Word: belfast
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These crafted poems are a roadmap of Seamus Heaney's soul. In them he has left Belfast and the political images of past volumes and retreated to the fields. He's headed to the coast, "through flowers and limestone" to eat the day "deliberately, that its tang/Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb." And an active, transitive verb at that. Heaney always places himself in each animated poem: in a record of his four sequestered years in the country, he wanders from the water's edge to open shed, from a stone pier to a deeply tilled...
...warm day in Belfast. That afternoon Anne Maguire, a 31-year-old mechanic's wife, was crushed against a school railing with her four children by a swerving getaway car used by terrorists of the Provisional I.R.A. The car's driver had been shot dead by pursuing British soldiers. Mrs. Maguire was hospitalized in a semiconscious state; it was several weeks before she fully comprehended that three of her children had been killed...
...Maguire herself there was no consolation. She emigrated to New Zealand with her husband Jack in 1977 and there gave birth to a second daughter. She suffered a nervous breakdown, and the homesick family returned to Belfast in less than a year. Perpetual grief led to even more breakdowns-ever deeper mental depression. Last week Anne Maguire finally gave up. She took her own life, slashing her wrists and throat with an electric carving knife...