Station Island

"Seamus Heaney’s poetry is so magnificent it’s difficult to do it justice. He engaged with politics and with the violence of the Irish struggle in a complex way. He says the poet is “stretched between politics and transcendence.” In Station Island he goes back to his roots to look at his communal ties, his early beliefs and the dead of his past. In the center of the Station Island sequence, the speaker is visited by ghosts, some literary, some with a personal connection to him, some of the dead who died in the violence. It’s Heaney accounting for who he is in the midst of this violent political struggle, in the midst of complex cultural currents. “Easy now”, one ghost, with his forehead blown open, tells him, “it’s only me. You’ve seen men as raw after a football match.” He tells one ghost, “Forgive the way I have lived indifferent.” In a previous book, he memorialized a cousin who had been killed in a sectarian assassination. Here the cousin’s ghost confronts him. It’s a line I think of often as I write about violence. His cousin says, “You saw that, and you wrote that — not the fact. /You confused evasion and artistic tact. /The Protestant who shot me through the head /I accuse directly, but indirectly, you /who now atone perhaps upon this bed /for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew /the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio /and saccharined my death with morning dew.” It’s an astoundingly thoughtful and beautiful meditation. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, why is this a book that I would want veterans to read? Because it offers so much for somebody trying to move forward in the aftermath of violence. Heaney confronts his complicity, confronts his guilt, confronts the dead and what he owes to them. For veterans, in the current era, all of the things that he’s confronting are very much alive and present. When I read it, it felt like a revelation."