Markings

  The Markings triptych sets out Heaney’s new parameters: revisit and redefine first order experiences through the eyes of a fifty year old poet, tease out and ‘credit marvels’ he failed to spot first time round. Helen Vendler puts it another way:  Heaney is concerned here with our immaterial extrapolations from the material … pretended boundaries,  imagined grids and lines are the latitude and longi­tude lines ( ) by which mentality orders the world. They become more visible to the poet as ghostly returner than they were to him as first-time encounterer.  I The ‘Markings’ poem … is set in one of our own fields at Mossbawn where a crowd of us would gather up in the summer evening and play […]