The Riverbank Fields

Abstract By the late work, the riverbank was Heaney’s sovereign territory. He had long noticed the significance of this marginal terrain between land and water, between the conditions of the here, the now, and the past and future. Constant is the question of where life begins and ends, or better to say in the late poetry of where it continues and in what form after death. Sometimes Heaney looked for this animation in fish and bird and tree. Sometimes he wrote it through the land and waterscape itself, the air a medium to light the whole. This closing chapter establishes how he imagined the river as a depth to be looked into and through, the abiding location for this perspective the riverbank fields of his first awareness, now observed as a portal to the unknown territory beyond.