Station Island
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About this ebook
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."
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Reviews for Station Island
54 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A deep meditation on Lent the wrenching emotional cross currents of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the role of artists in witnessing and addressing that world. The beauty and fluidity of his verse is breathtaking. He is a master. It is a book to read over and over again.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5There are times when I haven't a clue what Heaney's talking about, but even then I love the way he says it. He has a meaty, earthy, heavenly feel for words and their stories. I LOVE this book.
Book preview
Station Island - Seamus Heaney
PART ONE
The Underground
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
La Toilette
The white towelling bathrobe
ungirdled, the hair still wet,
first coldness of the underbreast
like a ciborium in the palm.
Our bodies are the temples
of the Holy Ghost. Remember?
And the little, fitted, deep-slit drapes
on and off the holy vessels
regularly? And the chasuble
so deftly hoisted? But vest yourself
in the word you taught me
and the stuff I love: slub silk.
Sloe Gin
The clear weather of juniper
darkened into winter.
She fed gin to sloes
and sealed the glass container.
When I unscrewed it
I smelled the disturbed
tart stillness of a bush
rising through the pantry.
When I poured it
it had a cutting edge
and flamed
like Betelgeuse.
I drink to you
in smoke-mirled, blue-black,
polished sloes, bitter
and dependable.
Away from It All
A cold steel fork
pried the tank water
and forked up a lobster:
articulated twigs, a rainy stone
the colour of sunk munitions.
In full view of the strand,
the sea wind spitting on the big window,
we plunged and reddened it,
then sat for hours in conclave
over the last of the claws.
It was twilight, twilight, twilight
as the questions hopped and rooted.
It was oarsmen’s backs and oars
hauled against and lifting.
And more power to us, my friend,
hard at it over the dregs,
laying in in earnest
as the sea darkens
and whitens and darkens
and quotations start to rise
like rehearsed alibis:
I was stretched between contemplation
of a motionless point
and the command to participate
actively in history.
‘Actively? What do you mean?’
The light at the rim of the sea
is rendered down to a fine
graduation, somewhere between
balance and inanition.
And I still cannot clear my head
of lives in their element
on the cobbled floor of that tank
and the hampered one, out of