The Long and Broken Road of an Irish Poet : SELECTED POEMS, 1966-1967 <i> by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $20; 260 pp.) </i>

After a while, a poet moves on or risks becoming Poet Laureate of himself. The moving-on is tough. It is not, like the pioneer’s, necessarily to greener or more promising land. Departure may be from the poet’s best work.

A midway selection of poems--in this case covering Seamus Heaney’s first two writing decades--is first of all the history of a journey, and of the discoveries and inventions made along the way. Heaney’s are remarkable enough; and some are so remarkable that, like automated bank tellers and pizza, it is hard to believe they ever were not there.

But such a selection also asks where the journey will go on to. Heaney is 50, and a couple more decades surely are to be had out of him. It is easy to pronounce a ritual salutation to the effect that with so much done, there is a lot to look forward to.

There is; but it’s not that simple. It’s like saying to a hunter: I look forward to your next 20 years of tigers. Heaney’s “Selected Poems 1966-1987” is a record of triumph, but the risks show themselves too. Dry spots, elaborations, explorations that seem unrevealing, and even a turn or two of Self-Laureating while the strength gathers for another mortal departure.

A broken road, an alternating possession and dispossession, have been the condition of most of the best poets, at least since advances in public health and the availability of teaching jobs encourage them to live past 30. But it particularly comes to mind with Heaney, because he has a belief about a poet’s progress. He suggests that the early and middle stages have to do with finding and mastering the individuality of roots, experience and voice; with becoming wonderfully oneself.

This is as far as many excellent poets go, developing full power and an unmistakable style. But there can be another stage, an overdrive. After exploring the voice to its limits, poets may work free of it--free of their images, landscapes, battlefields and perfected complexities.

Heaney has found signs of this lightening divestment in the later stages of such poets as Yeats, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and others. And of his own 20-odd years of writing, he tells us in a prefatory note:

“I want to believe that, in the course of that time span, a voice which began to be ‘found’ proceeded on some happy occasions to ‘free’ itself as well.”

You can think of the simplicity, which is not really simple at all, of Beethoven’s last quartets or Bach’s “Art of the Fugue.” Or you can think of Tolstoy moving from the splendor of his novels into “pure” but also empty exhorting; and into the railroad station where, finally divesting, he ran off to die.

Nobody can judge the broken road until it is ended. “Why are you going downhill?” the reader worries. Readers who love a poet love what they know, not what they cannot know yet. In broken country you have to go down to get to the start of a higher hill, but in poetry the hill doesn’t exist unless the writer makes it exist; and even the writer can’t see it clearly or know what it will amount to.

In 50 years it will not matter--I assume public health will not have improved that much--whether Heaney’s most living poems came at the beginning, middle or end of his span. Or rather, because things are hardly ever that neat, where they will tend to cluster. To try to pronounce about it now would not only be stupid but perverse.

So: It is an excellent thing to have these nine dozen and more poems, written over 21 years, in a new volume. To call it “Selected Poems 1966-1987” is accurate, inevitable and perfectly all right. Except that, in the sense I have suggested, it can be misleading. It led me to think I was going to review it, and perhaps to mislead anyone who has read this far into expecting that I would. A review is a judgment; I won’t judge the road; I resign the perch.

I will walk a few steps, though, unperched. The poems that brought Heaney into such light--the poems of the Irish land and boggy roots, those that dig into myth and the peat-preserved remains of the old dwellers, those that tell of growing up through and out of history, those that tell of the pain of Northern Ireland’s division--these still shine the most strongly for me.

I respond more coolly to others: those that seek to transform the specific beyond some--admittedly--undefinable point of formal and conceptual elaboration and refinement. I find the Glanmore sonnets in “Field Work” (1979) rather empty, for example. Some of the selections from “Station Island” and “The Haw Lantern” seem to me to show not so much a voice freeing itself as poems freeing themselves from any voice at all; through an austere complexity of fragmented images and emotions. A lot of accomplished contemporary poetry seeks for that, but Heaney can do more.

And does. Of the poems that I believe give him his stature, I find many in the early and middle years. Right at the start there is “Follower,” with his childhood memory of stumbling over tillage after his plowman-father, “His shoulders globed like a full sail strung/Between the shafts and the furrow.” And now, he is grown, and compelled to write of these root matters:

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

Yapping always. But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me, and will not go away.

There is “Gifts of Rain,” more mature, and a masterpiece. It tells the prehistory and history of his country in the image of a farmer in the eternal Irish rain:

Still mammal.

Straw-footed on the mud,

He begins to sense weather

By his skin.

And then, in the drowned plow-land:

A man wading lost fields

Breaks the pane of flood:

A flower of mud--

Water blooms up to his reflection

Like a cut swaying

Its red spoors through a basin.

For centuries, poets have looked up to the sky or across to horizons. Heaney’s specific and original gesture--seeking out the fatality that dogged his people--was to look down, into the bog and the sedimentary layers of history. And when he comes to the present, after his haunting poems about the mummified remains of Vikings and ancient Celts, he goes beneath the wars of Protestant and Catholic neighbors and finds the pain that lies under. He fixes this pain with a sharpness that mocks 20 years of the world’s journalism, and suggests that poetry is the real news.

Later, as he departs from such themes, I sometimes find him labored or brittle. Yet he never has really pulled away; he keeps circling back. His lovely “Sweeney Astray,” published in 1983, is ostensibly the retelling of an Irish epic, but it is all Heaney--astray himself, perhaps, from the burden of the departures. Vacations are known to hatch masterpieces; perhaps that’s even a slantwise aspect of what Heaney means by “freeing” his voice.

And in “The Haw Lantern,” along with work that seems to me more searching than rewarding, there is some extraordinary freeing, most notably in the shining lucidity of sonnets to his dying mother. In the seventh, the family is at the bedside where she has just died:

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

The last sonnet opens these clearances all the way. Heaney writes of the felling of the family’s chestnut tree, planted when he was a baby:

I heard the hatchet’s differentiated

Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

And collapse of what luxuriated

Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval

Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

A soul ramifying and forever

Silent, beyond silence listened for.