Seamus Heaney, “Staten Island” (1984)

“In ‘Station Island’ (1984) — a dazzling reworking of Dante, set on an Irish island known for centuries as a place of religious pilgrimage — all the themes of Heaney’s work come together in an orchestral whole. Here, the present, past and myth merge and overlap, and the competing claims on an artist emerge in the form of ghosts: literary ghosts, ghosts from the poet’s own past and ghosts from Ireland’s past: a young priest ‘glossy as a blackbird” and a shopkeeper cousin shot in the head, who ‘trembled like a heat wave and faded.’ ” […]    –Michiko Kakutani, “Capturing Rhythms of Nature in Poems,” The New York Times (August 30, 2013)