Word: heaneys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Imagine a library without the works of James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, Sean O'Casey, John Synge, Liam O'Flaherty, George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan, Frank O'Connor, William Butler Yeats and Christy Brown...
...Nobel touts were caught looking at the wrong continents. Less than an hour before Paz became the winner of the $700,000 prize, rumors were still spreading that the odds-on favorite was Chinese poet Bei Dao. If not he, then possibly Canada's Margaret Atwood, Ireland's Seamus Heaney or the U.S.'s perennial long shot, Joyce Carol Oates...
Here and in many others of Heaney's poems, body and land are one: the undersoil is richly strewn with bits of bone from people who have lived and died in the past. "Bone Dreams" (1975) recalls the Song of Solomon, as the bodies of the poet and his lover merge into the landscape...
...like Greek gods who were the very rivers and streams they represented in myth, language itself is an inextricable, physical feature of Heaney's pagan world. This takes on a literal dimension in "Alphabets" (1987), where the letter A is "two rafters and a cross-tie" and the number 2 "a swan's neck and a swan's back...
...more general sense, too, Heaney's language is like his landscape. His sentences are earthy and declarative; they have the tones of a farmer talking to his neighbor across the stone fence. The vocabulary is stoutly native, rich with Anglo-Saxon nouns whose vowels are strong and round as the hillsides. And, once again the archaeologist, Heaney mines the forgotten caves of English to exhume fine words in their last stage of decay, words like bleb and rath and coign, words shaped in the mouths of Beowulf and Cuchulain...