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  • Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers
  • Patrick Hicks
Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers, by Eugene O’Brien . pp. 213. London: Pluto Press; distributed by University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2003. $75 cloth; $25 paper.

Eugene O'Brien has been impressively prolific in his analysis of Ireland's most recent Nobel Prize winner, in Seamus Heaney: Creating Irelands of the Mind (2002) and Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (2003). In this, his latest effort, he successfully untangles the overlooked links between Heaney's prose [End Page 159] and poetry. O'Brien also reads Heaney against such literary thinkers as Derrida, Bakhtin, and Adorno, and he investigates textual interplays between Heaney and Yeats. Throughout, O'Brien explores the gaps—or "traces" to use the terminology of deconstruction—that help to fuel Heaney's search for aesthetic, political, and linguistic answers.

This readable book considers Heaney's entire oeuvre: poetry, prose, and translations. Heaney has now published eight collections of prose and it is through these writings, O'Brien reminds us, that Heaney's ongoing interest in plurality, the poetic voice, and heritage are highlighted. Heaney is never satisfied with his conclusions and revisits old ideas through new writings. Such oscillations in a poet—one who has been influenced by the binary oppositions of Ulster—makes it unsurprising that O'Brien invokes Jacques Derrida. Derrida grew up speaking French in colonial Algeria, and he also understood the complexities of cultural hybridity. Derrida recognized that answers promote further questions and in his philosophical writings he challenged the notion of logocentricism in much the same way as, O'Brien argues, that Heaney does throughout his own writings on voice and culture. Both men approach the notion of "text" from similar perspectives and are dubious about answers. O'Brien reminds us that Heaney, too, often oscillates between binary poles and that he places ideas in dialogue so that the search for answers might be widened, not collapsed.

Much of the final chapter, "Noble Causes: Heaney and Yeats," explores how the two poets understand their place in Ireland and, indeed, the Irish canon. Yeats obviously influenced Heaney, but now—since they have both stood on that rostrum in Stockholm—how might Heaney influence our reading of Yeats? Although O'Brien is not necessarily preoccupied with supplying an answer for such a question, he does tug at the strands that tie these two Nobel winners together: a strong sense of place, their mutual interest in the complexities of history, and a willingness to keep the text open. Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers offers a fine overview of Heaney's work and broadens our understanding of a writer who shuns the monolithic because he sees answers as malleable, porous, and temporary. As O'Brien suggests, Heaney does not arrive at simple conclusions because he refuses answers and encourages the search.

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