March 26, 2021

 

March 25,2021

I've been reading a collection of Seamus Heaney's first four books of poetry, and am so struck by his language, and by the emotional range of his poems.  I sometimes feel overloaded by the detail—this was particularly true of some pieces in his first two books—but there were many lines that stopped me in my tracks.  From "Elegy for a Still-born Child," for example: "Your mother heavy with the lightness in her."  Or his description of a bull mounting a cow in "The Outlaw": "He slammed life home, impassive as a tank, / Dropping off like a tipped-up load of sand."  Just a stunning perception of the act in question c/w an eye for evocative images ("impassive...tank," "tipped-up load of sand"), a touch for the right verbals ("slammed," "dropping"), and an ear for the assonance of the short a to convey the deed's business-like affect.  And now a series of poems I read last night about women and the sea in Part Two of Wintering Out, his third book, haunt me: "Shore Woman" ("A membrane between moonlight and my shadow"), "Maighdean Mara" ("She sleeps now, her cold breasts / Dandled by undertow"), and the heartbreaking "Limbo," which relates the story of a mother drowning her illegitimate baby, and local fishermen finding the child's body in their net one night soon after:

...I'm sure

As she stood in the shallows

Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists

Were dead as the gravel,

He was a minnow with hooks

Tearing her open.

She waded in under

The sign of her cross.

He was hauled in with the fish.

Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls

Through some far briny zone.

Even Christ's palms, unhealed,

Smart and cannot fish there.

March 8, 2021

Talking back to one of my idols on Twitter:

March 6,2021

And again...

March 3, 2021

Talking politics again...