Title: Poetry and peace : Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland /
Authors: Russell, Richard Rankin.
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press,
Year: 2010
Subjects: Longley, Michael, Criticism and interpretation.; Longley, Michael, Aesthetics.; Heaney, Seamus, Criticism and interpretation.; Heaney, Seamus, Aesthetics.; Belfast Group.; Political violence in literature.; Poets, Irish Political and social views.; Reconciliation Northern Ireland.; Reconciliation; Northern Ireland In literature.
Abstract: Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney's lives and careers have been intertwined since the 1960s, when they participated in the Belfast Group of creative writers and later edited the literary journal Northern Review. In Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland, Richard Rankin Russell explores Longley's and Heaney's poetic fidelity to the imagination in the midst of the war in Northern Ireland and their creation, through poetry, of a powerful cultural and sacred space. This space, Russell argues, has contributed to cultural and religious dialog and thus helped enable reconciliation after the years of the Troubles. The first chapter examines the influence of the Belfast Group on Longley and Heaney's shared aesthetic of poetry. Successive chapters analyze major works of both poets. Russell offers close readings of poems in the context of the poets' cultural and political concerns for the province. He concludes by showing how thoroughly their poetic language has entered the cultural, educational, and political discourse of contemporary Northern Ireland as it pursues the process of peace.
Contents: Introduction: Northern Irish poetry, imagination, and ethics -- Laying the foundations: the Belfast Group and Michael Longley's conciliatory cultural work -- Lighting out for the unknown territory: Longley's No continuing city -- Longley's poetry of war and peace -- Fragility and ceremony: Longley's pastorals, holocaust elegies and Asian miniatures -- "To make myself an echo chamber": Seamus Heaney's auditory imagination -- The road to Derry, Wintering out and North: Northern dialects, Northern violence -- Field work through The haw lantern: burrowing inward, looking outward -- Redressing reality: seeing things through district and circle -- Coda: poetry and the Northern Irish peace process.