Customer Reviews

Strong - By: William Burn, 28 Mar 2008
Returning to this book some ten years after I first encountered Seamus Heaney (under the inescapably unfortunate constellation of GCSE English coursework) I was a little unsure what I would encounter. Those first readings of "Mid-term Break" left me slightly puzzled: these were clearly moving, often quite funny stories, but I didn't "get" the poetry. I couldn't tell what it was that Heaney was doing with language. In short, it all seemed a little, well, pointless.

But now, rather older, & maybe a little wiser (though that's hardly a great improvement: I was a particularly useless example of a 15 year old boy), I findin Heaney a stunning ability to weave language into something that is far more than the sum of its parts. There is a denseness to his poetry, notin the sense of obscurantism or difficulty, butin the sound it makes when you read it,in the weight of the syllablesin your mouth, that sets him apart from any other poet I know. And this is not to claim some sort of affective fallacy, whereby the weight of his verse evokes the weight of the Irish soil, but to mark his writing out as something more firm, more resilient, than texts that could be so easily dismissed by a rather glib, arrogant young man.

And now I turn again & again to Heaney, seeingin his writing great thought, close observation & honesty, & I am grateful for the time that has passed.