Magnificent poems by one of my favorite writers. ( )

Seamus Heaney is a master at his craft. His poems are evocative and ensnaring. They deal with the culture of Ireland in actions and landmarks. His works are emotional and stirring. ( )

Berry season is here! I could smell their summery juice on the air currents during a recent hike, and although I haven't been out to pick my own yet, the markets are suddenly glutted with delicious, ripe berries of all stripes: rasp, blue, black, marion, straw, logan - they're all there, waiting for me to cave to temptation. All throughout berry season, as I stuff scrumptious fruit into my mouth in an effort to consume the totally unrealistic number of berries I always end up purchasing, and as I mourn over the molded cartons that I wake up to the next day, a certain couplet runs ceaselessly through my head. "It wasn't fair," it starts: the last two lines of Seamus Heaney's gorgeous "Blackberry-picking." Since the verses were already rattling around in my brain, I found it a good excuse to reinstate my poetry-memorization project for July.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun,
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn-pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

As sublime as individual lines are throughout the poem - "a glossy purple clot," "We hoarded fresh berries in the byre," "You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine" - it's that final couplet that really makes the poem shine for me. It speaks so eloquently to a universal tendency on all our parts, knowing one thing and stubbornly hoping another. Even though I still engage in this kind of "magical thinking," I associate its hopefulness particularly with that time just before adolescence when we begin to suspect certain truths about the adult world, but still retain a some of childhood's fuzziness around cause and effect, reality and hope. That one line takes the poem's nostalgia for childhood summers and transforms it into something deeper, leaving the childhood self intact, and simultaneously glancing toward the growing-up process. There is a feeling of existing between two states, or in both states simultaneously. "Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not." It's masterfully done.

I also love what "Blackberry Picking" has to say about the futility of hoarding riches away from their source: "Once off the bush / The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour." This must also be a universally devastating and intriguing experience, judging from all the fairy-, folk- and popular tales featuring elusive riches, vanishing piles of gold, Holy Grails that slip through our fingers, the bullion at the end of the rainbow, bewitched banquets, and so on. It's difficult to look at bounty and understand that it can't effectively be gathered to one's bosom and kept there without losing its shine and beauty. And it's equally crushing to accept that the glut of treasure in good times can't eliminate the lean times of scarcity, even if they can temper them. I love the way Heaney's poem moves from expectation, through lust and exuberance, to heartbreak, and on to a simultaneous melancholia, distance and hope.

And of course, the real high-point is the scrumptiously tactile and specific language. In a poem about berries, it's particularly fitting that one feel as if one's hands and tongue get stained purple just from reading it. "Blackberry-picking" delivers this feeling so viscerally for me that it's never far from my mind when a berry is near. ( )

His poetry is at once mysteriously haunting one minute and in the next a revelation. ( )

solid poetry. Sometimes emotion seems lacking though the mechanics and the description are always top tier. ( )