Polish Sleepers

Alan Gillis
a precarious balance
I remember, on first reading ‘Polish Sleepers’, being knocked sideways by
its final line. It throws me still. Its abrupt leap into troubled, evanescent
expansion is so precariously balanced. The enveloping aftermath of ‘rust,
thistles, silence, sky’ seems initially to be a world apart from the ‘block-
built criss-cross and four-squared’ solidity of what has gone before. The
sinister encroachment of the ‘tarry pus’ and the heaviness of each
approaching ‘languid, clanking wagon’ disappear so swiftly. Where do
they go? In the blink-of-an-eye passing from line thirteen to line fourteen,
a hiatus that doesn’t miss a beat, they have left the sonnet, left the page.
The poem turns to cut them off, curtailing both the imagined vision (the
accruing pus) and the memory (the approaching train) just as they are
coming into view, as it were. Yet with such steady-built momentum
behind them, which has taken almost the entirety of the poem to build,
they pass into reverberation, ramification, ghosted into the white edges
of the poem to perturb the silence, the sky. In passing into nothingness,
they pass into the reader of the poem, into us. The final four italicised
words are as unsettled as they are certain, as empty as they are elemental.
The rust and thistles already bring decay, a rasping scratch, polluting the
big clear emptiness that canopies them and us. And yet we are left with
them, their puzzling inevitability bringing some strange relief, a kind of
lift and freedom, an enlargement of sorts.
The poem revisits one of Heaney’s much-loved ‘Glanmore Sonnets’.
In the earlier sonnet: ‘
I used to lie with an ear to the line

For that way, they said, there should come a sound
Escaping ahead, an iron tune
Of flange and piston pitched along the ground ...
But in this earlier poem, similar to ‘Polish Sleepers’, the coming train
remains more of an intimation than something experienced within the
poem (‘But I never heard that’). Instead, the poem fixates on the
reverberations of the train’s distant passing: ‘Two fields back, in the house,
small ripples shook / Silently across our drinking water / (As they are
shaking now across my heart) / And vanished into where they seemed to
start.’ The power, physicality and motion coursing along the train lines
are interlinked through the vibrations to their passing, absence and
memory. Similarly, the rhythm of the lines of the poem, the physicality
poetry ireland review 113 125

of its sound, and the depth and reach of its memory are interlinked
through the vibrations of emotion. Being in the world is affirmed
through affect, the connective tissue between inner and outer, but this is
rendered palpable in a way that is somewhat blindsided and shaken, riven
with loss.
‘Polish Sleepers’ ups the ante on its predecessor, and then some. Rather
than vibrations coursing along the train lines, we get an accrual of ‘tarry
pus’ emanating from within the lines. A poem which begins as a very
‘Heaneyesque’ celebration of solid workmanship turns the four-square
tone of its opening on its head, as some form of sickness slicks from the
creosote like a disturbed after-effect: an infection at the point where human
endeavour and nature had met. Entropy and rot, in turn, are linked
(through ‘Wafts of what conspired’) to the strange vibrations felt in the
‘Glanmore’ sonnet, while these are further linked to the idea of loss in
the disappeared industry of the ‘goods from Castledawson’, now no more.
Loss and the passage of time do not reverberate here, but leach with bile,
just as transient culture leaves a bilious stain through nature. The lines
that link the inner and outer realms, history and being, past and present,
have become smeared and despoiling.
And then there’s that word ‘Polish’. An American blog recalling a
Heaney reading, from the time of District and Circle (2006), tells us that
when he introduced ‘Polish Sleepers’ he explained how, when laying
down railroad sleepers to shape his garden in Wicklow, a landscaper had
told him the sleepers were Polish. And Heaney then recounted a
memory of a writer saying once that the future belonged to ‘the thistles,
nestles and belladonnas’ that will grow between railroad sleepers after
humans have destroyed themselves. The lightness of touch with which
Heaney has approached the Nazi trains, which should otherwise rightly
obliterate the sonnet, is its own befitting monument to the unspeakable
weight of the subject matter. The shifts in Heaney’s poem, the queer
sense of space at its end, seem a poetic echo to the music of Olivier
Messiaen. Praising the grace, tact and power of the verse comes to seem
beside the point. We are merely lurched into the ‘rust, thistles, silence, sky’,
wondering what has just happened, and whether those final things, all
the relief we are left with, might somehow redeem, or whether they are
ruined. It is a precarious balance.
126 poetry ireland review 113

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Alan Gillis

I used to lie with an ear to the line

poetry ireland review 113 125

126 poetry ireland review 113

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