Poetry Page

[BarbStAubrey]

Welcome to September Poetry Page ~ Seamus Heaney
Let's Honor both Fairanna and Babi by
sharing the poems of of one of their favorites
Irish poet, Seamus Heaney.
Maybe all three are gathered with their friends in heaven's Pub...

Postscript And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightening of flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you'll park or capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

A few Links:

• Famous Poets and Poems about Autumn
• Poetry Foundation: Seamus Heaney
• Paris Review: Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry
• The Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry

Discussion Leaders: Barb

[JoanK]

Barbara: great job finishing the page.

I was looking this morning for a poem about a well that I remember reading when we were reading Heaney with Anna years ago (No, it's not "At the Wellhead"). Do you know it?

[JoanK]

I forgot to say how much I enjoyed the pictures with the poems.

[BarbStAubrey]

JoanK is this the one...

AT THE WELLHEAD

Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed
As you always do, are like a local road
We've known every turn of in the past --
That midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road where you stood
Looking and listening until a car
Would come and go and leave you lonelier
Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,
Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran,

Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,
Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour
Who played the piano all day in her bedroom.
Her notes came out to us like hoisted water
Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead
Where next thing we'd be listening, hushed and awkward.

That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician
Was like a silver vein in heavy clay.
Night water glittering in the light of day.
But also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.
She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille
In books like books wallpaper patterns come in.
Her hands were active and her eyes were full
Of open darkness and a watery shine.

She knew us by our voices. She'd say she 'saw'
Whoever or whatever. Being with her
Was intimate and helpful, like a cure
You didn't notice happening. When I read
A poem with Keenan's well in it, she said,
'I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.'

[JoanK]

No, but I like it a lot.

Probably I'm mixing up another poet.

[BarbStAubrey]

I am sorta remembering this one - no well but waterlogged wetness



Bogland

for T. P. Flanagan

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

[JoanK]

Oh, my.

[bluebird24]

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21889

A Kite for Aibhín

[PatH]

Nice, bluebird.

[BarbStAubrey]

Yes it is a nice one Bluebird - I added the title of the poem to your post so that folks have an idea of where the link is taking them.

The first stanza if breath taking isn't it

Air from another life and time and place,
Pale blue heavenly air is supporting
A white wing beating high against the breeze,

The poem brings back memories of flying a kite - we had a nearby hill that slowly tapered off into a huge swamp area where we could pick cattails that in summer turned to what we called Ducktails or Cigars - we used to light them and pretend we were smoking. I believe they were seedheads and were great lit to keep away summer insects.

The big treat was when our father's came home with another roll of string that we could add to our ball that allowed the kites to climb so high we could barely see them.

[BarbStAubrey]

I believe this is one of his first published poems - if not, it is among his earliest works.



Digging
          By Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb  
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound  
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:  
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds  
Bends low, comes up twenty years away  
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills  
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft  
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.  
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

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 I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

[BarbStAubrey]

Wheee I found one written by Fairanna in 2004.

A Poem of failure

Why cant I find the words that best describe a cloud ?
Nothing seems to fit that flowing moisture laded air
Sometimes they look like faces . Or ghostly ships at sea.
Sometimes like soap suds floating on a pond,
Some describe as cottony which doesn’t seem to fit;
For cotton is too substantial for these amorphous fluid shapes.
Times when they betray an anger that makes me fear,
Their darkened countenance. A juggernaut they roll
Across a deep gray plain; and punish us with pelting rain.
I have seen them huddled , a flock of sheep slowly moving
At some unseen shepherds command. , Always some who don’t obey
Wandering from the main, foraging..all alone on a blued field of grain
Sometimes along the horizon, they seem like milk spilled across the sky
A spoonful dropped upon the floor,
Spreading outward ,thinly veiling the azure high.
Waiting, for a dark cat cloud to come along and lap it up.


Bubbling over along its edge, a heap of curdled whey
I have seen them on the ocean, a flotilla massed at bay
Ready to do battle like pirates on foray
I have seen them, a tufted blanket from the window of a plane.
But never , never have I seen them look the same.
I have seen them in the morning , blushing to think
We've caught them by surprise or in the sky at sunset
On fire. They touch the world but never burn it down.
Alas, I can never , never pin them down.I just enjoy
These ever moving, never ceasing things ...called clouds.

Anna Alexander

 

[JoanK]

How wonderful to bring Anna back to us. I miss her so much!!

[bluebird24]

http://www.seniorlearn.org/bookclubs/archives/general/Poetry/Poetry03.htm

[BarbStAubrey]

Bluebird Ha just sent you an email because your earlier post went over my head - I see now it was in reference to a link to the archives - did you have a poem in mind from this link that you want to copy and paste for us to enjoy.

Are you, I hope I hope I hope planning to scour the archives and find some of Fairanna's poems to copy and paste here so we can enjoy them again - what a blessing that would be.

[PatH]

Barb, I'm glad you had so many posts to make to get to a new page; I've really been enjoying them, though it's been taking me a while to digest them.

I wasn't around when you read Heaney's translation of Beowulf.  I read Beowulf in college, though, and have always been fond of it.  So this gives me an excuse to post a link to a wonderful article by Blake Gopnik that appeared in the Washington Post in 2007.  It was sparked by the movie Beowulf, which had just opened, and makes a lot of reference to it, but it deals with Gopnik's experience of reading the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, and the total strangeness of the mindset of the poem.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/21/AR2007112102353.html

[PatH]

This post fits in with the poem Bogland.  As Heaney says, bogs preserve what is buried in them.  In Ireland, it's the Great Irish Elk, which is even more magnificent than he says, improbably gigantic horns.  In Denmark, it's men, many of them coming to a bad end.  Tolland man is one of the most famous, either executed or sacrificed, with a noose around his neck, and all the details in the poem are there in the body, which has a rather sad, wise-looking face.  Grauballe and Nebelgard are two more of the bodies from bogs.

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/the_tollund_man.php

[BarbStAubrey]

So glad PatH that you brought to our attention the archeological finds from the Bogs - wouldn't that be an interesting discussion - the information on these various finds plus any poems written about Bogs - I bet there are more poems than this one by Seamus Heaney. And then to tie it all into some of the myths from both Ireland and Denmark of course throwing in a bit of Shakespeare - wow what a month long study that would be -

PatH I keep thinking you were a part of Senior Learn forever, from back in the mid 1990s but from what you are saying, not so, when did you find Senior Learn and did you and JoanK find the site at the same time? Were you posting when Fairanna was still the discussion leader?

I looked at one of the archived early links to poetry and shocked to see name after name of folks who are no longer with us - felt empty and also I have to admit scary - I remember thinking during those years those who are now my age were ancient and ready to pass over - oh dear - not ready - too much to do - and yet, not the same energy as even 5 years ago. Ah so...

Reminds me of a quote by Seamus Heaney...

“All I know is a door into the dark”

[nlhome]

I think I'll have to peak in here now and then. I love the links to autumn poems, but I'll wait a few weeks to read them. Judging from the forecast, we still have summer here, although the days are shorter and the sky is filled with blackbirds going to roost at night.

[PatH]

It's still pretty steamy here, too, with none of the occasional early bits of fall color yet.

Barb, I joined the old SeniorNet early in 2004.  JoanK found the site first, by googling online book clubs, then after a bit got me to join it too.  So I was around for some time while FairAnna was doing the poetry, got plenty of chance to appreciate her fine spirit.  I did more reading than posting, though.  She and JoanK remained telephone friends to the end, though they never managed to meet in person.

Now you are her successor, and a very worthy one too.

[BarbStAubrey]

Glad you peeked in Nlhome - still hot however, dry not steamy but then we don't really look for relief till the end of September and so we are in triple digits again -  

PatH I sorta remember that JoanK found SeniroNet and encouraged you to join us - However, I had no memory of when that was. Yes, it was always a treat to receive a phone call from Anna - she was filled with everyday talk that took on a magic that was almost fairy like. Her trees, her yard, her home, her baking, her dog, her house guests, her family, even her neighbors were part of her breathing in and breathing out, she was one with all her surroundings.

I need to scour my books - I know I have a book of Seamus Heaney poetry but for the life of me I can not lay my hands on it. I think i'll look on Amazon to locate what the cover looks like - that should help me in my search.

[BarbStAubrey]

History says, don't 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 further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's 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.”

― Seamus Heaney

[BarbStAubrey]

Blackberry Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

[BarbStAubrey]

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

[Frybabe]

Blackberry Picking sure brings back memories of trekking through the woods and up behind the development where raspberries grew on a steep slope. We picked raspberries, blackberries and cherry when we could reach them. I don't know if the cherry trees were native or planted long, long ago and were forgotten and abandoned. There were only a few trees and quite tall. Thanks for sharing, Barb.

[BarbStAubrey]

It does bring back memories doesn't it Frybabe - Berry picking to me was a hot and dry time, blundering through tall grasses bleached by the summer sun - the rewards were great and so worth the effort but it was not near as much fun as peach or later apple picking.

I wanted to make sure about the word Byre in that poem - am I glad I looked it up because I thought it was more like a trough - byre  (br)n. Chiefly British, A barn for cows

[nlhome]

Enjoyed the blackberry poem - remember picking berries like that on my uncle's farm when I was quite small, along the pasture, stepping around the cowpies to get to the bushes.

Here we pick them in the woods, big and juicy - they are the taste of summer to me. But forget a bucketful and yes, the mold grows quickly.

[marjifay]

The Constant Reader group at Goodreads recommends Seamus Heaney's play, THE BURIAL AT THEBES; A VERSION OF SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE.  I was curious since I read Antigone long ago, so I've ordered it from my library.

Per Booklist, starred review, "There are many translations of Sophocles' Antigone but few with the understated power and spare beauty of Irish Nobel laureate Heaney's version. He has given the play a new title, The Burial at Thebes, that recalls both Antigone's punishment--to be walled up in a cave-- and the crime for which she is punished. He remains faithful to the letter and the spirit of the play, following the structure of Sophocles' fine storytelling beat-by-beat even as he finds words to make this classic story of conflict between an inflexible autocrat and an intransigent rebel legible to modern readers.  Written in a muscular but lively style, the translation, like Heaney's best poetry, finds music in the language of the streets and reveals the raw, primal power in the most carefully constructed rhetorical tropes."

[BarbStAubrey]

Wow - that does sound like a book worthy of owning - you are tempting me Margifay

I found one of the books I purchased a few years ago Seamus Heaney the Government of the tongue selected Prose - 1978 - 1987 Only one of his poems - the book is each chapter devoted to a poet as he analysis their work, usually only one poem - facinating - but I do believe i own another book with his poems - still have stacks and shelves and closets and drawers and boxes to search through.

[BarbStAubrey]

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

[JoanK]

Nice to see him appreciating swans. I always wondered what yeats had against them.

[BarbStAubrey]

I've seen swans placidly swimming on a lake and on shore nipping who ever mistakenly approaches but never have a seen a flock of swans swooping down - however, from a car window I have seen many sights that "catch the heart off guard and blow it open."

Only a very few miles out of town and this time of year the land blows me away - it stretches meeting the huge sky and whole swaths, almost like geometric shapes of grasses create a serenade with maybe an outcropping or a lone mesquite or maybe even a huge live oak as the only other growing thing - the grasses are nearly white against a large patch of reddish purple against another dove grey and still another bleached khaki with a washed out blue sky above with a few long wispy clouds. Catches me every time even more than these same fields in spring covered in wildflowers.

Soon the flocks of birds moving south will descend on our trees and in our yards but more impressive are the flocks of monarchs - you hate to keep driving since they get caught in the grill and paste themselves dead on your windshield - with all that road kill it is amazing they continue to migrate every year in such numbers.  

How about you JoanK do you have some memories of scenes that blew open your heart.

[BarbStAubrey]

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
For Mary Heaney

I. Sunlight
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose's wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

[BarbStAubrey]

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage
or political initiatives within a peace process,
there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

[JoanK]

When I went to the library this week, I found a book of poems about birds, collected by Billy Collins. It includes an old favorite by Elizabeth Bishop: "Sandpiper"

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sandpiper/

[BarbStAubrey]

That might be a good focus in the near future JoanK - a month of Bird poems - surely there are many

[BarbStAubrey]

The Harvest Bow
          by Seamus Heaney

As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall--
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser--
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

An ordinary, rather battered dresser. “Deal” is pine, which is soft wood used to create low-quality furniture and cheap coffins. The pine dresser is thus reminiscent of a poor person’s coffin.

[JudeS]

The Sept. 9,2013 issue of The New Yorker must have a spy that sneaks a peek at SeniorLearn. They too have a poem by Seamus  Heaney. Here it is:

THE GUTTURAL MUSE

Last summer, and at midnight
I smelt the heat of the day:
At my window over the hotel car park
I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake
And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting
As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up
That evening at dusk-the slimy tench
Once called the doctor fish because his slime
Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress
Was being courted out among the cars:
As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
Wanting to swim in touch in touch with soft-mouthed life.

Barb - those pictures that you put with the poems are simply breath taking.
Joan K-I know I am not a faithful follower of this site (as yet) but why just birds? Animals and fish broaden the category , yet still limit it.
Anyhow thanks to all who make this a beautiful site.

[BarbStAubrey]

Jude thanks - had to look up what a tench was and learned it is an interchangeable word for Dr. Fish with habits that illuminate the night scene when the bars close.

A link to the habits and habitat of the Tench -   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tench

What a contrast between that scene conjured up by night feeding tench and a girl in a white dress - I guess like most of us he/we wish there were few to no tench with many, rather than one vulnerable girl in a white dress. We are always looking for the white hat as our saving hero or in this case, heroine in a white dress.

[BarbStAubrey]

“If self is a location, so is love:
Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,
Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,
Here and there and now and then, a stance.”