Tag Archives: Seamus Heaney

Czeslaw Milosz – A Tribute – Part Two – A Poem to Honour the Men and Women in Ukraine in Wartime, February 2022

Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our […]

Flying Poetic Kites for Father’s Day – Poems by Heaney and Stafford

Father and Son No sound—a spell—on out where the wind went, our kite sent back its thrill along the string that sagged and sang and said, “I’m here! I’m here”—till […]

To Set The Darkness Echoing – Seamus Heaney and Natalie Shapero

Personal Helicon for Michael Longley As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.  One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch, A white face hovered over the bottom. Others had echoes, […]

The Bigness of Small Poems – # 35 in a Series – To Grieve, Yet Credit Marvels – Gelman, Berger & Heaney

  “The Deluded” hope fails us often grief never. that’s why some think that known grief is better than unknown grief. they believe that hope is illusion. they are deluded […]

Yet We Were Looking Away – On Missing the Moment!

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Let’s Go Fly a Kite – Heaney and Pascoli – Part Two

The Seamus Heaney translations  of two poems by Giovanni Pascoli (1855 – 1912) published in the New Yorker after the death of Heaney (1938 – 2013) last August sent me scrambling […]

The Large Piccolo Cose (small things) of Giovanni Pascoli

Washerwomen Out in a field half-fallow and half furrowed, A plough is standing, no oxen-team in sight, Forgotten looking, half-hid in a mist-cloud. From the mill-pond comes the wet slapping […]

Eyes Open, Uncovered To The Bone – Part Two – A Poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

What a delight it has been to discover the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly, author of three collections of poems and winner of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize […]

Seamus Heaney’s Kick In The Arse for Writers – Now Strike Your Note

As I work away at editing my manuscript  The Lucky Season, I am haunted by Seamus Heaney’s directives to writers. Like the one in the title of this post.  But the […]

Noli Timere – Be Not Afraid – Heaney’s Work: A Poet’s Work

from Lightenings viii The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along […]