Station Island (poetry)

Station Island

First Edition
Author	Seamus Heaney
Language	English
Publisher	Faber and Faber
Publication date	1984
Media type	Print
Pages	128 pp
ISBN
Preceded by	Field Work
Followed by	The Haw Lantern

Station Island is the sixth collection of original poetry written by the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. It is dedicated to the Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel. The collection was first published in the UK and Ireland in 1984 by Faber & Faber and was then published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1985. Seamus Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.

The title of the collection, Station Island, is taken from the long poem of the same name that comprises the second part of the collection. It refers to Station Island (also known as St. Patrick's Purgatory) on Lough Derg (Ulster) in Co. Donegal, a site of Christian pilgrimage for many centuries. During his undergraduate years at Queen's University Belfast, Heaney went on the pilgrimage several times.

The poems in the collection are generally focused on the role of the poet and their relationship to history and politics but, more specifically, are also a platform through which Heaney can examine his own complex relationship with the sectarian violence of The Troubles in Northern Ireland (including his decision to move his family out of the north to the Republic of Ireland in 1972). In an interview collected in Stepping Stones Heaney describes the driving force behind his writing of the long poem "Station Island": "I needed to butt my way through a blockage, a pile-up of hampering stuff, everything that had gathered up inside me because of the way I was both in an out of the Northern Ireland situation. I wasn't actively involved, yet I felt dragged upon and put upon by it." Earlier, in the same interview, he says that for him "Station Island" "was more like an examination of conscience than a confession. A kind of inner courtroom, as dramatic as it was confessional. It was written, sure enough, to release an inner pressure. But it was also set up so that different voices could speak and different weights get lifted."

Heaney had thought of writing a poem based on Lough Derg since the mid-1960s but it wasn't until he read Dante in the 1970s that what would become "Station Island" started to take shape. He states that, "Dante was the first mover of the sequence, no doubt about that. The experience of reading him in the 1970s was mighty, and translating the Ugolino episode [which appeared as the final poem in Field Work, the volume published prior to Station Island] was like doing press-ups, getting ready for something bigger." Before the long poem "Station Island" was published in 1984, as part of the collection by the same name, the first three sections of the poem appeared in altered form in The Hudson Review in 1983.