Word: heaneys
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...year ago, Seamus Heaney, 45, offered his incandescent version of Mad Sweeney, the legendary Irish king who was turned into a bird-man and condemned to live in the trees for slaying a psalmist. In this new collection of verse, Heaney moves to an even higher and madder style. In the process, Station Island reinforces his reputation as the best poet that Ireland has produced since Yeats...
...into anthologies. Set on Ireland's noted isle of pilgrimage in Lough Derg, Donegal, the long poem describes two journeys, one a pilgrimage of prayer, the other a search for self. That quest, and the thoughts it inspires, brings as much pain as enlightenment. In a typical passage, Heaney, who grew up in Northern Ireland, bitterly remembers the Catholic ghetto, and "how quick I was to know my place." In another, he faces the ghost of his cousin Colum, killed in the sectarian violence. "You confused evasion and artistic tact," the murdered man tells him. "The Protestant who shot...
...poem's final stanzas the accusations cease, and Heaney, like many another Irish artist, confronts the shade of James Joyce and his own destiny. The great Irish exile warns Heaney to forget his preoccupation with the past: "That subject people stuff is a cod's game/ in- fantile, like your peasant pilgrimage . . . it's time to swim/ out on your own and fill the element/ with signatures on your own frequency...
While teaching at Harvard last spring, Heaney lived in Adams House as a resident scholar...
...clause in the charter of the Boylston Professorship gives Heaney "the right to pasture a cow in the Cambridge Common," said Alfred. "But I think Seamus would be arrested if he tried...