"Records, television, cinema... I can’t remember a time before. These things permeated our daily lives, as intangible as broadcasts from another planet, but in the air and on our tongues. Heaney’s description of omphalos has a lovely, persuasive telescoping of the very local and the mythic, of two cultures. Though growing up a few decades earlier, he was certainly already alert and receptive to the wider currents flowing through the local, especially in terms of radio: think of his seventh Glanmore sonnet, or ‘A Sofa in the Forties’, with its “absolute speaker” of BBC RP blowing in from over the water. In how many subtle ways must these things adjust the bonds between people and places, our identities?" Paul Farley • Poetry Review (pdf)

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