Sinead Morrissey

Sinead Morrissey was shortlisted for this year's TS Eliot prize (for the best poetry collection published in the British Isles). I was hoping that she would win but unfortunately she did not. (The award went to Philip Gross.) I had to do a search through this blog to see if I had posted about Sinead Morrissey before and found to my surprise that I hadn't. Let me rectify that.
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It is apparent now that the generation of poets who were at Queens University Belfast roughly around the same time as Seamus Heaney exhibited the kind of genius that you find very rarely in history: Periclean Athens, Elizabethan London, Fin de Siecle Vienna, 20's Paris. Poets in the Queens circle included Heaney himself, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Michael Longley et al who, between them, have won just about every poetry prize going. Ireland of course has never been short of pugilists or poets and a new generation of greats is now coming to the fore among whom Sinead Morrissey is one of my favourites. Born in 1972 in Portadown, educated at Trinity, she brings your bog standard Irish gift for brilliant lyrical intensity to a disciplined and close observation of her own feelings and the world around her. Is she the real deal? I think so. She's intelligent, learned and is only getting better. The BBC has a nice clip of Sinead reading and a list of the other poets up for the TS Eliot prize here.

I Can Dig It - Heaney Poem Gets Statue

The town of Bellaghy in Northern Ireland has put up a statue to commemorate the Seamus Heaney poem 'Digging'. I do not know of many other statues in the world that commemorate poems, poets yes, but not usually actual poems themselves and certainly it must be a rare honour to see the work of a living writer so memoralised. 'Digging' of course is a canonical work of modern Irish literature; it was one of the future Noble Prize winner Seamus Heaney's first publications and it has been anthologized more than a hundred times. The picture I found on google shows Seamus Heaney and two anonymous council (?) officials with the massive bronze statue. Maybe this will inspire my local council in Carrickfergus to put up a statue to Louis MacNeice, our famous local poet, but considering the fact that they demolished his beautiful home without a thought for the cultural impact I suspect this is unlikely.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, 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.

- Seamus Heaney