Page 2 - Marie Devlin News Today

℘℘℘ When Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, the Swedish Academy noted the “lyrical beauty and ethical depth” of his work. His poems, though often suffused with allusions to Dante, Homer, and the other greats, are written with startling directness and offer intimate portraits of his life: his mother’s head “bent towards my head,” as they peel potatoes “While All The Others Were Away At Mass,” or his father crying at the funeral of his younger b...

  IN THOSE DAYS we were held by water. I came into being by an abyss, the deepest sea in the world. My parents raised me on a forty-three-foot sailboat in the Southern Hemisphere. For twelve years, the world settled on us as brine and brushed our toes with kelp. Even now when I think of touch, I think of ocean.   By way of explanation, I used to say about writing that the process involves taking discrete ideas and throwing them up in the dark as star tacks. You write yourself from one sharp p...