Station Island

the long version

Collection of poems by Heaney set on an island which has been a site of pilgrimage in Ireland for over a thousand years. His pilgrim is on an inner journey and proceeds through a series of encounters which lead him back into the which which first formed him and then forward to face the crises of the present. The long poem is preceded by a section of meditative lyrics that leads into a group of poems in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary Sweeney, a King of Ulster, Ireland of the Buile Suibhne Geilt