Red, White and Blue

Revisiting moments from his and Marie’s past Red, White and Blue provides insights into the man Heaney has become. In her review of Electric Light (Irish Times of Mon, Jun 3, 2019) under the heading ‘Heaney the Survivor’, Helen Vendler suggests that ‘exploring the mystery of the self has been a steady concern in Heaney’s work, but while the young poems came fresh to that mystery, the new poems come to it with layers of memory that both obscure it further and reveal it newly; the best vehicle for a memory-cluster is a poetic sequence. Each of the three poems bears a distinctive colour marking associated with wife Marie at specific moments in their history. I  Red The magnetic attraction […]