BLOOD PUDDING: Just finished re-reading Seamus Heaney’s collection North. Had not read it since high school. Really found it to be too much of a muchness: the earth = language = sex, yes, okay, I get it, also with a dash of Northern Ireland politics, a gobbet of prehistoric violence, stir well and serve at room temperature. I dunno. Felt like I should have been more struck by this than I was. Partly, the language is aggressively clotted–the mind’s tongue keeps balking, to the point where it’s showoffy as well as frustrating. You slog through the words. Partly, the problem is that almost every poem was doing the exact same thing as the other poems. Partly it’s that there sometimes seemed to be an overquick identification of humans and human things with the natural world: One of the points of being human is that we are a different kind of critter. Partly, maybe, it’s a lack of metaphysics–I never really felt the shock of the transcendent. Partly it’s a degree of self-praise for being A Poet, coupled with the usual contemporary pomo poet-as-traitor shtik, in more or less exactly the wrong proportions for my taste. (Or perhaps those bits just struck too close to home!) You’d really think I’d still like these poems: so much clinging to place, to homeland, to particular trees and turf and accents. But the collection really left me cold. Anyway, am still planning to re-read Station Island, but maybe not immediately.