Quote

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

Seamus Heaney

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Seamus Heaney
Age: 74 †
Born: 1939
Born: April 13
Died: 2013
Died: August 30
Actor
Author
Linguist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Seamus Justin Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Flesh
Sour
Turns
Fruit
Hoped
Felt
Cry
Picking
Keep
Sweet
Crying
Years
Wasn
Bush
Fermented
Always
Fairs
Smelt
Would
Turn
Lovely
Blackberry
Like
Knew
Fair
Blackberries
Year

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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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Poetry is language in orbit.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.
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I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.
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Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.
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Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.
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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
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I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.
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Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say, I cannot find the words to describe my hunch about them.
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