Glanmore Revisited 3. Scene Shifts

                      A father shows retrospective remorse for a moment when he lost his temper with his children, aware that he generated a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ situation. The noisy ‘scene’ to which he subjected them is re-worked as a silent melodrama! The initial incident was real enough: Heaney had invited two close friends, Brian Friel and David Hammond (reduced to one for the purposes of the poem) to carve initials into a garden tree (cut his name into the ash); Having watched the grown-ups Heaney’s sons did little more than follow their example (our kids stripped off the bark) and paid the price of unprecedented (first […]