Word: psalmists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...commoner but a king, and he does not merely listen to birds, he becomes one. Sweeney Astray is in fact not an original poem but a brilliant rendition of the 7th century Irish legend Buile Suibne. In it, Mad Sweeney slays an innocent psalmist and is cursed for his great offense by St. Ronan: "It is God's decree/ bare to the world he'll always be." Thereafter, the king loses a battle, a mind and an identity when he is reduced to a pitiable creature, "wind-scourged, stripped/ like a winter tree/ clad in black frost...