Seamus Heaney
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"Blackberry-Picking" by Seamus Heaney
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How perilous is it to choose / not to love the life we’re shown?
Seamus Heaney, from “The Badgers”
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Seamus Heaney, from a poem titled "Roots," featured in Contemporary Irish Poetry
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Two shades who have consumed each other's fire,
Two flames in sunlight that can sear and singe,
But seem like wisps of enervated air,
After-wavers, feathery ether-shifts...
Seamus Heaney, "The Walk," from Selected Poems
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Seamus Heaney, from Wintering Out (1972)
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All I know is a door into the dark.
Seamus Heaney, excerpt rom "The Forge"
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It was the month of May.
Trees in Harvard Yard
Were turning a young green.
There was whispering everywhere.
Seamus Heaney, from “Canopy”, Human Chain
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In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
Seamus Heaney
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Suddenly then
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc;
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.
- Beowulf Seamus Heaney 1999 translation.
(Grendel artwork by John Henry Frederick Bacon 1910.)
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Bogland
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
By Seamus Heaney
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This is the vowel of earth
dreaming its root
in flowers and snow,
mutation of weathers
and seasons,
a windfall composing
the floor it rots into.
Seamus Heaney, Kinship
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Ted Hughes, Charles Causley y Seamus Heaney, 1982.
Foto: Carol Orchard Hughes.
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from Inferno
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the right road had been lost sight of.
from Inferno Canto I, 1-3
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321),
translated by Seamus Heaney (Ireland)
Seamus Heaney
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BOG QUEEN, 2020
A commission where I was asked to draw inspiration from Seamus Heaney's poem of the same name...
I lay waiting
between turf-face and demesne wall,
between heathery levels
and glass-toothed stone.
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 gravel bottom,
my brain darkening,
a jar of spawn
fermenting underground
dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
the vital hoard reducing
in the crock of the pelvis.
My diadem grew carious,
gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history.
My sash was a black glacier
wrinkling, dyed weaves
and phoenician stitchwork
retted on my breasts'
soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
like the nuzzle of fjords
at my thighs–
the soaked fledge, the heavy
swaddle of hides.
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