Seamus Heaney, Poetry for the Win.
I'm not interested in reading what work the lady who just won wrote. Wild Irises? Not my bag, social interactions amongst the sophisticated set. But I'll re-read the best of Heaney.
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Mid-Term Break, Seamus Heaney
He was 14 when his 4 year old brother was struck by a car and killed, and Seamus was called home. Made him as a poet, and like so many artists -- they can ride early success and reputation for the rest of their lives. This poem, like all good writing, came from the heart. It shows (not tells) but in the telling, shows. If you write, you understand that.
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close
At two o'clock, our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying --
He had always taken his funerals in stride --
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in and I was embarrassed,
by old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble".
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry, tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, staunched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning, I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside. I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in a four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
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The poem was published in 1966 in Death of a Naturalist. The younger brother died in 1953. When was it written? Likely in all the years between. If you write, you understand that too.
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney, who has died aged 74, won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, created a bestseller from a translation of Beowulf (1998) and sold more books in Britain than any other living poet; the common charge that he was too easy — “far from unfathomable”, as one critic put it — was a backhanded compliment to his democratic lyrical powers.
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