E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

PJ Nolan reviews Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll From farm boy to Nobel Laureate, the life of Seamus Heaney has acquired a mythic proportion, in scale with the influences and preoccupations that continue to shape his remarkable output of poetry and related writings. Unapologetically a poet of the local, he has achieved a global readership, well beyond the halls of academe. Widely recognised as an affable interviewee, Heaney is also well-practiced in discretion – any tendency towards the oracular countered with determined respect for those private spaces which allow inspiration to flourish, within attendant and necessary mystery. Denis O’Driscoll, poet, editor, commentator and stalwart of the Irish poetry scene, is also widely respected. George Szirtes has referred to him as ‘a poet of European temperament, and stature’. He shares familiarity, firm friendship and mutual respect with Heaney and is therefore well placed to coax intimacy and cando...

You have to hand it to him. President Obama really is the new American Chavez - and it is thrilling, and a bit scary (because I keep hearing Jim Carrey's line "somebody stop me!" as an ominous taunt that may be taken up and replied to). I don't want him stopped - this is nearly too good to be true, and such epiphanic moments in politics are rare. What has occasioned this post? His new budget , which, in terms of redistributive justice, and dismantling of military-industrial prerogatives, is audacious.

This is Eyewear 's 1,250th post. The film Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is The Female ) is currently resurfacing in Britain, to excellent reviews, 60 years after its initial appearance. This 1949 (some say 1950) classic of film noir is one of the key films, for me, and greatly inspired my sense of style for my early 90s work. Budavox , in which "Gun Crazy" first appeared, 50 years after the movie's creation (in 1999) is, in some ways, an exploration of the sort of world set in motion by the movie. So, anyway, I am glad to see it back on release. Seaway , from Salmon, was where I published this new version, see below. G un Crazy Against the world, just us. Behind, a trail of gas stations, small banks, the meat packing plant, knocked over. FBI Telexes clatter like town gossips across America: Barton Tare and Laurie Starr, dangerous and armed. How did it begin? Neon wakes me, I peel back blinds to jackhammer rain, shake a Lucky from the pack, and light. Behind, on the tangled b...

Good to have Nigel McLoughlin (pictured) as the featured poet this Friday. He's one of the impressive new voices of his generation. He is also Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire and his work has been twice short-listed for a Hennessy Award, and placed in The Kavanagh Prize and The New Writer Poetry Prize. McLoughlin lectured in Traditions at Poets’ House from 2000 to 2004 and has worked as a tutor with the London School of Journalism and as a Senior Tutor and Curriculum Design Consultant with the Open College of the Arts. He holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing and a PhD from Lancaster University. He has written four collections of poetry: At The Waters’ Clearing (Flambard/Black Mountain Press, 2001), Songs For No Voices (Lagan Press, 2004), Blood (Bluechrome, 2005) and Dissonances (Bluechrome, 2007). He also co-edited Breaking The Skin (Black Mountain Press, 2002) an anthology of new Irish poets. His New and Selected will be out soon,...

The Guardian is offering readers a chance to listen to the new U2 album, courtesy of Spotify . Diving right in, as an existing member of Spotify, I am pleased to say that it sounds like No Line On The Horizon is not the over-hyped self-important and bloated dud How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb mostly was. It is impossible to write about U2 anymore - U2 writes white. U2 is overmediated, over-saturating. The only question we are fed is the one that makes sense to answer: is this the next Joshua Tree ? The next Achtung Baby ? Both those records are bolts from the blue, true masterworks that, within a few years, spanned decades and shifted styles decisively. Could this be the third time U2 astonishes and rips up the sonic pop rules? I think not quite, but this is their best album since Pop , more than ten years back. I want to write myself a critical blank cheque below, where I can add more thoughts, as the album sinks in, later, so for now, this is the last line:

Self-advertisement warning My Seaway: New and Selected seems to have had its first review, at Various Artists , Tony Lewis-Jones' online review vehicle, which reaches interested readers and writers across the world. The review is by poet Tom Phillips . I quote some of it here, below: "Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift’s Seaway is both a ‘greatest hits’ collection for those who’ve already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. [....] Words matter throughout. That might sound like a very obvious thing to say about a poetry collection but then, when it comes down to it, few contemporary English language collections exhibit the combination of ...