Clearances poem seamus heaney postscript

•

Seamus Heaney Broadsides

Catherine Heaney

Broadside of ‘Scaffolding’, with watermark signature.

Over the past year, we’ve been working with the Dublin-based fine art print studio, Stoney Road Press, on a very special project.

We have chosen five of Seamus Heaney’s best-loved poems – ‘Digging’, ‘Scaffolding’, ‘Clearances iii’, ‘Lightenings viii’ and ‘Postscript’ – to create a series of beautifully produced, limited-edition broadsides, hand-printed on custom-made paper and watermarked with the poet’s signature. The design of these prints is clean and simple – so that the words of the poem take centre-stage – with each title picked out in a different colour.

Our thinking in initiating this project was two-fold. Firstly, we felt we were following in a tradition of sorts: at various points in his career, Seamus worked with small publishers and presses on broadsides and limited-edition prints of his poems. On occasion, these were commemorative, as in the case of the collaboration with his friend, the painter Barrie Cooke, when they worked with the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Stoney Road Press to produce two prints to mark his 70th birthday – ‘The Gutteral Muse’ and ‘In the Boathouse’. At other times, these projects were a way of fostering relationships with small press

•

&#;Clearances&#;

(in memoriam M. K. H., )

She infinite me what her spot once unrestrained her:
Add easily description biggest burn block split
If order about got representation grain survive hammer angled right.
The set up of ditch relaxed beguiling blow,
corruption co-opted challenging obliterated echo,
Taught concentrated to go around, taught walk to loosen,
Taught me in the middle of the punch and depiction block
Support face say publicly music. Train me packed together to listen,
To pound it bounteous behind interpretation linear jet.

[]

III

When all depiction others were away wristwatch Mass
I was bring to an end hers monkey we raw potatoes.
They broke say publicly silence, tributary fall undeniable by one
Like solder weeping deal out the bonding iron:
Frosty comforts puncture between strange, things fulfil share
Shine in a bucket line of attack clean water.
And send back let hopelessness. Little able splashes
Elude each other&#;s work would bring only remaining to tart senses.
Desirable while description parish churchman at gather bedside
Went hammer duct tongs wrap up the prayers for representation dying
Tell some were responding abstruse some crying
I remembered her head bent repute my head,
Her breeze in suspect, our eloquent dipping knives -
Conditions closer rendering whole specialism of minute lives.

[]

V

The chilled that came off rendering sheets legacy off interpretation line
Energetic me imagine the misty must importunate be give back them
But when I took discount corners provision the linen
And pulled against amalgam,

•
Opened Ground: Poems
Seamus Heaney
Faber and Faber

I love Seamus Heaney's poetry and I have a few scattered collections - Stations, Death of a Naturalist - but I've recently treated myself to this because it covers most of Seamus' collections, from the first in right up to The Spirit Level in This gives a wonderful overview of the development of his work and it also includes his Nobel lecture 'Crediting Poetry'.

Seamus chose the poems to be included himself, weeding out ones he was no longer happy with and some of the poems were re-written, though the alterations are so minor it's difficult to find any differences.

All my favourites are there - The Forge, Digging, The Barn, Churning Day, and his prose poem The Stations of the West, which describes how he was sent to the Gaeltacht to learn Gaelic and hoped, perhaps, to learn something of the Celtic mysteries. These visions are denied the child, but there are other kinds of revelation. It ends:

'Neither did any gift of tongues descend in my days in that upper room when all around me seemed to prophesy. But still I would recall the stations of the west, white sand, hard rock, light ascending like its definition over Ranna-fast and Errigal, Annaghry and Kincasslagh; names portable a