The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Location: Kilcullen (Phone 087 7790766), County Kildare, Ireland

Saturday, August 22, 2009

great moments in sport

Afternoon in the Cafe Des Beaux Parvenus at Newbridge Silverware.
Doctor Barn and myself quaffing lattes.
The goodish Doctor says: "You know something Heelers. I think you genuinely are among the Irish poets."
I sit bolt upright.
"I am among them," I cry warmly. "And I'm shouting: Get out of my way you pretentious anti Catholic bar stewards."

3 Comments:

Anonymous MissJean said...

Why do I have this feeling that on cold wintry nights you warm your hands over the collected works of Heaney and Yeats burning on the hearth? :)

And just out of curiosity, has Padraic Colum been forgotten in his homeland? His books for children enthralled me.
-MJ

7:40 PM  
Blogger heelers said...

MJ.
A lot of us think highly of Padraic Colum. He's maybe more a people's poet than an academic's first choice. But I think there would be a great cross section of society who would appreciate something he's written.
As for the Heaney and Yeats... You got my number.
J

12:39 AM  
Anonymous MissJean said...

I always liked "Dark Rosaleen". But the Colum works that really got me as a kid were the King of Ireland's Son and The Children Who Followed the Piper.

The first had a blood-curdling line in it that I read twice because it horrified me: "And so he killed her." Not Disney movie material. :)

In the Children Who Followed the Piper, there's that moment when the young man tells his best friend the three secrets, even though it means he'll turn to stone. As each secret is told, he feels his body changing, but he tells the truth anyway. Good Lord! what a writer!

Incidentally, I have Yeats' collected works on my bookshelf next to Thomas Lynch the poet-undertaker laureate of Milford, Michigan. (He wrote poetry about death, sex, and God. I was taken with his poems when I was younger, perhaps thinking they were about sexgods of death. As you might say, arf, arf!)

When you going to publish a tome so I can justify throwing one aside?

5:09 AM  

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