Writing a bare wire

station island

Neil Corcoran

pp. 107-128

in: Michael B. Allen (ed), Seamus Heaney, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

Station Island, by far Seamus Heaney's longest book, is in three separate parts: an opening section of individual lyrics which take their occasions from the occurrences and the memories of the ordinary life; the central section, the title sequence itself which narrates, or dramatises, a number of encounters, in dream or in vision, with the dead; and a concluding sequence, "Sweeney Redivivus", which is, as Heaney puts it in one of his notes to the volume, "voiced for Sweeney", the seventh-century king transformed into a bird, whose story Heaney has translated from the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne as Sweeney Astray.

Cited authors

Heaney Seamus