In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
SEAMUS HEANEYNowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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