![]() ![]() Times were bleak, the political climate was deteriorating.” Beasts standing under a hedge, plastered in wet, looking at you with big patient eyes, just taking what came until something else came along. ![]() In Dennis O’Driscoll’s book of interviews, Stepping Stones, SH speaks of how the title for that volume came “from memories of cattle in winter fields. It was also an oblique reference to his third collection, Wintering Out, published in the same year. Oddly enough, this is not a line of poetry it’s a quote from an interview he gave in 1972, referring to the Troubles in Northern Ireland at a time when they were at their most deadly. “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.” ![]() One line from Seamus Heaney in particular seems to have captured the public’s mood and our need for hope in a time of collective anxiety: We have heard poems being read on the evening news, on morning radio shows, appearing on the front page of newspapers and all over social media – from Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything is Going to be All Right’ to Wendell Berry’s ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ to Gerard Smyth’s ‘Isolation’. Since the beginning of the current coronavirus crisis, people have been turning to poetry to express their bewilderment, to seek comfort, to put words to a situation that sometimes feels beyond comprehension. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |