by Mary Cullen

Poetry is everywhere at this time. What does it offer? Seamus Heaney argues that it offers redress by adjusting and correcting imbalances in the world, bringing human existence into a fuller life. It is ‘the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality’ which provides a ‘glimpsed alternative’ to that which is denied or threatened by circumstances.

It also offers redress by its very nature. Heaney celebrates the pleasure and surprise of poetry, its inventiveness, movement, and ‘brimming over’. Its rhymes, rhythms and intonations create energy and order which suggest that there is a much greater order and energy within which we have our being. The world is different after it has been read by a poet.

All this is illustrated chapter by chapter in a dazzling array of voices from different times and places – Christopher Marlowe and Brian Merriman, John Clare and Oscar Wilde, Hugh McDiarmid and Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, WB Yeats and Philip Larkin. A great and enriching read to which, as I did, you will want to return.