Motorisation of the Spirit

Ours is not the first study of poets and cars (autopoetics?). It follows humbly in the tire tracks of Medbh McGuckian's Horsepower, Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Cranagh Press, 1999). McGuckian, herself a fine poet, tracks the signal importance of the car in Heaney's poetry, "a gradual mobilisation of the spirit, even in the Shakespearian sense, over thirty years, tribal or collective as well as individual that Seamus's work charts."

Heaney's mobilisation begins rather gloomily with "Tractors," published in The Belfast Telegraph in 1962 (a poem, according to McGuckian, that now embarrasses Heaney in its "Animal Farm heaviness"):

Grey as slugs
Blue or red as lug-worms, 
The tractors lumber in the fields,
Their hopelessness hurts thought.

A more recent, more "joyriding," poem has Heaney characterizing (car-acterizing?) fellow Nobelist, Joseph Brodsky's, language use in distinctly motorized terms:

Nose in air, foot to the floor,
Revving English like a car
Hijacked when you robbed its bank
Russian was your reserve tank.

("Elegy for Joseph Brodsky,"1996)

For a poet of Heaney's generation and rural upbringing (b. 1939, County Londonderry), the car brought freedom of movement, access to new worlds - and to romance. Being Northern Ireland, however, the specters of politics, violence, and death are ever present. From the Station Island (1984) sequence:

My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach
Shrank to a cinder and tightened and cracked
...I saw country
I knew from Glenshane down to Toome
And heard a car I could make out years away
With me in the back like a white-faced groom, 
A hit-man on the brink, emptied and deadly.

The doubling of groom and hit-man, both typically backseat passengers, is a brilliant realization of the "conjunction between the loss of self in erotic tension and the fearful change of identity in violent death." Another of McGukian's examples comes from "The Betrothal of Cavehill" (1975):

The morning I drove out to bed me down
Among my love's hideouts, her pods and brooms,
They fired above my car the ritual gun...

Rituals of courting the living, rituals of burying the dead. The car is always witness.