CONTENTS: nine new poems: \u2018H\u00f6’fn\u2019, \u2018Horace and the Thunder\u2019, \u2018Helmet\u2019, \u2018Testimony: The Ajax Incident\u2019, \u2018Testimony: Anahorish 1944\u2019, \u2018The Aerodrome\u2019, \u2018A Shiver\u2019, \u2018Out of Shot\u2019, \u2018The Tollund Man in Springtime\u2019.<\/p>\n
How Seamus Heaney has always held his ground, through thick and thin, is something of a miracle, like the preservation in a Danish peat-bog of the Tollund Man, now revisited in this collection (\u2018The Tollund Man in Springtime\u2019) and given a clean bill of health. Here in A Shiver<\/em> Heaney\u2019s ground is reaffirmed, found and kept and a stance maintained, in lifelong love, though glaciers melt and Jupiter (after Horace, Odes<\/em> I, 34) finds ground zero: \u2018Anything can happen, the tallest things \/ Be overturned, those high places daunted, \/ Those overlooked regarded.\u2019\u00a0 These subtle and quietly allusive poems speak the violence of the new world order in a world itself in peril of oblivion as the polar ice-caps melt. There is sufficient blood and gore here to send a shiver down your spine, from a scene in a slaughter house, to Ajax rampaging (do not seek to identify him). In the title poem a shiver is sent up the shaft of a sledge-hammer, in a paradoxical celebration of creative power, \u2018witholdable at will\u2019, capable of making \u2018air of a wall\u2019. Martial code words infiltrate these poems, like shields in a \u2018testudo\u2019<\/em>, or cleaved to the helmet of an Irish-American fireman-poet called BREEN. The Americans are on the march too, though at a discreet distance, in 1944, bound for Normandy. The nine powerful (and power-full) poems that constitute A Shiver<\/em> signal the onset of a new campaign, as Heaney in age, enters the fray again.<\/p>\n Limited edition of 200 copies.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (Clutag Press, 2005)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CONTENTS: nine new poems: \u2018H\u00f6’fn\u2019, \u2018Horace and the Thunder\u2019, \u2018Helmet\u2019, \u2018Testimony: The Ajax Incident\u2019, \u2018Testimony: Anahorish 1944\u2019, \u2018The Aerodrome\u2019, \u2018A Shiver\u2019, \u2018Out of Shot\u2019, \u2018The Tollund Man in Springtime\u2019.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"featured_media":640,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[217,208],"product_tag":[176],"yoast_head":"\n