Originally posted by ferneyhoughgeliebte
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No you haven't - please don't. 
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I am in total agreement, ferney...keep 'em comin' Padraig!
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If you ever look at the threads over on the Quiet Corner, aka World Music, you'll see that the concept of over contribution has not been invented.Originally posted by Padraig View Post
Now you're making me feel like the person who drags the Sean Nos singer back onto the floor..Comment
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Thanks Padraig. You reminded me to head back to Human Chain which has been most fulfilling; I think because of your efforts on this string over the last while, actually. Thought I'd post one of the sections from 'Album' - I felt my Dad come back to me albeit in a different series of images.Originally posted by Padraig View Post
Album
IV
Were I to have embraced him anywhere
It would have been on the riverbank
That summer before college, him in his prime,
Me at the time not thinking how he must
Keep coming with me because I’d soon be leaving.
That should have been the first, but it didn’t happen.
The second did, at New Ferry one night
When he was very drunk and needed help
To do up the trouser buttons. And the third
Was on the landing during his last week,
Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm
Taking the webby weight of his underarm.
Seamus Heaney from 'Human Chains'Comment
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On Radio 4 Extra today was Seamus on 'Fine Lines' from 2001 talking about, and reading from, his book 'Electric Light'...presented by Christopher Cook.
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Many thanks, John. I had not heard that programme before.
He mentions the song Roddy McCorley - a well known rebel song, that can sometimes be provocative.
Here is Tommy Mackem giving it the treatment I think it deserves.
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I did not write, in the previous post, what I was thinking at the time - I had meant to muse on the song itself as a cultural artifact as well known to Heaney as the more familiar bogs. Thus his reference to the song would not be of the same order as, say, a rousing rendition in the pub on a Friday night 'somewhere in Ulster'. That is also the reason I attribute to Tommy Makem my opinion that he treats the song respectfully.Comment
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...or indeed the Bann or Lough Neagh or 'the slime and silver of the fattened eel' - and the year !798.Originally posted by Padraig View Post
At Toomebridge
Where the flat water
Came pouring over the weir out of Lough Neagh
As if it had reached an edge of the flat earth
And fallen shining to the continuous
Present of the Bann.
Where the checkpoint used to be.
Where the rebel boy was hanged in'98.
Where negative ions in the open air
Are poetry to me. As once before
The slime and silver of the fattened eel.
Electric Light 2001
I forgot I had stopped.Last edited by Padraig; 10-06-17, 19:35.Comment
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I've been working my way slowly once more through Neil McGregor's 'History of the World in 100 Objects'. Got to the helmet found at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk and had forgotten Heaney's contribution, his link to Beowulf, and his tale of a Boston fireman's helmet. Wonderful stuff.
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Was in Bellaghy at the weekend, John, and visited the grave.
Later enjoyed a song 'recital' by Len Graham in the Heaney Centre.Comment
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It's still an intention to go Padraig - just a bit of a stretch from our normal West Coast haunts.Originally posted by Padraig View Post
Your mention of Len Graham prompted me to find him singing The Parting Glass and Over the Hills and Far Away
Fine voice. Fine songs.Comment
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Maybe next year, Gt, 'if God spares us'. When you get to Sligo you're only 90 minutes away, but Hurry! they're talking about a hard border whatever that is.Originally posted by Globaltruth View Post
I went there yesterday for the last time this year. It was the first anniversary of the opening of the Heaney Centre in Bellaghy.
In the afternoon we had a very personal lecture, and emotional even, from Peter Fallon, a poet, and close friend of Seamus Heaney.
In the evening we had Bach Cello Suites 4,5 and 6, interspersed with Heaney poems - the conclusion of a recital begun a year ago.Comment
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The Heaney Family have just compiled an anthology of 100 Poems which has recently been released.
Includes this Haiku:
“1.1.87”
“Dangerous pavements.
But I face the ice this year
With my father’s stick.”
Article from Saturday's Guardian about it and the forthcoming exhibition of the National Library of Ireland's Heaney archive in the 18th-century Bank of Ireland building in Dublin.
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Thanks for the Haiku, John. I'll try to remember it.Originally posted by johncorrigan View Post
Book ordered, of course.
The Home Place in Bellaghy will have guest readings from 100 Poems on Friday, 9 November, and I plan to be there.Comment
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It's strange but wonderful that though you've read the poems before, a new collection breathes new life into them, or in some cases revives the reader. From Heaney's fifth book of poems there was a Song which was selected for 100 Poems. I have to confess that it came to me as a new discovery! So maybe, in my case, it's not so strange after all - but even more wonderful.
Song
A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the bye-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
Seamus Heaney
from Field Work, 1979Comment
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