Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, is out in paperback from Faber.
Come just after the sun has gone down, watch This deepening of green in the evening sward: Is it not as if we’d long since garnered And stored within ourselves a something which
From feeling and from feeling recollected, From new hope and half-forgotten joys And from an inner dark infused with these, Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered
Under trees...
Tom Paulin
Or Charlus as McGahern would call youwhen we stacked up stories with Heaney– all fun a great geg pure pleasureI’d think of this village near Donegal town– Mountcharlus they say in those partsnot Mountcharleswhich was how one editor at Faberused to sign every letter he sent(was it Dunn who wonderedhad you somehow acquired a peerage?)then I’d try hard to...
1
Incline to me, MacDiarmid, out of Shetland, Stone-eyed from stone-gazing, sobered up And thrawn. Not the old vigilante
Of the chimney corner, having us on, Setting us off, the drinkers’ drinker; no, Incline as the sage of wind that flouts the rockface,
As gull stalled in the seabreeze, gatekeeper Of open gates behind the brows of birds – Not to hear me take back smart remarks
...
I
The whole country apparently afloat: Every road bridging or skirting water, The land islanded, the field drains still as moats.
A bulrush sentried the lough shore: I had to Wade barefoot over spongy, ice-cold marsh (Soft bottom with bog-water seeping through
The netted weeds) to get near where it stood Perennially anomalous and dry, Like chalk or velvet rooting in the mud.
Everything ran...
for Ted Hughes
Years and years ago, these sounds took sides:
On the left bank a green silk tapered cast Went whispering through the air, saying hush And lush, entirely free, no matter whether It swished above the hayfield or the river.
On the right bank, like a speeded-up corncrake, A sharp ratcheting kept on and on Cutting across the stillness as another Fisherman gathered line-lengths off...
Heaney was not in any simple sense a ‘Virgilian’ poet, but the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid mattered more to his later writing than any other single text.
Robert Lowell has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs...
Robert Henryson is the most likeable late medieval author after Chaucer. He wrote with a directness, a lightly carried learning and a lack of sentimentality hard to match anywhere in the British...
In a shrewd and sympathetic essay on Dylan Thomas published in The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney found a memorable set of metaphors for Thomas’s poetic procedures: he ‘plunged into...
Writing in 1887 of the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing...
When Seamus Heaney left Belfast in 1972, to work as a freelance writer in the relative safety of the Republic, Northern Ireland was a war zone. Internment and Bloody Sunday had recruited so many...
Seamus Heaney has always doubted poetry – not as a philosopher might doubt reality, but as a rich man might doubt money. He feels not scepticism, but guilt. He thanks poetry for existing but...
Seeing things, Seamus Heaney’s ninth volume of new poems, is aimed squarely at transcendence. The title has a humble and practical William Carlos Williams ring to it, but that is...
In an interview given in 1979, Seamus Heaney endorsed a fellow writer’s lament that ‘you feel bloody well guilty about writing.’ To judge by this new collection of critical...
‘About the only enmity I have is towards pride.’ Seamus Heaney said this in an interview, and since we know him to be the most over-interviewed of living poets, perhaps he...
The title-sequence of Seamus Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage...
The Crane Bag is a magazine, published twice a year: each issue deals with one theme. In Irish legend, the crane bag contained the alphabet of knowledge. The bag belonged to Manannan, god of the...
‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the...
The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan...
In Ireland it often seems that the great world is too little with us – that all issues are reduced to the level of the parish pump. Yet, as Patrick Kavanagh warned, Irish writers turn...
Those of us who have never swallowed an oyster have presumably never lived life to the full. The Augustan poet was not merely mocking the heroic when he said that the man must have had a palate...
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