Field Work

"The opening five lines, really. It opens with the poem ‘Oysters,’ one of my favourite poems. It begins, Our shells clacked on the plates. My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water. I love this poem so much because it manages to capture the idea that a landscape can exist within a shell, basically. There’s a Shakespearean line: Hamlet says he “could be bounded in a nutshell and count [him]self king of infinite space . . .” Here we have a whole landscape in an oyster. The fact that people are the product of their environment, and so, at a beautifully direct level, are oysters. “My tongue was a filling estuary . . .”—the fact that this oyster is also a microcosmic version of its environment. And beautifully tasty for that, and beautifully exciting on the palate. You know, “my palate hung with starlight.” Just one little oyster, but it is everything. I think that’s as close a description of love as I’ve ever read. It’s utterly mesmeric and beautiful. But, to go back to the idea of interlopers, one of the next poems is ‘The Toome Road’: One morning early, I met armoured cars In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres, All camouflaged with broken alder branches, And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets. How long were they approaching down my roads As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping. I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping, Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds, Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell Among all those with their back doors on the latch . . . This idea of the coming of the soldiers into this landscape. The idea of rights-of-way, the idea of ‘my fields,’ ‘my land.’ And the fact that the camouflaged soldiers have these alder branches, that they’re trying to blend in to a landscape—yet their very presence makes it a hostile place, makes it frightening to the poet, or the child in that story. The book is full of these. You can’t really narrow this collection down to, ‘this is a good one,’ because I’d read you every single poem in it. But there’s a poem called ‘The Casualty,’ which is about a man that the poet meets in a park. He’s a fisherman. He gets blown up and we oscillate between the poet and “His deadpan sidling tact, / His fisherman’s quick eye, and turned observant back.” This is a man of the world, and yet he was out of his depth. He was in the wrong place, but he felt at home; he felt assured in his roots, of a locale. It’s about the way we exist within place, that’s how I’d sum up the work . Field Work is about the way we exist within place, the comfort we take from place and what happens when that apparent solidity and belonging is challenged. Yes, I think it’s another case of stepping back to see the bigger picture. I think there’s a huge sense of dread in this collection. There’s a huge amount of foreboding that runs through even the most pastoral and apparently peaceful poems here. You get the sense that the poems are of a world waiting for something, of a world unsettled, a world in flux, and a world that is holding its breath quite a lot of the time. As a poet he does that to us, because of the way that he brilliantly manipulates the mind while the poems spool out, but equally I think the words are chosen to forestall a conclusion to the poem: you’re given certain things, clues and images but other things are held back. There is no easy passage through this book. It feels like the foot is constantly hovering over the clutch for a change of gear. It feels like this is real engagement, not just with Heaney and his work, but Heaney and the readers, and there is as much between the lines as there is in the actual lines themselves. I think anything that self-identifies as nature writing is something almost to be suspicious of. I say that because I think nature writing is a quite recent invention. I have a problem with ‘nonfiction’ as a term, because I’m not overly keen on defining what I do by its lack. You know, it’s ‘not untrue’ . . . It’s a strange way of saying that these are stories from the world. “Nature writing is a strange kind of hinterland” Nature writing is perhaps a useful genre for selling books, and for shelving books. But nature writing is a strange kind of hinterland, which is neither fish nor fowl, although it claims to know everything about both. Maybe that’s a pious or pompous way to end. I don’t want to just slag off nature writing. I just think that a lot of the writers that I love that we could describe as ‘nature writers’ are not writing about nature as a separate thing from the world. Nature is not somewhere we choose to visit. Nature is somewhere we live. I do think about this a lot. I think the problem is that the term ‘nature writing’ plays into this idea of compartmentalization; a lot of these nature writing books look at the minutiae at the expense of the bigger picture. They play into this false narrative: that nature is a whole area of unconnected goings-on. It ties into what you said, the writer who was like, ‘I want to only see the things that should be there, and I’ll ignore everything that’s wrong with it.’ That’s nature writing. Yeah, sure, don’t tell me about the sewage plant at the edge of the farm. Just leave out all the inconvenient stuff. I think that nature writing runs the risk of being really myopic. Myopic and quite pleased with itself, and none of the writers I have spoken about here are any of those things. They try and see this connectivity and universality, rather than the false specialism of trying to sell books on a certain shelf, or fit things in a certain prize bracket. Because: bollocks to that. Look at Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer debacle; they didn’t know where to place him, how to pin him because he was beyond genre. All my five are interzonal in that way, perhaps—books like rushes of gold to the head, experiential portals into the thrilling in-between."

"This is my favourite of all his books, and the one that sees his poetry loosening, and tightening, into work of international stature. Written at a fresh distance from his home in the North of Ireland and the Troubles: these are limber, rangy, exquisite poems. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I would recommend any of the following: The Vivisector , Patrick White Waterland , Graham Swift The Handmaid’s Tale , Margaret Atwood The Book of Evidence , by John Banville A Disaffection , James Kelman Amongst Women , John McGahern Reading in the Dark , Seamus Deane Grace Notes , Bernard MacLaverty The Gathering , by Anne Enright Eileen , Ottessa Moshfegh One Lark, One Horse (2018) is Michael Hofmann’s first new collection in nearly twenty years. Appearing shortly, into the cacophonous white noise of self-promotion that currently passes for poetry, Hofmann shows us again how to write. The three novels on the shortlist that I haven’t yet read."