I love the way Heaney uses simple language and makes it sing, and he does that here as well as he does it anywhere. His words carry tremendous authority and power. The book is so readable, but the poetry doesn't feel light. If I have one critique, it's that I wish he was a little less referential...
I sought out this particular collection after enjoying Heaney's District and Circle TS Eliot prizewinner shortly before he died, and then seeing this mentioned in obituaries with reference to the inspiration of ill health. Unlike so many poets, he can make me feel I am reading scraps of beauty an...
People in Northern Ireland rather think that Seamus Heaney – “Famous Seamus”, they say with irony – belongs to them. They feel he is close to them, expressing their everyday concerns. Even when he ventures into abstruse territory, for example, translating Beowulf or Antigone, Ulster people sense...
The poet’s death on August 30, 2013, prompted me to search through my piles and shelves of unread books to see if perchance I had one more collection of Seamus Heaney’s poetry that I hadn’t yet devoured. For the moment I ignored the long shelf of read Heaney. After some searching I found District...
Despite the "author" of Sweeney Astray being listed as "Anonymous" on this site, this particular translation was actually done by poet (and Beowulf, translator), Seamus Heaney. Although I understand that the repetition of words/facts and the constant shifting from prose to verse and back again a...
My body was braille for the creeping influences: dawn suns groped over my head and cooled at my feet, through my fabrics and skins the seeps of winter digested me, the illiterate roots pondered and died in the cavings of stomach and socket. I lay waiting on the gra...
If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney And a dormant mountain. If I listened, an engine shunting And a trotting horse. Is it any wonder when I thought I would have second thoughts? &n...
I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird, as if he had stepped from his anointing a moment ago: his purple stole and cord or cincture tied loosely, his polished shoes unexpectedly secular beneath a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth. His name had lain undisturbed for yea...