Reading Seamus Heaney again. Dennis O'Driscoll's interviews with Heaney, published as Stepping Stones, allows Heaney to explain what was going on in his life, his head and his country when much of his best poetry was written. Looking for something else I came across one of the loveliest tributes to a mother I've come across anywhere, and the more impressive from someone who combines in such rare fashion words gently written with clear-eyed tenderness. He writes of sitting with his mother as she was dying: "Not a lot being said or needing to be said. Just a deep, unpathetic stillness and worldessness. a mixture of lacrimae rerum and Deo Gratias. Something in me reverted to the child I'd been in Mossbawn. Something in her remained constant, like the past gazing at you calmly without blame. She was a tower of emotional strength, unreflective in a way but undeceived about people or things. I suppose all Im saying is that I loved her dearly."
Those are words that suggest some of the deep humane reservoirs out of which Heaney's poetry is written. On the other hand Heaney's prose can be just as incisive and lyrical as his poetry, and I've found several of his sentences worth a longish ponder.
And incidentally, with apologies to Heaney, replace the words poem or poetry or poet in the quotations below with sermon, preacher and preaching, and his words still inspire a vision of the power of words to shape and nourish human life in all its tangles and turnings.
Poetry is like the line Christ drew in the sand,
it creates a pause in the action,
a freeze frame moment of concentration,
a focus where our power to concentrate
is concentrated back on ourselves.
….
A good poem holds
as much of the truth
as possible in one gaze.
….
Poetry is "the cry of the responsible human".
….
Poetry should, like the Gideon Bible,
be available in hotel rooms
and should be distributed
like handouts at Supermarket checkouts.
….
The vocation of the poet
…to be true to poetry as a solitary calling,
not to desert the post,
to hold on at the crossroads
where truth and beauty intersect.
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