So wrote Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet who died last September. I'm still wearing black. What a poet he was. He cast his net wide as far as poetry is concerned, but at the core of everything he wrote was his boyhood on a farm in County Derry. He writes about this reverently, in his Nobel Prize lecture, "Crediting Poetry." I think this image must have been the beginning of poetry for him:
“Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.”
I know there was a world-wide dirge when he died, but I felt it should have been longer and louder and bigger. Something akin to what García Márquez
received.
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| Seamus Heaney |
