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Those who follow-even if only glancingly-the world of poetry will know that one of the great poets of the 20th century, Seamus Heaney, died in Dublin in August 2013. His life and work have been much celebrated-volumes of poetry, criticism, and translation, including an outstanding translation of Beowulf from the Anglo Saxon. His honors included a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. The New York Times in its obituary (of August 13, 2013) described him as: “A Roman Catholic native of Northern Ireland,… renowned for work that powerfully evoked the beauty and blood that together have come to define the modern Irish condition.” Heaney managed to be hopeful without being sentimental, and political without being polemical. He was learned but never obscure and so was a poet of great popularity.
Here's a lovely example-at once simple and nostalgic and complex and evocative. As in all great art, craftsmanship disguises the labor that goes into making it.
Like Heaney's work generally, A Kite… is immediately accessible and can be enjoyed with little explication. The reader feels that he or she can almost breathe that “air of another life and time and place.”
But some context deepens the pleasure: Aibhin is the name of Heaney's new-born granddaughter. This poem was written to celebrate her birth and recollects an earlier poem for his sons called A Kite for Michael and Christopher. Anahorish, as is perhaps obvious, is Heaney's childhood home, a township in County Derry. But one would not necessarily know that the name in Gaelic means “a place of clear water.” In another poem, Heaney calls it “the first hill in the world where springs washed into the shiny grass.”
And the poem by Pascoli, L'Acquilone, is a poem Heaney translated into English from the Italian as The Kite. In Pascoli's poem, remembered joy and happiness are mixed with bitterness over the death of a fellow student. It includes the phrase, “air from another life and time and place.”
So underlying the apparently simple nosta