Light-drenched empyrean
As I write this, we have been shrouded with a dense winter fog, and yet a sudden burst of sunshine...
Translation as hammering
Heaney conveys in a simple image the difficulty of translating poetry. Elsewhere, he refers to his progress as being ‘scriptorium...
Thrice condemned monster
Heaney's tripling summary of Grendel, the world's fear and monster: a guilt-fouled fiend and a God-cursed brute with a hall-watcher's hate.  Thankfully,...
Of wood and winter
Filling up the reservoirs with summer warmth, to keep the 'blood-sullen winter' at bay. But a 'frost-stiffened wood' can be...
A stook of grain
A sight we no longer see:Â a group of sheaves or grain stood on end in a field. Also 'to stook',...
Mote-lit stillness
Commenting on some poems by Edwin Muir, Seamus Heaney says:
They return us, a little too unscathed, to the...
Unreel writing
There's something of fairy-tale magic in this idea of writing as a thread teased out from the writer's cupboard of...
Technique as dousing
In discussing the technique of writing, Seamus Heaney conjures a water diviner as a metaphor. At first glance far-fetched, as...
Poetry as a boat
Another maritime metaphor in Heaney's introduction to a poem set in a sea-world. The ‘big quay’ of language and literature can...
Death-haunted aubade
This triologism emerges from Seamus Heaney's imagining how Philip Larkin would have written The Divine Comedy, triggered by his reading...
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