The Singer’s House

Heaney reflected on the double preoccupation that produced poems such as  ‘The Singer’s House’ in Field Work: living up to my neck in complication, resident in Dublin but feeling called upon by what was happening in the North plus a renewed sense of the value of poetry itself as a consolidating element (DOD 195). On the occasion of David Hammond’s memorial service in August 2008 The Irish Times reported that the proceedings included Heaney’s poem  ‘The Singer’s House’ about Hammond’s holiday home in Gweebarra near Glenties, written in 1979 to encourage him to keep singing and to remind him of the importance of his art at a time when the Troubles were sucking out the joy of song  … The […]