An episode from 8/1/24: Tonight, I read seven poems from Seamus Heaney’s 1974 collection, North. Few poets from the last century took on the reality of violence in the ancient and modern world the way Heaney does in his poems about Iron Age bog bodies, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and ruminations through mythology and Viking history. I also read four poems from Heaney’s previous books, that can serve as a prologue to North:
- Personal Helicon (from Death of a Naturalist)
- Dream (from Door into the Dark)
- Bogland (from Door into the Dark)
- The Tollund Man (from Wintering Out)
Poems from North:
- Belderg
- Funeral Rites
- Bone Dreams pt. II
- Bog Queen
- The Grauballe Man
- Punishment
- Kinship
Audio of Heaney reading “Personal Helicon” comes from his 1971 appearance at the 92nd Street Y. The episode also includes excerpts from Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, and The Letters of Seamus Heaney. This episode is revision and complete re-recording of an episode first released in June, 2021.
You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series.
Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
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