Search Results

“... number of members would be elected a Saoi, or ‘wise person’. Samuel Beckett was one, so is Seamus Heaney. Since Francis Stuart was one of the original members of Aosdána, he was entitled to be nominated, and this was where the trouble began. When it was proposed that Stuart be made a Saoi, there was some informal debate between members of ...”

“... unkempt. Here we find colourful Miss Nellie, the last of the Dufresnes, and her husband Seamus – her father’s ex-groom – ‘an angry Irish peasant miscast as an aristocrat’. So Dr Donovan describes him. These potty old people need to be handled with care. One has the manner of an ostrich-like autocrat, while the other drinks and snivels and ...”

“... drag of the body?What possesses the poor souls? Why this mad desireTo get back to the light? Seamus Heaney, Aeneid, Book VIThe​ suitcase arrived long after its owner had left. It was handed over to me nine years ago in the car park of a London church on a miserable, gun-metal grey morning. The suitcase is chalk-coloured, weather-speckled, hooped ...”

“... me towards another instaurational poem, by another farm child: ‘Digging’, the first poem in Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist. Both are poems that lay claim to a slightly unexpected, even slightly implausible, persistence, while acknowledging that their makers have left the straight way: one digs with his pen, the other retires to eat ...”

“... it would be with figures from the past. It’s not about wanting to be more famous than Seamus Heaney. It’s more that there is a level of excellence to which you should aspire. Are you up to it? Some figures have this gift, and some don’t. In sports, yes, it’s quite clear who are the geniuses and who are the ones who are just quite ...”

“... riches of deep darkness sang.’ Published in 1972, the poem belongs to the same period as Seamus Heaney’s celebrated ‘bog poems’ and some of Ted Hughes’s explorations of the stickily chthonic. In English-language poetry it was an era of vintage mud; but where Heaney and Hughes had some Gravesian ...”