‘A white bird trapped inside me beating scared wings’ -
Seamus Heaney, his Lost Sibling and Re-Imagining
by Mary Adams
In his long midlife poem, Station Island, Seamus Heaney’s Dantesque journey, a penitential pilgrimage, he imagines a series of meetings with ‘familiar ghosts’, including James Joyce. Along the way, there is a sudden memory—in the most beautiful poetry--- of a ‘seaside trinket’ that had belonged to his father’s sister who died in her teens. Heaney described secretly looking at the trinket which had the status of a sacred relic, kept in a sideboard in his parent’s…
Plea for the Establishment of a Ministry for Men in the Next German Administration
Government ministry departments are constantly established, collapsed, abolished. A new ministry department is created when problems in a certain field increase, and when individuals, groups or the government realise this and subsequently act by establishing a new Ministry.
In West Germany, the Ministry for all-German affairs was created and later abolished in this manner during the cold war, and the German Family Ministry, changing with every administration, was also assigned the Departments of Youth, Women, Health or Sports. The Environmental Ministry was created by pressure of the…
