Notes

A Poet of the Threshold
Paul Gray
Time 16/10/1995 p.71
As an Irish Catholic, he has concerned himself with analysis of violence in Northern Ireland - with the express reservation that he wants to aviod the conventional terms." That reservation has made all the difference in his art. It is hard to imagine a less overtly political poet than Heaney, 56, or one who has more thouroughly purged his language of commonplace and banal. "Poetry is more a threshold than a path," he once wrote.
Death and suffering cannot be countered by polemics ...
tribute to human complexities ... The intensity of Heaney's poetry stems largely from a Roman Catholic temperament that has been baffled by doubt.
"My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension," ... "But then there's the reality: there's no heaven, no afterlife of the sort we are promised and no personal God."