Seamus Heaney

Fate goes ever as fate must.

Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.In the porch I met my father crying__e had always taken funerals in his stride__nd Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my handAnd tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at school, as my mother held my handIn hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

The way we are living,timorous or bold,will have been our life.

DiggingBetween my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look downTill his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging.The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly.He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deepTo scatter new potatoes that we picked,Loving their cool hardness in our hands.By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.My grandfather cut more turf in a dayThan any other man on Toner__ bog.Once I carried him milk in a bottleCorked sloppily with paper. He straightened upTo drink it, then fell to right awayNicking and slicing neatly, heaving sodsOver his shoulder, going down and downFor the good turf. Digging.The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edgeThrough living roots awaken in my head.But I__e no spade to follow men like them.Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I__l dig with it.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

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.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

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.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.