London Regional Transport

Seamus Heaney goes Underground
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date 3 February 1997
source London Regional Transport
type Press release

Seamus Heaney, recent winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of six poets to feature in the new set of Poems on the Underground.

Heaney’s poem "The Rescue" will be up from early February as one of a new set of poems on Tube cars - the 36th in the series that began ten years ago.

The new set of poems includes both ancient and modern:

My love is faren in a land - a 15th century love song
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun - Ecclesiastes
Nightsong: City by Dennis Brutus
Shopper by Connie Bensley
There was an Old Man with a beard by Edward Lear
The Rescue by Seamus Heaney

The Poems on the Underground anthologies, including the recently published Poems on the Underground Anniversary Edition (Cassell ?.99), have proved enormously successful, reaching sales of well over 200,000 to date. The anniversary anthology, Poems on the Underground Audiobook (?99) along with Love Poems, Comic Poems, London Poems and Poems 96 (?99) are all available from the London Transport Museum shop in Covent Garden and all good book shops. Posters of the individual poems are available from the London Transport Museum shop and the Museum also runs a subscription service for poem posters (both new and previous poems).

The poems used in the series are selected by Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert and designed by Tom Davidson. London Transport pays for the production costs and advertising space. The programme also receives financial support from the British Library (Stefan Sweig Programme), London Arts Board and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The Rescue by Seamus Heaney
In drifts of sleep I came upon you
Buried to your waist in snow.
Your reached your arms out: I came to
Like water in a dream of thaw.

Nightsong: City by Dennis Brutus
Sleep well, my love, sleep well:
the harbour lights glaze over restless docks,
police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets;

from the shanties creaking iron sheets
violence like a bug-infested rag is tossed
and fear is imminent as sound in the wind-swung bell;

the long day’s anger pants from sand and rocks;
but for this breathing night at least,
my land, my love, sleep well.

There was an Old Man with a beard by Edward Lear
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared! -
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!"

Shopper by Connie Bensley
I am spending my way out
of a recession. The road chokes
on delivery vans.

I used to be Just Looking Round,
I used to be How Much, and
Have You Got it in Beige.

Now I devour whole stores -
high speed spin; giant size; chunky gold;
de luxe springing. Things.

I drag them round me into a stockade.
It is dark inside but my credit cards
are incandescent.
From: the new set of Poems on the Underground (no 36), posted from February 1997.

Railhub Archive ::: 1997-02-03 LRT-001