Navigating the ‘Station Island’ Collection

Contents

Foreword

followed by:

• Main Sources;
• the Structure of Station Island;
• biographical ‘events’ between 1976-1984;
• the collection and its moment;
• Heaney’s ‘book of changes’; ‘hampering stuff’;
• Catholic beginnings; loss of faith; breaking loose;
• the political dimension; ‘Troubles’ timeline;
• poetry and politics: retaining a neutral voice;
• reconciling the clash between politics and poetry; the redemptive power of Art;
• Irishness;

• the Poems individual commentaries with footnotes and reflections on style and structure
• Part 1: the stirrings of change;
  • The Underground
  • La Toilette
  • Sloe Gin
  • Away from it All
  • Chekhov on Sakhalin
  • Sandstone Keepsake
  • Shelf Life
  • A Migration
  • Last Look
  • Remembering Malibu
  • Making Strange
  • The Birthplace
  • Changes
  • An Ulster Twilight
  • A Bat on the Road
  • A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann
  • A Kite for Michael and Christopher
  • The Railway Children
  • Sweetpea
  • Widgeon
  • Sheelagh na Gig
  • The Loaning
  • The Sandpit
  • The King of the Ditchbacks
• Part 2: Station Island; Lough Derg;
  • Part Two: Station Island – the Sequence
  • Station Island – the Sequence I
  • Station Island – the Sequence II
  • Station Island – the Sequence III
  • Station Island – the Sequence IV
  • Station Island – the Sequence V
  • Station Island – the Sequence VI
  • Station Island – the Sequence VII
  • Station Island – the Sequence VIII
  • Station Island – the Sequence IX
  • Station Island – the Sequence X
  • Station Island – the Sequence XI
  • Station Island – the Sequence XII
• Part 3: Sweeney from the wings to centre-stage;
  • Part Three: Sweeney Redivivus
  • The First Gloss
  • Sweeney Redivivus
  • Unwinding
  • The First Kingdom
  • Alerted
  • Drifting Off
  • The First Flight
  • In the Beech
  • In the Chestnut Tree
  • A Waking Dream
  • The Scribes
  • The Master
  • The Hermit
  • The Cleric
  • Sweeney’s Returns
  • Holly
  • In Illo Tempore
  • On the Road
• Station Island: Heaney’s road to renewal;
• Heaney’s use of voices and voicings;
• models and precursors.

Afterthoughts

• finding the blend; the poet’s compositional skills;
• the poem as a ‘music pleasing to the ear’;
• using assonance: ‘coloured sound’ is an attempt to highlight recurrent sounds in the poems using phonetic symbols and colour shades; ‘same colour, same sound’;
• standard English vowel sounds and their phonetic symbols;
• using alliteration;
• standard English consonant sounds and their phonetic symbols;
• Forms and Rhymes; the poems in collection-order;
• Subjects and Settings: the poems in collection-order;
• a more comprehensive timeline of the ‘Troubles’;
• Stylistic devices: labels and definitions;