It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,that will be his best and only bulwark.
History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme
If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.
I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.
I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Since when,” he asked,”Are the first line and last line of any poemWhere the poem begins and ends?
I suppose I’m saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker’s cough in the hall.
The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here.
The way we are living,timorous or bold,will have been our life.
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
words…To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.Pangur BánPoem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.
To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass…through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
And a young prince must be prudent like that,giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line.
At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.