Sweeney Astray

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Before his singing career, Ó Lionáird trained as a teacher and graduated with a Bachelor of Education degree. He served as a primary school teacher for seven years before pursuing his love of seán nós and singing full-time, enjoying a glittering career as a vocalist for Afro Celt Soundsystem and The Gloaming. Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, J. Cape (London, England), 1995. Daily Telegraph (London, England), February 19, 2000, p. 116; March 31, 2001; April 13, 2002; May 5, 2003.

in this work that balances the poetry of pain, it is the poetry of praise. And what is praised most beautifully and convincingly is the landscape of Ireland, its fields, meadows, hills, rivers, mountains, glens, the sea's eternal Translator) The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles'"Antigone," Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2004.Time, March 19, 1984; February 25, 1985; October 16, 1995; March 20, 2000, Paul Gray, "There Be Dragons: Seamus Heaney's Stirring Translation of Beowulf Makes Waves on Both Shores of the Atlantic," p. 84. The medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne was left untranslated from 1913 till Seamus Heaney published this, Sweeney Astray, in 1983. Heaney breathed new life into it for the contemporary audience. The hero of the poem is Mad Sweeney, who is cursed at the Battle of Moira; he is turned into a bird and flees. The Mad Sweeney from Gaiman's American Gods is based (quite loosely) off Buile Suibhne, which is perhaps the only other reference to the poem I can think of. The blurb of my old Faber & Faber edition states, "The poetry spoken by the mad king, exiled to the trees and the slopes, is among the richest and most immediately appealing in the whole canon of Gaelic literature." New Republic, March 27, 1976; December 22, 1979; April 30, 1984; February 18, 1985; January 13, 1997, review of Homage to Robert Frost, p. 14; February 28, 2000, Nicholas Howe, "Scullionspeak," p. 32; February 28, 2000, p. 32. version that one realizes that the counterpointing of prose with poetry intensifies the climactic lyric moments. To my mind, this is true of Irish literary works as far apart in time as the Old Irish epic dominated by the hero Cuchulain, Mahoney, John L., editor, Seeing into the Life of Things: Essays on Literature and Religious Experience, Fordham University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Sweeney Astray is an early Medieval Irish epic poem. The “Astray” is not his last name, but the fact of his going astray from normal life after a regrettable deed he committed.In Irish: ‘the Otherworld” is a repository of that-which-is-inherently-fantastic. In modern Irish, saolsignifies, alternately, ‘life’, ‘time’, and ‘world’, and is distinct from the pedestrian noun for world “domhan” which can’t be combined with any term for “other” in idiomatic use. are looking for roosts in his tree. The life God grants me now is bare and strait; I am haggard, womanless, and cut off from music. . . . Ronan has brought me low, God has exiled me from myself - soldiers, forget the man you knew.'' AB - Drawing on Jane Bennett’s theory of “crossings and enchantment”, this essay considers interspecies transformations in Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray (1983). As a bird-man, Mad King Sweeney discovers that the arboreal environment is a vibrantly interstitial space in which paganism and Christianity coexist. By negotiating this liminal space, he opens himself to forms of attachment and enchantment that radically ameliorate his accursed existence in the trees. s journey through the woods is one of penitence, marked by an adherence to Christian practices such as fasting on Fridays. For instance, as he encounters a woman giving birth by the church at Cloonburren, he is enraged that she is doing so on a fast day (p. 19). Repeatedly, he implores “Christ”, “God”, the “Lord” to have mercy on him: Richard Ellmann, in his review of Station Island for The New York Review of Books, praised the collection writing, "Many of these poems have a tough rind as though the author knew that for his purposes deferred comprehension was better than instant. Obliquity suits him. Heaney's talent, a prodigious one, is exfoliating and augmenting here." [10]