tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post2940716555049928236..comments2023-10-29T07:54:36.000+00:00Comments on georgiasam: Roustabouteryputhwuthhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05606399161863289851noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-63240012527655322002007-10-08T12:58:00.000+01:002007-10-08T12:58:00.000+01:00I now see my response is rather laboured, too much...I now see my response is rather laboured, too much 'sprawl'. You made your own point succinctly enough, and I should have whittled my argument accordingly (the perils of late night blog-commenting). But I stand by what I said, and there are one or two points in there, if you can be arsed finding them.Mark Granierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09899629187771913398noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17085938.post-59419423037936211412007-10-07T23:46:00.000+01:002007-10-07T23:46:00.000+01:00This is an interesting take on both poets. I too e...This is an interesting take on both poets. I too enjoy the roughness of Murray's work. I loved that opening, "Sex is a Nazi", the moment read it, though it’s the rest of that line, and the others that make up the first stanza, that give the poem that belligerent Murray cock-sureness: <BR/>“Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew<BR/>this at your school. To it, everyone’s subhuman<BR/>for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives.<BR/>You’ll be one of those if these things worry you.”<BR/>Murray is the only poet I can think of who has had a go at translating pig into pig-English and (as far as I’m concerned) succeeded. I wouldn’t call him self-pitying, though it seems the huge boulder on his shoulder and his very productive muse are almost one and the same. <BR/><BR/>Where Heaney is concerned I feel your dismissal is a tad sweeping (or bland), though I’m sure those noddingdog Heaney begrudgers, would agree with you. Nostalgia? Yeah, in places. But much of his work has a dark edge, as in the sonnet ‘The Nod’ or Hofn (from District And Circle). When I read Heaney (or McGahern or Murray for that matter) I don’t slot the poems or stories into my ‘rural Catholic background’ file. I accept them on their own terms. If, for example, the rhythm is faulty and (as I think Longley put it) a poem dies of heart failure, that is hardly the fault of the subject matter or whatever emotion (nostalgia, love, fear…) acted as a vehicle. <BR/><BR/>Heaney shares Murray’s background in as much as it is rural, but I suspect Heaney’s upbringing had little in common with Murray’s. After all, Heaney seems to have flourished at home and in school, and had no cause to be embarrassed or afraid of bringing friends home to a shack with a dirt floor and tin washbasin or (in McGahern’s case) an icily charming bollocks of a father. Okay, the North wasn’t Butlins, and Heaney has had to deal with its murky political shenanigans, including the murder of friends and relatives. He has addressed these things in his poems with honesty and artistic tact. <BR/><BR/><BR/>Anyway, from Heaney's first book, and its title poem, I would say a dominant anti-nostalgic current has run through the work: frogs are "mud grenades", "their blunt heads farting", the apprentice poet’s pen is ‘snug as a gun’, drowned kittens are "scraggy wee shits" (presaging those sectarian assassins in Station Island: "shites, thinking they were the be all and end all"), and the neatly parcelled meat in‘The Nod’ is ‘seeping blood’. <BR/><BR/>Heaney’s rural toughness (if not roughness), along with those dialect words (‘hoked’ and so on) is something he has been lampooned for. Sure, he displays affection for certain memories (in Bogland, The Swing, The Skunk, Postscript, The Settle Bed, Alphabets and so on) but that’s his prerogative, and in the best of the poems the language could hardly be called ‘bland’. Rather, I’d agree with Don Paterson who said that Heaney’s words are “so finely calibrated you can weigh air and light in them”.Mark Granierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09899629187771913398noreply@blogger.com