If there’s one thing we don’t need from Seamus Heaney, it’s another book about Scientology. When the poet first converted five years ago, most critics had only three questions: (1) How would it affect his poetry?; (2) Would he start dating a hot, young, weird celebrity?; and (3) Assuming the answer to the previous question was “Yes,” would the hot celebrity come to poetry events so we could hang out with her? His engagement to Jenna Elfman answered the second question and the third (Jenna! Kisses!), but the first was still an open issue. Not anymore. With The Bogs of Xenu, Heaney establishes himself as the most disappointing Scientologist poet since Richard Wilbur.

To be fair, Heaney is still capable of solid, poised writing, as in the opening to “Free Stress Test”:

Some day I will go to Clearwater,
That town of stucco and wise men,
To don the believer’s epaulets
And free myself through Hubbard’s words
Like a rill escaped from some icy tarn.

Notice how he links Clearwater, Florida, the major North American center for Scientology, with the “clear water” in the high mountain lakes of Ireland. This is vintage Heaney. Elsewhere, however, the poet succumbs to repetitiveness that’s as obvious as it is disheartening. The Bogs of Xenu is now the third book in which Heaney has described L. Ron Hubbard as a fatherly figure with “his boot nestled on a spade’s staunch lug” and the second in which he’s called John Travolta “a harness rod of the inexorable.” Even more depressing is the book’s finale, a fifteen-page poem called “Thetan Peat,” which is simply a repackaging of the imagined dialogue between Tom Cruise and Wolfe Tone that closed his previous collection. While a man’s personal religious choices are no one’s business, maybe Heaney should consider that, as Helen Vendler once wrote, “The line between great poetry and intergalactic space aliens is admittedly fine, but it remains a line nonetheless.”

—David Orr