POETRY

SWEENEY’S FLIGHT by Seamus Heaney with photographs by Rachel Giese (Farrar, Straus, Giroux: $35; 117 pp.) In 1972, Seamus Heaney moved from Belfast to Wicklow where, between “North” (1975) and “Field Work” (1979), he began to translate a medieval Irish saga. In 1982-83, Heaney wrapped up his translation (based on J. G. O’Keeffe’s 1913 bilingual edition) and published it as “Sweeney Astray.” Now, almost two decades after he took up with Mad Sweeney, Heaney has revised his ‘80s version and re-released it as “Sweeney’s Flight.”

But that’s not all. Because this time around the poet has joined forces with Rachel Giese and come up with a duotone marriage between image and text. In fact, it seems that Giese’s shots of Ulster Shuibhne convinced Heaney (despite his misgivings about the “problematic relation between image and text”) that the “right person had arrived at the right time.”

And how “right” Heaney was. Giese’s 34 black-and-white exposures offer him a virtual lens; an occasion to explore, as in his opening triptych, “The King of the Ditchbacks” (taken from “Station Island”), the “as if” of his relationship with Sweeney--”I went back toward the gate to follow him. And my stealth was second nature to me, as if I were coming into my own. I remembered I had been vested for this calling.” Even more than this, however, “Sweeney’s Flight” gives Heaney one last chance to remind his readers (in case they didn’t get it the first time) that the Irish language-- Irish poetry--”belongs to everyone”; that Mad Sweeney, even in the lateness of the ‘90s, can still serve as a “mouthpiece for the common, primary sensations and emotions which everybody experiences in the presence of the natural world.”