Word: heaneys
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...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...
...many of his earlier works, particularly, Heaney shows a fascination with the metaphor of archaeology. In poems selected from his books Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), he deals at length with the "bog people," prehistoric humans whose bodies scientists have recovered, almost perfectly preserved, from peat bogs in Denmark. These long-buried victims of "tribal, intimate revenge" become symbols of the collective subconscious of their modern descendants...
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...