Squarings xlvi
Heaney offers his reader a clue as to how to ‘enter’ the Squarings sequence: 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 recalls what he might term the perfect moment. An end-of-summer event, alive and brimful: at the poet’s back the feel and sight of empty upland (Mountain air from the mountain); in front of him Irish landmarks (stone-walled fields … a slated house); in the air an unmistakable Irish music (the fiddle going) its unbroken momentum as persistent as the skittering ricochets across water of a flat stone skimmed […]