Subtitle: Essays on the Creative Imagination. Essays based on the Seamus Heaney Lectures, 3rd Series.
A gift from Susan McKenna-Lawlor, one of the contributors. Beautifully-produced, with several brilliant essays. Perspectives from practitioners on creativity in poetry, painting, music, scientific work, and fiction, and on its place in education. Heaney on Kavanagh, a visual essay by Bridget Riley,
Peter Hamel on musical improvisation, Alan Titley on the writer's visceral relationship with words, Susan on our evolving understanding of the cosmos.
The essays on education (Seymour Papert, Kieran Egan, Jones Irwin, and others) present radical critiques of current practice.
In Titley's essay, even the prose is poetic. I disagree with him about the importance of the content, as opposed to the words, in literature, but I sympathise, too. In fact, I do admit the value of some work that lacks meaning, such as Jabberwocky and Finnegan's Wake. His discussion ranges over a considerable set of writers and tongues, and the quotations and discussion from various greats were stimulating. In particular, he stimulated me to revisit Lorca and to dig deeper in the Gaelic poets. Curious, coming upon his enthusiastic endorsement of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabhán so soon after reading Keating.
I particularly liked Egan's essay, entitled Imagination and Education, emphasizing the central importance of stimulating the child's imagination, and the rôle of story. This is good:
The trouble with our lives is that they don't have any clear meaning, except in so far as we can fit them into stories.I also liked:
My uncle has a dog with no legs. I asked, 'What do you call him?' He said, 'It doesn't matter. He won't come.'
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