.
.
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
.
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it
.
It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Hurtling like an animal at the house,
.
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
Afterwards. And not now.
.
.
“Had I not been awake I would have missed it,” the first poem in Heaney’s new book, Human Chain, appeared, with the minerally “Slack” in Little Star #1.
In The Telegraph, Nick Laird identified this poem as establishing an affinity between wind and instability and death which runs through the book and noted that “the house that the animal returns to in the opening poem recalls the house of death that Heaney’s father has gone to in ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ from District and Circle (2006), with its ‘low clay roof.’” For other valuable recent reviews see Colm Toibin in The Guardian and Sean O’Brien in The Independent.
And don’t miss Heaney’s recent translation of The Testiment of Cresseid and Seven Fables by Robert Henryson. Read Jonathan Bate’s comprehensive review in The Telegraph.
There are lots of readings by Heaney available on line, but here’s a nice bunch at the Poetry Archive. Seamus Heaney’s voice is one of the treasures of contemporary literature.
