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Station Island
The title poem of this collection, Seamus Heaney's first after Field Work (1979), is set on an island that has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. Heaney's pilgrim is on an inner journey and proceeds through a series of dream encounters which lead him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called this narrative sequence "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years." It is preceded by a section of richly meditative lyrics ("Wry, spare, compressed, subtle, strange, they have a furtive intensity and exicitement." - Richard Ellmann, The New York Review of Books), and leads naturally into a third group of poems, in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary Sweeney, a king of Ulster whose story Heaney translated from the Irish.
123 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Seamus Heaney
343books1,037followersWorks of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections
Wintering Out
(1972) and
Field Work
(1979) as well as a translation of
Beowulf
(1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
February 9, 2019
What a brilliant collection! Heaney’s Station Island is loaded with contextual references that by reading it I learned not only what constitutes brilliant poetry, but how a master in his art can impart much more than his brilliant craft—he can educate on history and politics.
From the opening poem ‘The Underground� of the first part, I realized I was in for a treat. The fantastic poetics was not enough, Heaney alluded to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, where the poet persona is in chase of a woman in the London underground, but unlike the myth, he does not want to look back and lose her:
A favorite here is ‘Chekov on Sakhalin,� that references Chekhov’s visit to Sakhalin to interview prisoners and eventually write his book on the conditions in the penal colony in 1985 (notes provided by Heaney in the book). We are to read this in the context of the Troubles in Ulster. Like Chekhov,
And then ‘Railway Children� really hit a sweet chord, seen from the eye of a child. Heaney blends imagery of landscape and nature, his forte, with the explorative religious fervor in this collection. Here is the poem in full:
The collection is divided into three sections, and the second section is a sequence of poems about Station Island or St. Patrick’s Purgatory, in which the poet-persona (believed to be Heaney himself) is on a pilgrimage where he encounters a number of shades � saints and men of letters � in visions:
This is the shade of James Joyce helping Heaney ‘out of the sea of what, of faith, of doubt? Does Heaney doubt also Joyce’s voice? � He urges Heaney to “get back in the harness. The main thing is to write/ for the joy if it.� Joyce warns against an abstract poetic vocation, one guided towards politics or a “profession�, and his hard words bring Heaney back down to earth.� (Ryan L. Womack) which is a rather ironic take, since Heaney is chiding himself for doing what he is doing in this collection. It is a rather self-reflective analysis, a meta-perspective on the poet as the poem is constructed. But perhaps fellow Irishman, Joyce, is the sound of reason Heaney needed at this moment to ground himself back to earth, as Womack explains.
The entire sequence is loaded with the history of the Troubles and the victims and Heaney’s ‘complicity through passivity, how his idling did nothing to stop the violence� (ibid.), impressing that Heaney’s journey on St. Patrick’s Purgatory is indeed a journey of redemption from his self-inflicted guilt. It really is a powerful sequence in which we see the pilgrim descend from guilt to practicality.
In the third section Sweeney Redivivus the poems take a gentler, breezier approach. Also, lighter than the tragic story of Sweeney Astray translated by Heaney, we see Sweeney returning to the poet in this collection in a far more imaginative way, sometimes out of the confines of the original restrictions of medieval Ireland, and with more voyeuristic tendencies towards the sexual:
These poems ‘voiced for Sweeney, the seventh-century Ulster king� as Heaney mentions in the notes of the collection, are much more playful and accessible than the tragic tale of Sweeney itself. Although Heaney would like them to stand alone independent of the original, and to some extent they do, the poems in this final section can be all the more appreciated in contrast to Sweeney Astray.
This is an overall ambitious collection of poetry that does not disappoint. Full of Heaney’s signature poetics and layered full of references to history, politics, and Catholicism (redemption of his own perceived passivity and guilt regarding the Troubles).
_______________________
Womack, R. L., ‘Converting to Things Foreknown: Heaney’s Marvelous Imagination in “Station Island”� (2016) published in Estudios Irlandeses (ISSN 1699-311X)
From the opening poem ‘The Underground� of the first part, I realized I was in for a treat. The fantastic poetics was not enough, Heaney alluded to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, where the poet persona is in chase of a woman in the London underground, but unlike the myth, he does not want to look back and lose her:
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed
�
To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
A favorite here is ‘Chekov on Sakhalin,� that references Chekhov’s visit to Sakhalin to interview prisoners and eventually write his book on the conditions in the penal colony in 1985 (notes provided by Heaney in the book). We are to read this in the context of the Troubles in Ulster. Like Chekhov,
�
That far north, Siberia was south.
Should it have been an ulcer in the mouth,
The cognac that the Moscow literati
Packed off with him to a penal colony �
�
To try for the right tone � not tract, not thesis �
And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze
His slave’s blood out and waken the free man
Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin.
And then ‘Railway Children� really hit a sweet chord, seen from the eye of a child. Heaney blends imagery of landscape and nature, his forte, with the explorative religious fervor in this collection. Here is the poem in full:
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
The collection is divided into three sections, and the second section is a sequence of poems about Station Island or St. Patrick’s Purgatory, in which the poet-persona (believed to be Heaney himself) is on a pilgrimage where he encounters a number of shades � saints and men of letters � in visions:
� ‘Old father, mother’s son,
there is a moment in Stephen’s diary
for April the thirteenth, a revelation
set among stars � that one entry
has been a sort of password in my ears,
the collect of a new epiphany,
the Feast of Holy Tundish.� ‘Who cares,�
he jeered, ‘any more? The English language
belongs to us. �
This is the shade of James Joyce helping Heaney ‘out of the sea of what, of faith, of doubt? Does Heaney doubt also Joyce’s voice? � He urges Heaney to “get back in the harness. The main thing is to write/ for the joy if it.� Joyce warns against an abstract poetic vocation, one guided towards politics or a “profession�, and his hard words bring Heaney back down to earth.� (Ryan L. Womack) which is a rather ironic take, since Heaney is chiding himself for doing what he is doing in this collection. It is a rather self-reflective analysis, a meta-perspective on the poet as the poem is constructed. But perhaps fellow Irishman, Joyce, is the sound of reason Heaney needed at this moment to ground himself back to earth, as Womack explains.
The entire sequence is loaded with the history of the Troubles and the victims and Heaney’s ‘complicity through passivity, how his idling did nothing to stop the violence� (ibid.), impressing that Heaney’s journey on St. Patrick’s Purgatory is indeed a journey of redemption from his self-inflicted guilt. It really is a powerful sequence in which we see the pilgrim descend from guilt to practicality.
In the third section Sweeney Redivivus the poems take a gentler, breezier approach. Also, lighter than the tragic story of Sweeney Astray translated by Heaney, we see Sweeney returning to the poet in this collection in a far more imaginative way, sometimes out of the confines of the original restrictions of medieval Ireland, and with more voyeuristic tendencies towards the sexual:
Body heat under the leaves, matronly
slippage and hoistings
as she spreads in the pool of day,
a queen in her fifties, dropping
purses and earrings. What does she care
for the lean-shanked and thorny,
old firm-fleshed Susannah, stepped in
over her belly,
parts of her soapy and white,
parts of her blunting?
And the little bird of death
piping and piping somewhere
in her gorgeous tackling? Surely not.
She breaths deep and stirs up the algae.
These poems ‘voiced for Sweeney, the seventh-century Ulster king� as Heaney mentions in the notes of the collection, are much more playful and accessible than the tragic tale of Sweeney itself. Although Heaney would like them to stand alone independent of the original, and to some extent they do, the poems in this final section can be all the more appreciated in contrast to Sweeney Astray.
This is an overall ambitious collection of poetry that does not disappoint. Full of Heaney’s signature poetics and layered full of references to history, politics, and Catholicism (redemption of his own perceived passivity and guilt regarding the Troubles).
_______________________
Womack, R. L., ‘Converting to Things Foreknown: Heaney’s Marvelous Imagination in “Station Island”� (2016) published in Estudios Irlandeses (ISSN 1699-311X)
December 15, 2020
Another great collection of poetry from Heaney, built around the lengthy centrepiece ‘Station Island� (hence the title of the book, I guess). To be honest, I’m going to have to revisit this one in less stressful times, as I had trouble concentrating on this one enough to really give it the close inspection it deserves, thanks to some horrible stuff I have going on at the moment.
The following was my favourite in this collection, because it was so evocative of my mother, who used to do other people’s ironing for money when she was raising my brother and me on her own, back in the day. I should add that I never saw her spit on the iron, though.
Old Smoothing Iron
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at anchor.
To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next to her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
The following was my favourite in this collection, because it was so evocative of my mother, who used to do other people’s ironing for money when she was raising my brother and me on her own, back in the day. I should add that I never saw her spit on the iron, though.
Old Smoothing Iron
Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at anchor.
To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next to her cheek
to divine the stored danger.
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron
like a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass
through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
September 6, 2022
Read this today.
April 5, 2014
Of Heaney's books of poems it is difficult to sift & say 'This is his best work.' I don't pretend to have the skills of a poet that should be the fundamental requirement for making such a judgement. It's much easier & more honest to stick with "This is my favourite of his work" & that's what struck me here - at least, that is, until I go back to one of his other volumes in the near future & think "No, this is my favourite!"
I first came across his poems when I was 15 in the local public library. I'd never heard of him, but the title, "Death of a Naturalist" grabbed me for no better reason than that natural history - birds & mammals in particular - were of huge interest to me. From that point of view, the poems were of limited interest, but none-the-less they took a hold of me & have kept it ever since. His are the poems that over the last 40 odd years I've probably gone back to most often & with greatest delight.
Why?
There is a saying among Quakers that "All life is sacramental." It strikes me that Heaney's poems embody this understanding of the world, not in specifically religious terms, but certainly in the sense of a depth, beauty & hope that infuses & underlies the surface history & even the smallest details of life. In the widest sense - although much of his imagery & underlying modelling is built on his Roman catholic background - he accesses & gives access to a powerfully 'spiritual' dimension of life.
Recently I've been reading for the first time some of Paul Muldoon's volumes of poems. Like Heaney he is a poet of huge skill. But I find a satisfaction that comes from reading Heaney's work is absent when reading Muldoon. While Muldoon skates across the two-dimensional surface of an ice rink with the consummate skills of the greatest of ice dancers, Heaney also skates with wonderful skills & grace across the ice, only in his case there are the depths of a lake below the ice over which he skates, and he opens a perception of those depths to the reader.
I found the whole of "Station Island" a delight to read. Within that, Part 2 spoke for me with most deeply & with the greatest resonance.
I first came across his poems when I was 15 in the local public library. I'd never heard of him, but the title, "Death of a Naturalist" grabbed me for no better reason than that natural history - birds & mammals in particular - were of huge interest to me. From that point of view, the poems were of limited interest, but none-the-less they took a hold of me & have kept it ever since. His are the poems that over the last 40 odd years I've probably gone back to most often & with greatest delight.
Why?
There is a saying among Quakers that "All life is sacramental." It strikes me that Heaney's poems embody this understanding of the world, not in specifically religious terms, but certainly in the sense of a depth, beauty & hope that infuses & underlies the surface history & even the smallest details of life. In the widest sense - although much of his imagery & underlying modelling is built on his Roman catholic background - he accesses & gives access to a powerfully 'spiritual' dimension of life.
Recently I've been reading for the first time some of Paul Muldoon's volumes of poems. Like Heaney he is a poet of huge skill. But I find a satisfaction that comes from reading Heaney's work is absent when reading Muldoon. While Muldoon skates across the two-dimensional surface of an ice rink with the consummate skills of the greatest of ice dancers, Heaney also skates with wonderful skills & grace across the ice, only in his case there are the depths of a lake below the ice over which he skates, and he opens a perception of those depths to the reader.
I found the whole of "Station Island" a delight to read. Within that, Part 2 spoke for me with most deeply & with the greatest resonance.
September 1, 2013
My favorite of his earliest books, read and reread, reread now hearing that he has died. So wonderful on so very many levels. The quick darkness in “The Underground.� The sharp juxtapositions and density of “Shelf Life.� And high above all the long title poem, the one that had me trying to copy him for months, stretching narrative out along a line that is both journey and stations, both going and pausing along the way, the intrusion of death, the entrance even of politics without ever letting go of art. Magnificent flagstone of a book.
A favored bit among dozens:
"Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer."
- "Station Island" IX
A favored bit among dozens:
"Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer."
- "Station Island" IX
July 3, 2021
Seamus Heaney really was the greatest poet of the late 20th century.
This was one of his best collections; and it contains the most glittering poem about swilling gin I know of.
This was one of his best collections; and it contains the most glittering poem about swilling gin I know of.
September 19, 2009
first collection I've read, couldn't put it down, bought it on a lark at half price books after hearing a friend mention the strength of his poetry
January 21, 2024
The first poetry collection I've rotated into my yearly reread queue.
March 30, 2018
This collection is beautiful at times but quite challenging to read without a guide, and I will have to return to the whole set of Heaney poems quite soon under proper supervision. Peter Barry wrote, in Reading Poetry, that “Poetry readers do not have to acquire the techniques of the Bletchley Park code-breakers of the Second World War because poets do not encode their meanings in that way.� There are some poems here for which I fear Barry is not entirely right, and I did decide to use Google for a few, notably “The King of the Ditchbacks�. Only at the end did I discover Heaney himself had supplied some brief notes as a key to the principal obscurities, proving there is indeed a code. It would have helped to flag these notes at the outset, or should we read such books from the back, like murder mysteries?
Even where the intention of the poems seems clear, there is good reason to go in search of hidden layers. The Station Island sequence of poems has references back to Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem on the same Lough Derg pilgrimage, with which it certainly must be compared and contrasted, and the pilgrimage itself has an interesting status in Irish Catholic culture. Questions within the poems about the role of poetry in Irish affairs resonate with an ongoing debate going back several centuries � described for example by Declan Kiberd in “Inventing Ireland,� - and it would be an interesting exercise to explore these themes.
Heaney seems to have taken the pilgrimage in all seriousness, and this whole collection is filled with Catholic religiosity. The impression is that in this intensely religious / mystical setting, he was able to confront his anxieties about the violence in Northern Ireland, with several powerful references to sectarian assassinations that clearly had a huge impact for him. It is a good thing to explore his themes across a sequence of poems, each with a different angle, because it gives him the scope to examine mutually contradictory and conflicting responses, including anger on the one hand and survivor guilt on another, imagined participation in some places and in others a wish to be liberated from any obligation to participate.
The poetry is not always so severe. In one poem Heaney refers to “the first step taken / from a justified line / into the margin.� To me, this refers to the neat alignment of text, leaving a white margin within which there is scribbling done. Later, in The Scribes, he suggests that “In the hush of the scriptorium,� the [monkish?] scribes may be writing “texts of praise,� but in the margins their poisonous doodles expose their bad temper at the vexations of their chosen profession, �...if the day is dark / or too much chalk had made the vellum bland / or too little left it oily...� In my reading of this poem, Heaney laughingly � and spitefully - imagines the miserable scribes being assigned the task of setting out his poem on vellum using their best calligraphy.
It is the sixth of his poetry collections, and to be fair he may expect readers to be fully acclimatised by now in his imaginative landscape. Reading slowly, and turning back to re-read many times, this is a rewarding and attractive collection.
Even where the intention of the poems seems clear, there is good reason to go in search of hidden layers. The Station Island sequence of poems has references back to Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem on the same Lough Derg pilgrimage, with which it certainly must be compared and contrasted, and the pilgrimage itself has an interesting status in Irish Catholic culture. Questions within the poems about the role of poetry in Irish affairs resonate with an ongoing debate going back several centuries � described for example by Declan Kiberd in “Inventing Ireland,� - and it would be an interesting exercise to explore these themes.
Heaney seems to have taken the pilgrimage in all seriousness, and this whole collection is filled with Catholic religiosity. The impression is that in this intensely religious / mystical setting, he was able to confront his anxieties about the violence in Northern Ireland, with several powerful references to sectarian assassinations that clearly had a huge impact for him. It is a good thing to explore his themes across a sequence of poems, each with a different angle, because it gives him the scope to examine mutually contradictory and conflicting responses, including anger on the one hand and survivor guilt on another, imagined participation in some places and in others a wish to be liberated from any obligation to participate.
The poetry is not always so severe. In one poem Heaney refers to “the first step taken / from a justified line / into the margin.� To me, this refers to the neat alignment of text, leaving a white margin within which there is scribbling done. Later, in The Scribes, he suggests that “In the hush of the scriptorium,� the [monkish?] scribes may be writing “texts of praise,� but in the margins their poisonous doodles expose their bad temper at the vexations of their chosen profession, �...if the day is dark / or too much chalk had made the vellum bland / or too little left it oily...� In my reading of this poem, Heaney laughingly � and spitefully - imagines the miserable scribes being assigned the task of setting out his poem on vellum using their best calligraphy.
It is the sixth of his poetry collections, and to be fair he may expect readers to be fully acclimatised by now in his imaginative landscape. Reading slowly, and turning back to re-read many times, this is a rewarding and attractive collection.
June 29, 2017
Station Island was published in 1984 when Seamus Heaney was in his mid-forties and he felt he was at a crossroads. Station Island is the site of St. Patrick's Purgatory, an ancient pilgrimage site which figures prominently in the poem. The prose-poem is divided into 3 parts. The first part is 41 lyric poems mainly about ordinary life. The second, Station Island has twelve sections of encounters with the dead as the author makes the pilgrimage and comes face to face with his younger self. In the third part, Sweeney Redevivus, the author uses the voice of a seventh century Ulster king in twenty poetic pieces.
Overall, the poem is beautiful and spiritual in tone. Its imagery is expressive of the both the joys and sorrows and confusions found in life. One caution for the reader new to Seamus Heaney. This prose-poem is very literary. Some simple ecclesiastical Latin, Dante, Irish culture and history are necessary to understand what he's talking about. It would help to know a little about Heaney, too. I looked up some as I went along and finally stopped and read up on the poem before continuing. I wish I had done it before I started. Even after I had read up on it, I still found the most pleasure in the first part, the poems about ordinary things.
Overall, the poem is beautiful and spiritual in tone. Its imagery is expressive of the both the joys and sorrows and confusions found in life. One caution for the reader new to Seamus Heaney. This prose-poem is very literary. Some simple ecclesiastical Latin, Dante, Irish culture and history are necessary to understand what he's talking about. It would help to know a little about Heaney, too. I looked up some as I went along and finally stopped and read up on the poem before continuing. I wish I had done it before I started. Even after I had read up on it, I still found the most pleasure in the first part, the poems about ordinary things.
September 20, 2022
For "rating purposes" I judge poetry collections not by the strength of the collection as a whole, but simply the enduring quality of one or two poems. Heaney is a must for anyone who wants to discover the beauty of muddy fields. I don't find him a poet I readily recall lines from, but his images are second to none, and I felt I was at home in Ireland reading this.
August 16, 2020
A fine collection of the late Séamus Heaney
August 17, 2007
I first saw Seamus Heaney speak at Aquinas College a little over a year ago. Not knowing what to expect, I beheld a curious, old, genius, Irish Nobel-Laureate poet and translator of Celtic, Old English (e.g. Beowulf), Latin, French, Spanish, and probably several other languages. He read poems from all points of his long career and fielded questions about the nature of art, poetry, and religion.
Station Island is the first collection of Heaney's poetry that I have read, and it did not disappoint my high expectations. The book is composed of three sections: a number of short, lyrical poems, a 12-part long poem that narrates poet's journey to Station Island and into his own being, and a number of poems spoken by Sweeney, a seventh-century Ulster king.
Seamus Heaney's power comes from his use of short, evocative Anglo-Saxon words that act as a counterweight to his enormous erudition which would appear both clumsy and pretentious if couched in Latinate terms.
Take, for example, "La Toilette," the portrait of the speaker's beloved dressing herself in the morning. After describing the details and alluding to the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost, he ends with a request of his beloved:
...But vest yourself
in the word you taught me
and the stuff I love: slub silk.
In the title and elsewhere in the poem, Heaney evokes the Franco-Latin tradition with words like "toilette" and "ciborium" and "chausuble" used to describe the elegance of the lady. Yet for all the he tarries in the high-end pretenses of the Continent, Heaney closes his poem with the rich yet short phrase of Anglo-Saxon sounds, "slub silk," which yet contributes to the elegance, albeit this time a more homey, natural kind.
Another example comes from one of the Sweeney poems, "The First Kingdom," whose first stanza alone is enough to give one a sense of Heaney's style, rich and earthy like Irish loam:
The royal roads were cow paths.
The queen mother hunkered on a stool
and played the harpstrings of milk
into a wooden pail.
With seasoned sticks the nobles
lorded it over the hindquarters of the cattle.
Here we find the Anglo-Saxon diction ("cow paths," "hunkered," "seasoned sticks") combined with rich metaphor ("played the harpstrings of milk") to create a wonderfully descript image of the old Celtic world before the influence of the Holy Roman Empire.
Heaney has created in Station Island, and I imagine in his other works, masterpieces of modern poetry. He has nearly single-handedly renewed my faith in contemporary poetry, which seems to me to, on a whole, lack ambition and purpose and instead falls prey to the too-clever-for-its-own-good, ironic descriptions of mundane scenes that is so in vogue with Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and the editors of Poetry in their recent summer issue. Seamus Heaney, in contrast, boldly explores his native Ireland, religion, nature, ancient history, and linguistic roots.
In short, Seamus Heaney is a true poet in a world of charlatans, dilettantes, and (to use a much more Heaney-esque term) quacks.
Station Island is the first collection of Heaney's poetry that I have read, and it did not disappoint my high expectations. The book is composed of three sections: a number of short, lyrical poems, a 12-part long poem that narrates poet's journey to Station Island and into his own being, and a number of poems spoken by Sweeney, a seventh-century Ulster king.
Seamus Heaney's power comes from his use of short, evocative Anglo-Saxon words that act as a counterweight to his enormous erudition which would appear both clumsy and pretentious if couched in Latinate terms.
Take, for example, "La Toilette," the portrait of the speaker's beloved dressing herself in the morning. After describing the details and alluding to the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost, he ends with a request of his beloved:
...But vest yourself
in the word you taught me
and the stuff I love: slub silk.
In the title and elsewhere in the poem, Heaney evokes the Franco-Latin tradition with words like "toilette" and "ciborium" and "chausuble" used to describe the elegance of the lady. Yet for all the he tarries in the high-end pretenses of the Continent, Heaney closes his poem with the rich yet short phrase of Anglo-Saxon sounds, "slub silk," which yet contributes to the elegance, albeit this time a more homey, natural kind.
Another example comes from one of the Sweeney poems, "The First Kingdom," whose first stanza alone is enough to give one a sense of Heaney's style, rich and earthy like Irish loam:
The royal roads were cow paths.
The queen mother hunkered on a stool
and played the harpstrings of milk
into a wooden pail.
With seasoned sticks the nobles
lorded it over the hindquarters of the cattle.
Here we find the Anglo-Saxon diction ("cow paths," "hunkered," "seasoned sticks") combined with rich metaphor ("played the harpstrings of milk") to create a wonderfully descript image of the old Celtic world before the influence of the Holy Roman Empire.
Heaney has created in Station Island, and I imagine in his other works, masterpieces of modern poetry. He has nearly single-handedly renewed my faith in contemporary poetry, which seems to me to, on a whole, lack ambition and purpose and instead falls prey to the too-clever-for-its-own-good, ironic descriptions of mundane scenes that is so in vogue with Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and the editors of Poetry in their recent summer issue. Seamus Heaney, in contrast, boldly explores his native Ireland, religion, nature, ancient history, and linguistic roots.
In short, Seamus Heaney is a true poet in a world of charlatans, dilettantes, and (to use a much more Heaney-esque term) quacks.
February 13, 2021
My appreciation for Heaney increases year on year. The techniques available to a poet for making the world they peer into and elucidate upon realer to their audience are all artfully deployed by Heaney. Some of his work is at once densely packed with information you have to dig for and lyrical in a way that you can dance past this history in the line and still enjoy it and get something from the work.
October 5, 2014
Big, heavy headed, chocolate cake rich poems that take lots of effort to read. You can spend hours just trying to fully grasp one line of thought, so maybe that is not so good for poetry which to my (later life) intuition should be all about clarity, but makes for masterly written'literature'. Something like that.
June 25, 2010
This book reminded me a bit of Bishop's Questions of Travel in the visceral nature of the poetry. Another reviewer noted that it is "salty, sandy," and I wholeheartedly agree. Worth another reading, I think.
September 3, 2013
"The verbs / assumed us. We adored. // And we lifted our eyes to the nouns. //// The main thing is to write / for the joy of it. /// You lose more of yourself than you redeem / doing the decent thing."
Read
July 13, 2022Do you ever like a book so much that it infuriates you because you hadn't read it sooner? Station Island is that for me. Slow cooked narratives - personal, historical, and political - with flavors that never hit you over the head, except when they do.
February 16, 2008
Sandy, salty, solid and satisfying. Good heft, but not pretentiously weighty. (sigh) I really can't explain. Read it, anyhow.
June 3, 2012
Heaney is always worthwhile.
March 10, 2013
This is wonderful, powerful, insightful moving poetry. This is the gift of language fully utilized. Full spirit in fire-words, spoken in the rhythm of the living and the dead.
Read
March 13, 2010One of Heaney's best collections.
December 20, 2017
is a writer of the immediate and the physical. He writes the feel of the iron in your hand and the soft humus sinking beneath your feet. He writes the bite of the wind, and the romance of expectations met and surpassed, or crushed as the case may be. Yet for all the present and gross of his writing, there remains a sheen of the mythic and the sheer understanding of the immortality of the classic as it mingles constant with the world around us today.
Here is a man whom even Niamh herself can't bring away from his reverie, here is history as a series of ghosts as one walks the stations in search of - what? Here is man cursed to be a bird, seeing the world from a new perspective and trying to make sense of the insensible. It's a romance that is difficult to characterize firmly, and even more difficult to fully understand, as all of Heaney's work tends to be. Layers upon layers, yet the beauty remains undeniable.
The lesson, ultimately, seems to be that it is impossible to ever choose a favorite work of Heaney's. It's all brilliant, all different, and all undeniable.
Here is a man whom even Niamh herself can't bring away from his reverie, here is history as a series of ghosts as one walks the stations in search of - what? Here is man cursed to be a bird, seeing the world from a new perspective and trying to make sense of the insensible. It's a romance that is difficult to characterize firmly, and even more difficult to fully understand, as all of Heaney's work tends to be. Layers upon layers, yet the beauty remains undeniable.
The lesson, ultimately, seems to be that it is impossible to ever choose a favorite work of Heaney's. It's all brilliant, all different, and all undeniable.
February 15, 2025
1/5
If you like Billy Collins, you'd love this. Unfortunately, I'm not for either. I love Heaney's Beowulf translation, and I know that he is a smart guy from his writings / interviews / awards, etc., but I would group this collection in the oldhead-erudite-pipe smoking-retired-white man poetry section. My grandpa who loves Shakespeare and enjoys solitude more than company would love this collection. I am not in this category.
So much wasted space--so many wasted words.
But the one star is given for two poems: "Sweetpea," and "Widgeon."
I don't know what this type of poetry is called, like Billy Collins'--it feels like lazy way of writing poetry that is untrimmed, fatty, practically poor micro-fiction--but I don't like it. Feels like T.S. Eliot was an influence here, and his masterful work is far from this.
If you like Billy Collins, you'd love this. Unfortunately, I'm not for either. I love Heaney's Beowulf translation, and I know that he is a smart guy from his writings / interviews / awards, etc., but I would group this collection in the oldhead-erudite-pipe smoking-retired-white man poetry section. My grandpa who loves Shakespeare and enjoys solitude more than company would love this collection. I am not in this category.
So much wasted space--so many wasted words.
But the one star is given for two poems: "Sweetpea," and "Widgeon."
I don't know what this type of poetry is called, like Billy Collins'--it feels like lazy way of writing poetry that is untrimmed, fatty, practically poor micro-fiction--but I don't like it. Feels like T.S. Eliot was an influence here, and his masterful work is far from this.
December 11, 2023
What a beautiful collection. While the star of the show is the titular poem -- a long, winding phantasmagorical journey across Station Island as the speaker encounters past ghosts both intimate and illustrious -- I found myself deeply in love with many of the lyrical poems in the first section. There is an indescribable humanity to Heaney's words unlike any other. I think I was too emotionally stirred by Part One and too entranced by Part Two to be entirely invested in the final part of the collection, but that's on me. Overall, this is undoubtedly one of my favourites from him.
February 24, 2025
Seamus Heaney's 'Station Island' was a beautiful read from start to finish. Having read 'North' previously, I wanted to delve into more of his works and this poetry collection did not disappoint. I do admit that in the first few pages I struggled to make sense of what he was writing about but when reading the notes section at the end of the book it made so much more sense. Heaney always leaves you pondering about things...no less the landscape he has created with his prose and his words on his homeland of Ireland. Beautiful work that is deserving of 4 stars!
April 3, 2020
Finished: 03.04.2020
Genre: poetry
Rating: A+++
#ReadingIrelandMonth20
Conclusion:
In this corona virus crisis I find it
very difficult to concentrate on a long novel.
Now is the time to pick up a book of poems
...just read one or two and you will feel refreshed.
Genre: poetry
Rating: A+++
#ReadingIrelandMonth20
Conclusion:
In this corona virus crisis I find it
very difficult to concentrate on a long novel.
Now is the time to pick up a book of poems
...just read one or two and you will feel refreshed.
December 26, 2020
Like Seamus Heaney's other poetry collections before, Station Island simply delivers beautiful verses, stanzas, and poems in general. The poem from which the collection got its name is an emotional account of growing up during a Civil War � like Heaney did, like his characters did. Nevertheless, Station Island does not quite reach the literal genius of Heaney's other books such as The Spirit Level or North.
March 5, 2025
I mouthed at my half composed face / in the shaving mirror, like somebody / drunk in the bathroom during a party, / lulled and repelled by his own reflection. / As if the cairnstone could defy the cairn. / As if the eddy could reform the pool. / As if a stone swirled under a cascade, / eroded and eroding in its bed, / could grind itself down into a different core.
- Sequence IX.
Seamus Heaney’s artful book of changes.
4.5!!
- Sequence IX.
Seamus Heaney’s artful book of changes.
4.5!!
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