A great one gone
Seamus Heaney died today. Obituaries and tributes will be written by people far more familiar with him and his work than I am. I will just say this: his translation of Beowulf is astonishing. It is grip-the-book-open, keep-turning-the-pages good. In a word, brilliant.
Here's something I found while reading different Heaney tributes and obituaries. Check out the video clip:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/30/217259973/heaneys-poems-great-dangerous-healing-live-on
A great Heaney quotation on writing that I found in the London Telegraph: “The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.”
Here's a link leading to another reading:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/30/seamus-heaney-reads-death-of-a-naturalist-nobel-lecture/