Poetry
- One of the hunger strikers, Bobby Sands wrote poetry throughout the protest. His best known poems include Weeping Winds and The Rhythm of Time Sands's narratives and various poems appear in the anthology Skylark Sing Your Lonely Song, and his poetry has been set to music by Seán Tyrell for his album A Message of Peace.
- Vincent Buckley, 'Hunger Strike', published in Last Poems 1991
- Award winning poet Medbh McGuckian cites Bobby Sands's hunger strike as an influence on her poetry, saying "We moved into a house and I have a lot of moving-into-a-house poems around that time; but, they're all thinking about Bobby Sands. You wouldn't know they were about Bobby Sands because I made him into a kind of icon." McGukian also says that shortly following Sands's death, she was unable to write poetry to him, but commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death with The Sands of Saint Cyprien, a poetic depiction of the Saint Cyprien concentration camp.
- In Bobby Sands desfallece en el muro, Chilean poet Carmen Berenguer draws parallels between Chile under Pinochet and Northern Ireland of 1981, adopting Sands's voice in the first person.
- In Paula Meehan's poem Hunger Strike, a female voice refers to the prisoners in H-block, speaking in the first person plural, identifying with the community's rage at the authorities refusal to relent. The persona undertakes a "personal strike", adopting first personal singular and withdrawing from life, her garden untended, as the image of the dying Sands dominates the community's awareness. Towards the end, an old woman rescues the speaker, bring her bread and butter, and chiding her for her self-imposed alienation.
- For Bobby Sands on the Eve of his Death by Michael Davitt.
Read more about this topic: Artistic Reactions To The 1981 Irish Hunger Strike
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Before now poetry has taken notice
Of wars, and what are wars but politics
Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)