‘A capacity for sustained flight’: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Ecology of Avian Encounter

Abstract

Belfast poet Ciaran Carson tells the story of a striking encounter with a blackbird just before his interview for the directorship of the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, a meeting that, upon his appointment, would inspire Carson to inscribe the blackbird as the Centre’s symbol.² The present website for the Centre recalls a genealogy of the image in the work of contemporary poets such as Carson and Heaney, as well as in the ninth-century lyrical tradition. While the selection of the blackbird as symbol for an internationally acclaimed Irish poetry centre is telling, what is perhaps more significant is the active inspiration and storytelling surrounding this selection, the impulse that drives the name, a synthesis of physical moment and meaning that stems from a serendipitous avian encounter, one that proceeds to represent an institution that is spurred by a trust in the value of poetic impulse. And perhaps this is especially appropriate given the Centre’s namesake. In Seamus Heaney’s Stepping Stones, Dennis O’Driscoll asks Heaney whether or not he ‘thinks poetry can play any practical or meaningful role in changing minds, and hearts on environmental issues’, the question softly framed with a reminder that in the past Heaney had conceded that no poem is strong enough to stop a tank.

M. Cannon (2007) Carrying the Songs (Manchester: Carcanet), 17.