Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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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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.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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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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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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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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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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