Almost forty years ago, a graduate student at Harvard spent a spring term with a genius — then a lifetime reading his poems whose startling exploration of humanity’s propensity for violence still resonates today.
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Last week, while searching the Internet for theories about humanity’s stubborn proclivity for war and violence, I stumbled on an old black-and-white photograph of the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. Although I knew was distracting myself from my grim task, I clicked the thumbnail anyway, and the photograph instantly expanded to fill the entire screen of my desktop. There was Heaney’s familiar, inscrutable figure as he stood—apparently alone and partly-submerged—in the middle of a peat bog. In fact, he looked both magically unharmed and happily at home in this peculiar location. The portrait is both striking…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2024