Of poets and places

My first blog about Oscar ended with a nod to (or a steal from) another school teacher, the poet Michael Longley, who taught us English. One of my favourite poems is “Detour” where he imagines his own funeral possession, winding its way through the Main Street of a small town in Ireland, stopping here and there to chat to neighbours, taking its time, going in and out of shops, with himself directing proceedings, procrastinating about where the funeral may go next. I love Longley’s gallows humour, his sense of place and possibility, and his refusal to be rushed underground.

A few years before Oscar lead us to Federico Garcia Lorca, Longley introduced us to his friend Seamus Heaney. Like Longley, Heaney was then teaching in a Belfast school, and one day he came into our prefabricated F hut classroom to read his poems to us. He was then relatively unknown and had just published his first volume, ‘Death of a Naturalist’. I remember ‘Follower’ – the poem about the boy walking behind his father as he ploughs a field, and ‘Blackberrying ‘ which we could all relate to from our own experience, and of course the poem which would later be his best known ‘Digging’. Whenever I read that poem I see my Uncle Robbie digging the potatoes and my father holding the ‘squat pen’. I still have my father’s Parker 51, the one he wrote his sermons with. The barrel is blue-grey, the colour of his eyes.

Our Air B n B host here in Granada is a Scot who is obviously a fan of Lorca. The wifi code refers to the poet and I found a biography of Lorca on a bookshelf. The book is by an Irishman called Ian Gibson who, (like Longley) studied at Trinity College Dublin, and (like Oscar) later taught Spanish. Heaney is quoted on the blurb as stating” ‘Magnificently detailed as a work of research and beautifully contoured as a book’

So, based on that recommendation, here I am, an Irishman in Granada, learning about the place through the eyes of Lorca’s Irish biographer. Granada, it turns out, is not only Lorca’s home city. It is also the main protagonist of the ‘Romancero Gitano’ – Gypsy Rhymes which we studied so many years ago. Lorca, the gypsies, the Alhambra and Granada are inextricably entwined. And so is music and song in the ancient folk tradition of the flamenco.