Book 11 - Seamus Heaney "Station Island"
Feb. 6th, 2019 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveSeamus Heaney "Station Island" (Faber & Faber)
He is a writer of the immediate and the physical. He writes with the feel of the iron in your hand and the soft humus sinking beneath your feet. He writes the bite of the wind, and the romance of expectations met and surpassed, or crushed as the case may be. Yet for all the present and gross of his writing, there remains a sheen of the mythic and the sheer understanding of the immortality of the classic as it mingles constant with the world around us today.
Here there is history as a series of ghosts as one walks the stations in search of - what? Here is a man cursed to be a bird, seeing the world from a new perspective and trying to make sense of the insensible. It's a romance that is difficult to characterize firmly, and even more difficult to fully understand, as all of Heaney's work tends to be. Layers upon layers, yet the beauty remains undeniable.
The lesson, ultimately, seems to be that it is impossible to ever choose a favourite work of Heaney's. It's all brilliant, all different, and all undeniable. It is deep meditation on the wrenching emotional cross-currents of the conflict that blighted Northern Ireland and the role of artists in witnessing and addressing that world. The beauty and fluidity of his verse are breathtaking. He is a master. It is a book to read over and over again.
He is a writer of the immediate and the physical. He writes with the feel of the iron in your hand and the soft humus sinking beneath your feet. He writes the bite of the wind, and the romance of expectations met and surpassed, or crushed as the case may be. Yet for all the present and gross of his writing, there remains a sheen of the mythic and the sheer understanding of the immortality of the classic as it mingles constant with the world around us today.
Here there is history as a series of ghosts as one walks the stations in search of - what? Here is a man cursed to be a bird, seeing the world from a new perspective and trying to make sense of the insensible. It's a romance that is difficult to characterize firmly, and even more difficult to fully understand, as all of Heaney's work tends to be. Layers upon layers, yet the beauty remains undeniable.
The lesson, ultimately, seems to be that it is impossible to ever choose a favourite work of Heaney's. It's all brilliant, all different, and all undeniable. It is deep meditation on the wrenching emotional cross-currents of the conflict that blighted Northern Ireland and the role of artists in witnessing and addressing that world. The beauty and fluidity of his verse are breathtaking. He is a master. It is a book to read over and over again.
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