“Turkeys made him a Poet”

An interview with the much-loved poet Seamus Heaney in our second issue in Winter 1966.

Who knew a row of turkeys hanging in a butcher’s shop would set Seamus Heaney on his way to becoming one of the most widely acclaimed Irish poets. 

Have a read at the poem below:

Turkeys Observed

One observes them, one expects them;

Blue-breasted in their indifferent mortuary,

Beached bare on the cold marble slabs

In immodest underwear frills of feather.

The red sides of beef retain

Some of the smelly majesty of living:

A half-cow slung from a hook maintains

That blood and flesh are not ignored.

But a turkey cowers in death.

Pull his neck, pluck him, and look –

He is just another poor forked thing,

A skin bag plumped with inky putty.

He once complained extravagantly

In an overture of gobbles;

He lorded it on the claw-flecked mud

With a grey flick of his Confucian eye.

Now, as I pass the bleak Christmas dazzle,

I find him ranged with his cold squadrons:

The fuselage is bare, the proud wings snapped,

The tail-fan stripped down to a shameful rudder.

Seamus Heaney