Search Results for 'Seamus Heaney'

Some 55,000 Leaving Cert students began their State exams yesterday, with English being the first test in a series of exams lasting over two weeks.

Seamus Heaney was not quite sure whether, as an adult, he ‘invented backwards’ some of his earliest fascination with words, but he didn’t think so. Because he could still picture the small boy absorbed by the old wireless in his farmhouse home, between Castledawson and Toomebridge, in Northern Ireland.* He would touch and pronounce some of the names on its dial, such as Hilversum, Stuttgart and Leipzig.

In September 2004 Seamus Heaney opened the Autumn Gathering in Gort, and he read the above poem (which I will conclude in a moment), and told the audience that he was happy to be once again in south Galway. “ To drive across Ireland, east to west, towards Padraic Fallon’s native Galway, is to experience a double sensation of refreshment and déja-vu. The refreshment comes from the big lift of the sky beyond the River Shannon, the déja-vu from entering a landscape which has been familiar for a century as an image of the dream Ireland invented by the Irish Literary Revival.’

An arts project from Athlone has been shortlisted for an Epic Award for its work in the community.

ALMOST SIX months have passed since the death of the much-loved poet Seamus Heaney and Galway will commemorate his life and work in a gala event at NUI Galway’s Bailey Allen Hall on Wednesday February 26.

Ireland’s longest running arts festival, the Clifden Community Arts Festival, begins today, and this year’s programme boasts a line up that includes Mary Coughlan, Mairtín O’Connor, Sharon Shannon, and novelist Dermot Bolger.

The famous holiday home of WB Yeats and his family, Thoor Ballylee, near Gort, could soon be in the hands of a local interest group and the county council.

BOTH AS an individual and as a writer Ron Rash, who reads in Galway next month at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, has been indelibly shaped by his southern Appalachian roots.

Edna O’Brien, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley, three of the titans of contemporary Irish literature, are coming to Galway for the 2013 Cúirt International Festival of Literature from April 23 to 28.

What dominated our news and much of our conversations during the 1970s (at least in the early years), was the deteriorating crisis in Northern Ireland. When I think of that decade I remember the initial hope that something would be settled quickly rather than letting it drag on fuelled by appallingly bad political decisions, thuggery, and deeply imbedded hatred. Seamus Heaney remarked that in the early 1970s ‘there was a promise in the air as well as fury and danger’. But in Northern Ireland any nervous sense of hopeful expectation quickly soured; as Heaney recalled: ‘Soon enough it all went rancid.’ In John Montague’s poem The Rough Field, he observes: ‘In the dark streets, firing starts.’