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    Station Island
    Station Island
    Station Island
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Station Island

    By Seamus Heaney

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    About this ebook

    The title poem of this collection, set on an Irish island, tells of a pilgrim on an inner journey that leads him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called the narrative sequence in Seamus Heaney's Station Island "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 13, 2014
    ISBN9781466855793
    Station Island
    Author

    Seamus Heaney

    Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the "most important Irish poet since Yeats."

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    • 5/5
      A deep meditation on Lent the wrenching emotional cross currents of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the role of artists in witnessing and addressing that world. The beauty and fluidity of his verse is breathtaking. He is a master. It is a book to read over and over again.
    • 5/5
      There are times when I haven't a clue what Heaney's talking about, but even then I love the way he says it. He has a meaty, earthy, heavenly feel for words and their stories. I LOVE this book.

    Book preview

    Station Island - Seamus Heaney

    PART ONE

    The Underground

    There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,

    You in your going-away coat speeding ahead

    And me, me then like a fleet god gaining

    Upon you before you turned to a reed

    Or some new white flower japped with crimson

    As the coat flapped wild and button after button

    Sprang off and fell in a trail

    Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

    Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,

    Our echoes die in that corridor and now

    I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones

    Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

    To end up in a draughty lamplit station

    After the trains have gone, the wet track

    Bared and tensed as I am, all attention

    For your step following and damned if I look back.

    La Toilette

    The white towelling bathrobe

    ungirdled, the hair still wet,

    first coldness of the underbreast

    like a ciborium in the palm.

    Our bodies are the temples

    of the Holy Ghost. Remember?

    And the little, fitted, deep-slit drapes

    on and off the holy vessels

    regularly? And the chasuble

    so deftly hoisted? But vest yourself

    in the word you taught me

    and the stuff I love: slub silk.

    Sloe Gin

    The clear weather of juniper

    darkened into winter.

    She fed gin to sloes

    and sealed the glass container.

    When I unscrewed it

    I smelled the disturbed

    tart stillness of a bush

    rising through the pantry.

    When I poured it

    it had a cutting edge

    and flamed

    like Betelgeuse.

    I drink to you

    in smoke-mirled, blue-black,

    polished sloes, bitter

    and dependable.

    Away from It All

    A cold steel fork

    pried the tank water

    and forked up a lobster:

    articulated twigs, a rainy stone

    the colour of sunk munitions.

    In full view of the strand,

    the sea wind spitting on the big window,

    we plunged and reddened it,

    then sat for hours in conclave

    over the last of the claws.

    It was twilight, twilight, twilight

    as the questions hopped and rooted.

    It was oarsmen’s backs and oars

    hauled against and lifting.

    And more power to us, my friend,

    hard at it over the dregs,

    laying in in earnest

    as the sea darkens

    and whitens and darkens

    and quotations start to rise

    like rehearsed alibis:

    I was stretched between contemplation

    of a motionless point

    and the command to participate

    actively in history.

    ‘Actively? What do you mean?’

    The light at the rim of the sea

    is rendered down to a fine

    graduation, somewhere between

    balance and inanition.

    And I still cannot clear my head

    of lives in their element

    on the cobbled floor of that tank

    and the hampered one, out of

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