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HEANEY scholar status in the works dare i say it?! big ty to KOEPKE for choosing Heaney as her JPo poet!!!

Some thoughts I jotted down while sitting at my desk last Sunday afternoon: Originally thought I'd sit and read this on my patio in the sultry New Orleans heat as I always picture dirt when i think of Heaney's poetry (can't help it because of "Digging" apologies!) Instead, it is raining, and I'm sitting at my desk watching the wind knock the oak trees about-- the trees are clapping, in a sense. feels right - a rainy Sunday afternoon in New Orleans reading poetry, sp. my friend's most favorite JPo poet. thinking, thinking quite a bit these past few days, but also just want to read a poem and then stare out at the rain and listen to the wind and thunder in the distance. also sounds of the sheets of rain and the occasional car going down the block mixed with the sounds of my brother and his friends playing out in the rain.
-- okay so let's say this whole backdrop that i decided to catalogue absolutely connects with "Digging." this shift from being in the world, working outside in the dirt, the soil to inside to the desk, the pen, the paper. sitting inside - view from his window as being similar to my rainy day set-up.
**"the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head" -- only word that seems apt for this one: dichotomy. and it's a gorgeous one at that.

-- okay now let's say "the Grauballe Man" fits rather perfectly with a visit to my old neighborhood a few days later. where i walk by my old house and peer down the driveway to a fence that conceals where the back garden used to be (perhaps still is in some fashion). where I'd sit on the stones that framed my little garden -- the magnolia tree tossed about by the wind overhead -- the clapping of the heavy limbs and shuffling of the rubbery leaves and the sunlight peering through. and I saw this as also connecting with "The Singer's House" -- where we get hints of the things missed -- never the real, preserved thing. only these flashing images beautifully (sometimes, that is) ingrained in memory, in the way we see the world.
**"So much comes and is gone / that should be crystal and kept, // and amicable weathers / that bring up the grain of things, / there tang of season and store, / are all packing we'll get"

and this is what poetry is supposed to do in one sense at least: imbue the way we see the world with a sense of magicalness (and we are at the magical point of summer -- late July, early August -- my most favorite time that exists outside of fall). Heaney's recounting of his past -- using poetry as a means of reconnecting with his childhood, with past memories -- is quite marvelous. it contributed to this sense of reflection and these past few weeks of seeing the world with a renewed sense of wonder, of summers' past with a keen sense of the magicalness it all held and continues to hold.