Heaney and the hunger-strikers

Madam, - I understand that Danny Morrison has criticised Seamus Heaney for failing to respond in his poetry to the 1981 hunger…

Madam, - I understand that Danny Morrison has criticised Seamus Heaney for failing to respond in his poetry to the 1981 hunger strikes (Letters, August 31st). Although I am from Fermanagh-South Tyrone, and was there at the time of Bobby Sands's dramatic election, I managed to write only one short elegy on his death, using the image of an hourglass with the "sands" flowing down. So the problem is surely not that Heaney is a "constitutional nationalist", but the extreme emotion of the situation, which makes it almost impossible for any artist to achieve the necessary aesthetic distance. (Think how long it took Yeats to get the balance right in Easter, 1916).

Fascinatingly, perhaps the most moving poem so far on the hunger strikes is a sequence by the Australian poet Vincent Buckley. Maybe being from Melbourne gave him the measure of distance necessary to distil all that anguish into poetry. - Yours, etc,

JOHN MONTAGUE, Schull, Co Cork.