New Poetry from Seamus Heaney
Posted by: David Bunch
Brad Leithauser of the New York Times has an excellent review of Seamus Heaney's new poetry collection called "District and Circle". I found Mr. Leithauser's comments on Heaney's (and others') use of rhyme very interesting.
Brad Leithauser of the New York Times has an excellent review of Seamus Heaney's new poetry collection called "District and Circle". I found Mr. Leithauser's comments on Heaney's (and others') use of rhyme very interesting.
I sometimes think there's no more reliable way of initially entering a poet's private domain than by examining what he or she rhymes with what. Certainly, the abbreviated signature of a good many poets could be read by assembling a sample list of the end-words of their lines. George Herbert, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, James Merrill — in many cases a savvy reader could, with all the quiet exultation of a code-breaking cryptographer, identify the author purely through paired rhyme-words, independent of what the poem was actually about.
Add to that company the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate of 1995, whose rhymes are rough-hewn, hand-honed. Dungarees and rosaries? Whops and footsteps? Joys and tallboy? We're in Heaney country.
