Seamus Heaney

My date, from The Third Annual Willow Manor Ball,

Poet, Seamus Heaney

is a finalist for the 

Griffin Poetry Prize

Canada's most generous poetry award.

His submission is called

Human Chain.

When asked about the mournful quality of the poems he replied:

"You get to a certain age and several of the people who were fixed stars in your life begin to fall. You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. A couple of poems in the book which end up being among the most elegiac were written before my stroke — I’m thinking of “The Baler” and “In the Attic.” But no doubt the stroke heightened the elegiac quotient, although it also brought on a surge of writing energy and in the months after it I wrote a lot of the things included in Human Chain."

I'll just be popping along to the bookstore now.

Good Luck Seamus!

I Shall Go To The Ball!

Seamus has just flown in from Ireland...

Not one for dancing the night away, Brilliant Husband has gladly aquiesced his position as my escort to The Third Annual Willow Manor Ball.

Seamus has secretly agreed to read his poem, Sunlight, as we drive down 

"There was a sunlit absence.

The helmeted pump in the yard

heated its iron,

water honeyed

in the slung bucket

and the sun stood

like a griddle cooling

against the wall

of each long afternoon.

So, her hands scuffled

over the bakeboard,

the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat

against her where she stood

in a floury apron

by the window.

Now she dusts the board

with a goose’s wing,

now sits, broad-lapped,

with whitened nails

and measling shins:

here is a space

again, the scone rising

to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love

like a tinsmith’s scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin."

Do I notice a slight  twinge of regret that BH is not coming
as I take Seamus' hand, dressed in my fabulous gown

and step into our Bugatti?

(but perhaps it is the car he is pining for!)

No matter...my dancing shoes are calling

Yes Cinderella, you SHALL go to the ball!
See you all tonight!  It's quite a long drive from here to there.  Perhaps I can convince Seamus
to read Lightenings VIII too!