Lightenings x
Heaney offered his reader a clue as to how to ‘enter’ the poems: You could think of every poem in ‘Squarings’ as the peg at the end of a tent-rope reaching up into the airy structure, but still with purchase on something earthier and more obscure (DOD 320). So long for air to brighten, said Fosterling. Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten. Heaney’s observer sits astride a crag top at a quarry’s edge, close to a sheer drop (Overhang of grass) where Nature clings precariously but persistently to life (seedling birch). Heaney identifies himself as the lofty speaker (Rock-hob where you watched), a man in his fifties studying the cargoed brightness carried along by the laws of meteorology: ineffable (travelling/ […]