When one thinks of a favorite, for me I cant help just adding one more till it’s a list which by length may appear to dilute any one member.
However, Seamus Heaney unfailing stirs the depths more than most.
Kafka said, ” I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”
Albeit that he was of Jewish tradition the axe and ice are Teutonic, central continental images. Heaney is of the West. Irish, Celtic, where the spade and the peat replace the axe and the frozen sea. Nevertheless to read Heaney is to do the same and more. Kafka’s Germanic soul appears to leave out joy, delight. That even in dark forests there are groves of light. There’s also, the oak, the ash, the yew, the alder, the elder, the hazel, the apple.
In fairness, he is perhaps reminding us of the need of cultivating the “Yin” to counterbalance the “Yang” rather than dismissing it. I read the quote as a polemic.
Anyway, Heaney is special. Here is a BBC presentation that portrays him well.
ragbag 