When, suddenly, a voice intrudes with a direct challenge to a writer in his own text, the reader is put on special alert. Think of the charged encounter in Seamus Heaney's 'The Flight Path'. The grimfaced stranger on the train, 'last met in a dream', hurls

'When, for fuck's sake, are you going to write
Something for us?'

at the poet. Heaney responds:

'If I do write something,
Whatever it is, I'll be writing for myself.'
And that was that. Or words to that effect.

'You', 'us' and 'I' are a tense, complex trio of identifications and distinctions. The complexity increases: Heaney thinks of himself in relation to the months of 'dirty protest' in Long Kesh, as walking through Dante's hell 'behind the righteous Virgil,/As safe as houses and translating freely'. The dialogue hits the imagination like a snooker ball cannoning round the table then cracking into a pack of reds, setting up new configurations, new challenges.

LRB 3 September 1998 | PDF Download