No major poet, David Schurman Wallace notes, ever wrote about eels as often as Seamus Heaney did. The eel — elusive, elongated, forever slipping the grip — was his image for the thing he spent a life chasing: "the slipperiness of the real." His famously thick onomatopoeia, all squelch and slap, was an attempt to bind language to the material world, to make the sounds the mouth makes feel like the things themselves.
Whether that binding is fidelity or a lovely trick is the essay's open question. The critic Terry Eagleton called Heaney's materiality "a linguistic trompe l'oeil" — association, not incarnation. "Still," Wallace admits, "it works on me." It works on me too.
A backward-facing poet, forever glancing over his shoulder into childhood and Viking history, turns out to be surprising company for anyone who has ever tried to pin a word to a world that won't hold still.
In good company
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In good company
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