Squarings xlv

  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); The poet discerns a chasm separating a ‘them’ and an ‘us’, certain ones and our ones identified in Squarings xlii as the Irish nearly blessed … gaunt ones. The other side of death will  be kinder to certain ones  … what was written may come true; their souls will be relocated , separate from the ‘us’ (in the distance), in an arcadian land of milk and honey (the mouths of rivers). No […]