Sunday, May 11, we will continue our Irish poetry segments read by 
the Jim Cavanaugh.  On the 11th, Jim will read a poem called "The 
Choice" by Theo Dorgan.  He will also read a poem of his own 
composition called "The Contender".

Below is some basic biographical info on Theo Dorgan.

Theo Dorgan .

Born in Cork, 1953. Having completed a BA in English and Philosophy 
and a MA in English at University College Cork, Theo tutored and 
lectured in that University, while simultaneously Literature 
Officer with Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. 

He now lives in Dublin, where he is Director of Poetry Ireland, the 
national poetry organisation. He has presented a wide variety of 
radio programmes over the years including, Poetry Now (RTE Radio 1 
from 1996 to 1997) and presented that station's weekly books 
programme, Imprint. (1993 to 1995). 

As a broadcaster since 1982 he is also frequently heard on BBC 
radio and he contributes to Irish-language TV & radio. He has 
presented IMPRINT, now in it's third series since early 1999

(Poster's Note:  Tonight (05/05/02)  we will play one of our new Irish 
Poet's series. Jim will read Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging" (see end 
of this posting).  and he  will read "Digging".  Jim Cavanaugh is a 
freelance writer and poet himself.  Jim will also read one of his own 
poems entitled "Hind Sight".  Jay)

Seamus (Justin) Heaney - (1939)

Irish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. 
According to Heaney, poetry balances the "scales of reality towards 
some transcendent equilibrium." From the early collections, Heaney 
have combined in his work deep personal memories with images of 
Irish heritage and the landscape of Northern Ireland. There is also 
references to English-Irish and Catholic-Protestant conflict, but 
Heaney's view is much more visionary and allegorical than bound to 
contemporary issues. 

"Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help 
knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in 
blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very 
remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with 
the actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a 
host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the 
inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much 
constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in 
the work of art." (from Nobel Lecture, 1995) 

Seamus Heaney was born near Castledawson, County Derry, and grew up 
on his father's cattle farm. He was the eldest in a Catholic family 
of nine children. Heaney attended St. Columb's College, Derry, and 
moved in 1957 to Belfast to continued his studies. In 1961 Heaney 
graduated from Queen's University, Belfast, and was then trained as 
teacher at St. Joseph's College of Education. After one year as a 
secondary school teacher, Heaney returned to St. Josephs, where he 
was a lecturer for three years. In 1966 he became a lecturer at 
Queen University. 

In 1972 Heaney gave up his work at Queen's. Partly to escape the 
violence of Belfast, he moved from to County Wicklow, where he was 
a freelance writer for three years. He then taught at Carysfort 
College of Education until 1981. Next year, after spending frequent 
periods as a guest professor at American universities, he was 
appointed visiting professor at Harvard. Since 1985 he has been 
there as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Between the 
years 1989 and 1994 he held Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. 

Heaney's first book, ELEVEN POEMS, appeared in 1965. He won in 1966 
the Eric Gregory Award with DEATH OF A NATURALIST at the age of 27, 
and established his reputation as a poet. Heaney was in Belfast at 
the outbreak, in 1969, of what has become known as 'The Troubles'. 
In 1968-69 arouse serious disturbances from Protestant political 
dominance and discrimination against the Roman Catholic minority in 
employment and housing. Catholic student arranged civil rights 
marches that had much similarities with protest movements in 
elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. British troops were 
sent to restore peace in Belfast and Londonderry. Heaney left 
Belfats at the height of this conflict, but his work reflects his 
experiences of that time. 

I can see her drowned 
body in the bog, 
the weighting stone, 
the floating rods and boughs. 
(from 'Punishment' in North, 1975) 

After NORTH (1975), in which Heaney addressed the ongoing civil 
strife in Northern Ireland, he was considered the finest Irish poet 
since W.B. Yeats, and with Ted Hughes among the leading poets in 
English. Among its much anthologized poems is 'Punishment', in 
which the poet depicts a tribal revenge of adultery but confesses 
his own powerlessness in front of ancient, violent forces. "I 
almost love you / but would have cast, I know, / the stones of 
silence. I am the artful voyeur / your brain's exposed and darkened 
combs..." Heaney's works are rooted in Northern Irish rural life, 
and draw on myth and unique aspects of the Irish experience. 
Reflections on his childhood have given way to darker commentaries 
on the social and political problems in Northern Ireland. In THE 
GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE (1988) Heaney questioned the role of 
poetry in modern sociaty. The central symbol in the author's work 
is the bog, the wide unfenced county that reaches back millions of 
years. The bog is the starting point for the exploration of the 
past, and in several works he has returned to the "bog people", 
bodies preservend in the soil of Denmark and Ireland. 

The political situation in Northern Ireland is explored in North 
and Field Work (1979), from the standpoint of Heaney's Catholic 
background. However, Heaney has been consistent in his refusal to 
reduce complex political and social issues to simple slogans. 
Strong individualistic, meditative mood marks his later works, 
including STATION ISLAND (1984), THE HAW LANTERN (1987), and SEEING 
THINGS (1991). In ELECTRIC LIGHT (2001) Heaney's childhood memories 
mix with his sense of fleeting time and death: "The room I came 
from and the rest of us all came from / Stays pure reality where I 
stand alone, / Standing the passage of time, and she's asleep / In 
sheets put on for the doctor, wedding presents / That showed up 
again and again, bridal / And usual and useful at births and 
deaths." Heaney's poems have often been allegorical and he has 
drawn on the Divine Comedy of Dante and on the work of such 
contemporary central European writers as Czeslaw Milosz. In his 
Nobel lecture in 1995 Heaney defended poetry "as the ship and the 
anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world 
politics.

Heaney's work as translator includes SWEENEY ASTRAY (1983), from 
the mediaeval Irish poem about an Irish king who went mad during a 
battle and was turned into a bird; THE CURE AT TROY (1991), 
Heaney's rendering into English of Sophocles' Philoctetes, and the 
Anglo-Saxon poem BEOWULF (1999), which was composed towards the end 
of the first millenium. The translation won the Whitebread Award as 
the best book of 1999. 

"You have won renown: you are known to all men 
far and near, now and forever. 
Your sway is wide as the wind's home, 
as the sea around cliffs." 
(from Beowulf, trans. by Heaney) 

The epic records the great deed of the heroic warrior Beowulf in 
his youth and maturity. The hero kills three monsters: a maneater 
called Grendel, Grendel's aggrievated mother in her underwater 
dwelling, and 50 years later a fire-breathing dragon, which is 
stirred by the theft of a goblet. It mortally wounds Beowulf before 
expiring. The poem ends with Beowulf's funeral pyre. Central theme 
is the workings of fate (wyrd) in human lives. It is generally 
accepted that originally Beowulf was the work of a single poet, who 
has recounted legends that were passed down orally from several 
centuries earlier. Heaney's retelling makes the hero's tragic 
stature prophetic: when he dies his people wait of the disarter 
that will descend on them. However, loving one's enemies was not 
part of the feudal code. 

It is always better 
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. 
For every one of us, 
living in this world 
means waiting for our end. 
Let whoever can 
win glory before death. 
When a warrior is gone, 
That will be his best and only bulwark. 
(from Beowulf, 1999) 

For further reading: Passage to the Center by Daniel Tobin (1999); 
Seamus Heaney by Helen Hennessy Vendler (1998); Passage to the 
Center by Daniel Tobin (1998); Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney, 
ed. by Robert F. Garratt (1995); The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. by 
T. Curtis (1994); Seamus Heaney: Poet and Critic by Arthur E. 
McGuinness (1994); Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet by Michael 
Parker (1993); Seamus Heaney, ed. by H. Bloom (1993) - Suomeksi 
Heaneylta on julkaistu Ojanpiennarten kuningas (1995) Jyrki 
Vainosen valikoimana ja kääntämänä, sekä valikoima Ukkosvaloa 
(1997), samoin Vainosen suomentamana.

Selected works:

* Eleven Poems, 1965 
* Death Of A Naturalist, 1966 
* The Island People, 1968 
* Door Into The Dark, 1969 
* The Last Mummer, 1969 
* A Lough Neagh Sequence, 1969 
* A Boy Driving His Father To Confession, 1970 
* Catherine's Poem, 1970 
* Night Drive, 1970 
* Chaplet, 1971 
* Land, 1971 
* Servant Boy, 1971 
* January God, 1972 
* Wintering Out, 1972 
* Bog Poems, 1975 
* Two Decades Of Irish Writing, 1975 (Ed. D. Dunn) 
* North, 1975 
* Stations, 1975 
* Four Poems, 1976 
* Glanmore Sonnets, 1977 
* Robert Lowell: A Memorial Address, 1978 
* Richard Murphy, Poedt Of Two Traditions, 1978 (Ed. M. Harman) 
* After Summer, 1978 
* Christmas Eve, 1978 
* A Family Album, 1978 
* Field Work, 1979 
* Gravities, 1979 
* Ugolimo, 1979 
* Ed.: Anthology: Arvon Foundation Poetry Competition, 1980 (With 
T. Hughes) 
* The Making Of Music, 1980 
* Preoccupations. Selected Prose 1968-1978, 1980 
* Changes, 1980 
* Selected Poems 1965-1975, 1980 
* Toome, 1980 
* Holly, 1981 
* Sweeney Praises The Trees, 1981 
* James Joyce And Modern Literature (Ed. W.J. Mccormack And A. 
Stead) 
* Contemporary Iris Art, 1982 (Ed. R. Knowles) 
* Chechov On Sakhalin, 1982 
* Ed.: The Rattlebag, 1982 (With T. Hughes) 
* The Names Of The Hare, 1982 
* Remembering Malibu, 1982 
* Sweeney And The Saint, 1982 
* Verses For A Fordham Commencement, 1982 
* A Hazel Stick For Catherine Ann, 1983 
* Sweeney Astary, 1983 
* An Open Letter, 1983 
* Among Schoolchildren, 1983 
* Hailstones, 1984 
* Station Island, 1984 
* From The Republic Of Conscience, 1985 
* Clearances, 1986 
* Towards A Collaboration, 1986 
* The Haw Lantern, 1987 
* The Government Of The Tongue, 1988 
* An Upstairs Outlook, 1989 (With M. Longley) 
* The Redress Of Poetry, 1990 
* New Selected Poems 1966-87, 1990 
* The Tree Clock, 1990 
* Seeing Things, 1991 
* The Cure At Troy, 1991 (From Sophocles' Play Philoctetes) 
* Sweeney's Flight, 1992 
* Ed.: The May Anthology Of Oxford And Cambridge Poetry, 1993 
* Joy Or Night, 1993 
* Translation: The Midnight Verdict, 1993 (From B. Merriman And 
Ovid) 
* The Redress Of Poetry, 1995 
* Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, 1996 
* The Spirit Level, 1996 - Whitbread Award 1997 
* Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, 1998 
* translation: BEOWULF, 1999 - Whitbread Award in January 2000 
* Electric Light, 2001 
* Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, 2002 

            ******************************************

Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. 

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.