Tate’s Avenue

Shared rugs are emblematic of a long partnership that after forty years has lost none of its physical chemistry! Discussing the erotic in District and Circle with DOD (p 406) Heaney indicated (with tongue in cheek, no doubt) that it was present in this piece ‘in an abstinent kind of way’- there was something in the air but nothing came of it.  The poem take us to Tate’s Avenue, an address in Belfast via two stanzas devoted to rugs from other occasions and not the particular one he wishes to concentrate on. The first was a brown and fawn car rug, spread out by the sea but very much earth-bound (breathing land-breaths) and dating from the chaste period (vestal folds) […]