Up and down and up again – the changes in the temperature this spring have caught me off balance more than once. Uncertain times call for poetry, I think, and for contemplating the purpose of poetry. Seamus Heaney’s book The Redress of Poetry shows how poetry should repair or restore by providing a “glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential” (4). It should not simplify or reduce, but rather should “be a match for the complex reality that surrounds it” (8). In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, he advised us “to walk on air against your better judgement.”
Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995, p. 8.