The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, even monstrous events and who are now being exposed to a comfortless future. We immediately recognize her predicament and the pitch of her grief and find ourselves the better for having them expressed with such adequacy and dignity and unforgiving truth…

Even as the original epic grapples with its monstrous past, so, too does “Wolfe” take up the difficult subject of the settlement of the American West. In one passage, a ranch hand recalls his Colonel ordering them to kill one thousand Indian horses, telling us, “They say / The white bones made, in later years, / A heap like bent and bleaching spears.” From this dark past, the rage of the ancient wolf-like creature standing in for Grendel seems an embodiment of the wild land itself. This sense of weary sadness and regret carries through the heroic deeds and distinctly western theme to elevate “Wolfe” from simple legend into a more complex, human sphere. Musical, compelling, and timeless, Williams has given us an insightful new take on one of the oldest stories in English, fusing it with an honest look at American history.

Imagine the look on my guidance counselor’s face when I told her that I wanted to transfer into the English department. My grades were good; what was wrong? I told her that I simply wanted to pursue something more–how could I say it?–human. She suggested that I consider a career in the exciting new field of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

After signing a legal contract wherein I promised that I would not, under any circumstance, try to beg my way back into the Engineering department, I found myself sitting auditorium-style with three hundred other students, eagerly attending a lecture by Robert Hass. Within minutes, I felt all three hundred students disappear, and I seemed to be sitting fireside with my favorite poetry-loving uncle. Professor Hass mentioned that Seamus Heaney was returning to Berkeley to discuss his new translation of Beowulf, and to read some poems. He encouraged us all to attend.

After graduation, I followed a high-tech career up to the executive level, reading and writing poetry less and less with each promotion. I started my own company, got married, and moved out to the country to be closer to my parents, who were soon to be grandparents. After the death of our infant son, all my worldly ambition evaporated. In poetry, I found solace, and a means to engage the complexity of human experience on its own terms–not as a reductive conclusion or homily, but an expansive and containing act of art. Still, I felt divided–between the new self that embraced the wildness of a contemporary American voice, and the keen, impressionable undergraduate quoting Keats late into the night.

Seamus Heaney appeared before me, blinking under the spotlight. He read poems and told stories, explained the music of Anglo Saxon, quipped about his traditional education that, “those of us who chose Latin were bound for the seminary; those who studied French were bound for something known as ‘the world.’” Here was a man who navigated many worlds: Protestant and Catholic, farmer and academician, poet and critic. In his poetry, he seemed to take on the best of the British lyric tradition, the contemporary voice, the Irish tradition of music and story, Classics, folklore, the Bible, free verse, form–and tackle subjects as close to the bone as the death of friends and family during the atrocities of twentieth-century Northern Ireland. Yet the man was also a celebrant of simplicity, humanity, and hope.

This is why I chose, after recommitting to my writing by undertaking an MFA, to examine the work of Seamus Heaney closely. In the coming weeks and months, I will continue to post some of my research and revelations to this website, and welcome your thoughts.