Essayists From Northern Ireland

"The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it."

"God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure."

"Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured."

"History says don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells."

"Call the miracle self-healing: The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling. If there's fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term."

"Here is the great paradox of poetry and of the imaginative arts in general. Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed."

"My poetry journey into the wilderness of language was a journey where each point of arrival turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination."

"The writing of certain poems took me to the bottom of myself, something inchoate but troubled. [...] The Troubles, you might say, had muddied the waters, but I felt these poems ["The Guttural Muse" and others] arrived from an older, deeper, cleaner spring."

"I don't mean sound as decoration or elaboration, but the actual cadence that moves the thing along."

"Is there life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again."

"I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing."

"Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised My passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised To toast The Queen."

"Don't be afraid."

"A poet for whom sound is crucial, who relishes the way words and consonants knock around together."

"Heaney has the rare capacity to improvise sentences which are at once spontaneous and shapely, play and profound, beautiful and true."

"För ett författarskap av lyrisk skönhet och etiskt djup, som lyfter fram vardagens mirakler och det levande förflutna."

"I didn’t find the voices in published literature in Australia that could show me the way...Heaney felt like a mentor I wish I had while I was trying to write."