P. J. Kavanagh
A novel in which. I took a shame-faced delight was Stanley and the Women by Kingsley Amis, because of the deadly way it pins certain kinds of specifically female ghastliness. It is rumoured that U.S. pub- lishers are too nervous to print it. The ,reaction of women that I know has been interesting: they wonder what the fuss is about. It is only false presentations of their sex that reasonable women object to.
Seamus Famous, the darling of the syllabuses, the light of his publisher's eye — how can he survive the pace and praise? That Seamus Heaney can, praise be, is proved straight away by an early poem in Station Island, called 'Sandstone Keep- sake', a beautiful insistence on the intact- ness of a poet Cone of the venerators') in the midst of public brutalities. The fasci- nating Dante-like sequence 'Station Is- land', in which Heaney is confronted by ghosts of his past and the past of Ireland, is the autobiography of the poet, an account of his guilts and stratagems.
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