Traditions

For Tom Flanagan Heaney met Tom Flanagan and was inspired by his Ireland-centred thinking at Berkeley. He explains the dedication: ‘It was Tom’s poem because I lifted the conclusion of it from his book on the Irish novelists (The Irish Novelists 1800-1850). The epigraph to that book juxtaposes MacMorris’s question in Henry V ( ) with Bloom’s answer in Ulysses … (Bloom’s reply) seemed to cut through a lot of the Identity crisis stuff that surrounded us in the early seventies so I stole it for the end of the poem’ (DOD143). The title introduces national stereotypes and the piece will pull the rug from under their feet. I The speaker identifies closely (Our) with the guttural muse of throaty […]