field of force. McCartney’s ghost charges that his cousin the poet ‘confused
evasion with artistic tact’.^69 The dead man berates the poet for imagining and writing
something that emanated from himself and not ‘the fact’ of the murder—which
remains at an unreachable remove from the poet. Significantly, the dead man does
not say that the poet should refrain from representing what happened. And indeed,
the success of Heaney’s revision lies in the fact that the images of the murder and
its scene are not ‘corrected’ or replaced with something more ‘accurate’; rather, the
‘true’ voice of the dead is appended to the ‘false’, if searching, voice of the living poet.
We hear the voice of the unquiet dead out of time not only chastising but refusing
the easy burial ordered by the living, and so remaining unburied and present—as
a voice—to the poet and the poem. As if becoming a genius of the place, this
voice out of time and space replaces any empirical actuality about the place or
event, and the purgatorial blinds of forgetting are cast aside for a different kind of
remembrance, a haunting, in which the dead and death remain—timelessly—with
the living and within the poetry. The two McCartney poems, which must be read as
extensions of the same poem, demonstrate how Heaney’s poetry witnesses war not
as a vast incomprehensibility but within the suffering of a person, living or dead,
and bearing a voice that refuses the silence of mere memorialization.
Heaney says, by way of Owen, that ‘the ‘‘poet as witness’’...represents poetry’s
solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the under-privileged.
The witness is any figure in whom the truth-telling urge and the compulsion to
identify with the oppressed becomes necessarily integral with the act of writing
itself.’^70 Heaney’s work across his career should be categorized as a species of
witnessing poetry, still haunted by the presence and example of poets like Owen
and Mandelstam.^71 Brearton suggests that Heaney’s ‘polarized’ use of Owen to
(^67) Maurice Blanchot,The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995), 51.
(^68) Heaney, ‘Grauballe Man’, 115. (^69) Heaney, ‘Station Island’, inOpened Ground, 261.
(^70) Heaney, ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker’, inGovernment of the
Tongue 71 ,p.xvi.
In his introduction to an extraordinary small book of translations of ‘Anything Can Happen’,
his poem in response to the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, which was translated into
twenty-four ‘languages of conflict’ and published for the benefit of Amnesty International, Heaney yet
again addresses the question of ‘how exactly art earns its keep in a violent time’ (Heaney,Anything Can
Happen(Dublin: Townhouse, 2004), 19 and 14). With its ‘element of surprise’ and ‘soothsaying force’,