The Skunk
Seamus Heaney The Skunk
This is a love poem without clichés. Seamus Heaney is exiled in California in pursuit of his work and missing his wife Anne. The skunk wanders across the night garden and into the poet’s imagination. When Heaney is at home again, the image of the skunk comes back and he commits it to paper. The poem is alive with sensory and sensuous images, not just the visual metaphor of the skunk but with sounds, smells and recollected touch and taste.
The American artist Edward Hopper provided many of the features in the painting, most usefully the lady getting undressed for bed. The image of the young Heaney with his back to us was borrowed from Edward Maguire’s portrait of Heaney which is in the possession of the Ulster Museum. It appears on the back cover of the Wintering Out collection. Typically, Heaney is at his desk – writing, working.