I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

Issue 16, Winter 2010

A Gift of Tongues

With so little available for the general reader on Irish literary culture between 600 and 1600, in either Irish or English, we have to wonder at the failure of most of the few dozen relevant academic Columbuses to report back to us on their explorations. To how many of them has it ever occurred that the occasional act of public communication would not be a sin against the integrity of their trade?

The Big Splatter

What is truly dazzling in Heaney is his descriptive power, his almost hymn to a Conway Stewart fountain pen, or glimpses of his father performing a farmyard task, wrought to a hallucinatory, Van Gogh-like intensity. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus is a mystic of the ordinary, which he renders extraordinary, though unlike Hopkins he does not leap towards God.