Customer Reviews

Stepping Stones (Audio, Faber)

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This one cassette holds the power to open your ears and heart and mind to the first thirty years of great work from Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. This one casette tape of 72 minutes length and breadth releases the power to help you see and feel once more our world, our life, our love, our unity.

The poet selects over an hour of his own work up to and including the 1996 collection entitled The Spirit Level. The poet reads this work with ease and a conviction and an intimacy unheard elsewhere, with brief yet comprehensive friendly commentary: autobiographical, sociological, historical, personal, political, etc.

Rarely do we hear this great poet so personal, so relaxed, so at ease. Strongly do we recommend hearing as well his recordings entitled Heaney at Harvard from the Poetry Room, which I located by miracle here upon the amazon and hope it remains available. Each of these prized recordings must be transformed into later and more durable technology than casette tapes, with their hiss and echo, while we still may.

This present recording was made for ihs British Publisher Faber and for Penguin, and released but a year after his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. You may read his excellent address upon receiving that medal in Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture. From there he recorded this selection of his poetry to date.

The first side of the tape includes the earlier poems, such as Mossbaum: Sunlight, which unexpectedly begins without introduction nor spoken title but in media res. After this awakening and bracing piece, Mr. Heaney kindly introduces each piece witrh a few words, more as he grows comfortable later in the tape. He then shares ihs love of wells (Wales did he say? Whales?) in Personal Helicon. Interestingly he does not read the one poem Death of a Naturalist (Faber Pocket Poetry), nor the remarkable poem in which he defines his pen as the spade inherited from his north Ireland farming father and grandfather, with which he too shall dig (and indeed dug so well).

He then introduces fully and reads Bogland, followed by three discussing Iron Age ritual punishments and killings (seen as Heaney here explains in the light of happenings in his region): The Tollund Man, Punishment and Strange Fruit. He then reads Exposure, and Oysters, and Casualty, and a selection from the Glanmore Sonnets: #'s 2, 3, 7 and ten. He reads part VII from Station Island, and closes with ihs moving translation (in this his moving reading) of the Ugolino passage from The Inferno of Dante Alighieri. On that vengeful, violent note side one of the tape hisses to a halt.

Side Two opens with Alphabets, the from the Republic of Conscience, then Clearances (Prologue 2, 3, 5, 8). The Wishing Tree follows with always very personal reflections as introduction, and Fosterling, then Lightenings (#'s i, ii, vi, viii). Crossings (#'s xxvii, xxxiii, and xxxiv) follws, and Tollund. St. Kevin and the Blackbird, Mint and At the Wellhead end the 72 minute taped presentation.

I am ever deeply moved to hear him introduce so fully hear, and then to read Casualty; please see this historical poem, as well as the account of the killing of the shop keeper awakened at night by banging at his shop door. Ugolino has never been so grippingly translated and told. The story of the sailor descending a rope from a great ship to unloosen its anchor trapped in a monastery choir always touches me personally and deeply. The Tollung Man stands alone, ever, for some thousands of years now.

Hear this, please, to weep and be liberated.

Hear this that your heart may once more come flesh and blood, not stone.

hear this and hear our ancestors's soft embrace.

Hear this tape before it crumbles into dust.

Now, a dozen years later, hear this tape, and acquire all that you can of Mr. Heaney.

Hear this tape . . .

again.