Heaney

This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century.

Seamus Heaney

Follower 

Punishment 

Strange Fruit Lyrics

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
Blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
The scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
for the rain to gather
for the wind to suck
for the sun to rot
for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

 Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney

Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.

Resources on the 'bog body' poems:

 http://www.tollundman.dk/liget.asp

http://www.bogpeople.org/bog_uk/index.html

http://www.jamesmdeem.com/bogpage.windeby.htm

The poet:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/heaneys1.shtml

The poetry:

'Funeral Rites' and 'Punishment'

http://www.teachitcalifornia.com/attachments/6084.pdf

http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/anthology/seamusheaney.htm

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