The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland, www.gallerypress.com
‘August for the people and their favourite islands,’ wrote W. H. Auden in a poem from his early Marxist phase. This holiday season brings from our adjoining island a parcel of poetry better suited to Christmas or some elate private festival, a salvation of riches. Literary beachwear is usually marketed as undemanding: thrill- ers, Aga sagas, bonkbusters and the like. The secret is to stick to good poems. Reading them requires fierce brief sensual attention akin to lovemaking itself. Afterwards you can doze again in the sun or over a novel.
Seamus Heaney’s previous collection, Electric Light, disappointed some of his large readership (though not this member). He treated his boyhood in wartime Co. Derry directly, not obliquely, flattening his usual tone in order to relax and make it prosier.
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