"I am the artful voyeur"
Seamus Heaney's North.

I first read the poetry in North when I was 22 years old. I was working as an archaeologist on a Viking excavation in Dublin, spending my weekends back in my home in Belfast. It was a summer of turbulence, violence, fear and hope - the referendum of the Good Friday Agreement.

Heaney's poems, written in 1975, capture the archaeology of Ireland, the invasions, the wars and the landscapes that marked the country from the Vikings to that present day. There was enormous resonance with what I read and what I was experiencing, both in my own country and my own life.

That was the summer I also fell deeply in love with the man I was set to marry. The pair of us sat in darkened pubs and sunlit parks scrutinising the intimacies of someone else's poetry.

The lines struck home:

"Tell me as you labour hard
To break this unrelenting soil"
- as we swung mattocks above our shoulders.

"I shouldered a kind of manhood,
stepping in to lift the coffins
of dead relations"
- his murdered father, my dying aunt.

"we will drive north again
past Strang and Carling fjords;"
- my lough-side home and his.

"your back is a firm line of eastern coast"
- nights spent mapping new bodies in a narrow single bed.

To anyone else, they are just words. To us they were a perfectly captured slice of time. I hope he still has his copy; I have mine.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 15 May 2008, 21:24, 3 replies)

Hooray for poetry
Sadly often overlooked these days.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Thu 15 May 2008, 22:11, closed)

*click*
i will be haunting all the 2nd hand bookstores this week with a big list of new things to read! this one is definitely on that list.
(chameleon61, Fri 16 May 2008, 11:24, closed)

Exactly...
That's what good writing does- it perfectly describes things you've thought or felt.

John Berger's Into Their Labours trilogy does the same thing to me.

*click*
(dozers, do fuck off ur a nob m8, Sun 18 May 2008, 18:02, closed)