Word: heaneys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Watching 250 people pack Emerson Hall on a warm Thursday evening for the poetry reading he has organized, Haviaras feels a mixture of nervous excitement and dread--dread that there will not be enough room for the crods who have come to hear James Merrill and Seamus Heaney read...
FICTION: Edisto, Padgett Powell God's Pocket, Pete Dexter ∙ Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon Sweeney Astray, Seamus Heaney Testing the Current, William McPherson ∙ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera...
...epochal year, the poet has published continuously, contributing criticism to scores of quarterlies, editing others, bringing his admixture of exuberance and melancholia to packed houses at European and American colleges. "I have long insisted that the artist who works within the university system pays his way in society," says Heaney. "There's a strong puritanical streak in me that still believes...
That streak is well hidden in Heaney's verse, which, like Yeats', mixes the familiar-domestic animals, the aroma of a country afternoon, the benison of a homecoming-with the stuff of legend-myth-haunted Gaelic songs, the discovery of a 1,000-year-old man buried in peat. For Heaney, objects always cast a long shadow: the observation of a skunk, of all animals, brings on a longing for his absent wife: "Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer/ For the black plunge-line nightdress...
...erotic or pastoral turn can long allay the great sorrow of Irish history. Sometimes Heaney confronts it head on, as in "Requiem for the Croppies," composed in memory of the Catholic farm boys who fought the Protestant armies nearly two centuries ago, "on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave," where "terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon." Even these acrimonious lines have not satisfied some Irish nationalists who criticize him for refusing to write anti-British broadsides. Counters Heaney: "The job of the artist is to make works of art, not to be involved in one cause or another...