Seamus Heaney Poem 2

From the Frontier Writing
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration--

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

In Seamus Heaney's the Frontier of Writing describes the speakers inner struggle with writing as well as the struggle from outside pressures. Heaney creates a disconnected tone, of a writer torn in his writing as he uses an extended metaphor of a military interrogation/blockade to the process of writing to demonstrate a broken identity.
In the first four stanza's Heaney describes how the process of writing is disconnected of self. This is most noted in the use of "you" instead of I when referring to his difficulties. Also, in the beginning he makes the comparison of self to a car with only a make and number suggesting a loss of identity as he goes through the heavy process of writing having the pressures of "troop" or critics. Furthermore he says that there are many out the window implying that a writer is never free of critics but also internally the writer continually criticizes himself. And so by that a writer is exhausted "spent" when completing the job.
In stanzas 5 and 6 Heaney identifies the Frontier of writing, and then describes how the speaker thought he was out of the problem but meets another blockade. This emphasizes the disconnection of the speaker as he is continually stopped and unable to go forward. In the final two stanzas he is finally able to drive on uninterrupted. By this he passes under a waterfall- which connotes purification-water... and so in my opinion it is here that the speaker feels relief from the pressures but still lacks joy in his creation as to him it is only "polished", in other words finished.
Heaney's frontier of writing uses a lot of violent images to create this disconnection as the speaker struggles with himself to produce a work worthy of praise and not criticism.