“... once escaped it could go anywhere, most obviously ‘East’ to Ireland. (The poem is dedicated to Seamus Heaney.) It is a kind of envoi, but one with the opposite wish, namely ‘stay, little book.’ I was reminded of John Berryman’s epigraphs for his Dream Songs, from Sir Francis Chichester and Gordon in Khartoum: ‘For my part I am always ...”

“... viscose optics now extruded/now wizened instantaneously’. Murray is sometimes compared to Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. But at his best he is much more inventive, much wittier and more agile than either poet. Like Lawrence’s poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Murray’s have a childlike freedom and responsiveness: the lines go their own ...”

“... by a country park. At this point The Book of Demons ‘overdraws its rights to our sympathy’, as Seamus Heaney said in The Government of the Tongue of Plath’s ‘Daddy’, a poem which rampaged ‘so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows’. Yet the risks that MacSweeney takes with a reader’s goodwill seem to be justified by the ...”

“... play as a capitulation to that threat, so long resisted in his verse – ‘an idyllic romp’, as Seamus Heaney put it, ‘as if The Joy of Sex were dreamt under the canvas of a Welsh eisteddfod’. Heaney underplays the great tugging undercurrent of desolation within the work, but I think the most distinctive Thomas ...”

“... of Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. In May 1974, in the New York Review of Books, the critic Seamus Deane lambasted Conor Cruise O’Brien, then minister for posts and telegraphs in the Irish Republic’s coalition government, for implying in a previous issue that ‘the Provisional IRA began the killing in the North.’ Not so. It was the Royal Ulster ...”

“... overhauled seventh edition, which opens with a new translation of Beowulf commissioned from Seamus Heaney for the occasion (also available as a freestanding volume). These anthologies are making literary history, not just reporting it. The original Norton Anthology of English Literature might have disclaimed that aspiration. Few buyers of the 1962 ...”

“... The ‘Ballad of the Two Left Hands’, on the unemployed, and a fine elegy for Lowell (compare Heaney’s), confirmed Dunn’s greater range and assurance. I only regret the omission from this selection of ‘The Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title ...”

“... like being beaten about the head with balloons’; a by no means uncritical account of Seamus Heaney nevertheless praises his refusal of Hill’s ‘ironic zero’ in favour of a labour of transcendence; ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy’ is a poem which treats patriotism and martial valour ‘monumentally’, but in which the ...”

“... for Enright, ‘vulnerable to even the least malignant of ironists’, whereas for others of us (Seamus Heaney, for one, who recently incorporated the poem – in Robert Pinsky’s superb translation – into a fervent lecture on poetry and political witness), ‘Incantation’ is a poem to freeze the spittled irony upon the lips of even the most ...”

“... It constitutes the acceptable, as opposed to the unacceptably theoretical, jargon of the subject. Seamus Heaney is one of its leading perpetrators. Another instance, this time Alan Hollinghurst on Graham Swift’s Waterland, is quoted by Lindsay Duguid: ‘The prose itself falls into a recurrent pattern of question and answer which imitates syntactically ...”

“... whose curious and variously appealing customs she is gradually and ambivalently getting to grips. Seamus Heaney, she recalls, once remarked on her ‘comparatively untethered skirmishes with old age and thoughts of dying’. Having been brought up a Catholic, with ‘the drama of last things … there from the start’, he was surprised at her surprise ...”

“... heirs are the self-styled barbarian poets, such as Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, Les Murray or Seamus Heaney. They are the poets who more and more expose what Davie would call the ‘blind spots’ of crumbling English cultural imperialism. In the Scottish tradition, Davie is good on the links between Scottish arts and Scottish science and ...”

“... diminished. There were, and still are, alternatives to Larkin. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison are powerfully present in these books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur ...”

“... put it to the torch of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. Paulin has learnt, probably from Seamus Heaney, how to put his sense of immediate provocation under the protection of natural and epic grandeurs. I’m surprised that the rhetorical procedure – which is just as questionable as Yeats’s – hasn’t been much reflected on. People plagued ...”

“... I can heal these father’s wounds: your family has fed no grave, all your people are alive. Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray My friend the poet, Matthew Sweeney, is certain he is dying. This is a conviction he has held without remission, since 1952 when he first saw the light, in its grey Irish version, in Ballyliffin, in northernmost Donegal. He knew ...”