FROM THE FRONTIER OF WRITING by Seamus Heaney

Where people can share a poem they like or poetry they have written themselves.

Moderator: Lynn_D

Post Reply
User avatar
Lynn_D
Posts: 14
Joined: Wed Sep 26, 2007 5:51 pm
Location: Newtownards, Co Down

FROM THE FRONTIER OF WRITING by Seamus Heaney

Post by Lynn_D » Mon Oct 01, 2007 7:23 pm

[align=center]From The Frontier Of 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.[/align]


ImageImage

User avatar
BASEL
Site Administrator
Posts: 1328
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2007 12:24 am
Location: dark side of the moon
Contact:

Post by BASEL » Sun Oct 07, 2007 12:45 pm

I just thought i would add this, hope you don't mind Lynn


Seamus (Justin) Heaney (1939-)



Irish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. According to Heaney, poetry balances the "scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium." From the early collections, Heaney have combined in his work personal memories with images of Irish heritage and the landscape of Northern Ireland. There is also references to English-Irish and Catholic-Protestant conflict. However, Heaney's view is much more visionary and allegorical than bound to contemporary issues.

"Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art." (from Nobel Lecture, 1995)

Seamus Heaney was born near Castledawson, County Derry, and grew up on his father's cattle farm. He was the eldest in a Catholic family of nine children. Heaney attended St. Columb's College, Derry, and moved in 1957 to Belfast to continued his studies. In 1961 Heaney graduated from Queen's University, Belfast, and was then trained as teacher at St. Joseph's College of Education. After one year as a secondary school teacher, Heaney returned to St. Josephs, where he was a lecturer for three years. In 1966 he became a lecturer at Queen University.

In 1972 Heaney gave up his work at Queen's. Partly to escape the violence of Belfast, he moved from to County Wicklow, where he was a freelance writer for three years. He then taught at Carysfort College of Education until 1981. Next year, after spending frequent periods as a guest professor at American universities, he was appointed visiting professor at Harvard. Since 1985 he has been there as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Between the years 1989 and 1994 he held Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. In 1997 he was appointed Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence at Harvard.

Heaney's first book, ELEVEN POEMS, appeared in 1965. At the age of 27 he won in 1966 the Eric Gregory Award with DEATH OF A NATURALIST. With these works Heaney established his reputation as a poet. In 1969, Heaney was in Belfast at the outbreakof what has become known as 'The Troubles'. In 1968-69 arouse serious disturbances from Protestant political dominance and discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority in employment and housing. Catholic students arranged civil rights marches, that had much similarities with protest movements in elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. British troops were sent to restore peace in Belfast and Londonderry. Heaney left Belfats at the height of this conflict, but his work reflects his experiences of that time.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighting stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
(from 'Punishment' in North, 1975)

After NORTH (1975), in which Heaney addressed the ongoing civil strife in Northern Ireland, he was considered the finest Irish poet since W.B. Yeats, and with Ted Hughes among the leading poets in the English-speaking world. Among its much anthologized poems is 'Punishment', in which the poet depicts a tribal revenge of adultery, but confesses his own powerlessness in front of ancient, violent forces. "I almost love you / but would have cast, I know, / the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur / your brain's exposed and darkened combs..." Heaney's works are rooted in Northern Irish rural life, and draw on myth and unique aspects of the Irish experience. Reflections on his childhood have given way to darker commentaries on the social and political problems in Northern Ireland. In THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE (1988) Heaney questioned the role of poetry in modern society. The central symbol in his work is the bog, the wide unfenced county, that reaches back millions of years. The bog is the starting point for the exploration of the past, and in several works Heaney has returned to the "bog people", bodies preserved in the soil of Denmark and Ireland.

The political situation in Northern Ireland is explored in North and FIELD WORK (1979), from the standpoint of Heaney's Catholic background. However, Heaney has been consistent in his refusal to reduce complex political and social issues to simple slogans. He has also made explicit his desire not to be called a "British" poet: "Be advised! My passport's green. / No glass of ours was ever raised! To toast The Queen". In a lecture in 1995 Heaney explained that he wrote about the color of the passport "to maintain the right to diversity within the border".

Strong individualistic, meditative mood, marks his later works, including STATION ISLAND (1984), THE HAW LANTERN (1987), and SEEING THINGS (1991). The Haw Lantern contains poems in memory of Heaney's mother, who died in 1984. In ELECTRIC LIGHT (2001) Heaney's childhood memories mix with his sense of fleeting time and death: "The room I came from and the rest of us all came from / Stays pure reality where I stand alone, / Standing the passage of time, and she's asleep / In sheets put on for the doctor, wedding presents / That showed up again and again, bridal / And usual and useful at births and deaths." Heaney's poems have often been allegorical. He has drawn on the Divine Comedy of Dante and on the work of such contemporary central European writers as Czeslaw Milosz. In his Nobel lecture in 1995 Heaney defended poetry "as the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

Heaney's work as translator includes SWEENEY ASTRAY (1983), from the mediaeval Irish poem about an Irish king, who went mad during a battle and was turned into a bird; THE CURE AT TROY (1991), Heaney's rendering into English of Sophocles' Philoctetes, and the Anglo-Saxon poem BEOWULF (1999), which was composed towards the end of the first millennium. The translation won the Whitebread Award as the best book of 1999. In 2003 Heaney won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The award is the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language.

"You have won renown: you are known to all men
far and near, now and forever.
Your sway is wide as the wind's home,
as the sea around cliffs."
(from Beowulf, trans. by Heaney)

The epic records the great deed of the heroic warrior Beowulf in his youth and maturity. The hero kills three monsters: a maneater called Grendel, Grendel's mother in her underwater dwelling, and 50 years later a fire-breathing dragon, which is stirred by the theft of a goblet. It mortally wounds Beowulf before expiring. The poem ends with Beowulf's funeral pyre. Central theme is the workings of fate (wyrd) in human lives. It is generally accepted that originally Beowulf was the work of a single poet, who has recounted legends, that were passed down orally from several centuries earlier. Heaney's retelling makes the hero's tragic stature prophetic: when he dies his people wait of the disaster that will descend on them. Also the Finnish national epic Kalevala ends in resignation with the decline of paganism, when Väinämöinen, the central character of the epic, departs the land of heroes.

It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us,
living in this world
means waiting for our end.
Let whoever can
win glory before death.
When a warrior is gone,
That will be his best and only bulwark.
(from Beowulf, 1999)



Basel :meeting
To resist the influence of others, knowledge of one's self is most important.

Draw from your past....... but don't let your past draw from you

Yama, The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was..... is lost. For none now live who remember it.

For all your Computer needs www.btlogic.co.uk

Post Reply