Weighing In

Something has lodged itself in Heaney’s nose and he ends up venting his anger against the forces seeking to perpetuate disregard for his minority Catholic community. He uses an everyday weight of defined mass to expose the political and sectarian imbalance in Northern Ireland and the need for very elusive compromise. The sequence is to do with weights and balances, dead weights and spaces for reason to intervene; ‘weighing’ has to do with balancing forces against one another or adding force to an argument so as to tip the balance; contestants ‘weigh in’ before a contest; ‘weighing in’ suggests ‘actively taking sides’. The unyielding, inflexible block (56 lb. weight … solid iron) is not an object that affirms much (unit […]