Pages of Art

Barry McCallion

–The samples below are part of a new book:

Seamus Heaney / Vincent van Gogh: Face to Face

Colophon

In a letter to his mother in October, 1889, Van Gogh writes — “You will see from the little portrait of myself that although I saw Paris and London and so many other large cities… I still look more or less like a peasant… and I sometimes imagine that I feel and think like that too, only peasants are more use in the world… Anyway, I plough on my canvases as they do in their fields

Some months later I came across a similar expression in Seamus Heaney’s poem, Digging.  In the poem, Heaney, looking up from his desk, observes his father digging in the garden, which evokes an earlier memory of his father digging potatoes, and before him, his grandfather, digging peat from the local bogs.  It is a farm tradition that Heaney will not know; his future will be different.

He writes:

But I've no spade to follow men like them 
between my finger and my thumb
the squat pen rests
I'll dig with my pen 

Fascinated by the sameness, I made a book.