David Wheatley
Ever Upward
On Seamus Heaney
By R F Foster
Princeton University Press 248pp £14.99
Cropping the hesitant pen name ‘Incertus’, under which the young Seamus Heaney published his first attempts at poetry, Roy Foster titles the opening chapter of his study of Heaney ‘Certus’. Foster is keen to stress, for all Heaney’s shows of diffidence, how firmly on his way he was from the outset, and how fuelled by purpose and ambition. From the early days in Philip Hobsbaum’s workshop at Queen’s University Belfast, he was a marked man. An expression of interest from Charles Monteith of Faber & Faber in 1965 accelerated Heaney’s work on Death of a Naturalist. Within a year the book was published, and the long march towards the Nobel Prize had begun.
All this was before the Northern Irish Troubles, but within a decade Heaney had published three further volumes, the last of which, North (1975), became one of the defining responses to that conflict. Heaney’s sense of his beleaguered position in Northern Ireland drove him to swap Belfast for County Wicklow,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm