It is with welcome relief that we reach the end of 2017 – a year enveloped by terror. Five attacks in the UK and 35 people killed. But we are through it, and we endure. Others have been less fortunate, and it is hard to imagine how their families feel. For them, it wasn’t a year punctured by the feeling that the whole world is falling apart, but a year punctured by the feeling that their world has already fallen apart.
My mother and my sister were on the brink of such tragedy. At their millionth Ariana Grande concert, they heard a bang and they ran. They escaped by a back exit of the Manchester Arena and saw nothing but smoke. Usually they leave before the encore to beat traffic, and if they had done so on 22 May, they probably would have stepped right into the path of the attacker, Salman Abedi.
For so long, Heaney’s poetry performed this function – to articulate the horror that surrounded him
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