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:
“Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole- star for a thousand years?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)