Currock Press
  • HOME
  • About us
  • John Irving Clarke Writer
  • The Red Shed Poetry Competition 2023
  • What Am I Looking For?
  • Competition Entry Form 2023
  • Poetry Competition 2021 Results
  • Wakefield postcode poem 2021
  • Viv Longley's Tally Sheet
  • Who the Hell is Ricky Bell?
  • Sound and Vision
  • 2020 winning and commended poems
  • Poetry Gallery
  • Events
  • The Red Shed Readings
  • Of Chalk and Talk
  • The Word for Moving Clouds
  • Listening to Owls
  • Laura Potts' Chatterley
  • Giving the Voiceless a Voice
  • I Figli di Mondovi
  • Book Stall
  • Contact
  • currockman blog
  • WEA students and Carys Davies' West
  • W.E.A. Short Stories
  • The Red Shed Poetry Competition 2023

The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark

10/2/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
On This Day…October 5th 1995

 Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature

 

 The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark

 (in memory of David Hammond)


The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I'd entered (I remember now)

The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

On an overgrown airfield in late summer.

Seamus Heaney


 1939 – 2013

 

 

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Seamus Heaney described poetry as “the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable.”


I once went to a reading of Seamus Heaney's which was a complete disaster from an organisational point of view. Despite being a ticketed event, the organisers seemed surprised by the number of people who had turned up. They seemed equally surprised that a crowded room in midsummer would generate heat. The giant fans which were turned on were noisy affairs drowning out the poet's voice, a neat precursor to a fault in the sound system. Heaney was offered a hand held microphone which was fine until he wanted to turn the page of the book he was holding in the other hand. Enough for some poets I know to throw something of a hissy fit but not our man. Not only did he genially contend with all of these mishaps but he somehow, rode all the problems and carried on to give a reading which was good-humoured, thought provoking and inspirational. In fact the reading is remembered for those qualities rather than the nonsense which preceded it. And it is a memory which is particularly poignant now after his death in September.


A good man and a great poet gone.  

0 Comments

    Author

    A visit to the Media Museum in Bradford and a damn good curry at the Kashmir. What greater pleasure can life afford? Writing a film review afterwards seems only fair. The routine began many years ago and the first review: Sam Taylor Wood's, Nowhere Boy is included here. But there will also be space for books and anything else that takes John Irving Clarke's fancy.

    Archives

    November 2018
    September 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    August 2016
    August 2015
    June 2015
    April 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    Categories

    All
    Film Review
    On This Day
    Poetry
    Short Stories
    Travel

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.