You may have harboured doubts about the poetry of Seamus Heaney; but you will not have put them so well, nor so cruelly, as A.N. Wilson in the Telegraph today. His review of District and Circle concludes:
There is nothing here, unless you like poems about turnip-snedders or bits of unconnected prose about the Nissen huts that constituted the poet’s first school.
You see cruelty. I see silly knockabout.
Caroline Moore ended “her review”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/04/02/bohea02.xml in the same paper saying, “Only very sour-grape dissenters will not agree that Heaney has ‘a power to bind and loose’ in this volume.”
Do you think Wilson read that, recognised himself, and rose to the challenge?
PJ