Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
Originally posted on Pilgrimage In Medieval Ireland:
The 18th of February is the feast day of St Berrihert/Berrahert of the parish of Ardane, Co Tipperary. An Anglo-Saxon saint, he is…
Silence is rarely pure. You can hear real silence sometimes deep in a cave – when, if you stop talking, the sound of nothing comes as a physical shock. But…
So uncatchable is Odysseus that when the poem describes his state of mind, you can never be certain where to find him. When he is lying in bed, anxious and…
Grammatical construction can make of an apparent riddle or paradox a font of expanding intuition: “Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep.” Ring-structures spiral…
We do speak about music. The verbal analysis of a musical score can, to a certain extent, elucidate its formal structure, its technical components and instrumentation. But where it is…
This is a rather grumpy review. I found the writing in this anthology by and large ponderous and forced, too self-consciously “literary.” I think that is pretty clear from the…
A while ago (during November, to be exact) I blogged that I was using NaNoWriMo as a framework for trying to finish a story I was writing. I wrote that I…
Originally published in the TLS – original link available only to subscribers. With thanks to Maren Meinhardt for supplying me with the printed text. This is one of those pieces…
Séamus Sweeney 