Tag: Seamus Heaney

Categories
Book Reviews Literature Poetry

Listening to Reid

Well, perhaps I have had too much time on my hands and a surfeit of Government adverts on Classic F.M. The latter causing my blood pressure to rise despite the compensating soothing by a combination of the symphonies and the smooth and slightly manic A.A. (Alexander Armstrong). Despite the irritations of the lockdown the discovery of the variety of poetry of Christopher Reid. It is the gift that keeps on giving without the unpleasant associations of that phrase. Here is the great man talking about Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.

At the University of Huddersfield
Prose
Prose pays a call on poetry.
A seafaring tower block,
palatial, proud pristinely white
as if fresh from the drawing board
of some high minded architect,
has arrived to inspect
the tired old city.

From Reid's latest collection The Late Sun

There is something subtle and gentle about this poet that reminds me of the best headmaster that I taught under. He can be amusing, eloquent and engaging even with quite short poems like the following from his Selected Poems published in 2011.

Categories
Literature Penwith Poetry West Cornwall (and local history)

Reading Padraic Fallon

  1. Fallon (1905-1974) came from lovely County Galway and was drawn to Dublin by George Russell (AE) to take part in the Irish Literary Revival. Heaney wrote of him “His sensibility has weathered in Galway the rainy light that was familiar to both Rafferty and Yeats; it has been tutored by a landscape at once elemental and historical; a landscape that holds the walled demesne and the tower as well as the bog-face and the stone wall…”

I came across this poem entitled YESTERDAY’S MAN which contained the following lovely and intriguing stanzas:-

Lines of verse too left littering

After poems that never got away,

A pen drawing, very odd, the storm God Zu

Trusses in his fowl form to a carrying pole;

(From him the wren-walk on St Stephen’s Day)

 

Copied I suppose, to prove a point,

(Akkadian seal, Babylonian cylinder?) How

Much at home I am in this mad world

Suddenly and again! And here somewhere

You the girl enter

 

Anonymously, in two wooden stanzas, into which

You have entirely disappeared. Words, words,

That’s all you are, girl who never

Was a lover. And I likened you,

Body I could see through, to a catapult

The poem concerns itself with writing poetry and the poet looking through his notebooks and considering lost loves, regret and all in a stormy atmosphere. I like the variation between detail , here about the paraphernalia of writing and the vagueness…”here somewhere”. The latter representing ageing disorientation.

More on Fallon may be found at preview.co.uk where Seamus Heaney has written an appreciation and quotes some lines about Lands End.