Sheers and Heaney Critics

Andrews

Heaney's questions of identity are particularly acute for 'the poet writing in a time of war and continually under pressure to say something, to take sides'

Links to Heaney's identity crisis, whether to keep his political opinions private or comment on the troubles. Andrews argues that the pressure makes his crises more 'acute'

Bloom

Heaney demonstrates a 'renewed understanding that beauty and calm can coexist with darkness and fragility, that the private can never be separate from the public'

Corcoran

Heaney writes a 'poetry of ordinary domestic happiness'

Coughlan

'Genial Voyeurism'

'Heaney's love poems contain a genial voyeurism'

Genial voyeurism means a friendly pleasure of watching other people in private, sexual situations.

Feminist argument

Coughlan

Otter

In 'The Otter', the 'land woman' metaphor works to fetishise the woman's body, with 'stress on the erotic excitement of the speaker'

Etter - Sheers

A 'sense of fragility' runs through Sheers' volume

Borton - Sheers

'Sheers is a writer who is confident in his own raw emotion, confident even in the instability of the image he creates'

Sarah Crown on structure

"His rhythms are wonderfully dextrous, at times so delicate as to be sensed rather than heard."

Sarah Crown on setting

“His scenery, characterised by gaps, shadows and boundaries”

“elegant understatement is the exception rather than the rule”

Independent

“may elegise but he doesn’t romanticise”

Sheers on landscape

“can’t separate landscape from people”

Corcoran on Heaney

brings a sense of his ordinary social self to his poetry”