PerfectlyWritePoetry: The Afterlife of a Wandering Sailor-Poet

Tuesday 7 April 2015

The Afterlife of a Wandering Sailor-Poet

Broadcast journalists, Paul Heiney and Libby Purves are still trying to come to terms with the death by suicide of their son, Nicholas although it happened nine years ago.

Indeed, I am sure everyone reading this will be acutely aware from other public figures, relatives or personal friendships how enduring to a parent is the pain caused by the death of a child at any age for whatever reason. To put it simply: it goes against the natural order of life. Parents do not expect to bury their offspring.

I have been musing on this since reading about Heiney’s book, One Wild Song, which charts an 18,000 mile round voyage he made trying somehow to recapture his son’s presence; to find the same “intellectual depth in going to sea” as Nicholas had achieved as a sailor and a poet when he died aged only 23.

Before I look at an example of Heiney junior’s unusually mature verse, I must state a circuitous personal link to his father. I’ve discovered that like me, Paul attended High Storrs Grammar School in Sheffield, U.K. when, as the son of a Polish serviceman who had settled in Sheffield and then married a local girl, he was still named Paul Wisniewski. For a reason I’ve not yet ascertained, he changed his surname in 1971. His original family name rings a bell and I think a relative - perhaps a sister – was one of my classmates (circa 1968-72).

An outsider may think that an individual like Nicholas Heiney would have enjoyed all that life had to offer. He was part of a loving, successful, well-known family; apparently physically robust - quite romantically good-looking – and a gifted writer whose talent was beginning to flower when he died.

But there’s always a ‘however’: Nicholas was most horribly depressed; a condition that was exacerbated, if not triggered by labyrinthitis. This is an infection of the inner ear whose symptoms may include tinnitus and vertigo. If Nicholas suffered either of these I consider it remarkable that he continued sailing on tall ships as the routine includes climbing very high rigging. Moreover, the symptoms of tinnitus – as I know from personal experience – may include unsettling continual sounds like a low roar – similar to being on windswept moorland – perhaps a motorway with the car windows open - or more congruent here - at open sea.

To have such noises tormenting you at intervals night and day must be an exquisite torture. So as a fellow writer, I suggest that Nicholas coped for a time by turning the phenomenon in on itself, not only by writing about his experiences visually but by penning a writer’s aural seascape worthy of someone far more celebrated than he.

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From:

The Silence at the Song’s End

"The morning runs

on, a springtime secret

through the avenues

and avenues which lure

all sound away

“I sing, as I was taught

inside myself.

I sing inside myself

when wild moments

slice some tender evening

like a breeze

that rattles gravel

and digs in the dirt

“I sing, as I was told,

inside myself.

I sing inside myself

the one wild song, song that whirls

my words around

until a world unfurls

“my ship’s new sail

I catch the dew

and set a course amongst the ocean curls

“The silence at the song’s end

Before the next

Is the world"

The Silence at the Song’s End by Nicholas Heiney is edited by Libby Purves and Duncan Wu (Songsend Books, hardback - £12.95). Paul Heiney’s One Wild Song (Bloomsbury - £16.99).