There are actual owls a’hooting as I speak this poem through the gloaming on today’s video! It’s easy to take such chuntering for granted when living rurally, but I enjoy being reminded that us human-types are the blip in our little chunk of Scottish countryside…
So, I have actually read Docker on Substack before in an early audio post and I have re-visited it because it floors me every time and alongside the Glasgow Sonnet I by Edwin Morgan it serves to highlight how poems can paint a picture that is at once familiar and entirely of its own time. The power and precision with which Heaney writes allows him to say more in 14 lines than some novels manage in 300 pages. I was chatting to a friend recently about how less can equate to so much more when trying to convey feelings and emotion, and in Docker we see an epic tale chock-full of historical, often violent, social commentary play out in the gaps the poet allows to grow. We all know of men like this and every family has at least one lurking in living memory waiting to prod and prejudice as we hunker down in our modern malaise. Seamus Heaney has managed to turn memory into myth and in doing so he makes a makar of us all.
Grab a copy and find out more here.
Docker by Seamus Heaney