Station Island

I am sorry Mr. Heaney has left us........I have read and reread this book of poetry. It will stay on mynight table for a long while. I wish I could write like this (and think like he did).

"Station Island" is a series of 12 poems in the second section of the book. It follows Dante's meeting with different shades in The Divine Comedy. Heaney himself claims to be deeply influenced by Dante, and it is a Dante through TS Eliot. Although unlike TS Eliot who increasingly become religious in his work (partly due to what Dante claimed in the Divine Comedy that writing needs a transcendence and it must come from god), Heaney rejects religion as a form of transcendence.The book must be taken as a whole and as a whole, Heaney wishes, for the first time in his career, to shake off his past literary influences and Irish writers such as James Joyce (who wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Patrick Kavanagh, and William Caleton. It is also the first time that he wishes to explain his political apathy despite his success as a poet through remarkable poems like Chekhov on Sakhalin, section VIII of "Station Island". The poems are incisive and unapologetic, like the shade of James Joyce telling Heaney to "Let go, Let fly."However, after rejecting religion, politics and his literary past in the sequence of poems, Heaney cannot provide an answer what and why he is writing for because:"There a drinking deer...at a dried-up source."The deer of poetry has met a drought of a pool of dried-up ink. If only he could provide a kind of transcendence then this book would have been perfect.

This is still Heaney's best book of poetry to date. Centered around his 12 canto "Station Island," a poignant and disturbing 'portrait of the artist,' Station Island marked the transition in Heaney's career into the mature artist and greatest poet writing in English that we know today. A classic book of verse, written with lyrical precision and emotional power.

There's no doubt Heaney was a brilliant poet and a master of language. But he did tend to write for other academic poets. A lot of the poems are simply 'over my head' - I simply cannot make out what he is on about - and I have 4 arts degrees - what chance do most of us stand?! He's writing tributes to obscure poets who perhaps wrote in gaelic or something and he's translated their works. Some sort of introduction or brief commentary explaining who these people the poems are tributes to were, might help.

good purchase

Just what I hoped for

It helps if you have a background in Irish mythology to fully understand the work but can still be understood without this background and has lessons for the contemporary world