Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of
"The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But Ive no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. Ill dig with it."
"God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure."
"Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured."
"History says dont hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells."
"My poetry journey into the wilderness of language was a journey where each point of arrival turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination."
"Call the miracle self-healing: The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling. If theres fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term."
