perfect study

2010 (my attempt at a review can be found on the LibraryThing post linked)
http://www.librarything.com/topic/90167#2169945

27 poems in a slim text from 1979, deeply imbued with Irish references, and many dedicated to the memory of an Irish national. Certainly worth reading and Heaney at times pierces with his imagery or a turn of phrase, but for some reason this collection didn’t resonate completely with me.

My favorite was Part X of the Glanmore Sonnets:
“I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.
Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.
Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out
Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.
And in that dream I dreamt – how like you this? –
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.” ( )

"I used to lie with an ear to the line
For that way, they said, there should come a sound
Escaping ahead, an iron tune
Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,
But I never heard that." (Glanmore Sonnets IV)
Seamus Heaney is fantastic.