(New to) Great Regulars: During the course of the celebratory evening,

[Seamus] Heaney selected a pair of poems to read in honour of what many call "the sacramental Cohen," one of which he also delivered, IIRC, at the Nobel ceremony, 1984's "The Underground."

He also read one of the most nearly perfect poems exquisitely suited to this Holy Season in our (now) shared language, "A Drink of Water" (1979):

Here, (said poetry-blogging she, donning her critical cap), Heaney first creates a world inhabited by the sacred dignity of the catch-as-catch-can quotidian consonant with the past and redolent with those oppressive "Troubles":

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: On Other Words: Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney honoured

~~~~~~~~~~~

"The perfect poem," [Erin] Mouré additionally muses, clearly equivocating vis-à-vis that earlier question, the one that's struck her as germane to all it is a poet shapes and makes, "the perfect poem is the one that touches me at the moment of reading and exposes me to something outside my being that, paradoxically, shows me that in me, too, is something that is outside of my being. Language is mine, and is not mine. The language of the poem shatters the cogito, which was always never unified: the language of the poem pulls the mask of self-unity off the cogito, I guess."

Cogito ergo doleo? Does Mouré think a poem can change the world?

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: On Other Words: Traversing the mysterious Mouréan terrain

~~~~~~~~~~~