Triptych

I After a Killing Heaney explained what prompted the first stanza to DOD (211): the assassination of Christopher Ewart-Biggs wasn’t so much personal grief as shock … that knocked me and everybody else sideways … The news that morning on the radio mentioned two men with rifles running up the hill from the site of the explosion … it stayed with me as a kind of dream image: it was as if the ghosts of those Old IRA men of the West Cork Flying Column – ‘the unquiet founders’, the ones who’d fought and ambushed the Black and Tans – it’s as if they were coming back to haunt the state they’d fought to establish … but in my old-fashioned […]