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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.

Seamus Heaney

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fact Lyrics Medium Poetry Recognition Truth
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Form Movement One Liner
If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Dimension Ghost People Pleasant Quiet Training Yourself
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Risk Truth World Yourself
The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Argument Aristocrats Behavior God Talk
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Myself Possible Space Walk
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Academy Foundation Mindset Myself Name
It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Difficult Heart Learning Rhyme
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Best Description Himself Myself Writing
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Case Chapter History Poetry
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Break Death Poetry
Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Deal Temperature World Writing
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Community Deep Feeling Joy Moments Myself
Nowadays, 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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Award Judgement Panel Poetry Solidarity Yourself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expression Solid Stress True Work Writing
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fundamental Memories Myself Poem Start

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Seamus Heaney Quotes