Editor Lucy Thynne - The Telegraph
Sometimes the best poems are written quickly; sometimes you can tell. For Seamus Heaney, “Postscript”, his famous poem about a drive along Galway Bay with friends Brian and Anne Friel, came “like a ball kicked in from nowhere”. As he said in one interview:
“I had this quick, sidelong glimpse of something flying past; before I knew where I was, I went after it... It excited me, and yet publishing it in The Irish Times was, as much as anything else, a way of sending a holiday postcard – a PS of sorts – to the Friels.”
I like the idea of a poem as a postcard, and it feels an astute way of recognising this poem’s form, in its blockiness, all the lines running to much the same length. It’s also a good description of the poem’s familiar tone – “And some time make the time to drive out west” – which, to me, sounds like the urging of a nostalgic, eccentric friend.
Heaney said he wrote the poem while working on the lectures he would deliver as the University of Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, in the early 1990s. He would have been in his 50s then, and I think the experience shows: there’s a trust in informal images (the swans’ “headstrong-looking heads”), and that quick pace, which seems to deliver the ending on a gust of wind.
And yet: despite the poem’s speediness, it still manages – as I always remember a friend once saying – “to make me feel so calm”.
Postscript by Seamus Heaney
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
From The Spirit Level
