Heaney quotations

Death of a naturalist

the great slime kings

flax-dam

angry

gathered there for vengeance

warm thick slobber

coarse croaking

Blackberry picking

Each year I hoped they’d keep/knew they would not

a glossy purple clot

rat-grey fungus

stinking

fermented

Follower

an expert

a full sail strung

it is my father who keeps stumbling

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling

His eye / Narrowed and angled at the ground

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake

plough, furrow, horses

A kite for Michael and Christopher

You were born for it

Stand in here in front of me/ and take the strain

lark, chaff, snipe

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb/the squat pen rests; snug as a gun

The shovels “squat-pen” nature

the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man

slicing neatly

I have no spade to follow men like them

Mid-term break

He lay in the four-foot box as in the cot

four-foot box, a foot for every year

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

The Otter

Turning to swim on your back

The light of Tuscany wavered

warm stones